Protest politics are one of the decayed remnants that still remain behind in a post Christian quasi religious culture. The reason for this is that protest politics focuses on moral and ethical values, which is a completely bankrupt perspective. It is for this reason that protest politics has always proven to be worthless and no damned good for anything in the past. At the end of it all protest politics leaves people completely demoralized, and then like washed up 1960s radicals they just learn to accept that humanity is an originally sinful pig and they become yuppies and sell out to the system, knowing as they do that you just cannot reform the morals of a collection of pigs no matter how hard you try.
One example of this sort of thing are 'tree sitters'. This protest movement is concerned about the immoral behavior of unethical loggers who will ruin the environment by chopping down every forest if they are not prevented from sinning some more. Yes greedy and unethical logging companies are chopping trees and ruining pristine environments. A moral and ethical protest must be launched to stop their sinning, and this involves having protestors sitting up in trees so they cannot be chopped down.
Now as we know, logging companies must be competitive, or they will go bankrupt. Logging families will lose the house when they can no longer compete with loggers from other nations in the race to chop down trees and thus keep the competitive logging industry in business. For this reason the wife of a logger threatened to go out into the forest and machine gun every last fucking spotted owl in the forest and just get it fucking over with.
As for tree sitters, their past history is one of constant retreat. Each year they sit in trees a little further back in that forest. They claimed some past victories, but they proved to be short lived as the sinful logging companies once again went after those trees. Over time the rage of the tree sitter builds against the American people who are originally sinful pigs because even though a moral and ethical appeal is being made by the tree sitting protest movement they never get mass support from those unethical pigs, the American people. You can always recognize some washed up moralizing quasi religious radical who believes in the doctrine of originally sinful pigs because you can instantly recognize them by their cynical view of the American people as being immoral and unreformed sinful pigs. It is often said that the American people are politically backwards because they no longer show up in large numbers for protest politics. The opposite is true, for the American people are to politically advanced and they understand just how worthless protest politics is and so they don't even waste their time with that bankrupt strategy.
Now are protests always worthless. Protest politics which focus on reforming what are alleged to be the sinful pigs in some corporation or in some political office are always worthless and in the end lead to washed up and demoralized herds of ruined radicals who never understood that the system only allows the evil option and therefore cannot be fixed by morally reforming individuals, since the only options available under that flawed system are the lesser of two evils. A protest movement which was not focused on quasi religious moralism masquerading as progressive activism would be intent on raising public awareness of systems and how they work and the role played by systems and that might have some value, unlike those quasi religious post Christian protests about morality and ethics which represent a dying political perspective which has already gone completely bankrupt, as you can tell by how few people ever bother with protests these days.
