Our ability to alter existing laws and oust officials from positions of power is limited by the constraints they place on us through the laws themselves, not to mention the cultural and ideological barriers they erect to preserve "civility" above all else.
All that would be necessary to ensure that the powerful few who control most of the wealth and all of the government can do whatever they want without fear of serious repercussions is this:
1. Convince everyone that they should never protest in a way that causes inconvenience or disruption to one another (which inadvertently protects the interests of those who depend on our showing up to work every day).
No one has argued that protests should not cause any inconvenience.
2. Make sure the public infrastructure is so interconnected and self-referential that literally ANY protest with the potential to bring about meaningful change is encapsulated within that forbidden category.
I would argue that, indeed, this is exactly what has happened in America. Unions have diminished greatly in number and power, and media outrage is aimed at instances of impoliteness/impropriety rather than injustice. Our obsession is with gaffes, insults, slurs, and (above all else) the absolute sanctity of private property. Beneath all that in importance, way down the list, it is begrudgingly accepted that a bunch of people standing around holding signs should be allowed (but only if some of the signs are witty enough to post on social media).
Why are we like this? It's because we have swallowed the negative conception of freedom as an individual's war against everybody else who would deny or infringe it, and abandoned the original social conception of freedom as something only made possible through cooperation with others, where each person supports the aspirations and creativity of everybody else. In this light, it makes sense to cause individual upsets in pursuit of greater independence for everyone, in solidarity and mutual concern. It makes sense to say that as long as anybody in this society is a slave or a prisoner, nobody is free, even if by the other definition of freedom many people are apparently not directly inconvenienced by it.
When freedom is something that depends only on not stepping on somebody else's toes, joining a protest against something that "doesn't affect me" becomes, at best, something I might do if I'm in a generous mood (but if it makes me late for work I'll raise hell). And this is by design! We are taught through all kinds of marketing, entertainment, history, and direct pronouncements by state officials that liberty means we all do what we want unless it prevents someone else from doing what they want, and everything else flows naturally from that. It's a great propaganda tool for ensuring that others are not seen as fellow citizens with shared goals, but with suspicion, as competitors and potential threats.
The antidote to this tendency (which was almost uniquely American until a very short time ago) is a return to the ideas of the French Revolution that were vociferously rejected by conservatives at the time: "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité". Freedom, equality, and fraternity, where each element depends on the other two for its existence and none are desirable in isolation. What are the options for a society that has embraced "freedom" (in the strange antagonistic sense espoused by American libertarians) but treats equality and fraternity as merely nice-to-haves, or worse yet, subversive tendencies of an emerging authoritarian undercurrent?
None of this follows from anything I said, and only follows if you allow the whatever the current law is to define what fundamental basic rights people should have, or "civility" means. Nothing I have said presumes nor allows that. Those are matters of moral conscience and thus they are outside of legal statute.
We are not debating whether people should always obey current laws, but whether they should violate a more basic foundational principle of ethics on which all non-authoritarian ethics are built, namely that people have a moral right to govern their own body and speech, which as a matter of internal logical limits, means that it is unethical to use one's speech or one's body in a manner to directly limits other's control of their speech or body.
There is no morally defensible protest that can disagree with this principle and every injustice you whose protest you would support is ultimately an injustice b/c such principles were violated. This principle inherently means that only laws that respect this principle should be obeyed. Thus, not only allowing but encouraging civil disobedience against such laws or practices.
But disobeying unjust practices does not require engaging in unjust violations of other people's basic rights. Such tactics are lazy and impatiently short sighted in the inherently long term damage they do to all by undermining all rights by undermining the principle which is their only source outside of relying upon the law to decide what rights should be.
Slavery would not have been abolished if the slaves themselves had not contributed to their own liberation in myriad ways, all of which caused untold property damage, held up productivity, and took lives across the board. Abolition was not something that Lincoln and other nice whites decided to do for the slaves one day. It was made possible through violent, disruptive struggle without regard for the comfort of others, even those who were not personally responsible for the institution of slavery nor held slaves.
First of all, it is total bullshit that the abolition of slavery required slave revolt. Countless slaves around the world have been freed without them doing or able to do anything about their condition. Slaves existed since pre-civilization and the practice was not ended on any large scale, despite those slaves trying to end it. There was nothing unique about the character and self determination of US slaves over other slaves that made them the first to finally end it.
Whether US slaves happened to play a role in bringing an end to their own slavery is besides the point that their role was not neccessary and was minor to the more general principled ending of the practice. That occurred because of the long term effects of Enlightenment principles which included ideas about individual rights of person's and the need for such principles to applied with reason rather than arbitrary authority, which would inherently and eventually did lead to their legal application to all humans.
It was a cultural ethical shift that occurred because people gained more and more respect for the principle of personal liberty as the foundation of ethics. The US slaves were also impacted by this cultural shift. While nearly all past slaves objected to their own enslavement, they did not as strongly object to slavery in general on principled grounds. The increased respect for individual rights changed that and led more slaves to feel a sense of moral righteousness and opposition to the entire idea of slavery that emboldened their revolt and opposition beyond trying to end their personal hardships.
Secondly, any long term positive impact of the slave revolts on reducing injustices more generally were only due to actions that protected their own rights with damage to property, production, and other persons as incidental and directly tied to their enslavement. There is no violation of the principle of individual rights if the harm or inconvenience to others is an incidental effect of one preventing violations of their own rights, such as death of those trying to keep them enslaved or disruptions to production due to disruptions to enslavement. Those "harmed" do not have the right to profit from violating other's rights. If simply exercising one's own basic rights causes harm to others, then that would inherently means that those others were the one's violating those people's rights.
It is like if you swing at me and I grab and break your arm in self defense. The direct connection between the act being truly neccessary to protect my own rights means that the act promotes rather than undermines the principle of protecting individual rights. In contrast, if I were to grab your daughter and threaten her life if you try to punch me, then I have violated her rights as much as you were trying to violate mine, and the principle of individual rights is doubly undermined rather than protected.
Decent and reasonable people make a huge ethical distinction between these two situations, just as they do between "protesters" who are controlling their own body and speech (such as not working and speaking out about their conditions) versus those who violated the basic rights of bystanders to coerce politicians into intervening on their behalf (e.g., blocking traffic).
Likewise, if you refuse to work for an employer and harm his production, that is just exercising your right to control your body. However, if you try to get others to support your cause by drawing attention via preventing other people from getting to their jobs, then you have violated their rights as much as your employer would had they used goons to threaten you with violence to get back to work. That is a form of "protest" that is no longer exercising your rights of action and speech, and becomes a violation of others action and speech, which undermines the very principle and makes greater violations of it more probable for all in the future. Thus, it is not an acceptable method, not to mention cannot be reasonable argued to be neccessary in order for you to protect your basic rights over your own body and speech.
Such a principles never eliminates the ability to promote change, only the use of certain methods that are not neccessary and which, while they may force quicker change by use of force and coercion against the liberties of others, will have long term harmful effects upon all forms of progress which depend upon holding basic individual rights, such as speech, association, and movement, as the most sacred principles guiding both moral and legal sanctions.
Hopelessly naive and exactly the kind of interpretation of human potential that is duly expected of (and enforced upon) us by those in power. The missing ingredient, again, is the notion that no individual rights exist without being enjoyed by all
Nonsense. You are the one missing that point. You are advocating violating the rights of some to promote the rights of others, which inherently means the rights of all are not being respected and the principle of rights is being disregarded whenever it is politically expedient.
It is logically impossible to promote the idea that all should have similar basic rights by violating those rights for some.
IF you are harming people as a byproduct of simply engaging in acts neccessary to exercise your own rights, then their rights are not violated b/c they do not extend in any way that would prevent your rights. If you are harming others as an unnecessary tactic (which applies to nearly every method in question, like blocking traffic or shouting down other's speech) to draw attention to your concerns, then you are violating not only their rights, but the idea that it is valuable to protect the rights of all and that it is wrong to violate some people's rights for the gain of others, even the majority.
That's only possible if you give up the individual, negative conception of freedom as the basis from which all other things flow, and the fact that nothing of substance has changed in America for so many people as we have become more and more individualistic in our conceptions of liberty is evidence that the message is working as intended
The very concept of rights makes no sense except in relation to the individual. Groups exists only as a mental abstraction. In reality, what exists are individuals onto which various manufactured mental categories can be placed. The whole notion of something having rights is that it must be free to act in accord with it's own thoughts and will. There is not such thing a group mind or group will. Minds and will's are products of brains, which exist within individual skulls and vary independently, even when they happen to arrive at the same state. Thus, all rights and ethics do flow from the protection of things that have a will (which are individuals) to exercise that will over the body from which it is created.
These enlightenment conceptions are the primary source of all the exponential moral and political progress in the last few centuries, including ending slavery as an institution, the civil right's acts, women's suffrage, gay rights, etc..
The concept of individual rights is by far the most essential and neccessary ingredient in all of that improvement to the lives of almost all who live in cultures where this principle has gained acceptance, while cultures where the collective takes priority over individual rights have generally lagged well behind in granting basic rights to all and only achieve "equality" by granting rights to none but the few with political power.
