A longer piece on this is to come, but over the past couple days I've been really thinking about it and want to be as charitable as a possible to what the utility of a protest parade could be in the modern era, given a practical analysis of the current power structure and state of play.
What I've come to is that before ~100 years ago, a march protest was an actual threat to power because those people could go somewhere and grab somebody out of their house/castle/etc if they didn't do what the People were asking. So those were effective af and not a performance but both an action and a genuine challenge to power.
In the civil rights era, the non-violent marches were def backed up by people/tactics who *weren't* non-violent and also represented boycotts and other practical challenges to power. Importantly, though, this era coincided with the spread of television, bringing images of brutality right into people's homes where they couldn't ignore it. So even though there is an inherent level of performance in a non-violent march (i.e. it is not intended as an action itself nor a direct threat, but a performance with a desired audience to provoke a shift in power), that performance had an audience, and a one newly educated, informed, and shocked. Many who saw what happened to the protesters were indeed moved, if only to make themselves feel like they were better people than they were and not because they really cared about the marginalized. But honestly, who cares what someone's motivation is if they actually move to do the right thing :person_shrugging::skin-tone-4: Honestly there's often too much focus on people's motivations and not what they actually do - but I digress.
In the modern era, we have all seen all of the brutality and the violence by now, as a society. Politicians no longer have any fear of our votes or our words because corporate control is complete. And lastly, internalization of the "peaceful protesters" narrative has taken the likelihood of folks straight up going to politicians houses to tar and feather them out of the equation. So practically speaking there is no longer any real world use for all those people gathering because there is no audience that matters for the performance of it, it does not actually harness power if there are no demands and not even a critique of the system itself, and there is no threat represented other than "we'll vote you out so hard in 3 years :triumph: " which, lol.
All of those people who went out all across the country and provided a big payday to capitalism would have actually been threatening capital if they hit instead stayed home and only participated in local commerce/community spending and given not a single solitary cent to any business which is supported by or supports the power structure. If instead of marching all of those people had pledged to dump Amazon Prime and/or help someone with a community garden and/or start a local child care initiative and/or do community defense against ICE, and/or something else tangible that would help us obviate the system, they would have been orders of magnitude more useful, i.e. actually useful and not counterproductive. Until these things can actually start to be a threat or a way to gather power rather than just a feel-good parade for people who don't actually give a shit, they are outdated and a tool of the overculture.