Back to what he says in the video. I think there is truth behind the premise. That allowing protest in our liberal democracy is really just a form of pacification, rather than any kind of threat.
I respect the idea here, but at least with my gut check, I fear this is one of those ideas that can't really have anything done with it. Time to use the table formatting!
| Corrupt Government | """""Honest""""" Government |
| Stop the Protest? | Bad idea, leads to unrest. | Bad idea, leads to unrest. |
| Allow Protest? | Good idea, lets them feel heard. | Good idea, lets them feel heard. |
It's not the Prisoner's Dilemma, but you enter into a similar kind of game theory problem whereby proper play naturally guides both good and evil players to the same conclusions. The only exception here is if this is China where there's no expectation of a protest being tolerated in the first place, and even then Tianenmen Square still bit China in the ass for a long time given the palpable issues there.
Realistically, if this is some wannabe breadtuber, 75% of this is rage against his own impotence. The left fundamentally lost their understanding of how classically liberal societies culturally function and they're "losing the debate," by and large as a result. So when a libshit protest happens, they don't understand they're the 20 on an 80/20 issue and confuse the general dislike of them meaning nothing is achievable as protests themselves being ineffective because results weren't achieved. They've got cause and effect swapped around on this.
But what of the 25%? Well... he's uselessly right. Classically liberal countries, even if they've declined massively from that ideal, do all understand the feelings of free speech and that it's a good thing. Protests are the most obvious and institutional expression of that, so it makes sense that if you're a cabal of Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, and Woodrow Wilson in the same room plotting to contain the opposition, you want to have feckless protests as a pressure valve. This is where he's right, but I tap the table above for why this is useless to focus on. This is true regardless of who's in power right now or whether government's gone truly sour or not. Protests innately have a pressure release aspect to them, so naturally an amoral, not immoral, player-of-the-game will want to employ this useful tool, and pointing this out just doesn't really lead to anything else you can
do with the idea.
It's not a trick, it's not some magic voodoo spell, it's quite literally basic bitch politics in a Western nation. Man just rediscovered classical liberal theory and is doing a soyjak face while pointing at it. I know this because the neat trick basically works until it doesn't. Protests, in addition to being pressure release valves, are also trying to be bellweathers for what "the culture" wants. I say trying to be because modern leftist protests, having been exposed as ridiculously bought and paid for, do not represent this and the general apathy to their demands turning into contempt is evidence of that. Meanwhile if we try to cart out where Trump's rise came from, you can draw a pretty direct line from MAGA to the Tea Party, and from there you can find various protest votes and responses in Ross Perot or Barry Goldwater in addition to the more right wing aspects of Occupy Wall Street before that turned into a complete leftoid cock-up and burned itself out. So if OP's vidya guy here had a proper grasp of political history, he'd realize that contained opposition is basically like a contained forest fire. It is until it isn't.
