Thread by @Noahpinion

1/As COVID recedes, the world is going to remember that it was in a state of unrest before the virus struck -- and that that unrest never really went away.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-great-pr…

2/In 2019 we struggled to come up with a single unified explanation for why practically the whole world was breaking out in massive street demonstrations.

3/One theory was that the protests were a general revolt against economic inequality, and against government policies like taxes and and fee hikes that exacerbated it.

theconversation.com/2019-was-a-yea…

4/Another theory was that new technologies -- especially Twitter -- had simply made it easier to spread outrage about stuff, in addition to making it easier to organize decentralized protests.

noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2019/02/book-r…

5/And yet another theory was that the protests were a general revolt against authoritarianism.

At first I didn't embrace this theory, but after a second year of unrest, I am coming around.

6/There is a darkness creeping over our world.

Democracy and freedom have been in retreat for a decade and a half.

freedomhouse.org/report/freedom…

7/This is not just about the rising strength of illiberal powers like China and Russia.

Many traditional bastions of liberalism, like the U.S. and India, are also becoming significantly less liberal.

8/Freedom House characterizes the protests as a "leaderless struggle for democracy", and I think this is basically right.

freedomhouse.org/report/freedom…

9/I think the creeping darkness is the thing that unifies most of the protest movements.

There is simply a general feeling that the world is being run by the wrong people. And that general feeling makes people more likely to kick out against their local authoritarians.

10/That leaderless popular struggle intensified in 2020, despite the pandemic.

11/In the post I went and took stock of 15 different protest movements, to see how they fared.

The more free a country was, the more likely it was to acquiesce to protesters' demands, and the less likely it was to use deadly violence against protesters.

12/The problem with this is that liberalism is waning.

Trump, Modi, and other authoritarian-populist leaders resisted protest movements more than other leaders of America and India probably would have.

13/But countries like Iran and Myanmar were the worst, shooting hundreds or even thousands of their protesting citizens. And in China, protesters weren't massacred this time, but the movement was decisively crushed.

14/Anyway, I think that despite their disparate goals and triggers, it's possible to see the global protest movements as part of one big popular resistance against the encroachment of global illiberalism.

15/Protesters across Asia have been finding common cause with each other -- realizing that in some sense they're all on the same side against illiberalism.

https://twitter.com/Policy/status/1379982365380911104

16/But even if all the protesters in the world do the same, it won't be enough. Street demonstrations can resist the power of the state somewhat, but in the end, turning back the dark tide will require seizing government power and turning it towards liberalism.

17/It's my hope that in the U.S. we've done this with Biden (and with the smackdown of the Trumpist coup attempt).

But whether that momentary success will endure is still in question. And whether it will be echoed elsewhere around the world is not at all clear.

18/If we really are entering another period like the 1930s, things will get worse before they get better.

We might one day look back on the Great Protest Wave of 2019-20 as the harbinger of a vaster, more terrible struggle...

(end)

noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-great-pr…