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A few random thoughts I've been thinking about watching the militarized crackdown on Portland protesters...
DHS - ordered by Trump - launched a heavy-handed crackdown on the relatively small group of protesters in Portland. And that seems to have had the effect pissing off a lot of people, thus mobilizing MORE turnout, as opposed to deterring protesters.
I don't have the empirical data to back this up, but anecdotally, it seems like if you are a government trying to suppress protests, your options are to quietly try to break them up or launch a crackdown of such overwhelming violence that average citizens are too scared to join.
DHS's actions were neither of those. And it's not surprising to see stories of people like the "double bird" Navy vet join the protests in response. It's worth looking at the examples of Iraq and Lebanon's recent protests for this dynamic at play. https://tcf.org/content/report/arab-revolutions-adapted-unfortunately-regimes/?agreed=1&agreed=1&session=1
The other interesting dynamic of doing this in Portland - a predominantly white city - is that the ethnic composition of the protesters is much whiter than for instance the BLM protests I joined here in NYC. This has important implications for how the protests are portrayed.
Non-violent protests are more likely to succeed when the protesters share the same ethnicity as the government b/c its harder to "otherize" them. Suburban white people now see people that look like them getting viciously attacked on TV. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09636412.2020.1722854?scroll=top&needAccess=true
Third item: Participating in protests makes you feel powerful and gives you a sense of agency. (See this poll of Iraqi protesters.) Covid has sapped us of agency over our day to day lives, so many people are likely chasing that feeling by joining protests. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/10/iraqs-protests-havent-yet-changed-system-theyre-transforming-iraqis-belief-themselves/
The ability of protests to drive political change is hard to measure, but @EricaChenoweth's research seems to indicate that protests - particularly nonviolent protests like BLM - are becoming more and more effective. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/01/18/how-the-world-is-proving-mlk-right-about-nonviolence/?utm_campaign=the_monkey_cage&utm_medium=Email&utm_source=Newsletter&wpisrc=nl_cage&wpmm=1
How big does a national protest need to be before it can succeed? @EricaChenoweth's research offers us a basic rule of thumb of 3.5% of the total national population. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world
How many people have participated in the BLM protests? As of mid-June about 6-10% of the US population - well over double this rule of thumb. And if Trump keeps ordering attacks on protesters while Covid drains us of agency, that number is bound to grow. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html
