As an American, I'm unfamiliar with any of the American protests this summer being characterized as "pro-Democracy" by any side in the various debates. Especially in the case of the BLM protests, no one is opposed to democracy nor does anyone support police brutality: the key question is whether we have a police violence problem or a police racism problem.<p>BLM critics point out that crime rates predict the entire disparity in police killings and then some, and they also note many heinous killings of white Americans by police (about which the media are loathe to report). So far, I'm unaware of any popular answer to these criticisms, and the media rarely if ever address these criticisms in the first place. It's hard for Americans to watch their cities burn against the backdrop as yet another journalists dutifully reports on "another night of mostly peaceful protests" for a dubious premise. Contra TFA, I don't think it's any dearth of strategy that renders BLM (relatively) ineffectual so much as it is an inability or unwillingness to address relatively straightforward criticisms.<p>Similarly, with respect to the Women's March, the only policy proposals I'm aware of revolved around walking back due process rights, which also doesn't strike me as particularly democratic. Here again it's not a lack of strategy but a lack of a persuasive objective that rendered the movement relatively ineffectual.
Related: Srnicek and Williams on "folk politics." [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventing_the_Future:_Postcapitalism_and_a_World_Without_Work#:~:text=By%20emphasising%20temporal%2C%20spatial%2C%20and,institutional%20responses%3B%20single%20issues%20over" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventing_the_Future:_Postcapi...</a>