Am I remembering this correctly?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to camp out in your park, strew trash all over, and forcibly block the local farmers' market.
But OK. Within our lifetimes, homosexual behavior used to be actually illegal in much of the country, and now not only is it increasingly accepted, but same-sex marriage rights are being established in one state after another, including not just the usual liberal coastal states, but core Jesusland hick states like Iowa.
This progress has been made from within the system, sometimes legislatively, sometimes judicially, and principally through moderate yet persistent persuasion. Anytime the proponents of equality started to get riled up, they discovered that their opposition had ten times their capacity for passionate fervor but basically no ability to effectively meet them on the field of ideas.
And as far as the 1960s protests go, I think it's safe to say that ending the war in Vietnam was their primary cause. We stayed in Southeast Asia until 1975. But angry criticism from the left sank LBJ's prospects for a second term so badly that he didn't even bother to run, and the Dems fired the guy who brought you the Civil Rights Act, Medicare, and Medicaid. Their 1968 convention collapsed into mindless mobs screaming obscenities at each other through clouds of tear gas, and we got Richard Nixon.
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Sure, I don't think anyone is saying that holding a sign magically gets you a tenth vote on the Supreme Court, or that Occupy Albequerque should get two Senators. But I don't think the effect of visible public action on the opinions of the public and the people they elect is negligible.
If nothing else, I think that the Occupy movement has carved out some mindshare again for populist liberal opinions, in a way that the Tea Party had previously managed to define populism as conservative and liberalism as only held by out of touch ivory tower seal-hugging academics and Washington insiders.
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So I'll give you that progress is not made entirely by noisy rudeness, that's very true. But I don't see it being made without some noisy rudeness either, much as I would wish you could just present a good idea and make progress with it, it doesn't seem like you can get traction until you're willing to make it inconvenient to keep ignoring you.
I can't really talk intelligently about the end of the 60s, I'll have to go do some reading.
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That said, the Tea Party movement elected an influential 25% of the House largely through popular protests. The main reason the Occupy movement is ineffectual is that they are tiny - their rallies are 1% of the size of the Tea Party rallies, for example.
Of course, maybe it's not the size, but that the Tea Party protests didn't turn popular opinion against them by leaving behind a lot of litter and tolerating rapists.
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Facile wordplay aside, while invading Iraq and TARP bailouts both got done by argument, neither was a societal change, they were both actions of government. I think while both the Tea Party and OWS want some actions of government to happen the big things they want are societal changes.
In fact in both cases the government actions they want are I think less coherent than the societal changes - OWS wants various weird things from the government that aren't well thought out, and the Tea Party wants less government spending that also doesn't take away any of their medicare etc.
Societal changes are what are important in the end, though it helps if the government doesn't actually have to be dragged into them kicking and screaming. It will get dragged eventually after all.
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I'm skeptical about peaceful societal change through protests.
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Sure the protesters aren't writing the legislation, but it doesn't just happen.
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