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  • I too grew up in an era of action movies, where the good guy decisively self-defenses the bad guy to death, saves the world, goes home and has marital relations with the prom queen. It's a powerful story, but ultimately it's just a story.

    Peaceful resistance does work, but there isn't a single event that achieves change. It has to be an accumulation.

    Rosa Park's arrest didn't achieve anything "in terms of change".

    Ghandi's protest fasts didn't achieve anything "in terms of change".

    When the Baltics had their singing revolutions, there wasn't a single performance that achieved anything "in terms of change".

    All these were parts of larger efforts of peaceful resistance that culminated in change.

    What did Cory Booker's speech achieve? It's too early to say. It's possible it will be part of an accumulation that culminates in measurable results. On the other hand, it's possible cynicism will poison the resistance and it will achieve nothing. We'll only know once the history is written.

    • This is essentially what I was going to say (though more poetic).

      I'm of two minds. I admit that i cringe a bit that he would even call this "good trouble". John Lewis' "good trouble" was nearly getting beaten to death. How Booker can apply such a label to an act of protest that didn't even meaningfully delay any noteworthy business is frankly amazing to me.

      But also, he did fucking do something. He specifically articulated that we should all be alarmed, and he declared that he intends to not cooperate with or normalize what is happening. Low bar? Yes. But we all have to start somewhere.

      I actually like Cory Booker. He was my third or fourth pick among the 20-something candidates that ran in 2020.

      I'll say this: this act is not enough to convince me that elected Democrats are going to do anything meaningful in the next two years. But the absence of it would've made me far less likely to expect it. Good for him.

  • It's political momentum. Same thing bernie and AOC are doing. None of them have changed anything yet, it's just getting attention and support for future acts

  • It got people to talk about it and take interest in what is going on. There are undoubtedly some portion of the population that are fully oblivious of the world around them, or just indifferent at least, but someone going on for that long has to make them wonder why he would do that.

  • Nothing by itself. But if it can encourage other senators to filibuster, and more importantly, to organize to filibuster together , the impact could be paralyzing.

    To take an obvious example, for half a century, from say 1910 to 1964-5, there were more than enough votes in the US senate to enact civil rights legislation, as southerners only made up 22 or so of the 96-100 senators then (no Hawaii or Alaska for part of that).

    But that legislation never happened. And the reason why it didn’t was that southern senators were able to filibuster so effectively that the legislation could never be brought to the floor, or to force its withdrawal if it got there.

    It’s not that the votes on that specific bill weren’t there. It’s just that under the leadership of Sen Richard Russel of Georgia (who the “Russel Senate Office Building” is named after), the southern senators understood the way to block legislation was to filibuster not just the bill in question, but any law that was about to lapse that was so important economically that senators couldn’t afford to let that happen.

    So they organized, filibustered key bills, set up “watches” where at least one senator had to be on the floor to defeat any quorum calls (which ends a filibuster, as you do not actually have to be talking to filibuster a bill), and filibustered not just votes on key bills, but even votes on motions to bring those bills out of committee to the floor.

    Moreover, since these filibusters weren’t on the bill itself, it was easy for an individual senator to say they were against another bill, or another motion, and make it seem like an unrelated objection, when it was really all part of a comprehensive strategy.

    Eventually, the impending economic doom created enough pressure to get any civil rights bill withdrawn in order to let those other bills pass, which was the southerners asking price.

    Obviously, the democrats now aren’t doing that. But they could. And by generating headlines by filibustering, he encourages other senators to do so, if only for popularity.

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