I think it’s not “3.5% of people want an outcome” but “protests of significant magnitude to have 3.5% actively on the streets pushing” correlate with a very very large population that agrees, but not enough to be out on the streets.
So even if 40 million people want single payer, there are not 12 million in the streets.
But again, this is based on a scant handful of “movements”, so it’s pretty useless on specifics. Most I can see as a takeaway is perhaps that a violent movement may be too high stakes for people and a largely non-violent movement can attract more people and more people usually matter more than more violence.
WraithGear@lemmy.world 1 week ago
And that pushing apparently includes activities the report defines as “nonviolent”
jj4211@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Well I meant the more rhetorical “pushing”, but yes, some of the activity of the claimed non-violence seems a bit violent.
I would say that I doubt you can have millions of people protest and manage to be completely non-violent. Some folks will take it to violence in the name of the cause, some will opportunisticly do it under the cover of the movement, and finally some might “false flag” to try to discredit the movement.
WraithGear@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I would say that worrying that the protest appears non violent is a waste of time. If the protestors refuse to get violent to lend sympathy for the boot, then violence can be manufactured. It happens alot in protesting, and the whole shtick of the non violent protest is it REQUIRES media but in. If the media is captured by oligarchs for example then the message will be drowned out or perverted. Even a neutral reading of “this protest happened, it has 1 billion people in it, now to John for the weather” the protest will fail.
jj4211@lemmy.world 1 week ago
If a protest of a billion people happens, then it cannot be ignored by the media.
I know, it was hyperbole, but the point is that if 12 million people are on the street, it’s not that the 12 million people need to get people’s attention, they are indicative that the people already have that perspective and are showing it in the streets.
A small protest has a goal of getting attention on a problem that people may lack awareness. A multi-million person protest isn’t about a need to raise awareness anymore, it’s about showing the awareness and commitment that is already there. For whatever volume of people actively protest, you can be sure there’s a singnificant multiple of that number of people who agree with the protestors but didn’t take it to the streets for one reason or another.