Listen To This Story

When I was younger, I imagined the “moral arc of history” getting a little closer to justice every day. Indeed, the overall story of the last several hundred years has been one of increasing freedom and civil rights. 

Rather than a straight line, however, it’s been a series of progressive leaps forward followed by a clawing back by reactionary forces. Emancipation and Reconstruction were followed by Redeemers, Jim Crow, and the rise of the second Klan. The Civil Rights Act was met by gerrymandering, voter ID laws, and other forms of disenfranchisement. The election of Barack Obama, one of the greatest leaps forward in my lifetime, faced swift backlash, first with the rise of the Tea Party and then the inevitable arrival of Trumpism.

One reason for this back-and-forth is that it’s difficult to sustain a social movement once it’s achieved its goal. It’s more common for them to declare victory and move on. 

The week before his inauguration, Obama announced the creation of Organizing for America, saying, “As president, I will need the help of all Americans to meet the challenges that lie ahead. That’s why I’m asking people like you who fought for change during the campaign to continue fighting for change in your communities.” Would that we had listened.

This cycle of expansion and contraction of rights resembles a yo-yo diet: We feel frustrated when we don’t see immediate results from our trip to the gym, or return to our bad habits once we’ve reached our target weight. 

Because social change can sometimes take years or decades, it’s understandable that we question whether protest works or is worth the effort. As a political communication scholar, though, I can assure you that protest is a vital tool to effect social change, and I’d like to discuss some of the mechanisms: framing, agenda setting, and identity construction.

The first way that protests work is by influencing the media’s framing of issues. 

Framing a story means choosing which features to focus on, or the language that we use. People may show support for “social programs” while opposing “welfare.” Likewise, people will respond differently to legislation when it is framed as “gun control” versus “gun safety.” The choice of frame can make the difference between the success and failure of a social movement. 

In 2018, communication scholars Rachel Mourão, Danielle K. Brown, and George Sylvie published a paper called “Framing Ferguson.” They looked at newspapers’ framing of the 2014 Ferguson, MO, protests. Initially, newspapers chose what the authors referred to as “episodic” and “conflict” frames, covering only specific events and clashes between police and protesters. But, as protests continued, papers started using “thematic frames,” covering the issues motivating the protests. 

They also found “legitimizing” frames: indications that the protesters were not a violent mob, but people with legitimate concerns. This is particularly important today, when Cabinet member Sean Duffy, joining his fellow calumniators high in the ranks of GOP leadership, is misrepresenting peaceful No Kings protesters as “paid protesters” and “part of antifa.” 

The important point here is that one protest isn’t enough: Protests must be sustained long enough to shift the conversation from dates and crowd sizes to the underlying issues.

A second mechanism for change is influencing politicians through “agenda setting.” 

According to agenda-setting theory, attention is one of our scarcest resources. Like any person, politicians depend on numerous signals to determine what’s important. As required effort increases, so does pressure on a politician. A phone call takes more effort than sharing a post on Facebook and, therefore, means more to a representative. Leaving your house and joining others in protest is orders of magnitude beyond that and sends a strong signal. 

While it’s true that most members of Congress will be reelected no matter what they do, the Cook Political Report rates 39 House races in 2026 as either “lean” or “toss-up.” Candidates in those competitive districts are particularly sensitive to protests.

I attended my first political demonstration in 2015. Before that, I didn’t consider myself an “activist” or a “protester.” Since then, I’ve attended dozens of events, ranging from a handful of people to over a hundred thousand.

The third way that protests work is through “identity construction.” 

Throughout their lives, people adopt numerous identities: son, mother, student, spouse. One barrier to attending protests is that people often don’t see themselves as “someone who attends protests.”

I attended my first political demonstration in 2015. Before that, I didn’t consider myself an “activist” or a “protester.” Since then, I’ve attended dozens of events, ranging from a handful of people to over a hundred thousand. The first was scary, but since then, I’ve approached each event with the same attitude: I’m continuing my habit of standing up for democracy just like I go to the gym every week. 

It’s never too late to start. In 2017, I met a woman at a protest in San Francisco. She was in her 60s and told me it was her first protest. She’d tried to recruit her husband and friends but wound up coming on her own. Can you imagine how important the protest was to her that she drove over an hour to join a crowd of people she’d never met? This is the kind of fellowship that people find when protesting for a cause they care about.

I’ll leave you with this. Someone recently said to me, “Want to be a bad person? Do bad things. Want to be a good person? Do good things.” Building on that, I would add: “Want to support democracy? Do things that support democracy.” 

Peaceful protest is one of those things. I’ll be attending the second No Kings protest on Saturday. Whether it’s your five-hundredth or first event, I hope you do, too.

Daniel Malmer, a co-founder of several tech startups, is currently a PhD student researching media, political communication, and extremism.