I lived in HK 2018-2020, leaving around the passage of the “national security law”. I think HK is a perfect case study of a line of fallacious thinking popular among westerners: the idea that peaceful protesting or rule-abiding political opposition is generally effective. This is wrong for at least two reasons. The first mistake is failing to recognize that many governments (case in point) are not nearly as vulnerabl…
There is a Cambridge University Press / APSA study about the United States that shows populist swelling or the popular vote rarely results in any legislative change that matches the sentiment, and legislative changes come from well funded special interests that were already there. It is either purely coincidence when those changes match what the protesters want because special interests became interests, or were alre…
My first thought to your comment was an opposing example of gay rights. Sure gay marriage was SCOTUS but it first changed as policy at the state level. politicians changed because it became popular enough and strong voice in media (remember obama was against marriage equality amongst other things at first). We're now seeing this struggle with Trans rights. Where it's >52% popular you see equality legislation, where it's a good wedge issue for Republicans they act against (e.g. DeSantis is running for president on the backs of attacking children..)
Civil Rights Act comes to mind too and interesting in that it had such strong opposition, interesting question of what are special interests if you expand beyond 'economic and business elite.' NAACP et al were very powerful.
Marijuana & decriminalization is another quick thought, though that's a bit more cloudy especially with later states with a more established business interest group. But I worked on the original campaign here in CO and our budget was pretty tiny...