BLM is a great example, and exactly as you say. There was a moment there when it looked as if the American people, as a whole, were going to get angry about cops killing citizens. Then BLM came along and everyone who's hostile to or even just suspicious of the ever-growing, ever-profitable and ever-incompetent black advocacy industry backed off. What could've been a unified front was immediately fractured.
My favorite example though is two fundamentally similar movements that were both, and not accidentally, co-opted and warped by partisans and not coincidentally condemned and ridiculed by the opposing partisans - the Tea Party movement and Occupy Wall Street.
Both of them were originally protests against the exact same thing - the increasing, and increasingly overt, cronyism between Washington and Wall Street. They weren't even just similar in that regard - they were identical. But the Tea Party movement was quickly turned into a painfully stereotypical brainless righty thing, earning the condemnation of the left, while OWS was just as quickly turned into a painfully stereotypical brainless lefty thing, earning the condemnation of the right. So even though we had people on both sides of the aisle justifiably protesting the same thing, we also had people on both sides of the aisle condemning the other side's protest, which not coincidentally meant that both of them ultimately failed.
And I'm not going to be in the least surprised if somebody responds here to rail about how <the protest aligned with their party of choice> was certainly worthwhile, but that <the protest aligned with the opposing party> was <predictable string of shallow characterizations>.
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Rottcodd ago
BLM is a great example, and exactly as you say. There was a moment there when it looked as if the American people, as a whole, were going to get angry about cops killing citizens. Then BLM came along and everyone who's hostile to or even just suspicious of the ever-growing, ever-profitable and ever-incompetent black advocacy industry backed off. What could've been a unified front was immediately fractured.
My favorite example though is two fundamentally similar movements that were both, and not accidentally, co-opted and warped by partisans and not coincidentally condemned and ridiculed by the opposing partisans - the Tea Party movement and Occupy Wall Street.
Both of them were originally protests against the exact same thing - the increasing, and increasingly overt, cronyism between Washington and Wall Street. They weren't even just similar in that regard - they were identical. But the Tea Party movement was quickly turned into a painfully stereotypical brainless righty thing, earning the condemnation of the left, while OWS was just as quickly turned into a painfully stereotypical brainless lefty thing, earning the condemnation of the right. So even though we had people on both sides of the aisle justifiably protesting the same thing, we also had people on both sides of the aisle condemning the other side's protest, which not coincidentally meant that both of them ultimately failed.
And I'm not going to be in the least surprised if somebody responds here to rail about how <the protest aligned with their party of choice> was certainly worthwhile, but that <the protest aligned with the opposing party> was <predictable string of shallow characterizations>.