[shaki-dora]

I really don't understand how protests became conflated with violence (mostly in the US, as far as I can tell).

Protests are a basic right in every democracy. The vast majority of protests (as in: >99%) is peaceful.

Protests are among the basic set of methods and institutions that form the public sphere where democracy actually happens. They are no better or worse than newspapers, public libraries, TED talks, Trump rallies, call-your-senator-campaigns, Twitter, Sunday sermons, bumper stickers, the NAACP, triple-A, or, yes, even the Star Wars franchise.

Each of these forums has different strengths and weaknesses, and protests are somewhat unique in being basically free and accessible to everyone (as active participants, not just consumers). Not a single protest since the Civil Rights Movement got anywhere close to being large enough to threaten the sort of overthrow-the-system violence that would be required in an outright confrontation challenging the US government.

[drjesusphd]

And what protest movement since has had significant success?

(I include Vietnam War protests as meeting the threshold).

[shaki-dora]

In the US, very little. That's because there really aren't many meaningful protests these days, because the US has effectively killed the public spaces protests rely on. But the Tea Party movement was arguably influential, and protests were its main tool. Occupy Wall Street was also far more successful than commonly believed: the 1%-vs-99% divide has become a central narrative of US politics, even on the right.

Outside the US? The Arab Spring was nothing but protests, and it did topple something like a dozen governments. Yes, the new ones mostly failed, but that's a different matter.

In Ukraine the protests succeeded. In Hong Kong, they certainly seem to be a major pain for the local government as well as China.

Environmental protests have succeeded almost spectacularly over the last decade or so. Germany's anti-nuclear movement relied on protests as their main method-the Green party was actually founded by a group of people who first met at a protest. Today, Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future and similar keep climate change in the news week by week. That's the sort of pressure without which the Paris accord would have never been attempted.

Compare any agenda from a G7/G8/G20 meeting a decade or two ago, and you'll notice that issues such as the environment, labor protection, or fair trade have gone from zero to dominating these meetings.

The US-EU trade agreement basically died on the day that half a million people in Berlin protested against it.

Obviously, it is often impossible to unambiguously assign causality. It's a complex system where everything affects everything.

But purely subjectively, I am actually surprised by how effective protests are. Consider Ukraine, where a single protest at a central square toppled the government. In practical terms. a Tiannanmen-style massacre was entirely possible. But the protesters won. Why? How?