Longish essay on counterpunch, this pull quote doesn’t reflect the thesis of the piece, but rather something that should be concerning to progressives and people who want to see change in society. The status-quo is resilient for a reason, and not taking that into account pretty much dooms whatever project you happen to be working for to failure.
“It’s foolish to think that the failure of previous non-violent protests to change state structures can be blamed on the failure of the tactics, rather than the failure of the underlying politics in other domains. Those mass movements either did not achieve popular support, or, more poignantly, they did, but that support was coopted and channeled into an electoral theater and a political leadership that undermined and effectively annulled their goals, and turned energetic popular opposition back into apathy and acceptance. The transition from millions of antiwar protestors on the streets against the Vietnam and Iraq wars to <crickets> in the face of Obama’s Libya-Syria-Yemen-drones-around-the-world wars, illustrates that sad political dynamic.”
And there we have the problem folks. The status-quo only persists because we allow it to. Without changing the underlying political structures and features of a democracy, you can only count on one aspect, and that is ‘more of the same’.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
1 comment
October 31, 2017 at 7:13 am
Steve Ruis
We also need to realize that the “status quo” is not just some physical phenomenon that “just happened.” There are forces that were active in creating it in the first place (the GOP hijacking a Supreme Court nomination, for example) and there are forces active in maintaining it. Since the status quo clearly benefits the wealthy, one need look no farther than the usual suspects for the source of the maintenance actions (see the Koch brothers, et. al.). Money is not power natively, it is however transformable into power, so as a small group of Americans gets more and more wealthy, the number of people who have the option of turning money into power shrinks, but so does the number of those people needed to exert formidable power.
And it is a basic truism of politics that a small group is easier to organize than a large group … and asking rich people for money is more productive than asking poor people for effort (note the trend in political fund raising: got to the billionaires first …).
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