By Chiara Baez

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Emile Lester

Abstract

Protest movements in the US have been steadily declining, unable to keep up with changing rhetoric and societal expectations regarding First Amendment free speech. Seemingly overnight, protests have lost the ability to directly input the people’s voice into policymaking. Grassroots protest movements are being priced out of the political participation that was once accessible to them by Political Action Committees (PACs), and politicians are favoring pollsters’ skewed data over the public opinion expressed in organized protest. This has created a systemic barrier, halting the voice of the American people. Grassroots protest movements have not disappeared from the American political landscape; instead, they have become largely unsuccessful, despite their popularity. However, there is an identifiable gap in the research regarding how the decline of protests in America may be directly tied to the rise of primary elections and the shift in public opinion regarding the role of protest as a form of political participation in the 21st century. This research uses the 2020 BlackLivesMatter protests as a case study to argue that their failure originated not from mishandling escalation but rather from rhetorical and systemic barriers within the United States’ governmental and societal structures. This paper argues that the result of the 21st-century barriers identified is diminished support from elected officials and the general public for policy change that originates from protest-based movements, regardless of their popularity.