A critical and defining feature of a democratic country is its maintenance of the right to protest. Civilian protests, in addition to democratic elections, are a crucial means by which citizens hold power over their livelihoods. They are often written into the fabric of a country in its constitution. However, the degree to which such a right is upheld and practiced appropriately varies. Current world events are beginning to expose the defectiveness of the right to protest.
Americans are notoriously emphatic about their constitutional rights to assemble and protest, rights that have defined the American experience and every pivotal moment in American history (think the Boston Tea Party and the civil rights movement). Protests are indispensable to the character of the United States in that they have been and continue to be crucial to American political progress. In practice, however, American protests meet more resistance than indulgence and adulation. Within the U.S., protests are acknowledged to be a rudimentary facet of democracy and are thus lauded as truly American, but only theoretically because the oppositional inconvenience that protests inherently are drives resentment. Although the right to protest is preached by American politicians, actual governmental responses suggest that dissatisfied Americans should rather politely whisper their grievances without causing too much of a commotion.
The civil rights movement in the 1960s moved with the intent of systemic change and the equality of all Americans, regardless of race. White America fearfully clung to Jim Crow laws and centuries of an oppressive and blatantly racist social structure. Black and brown protesters were condemned, arrested, assaulted, and assassinated before substantial reform finally took place.
More recently but still continuing along the same ongoing, yet-to-be-resolved thread of the injustice faced by black Americans, the Black Lives Matter movement emerged over the past few years as a response to police brutality. The premise of the summer 2020 BLM protests was widely agreed to be respectable and valid. Black Americans did not want to be ruthlessly and systemically murdered by the very people that are supposed to protect them. It was a fair wish. But when American CVS’s and Target’s were looted in the protests, the red, white, and blue-clad American right rushed to vilify the protestors as anti-American thugs and delinquents. The entire movement, in spite of its generally peaceful nature that sat in close alignment with democratic ideals, was labeled by conservatives across the country as a violent attack on America.
Approximately half a year later, in the wake of the 2020 election results, these same self-proclaimed patriots conducted a siege on the Capitol building because the democratic process of an election did not result in their favor. In addition to the motivation behind this “protest,” the action itself of attacking the Capitol building was quite literally an assault on the institutions of American democracy.
The BLM protests operated under democratic ideals with some expected criticism from conservatives due to a small amount of violence, but they were fundamentally democratic. They epitomized the intention of the democratic right to protest. Americans noticed a systemic flaw that has been incessantly murdering members of a particular race, and acted upon such an observation with marches, chants, petitions, and signs. The BLM protests did not exist in opposition to democracy, they exemplified it. However, the Capitol riots directly attempted to defy the democratic institutions and systems of this country, primarily wielding the tool of fear, suggesting that they were an act of anti-democratic domestic terrorism.
This then asserts the easily malleable nature of the right to protest. It is all too often manipulated to conform to political agendas, generally favoring right-wing interests. And this is because the specificities of what exactly constitutes a democratic protest are generally absent from legislation, so the nature of protests is an extremely vague and broad concept, hence the extremely wide variation in American protests. With this being said, it can reasonably be agreed that anti-murder, anti-racism protests are conceptually what the founders of democracies intend for, not violent acts of terrorism against democracy itself.
Democracy of course exists outside of the U.S. as well. Myanmar’s brief democratic regime was swiftly extinguished by a reclaim of power by the Tatmadaw and the arrest of democratic politicians including elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi. As retaliatory protests broke out across Myanmar and were met by a severe and violent military crackdown, a question arose: does the prohibition of protests equate to the decisive end of democracy? This is likely the case. Without the ability to peacefully protest, Myanmar’s civilians have lost their last hold on power and are completely at the mercy of the authoritarian military regime.
The primary purpose of protest in a democratic system is to allow for the voices of all citizens. For democracy to survive, so must the preservation of the right to protest, which must be practiced appropriately and in such a way that supports democracy. Without the functionality of the practice of peaceful protest, America and other democracies will crumble.
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