The Utility of Protest

I think there's some serious cultural lag going on.

Protest is meant to signal lasting anger in the voting or labour populations; one will get you voted out of office, and the other will get you economic costs from strikes or other labour disruptions.  There was a period of time when these were important things.

Neither of those actually apply anymore.  Extra-legal vote manipulation is rife and has no real consequences.  (E.g., Stephen Harper's first majority; the conviction happens to a disposable minion, and none of the election results are questioned.  Or the election results in Ontario when a large fraction of the PC candidates are under investigation for extra-legal campaign practices.)  Election results are primarily driven by media brain-hacks in the month or two months prior to the election.  Getting voted out of office is much less of a risk (for many American politicians, no risk) than the system presumes that it is.

There's no meaningful labour movement.  (Canada still has unions.  No non-fringe figure is willing to get up and argue for collective anything, or that there are legitimate forms of social organization other than corporations.)  There's certainly no meaningful mechanism to impose economic costs on the right wing for doing extra-legal things.  (E.g, Galen Weston, and price fixing bread.)

(The only functioning-as-a-movement unions are police unions, who want no oversight and increasing spending and do not tolerate civil control of the police.  They're effectively the official armed wing of white supremacy as a movement.)

Economic actions such as boycotts don't work.  (Just try figuring out what you can eat that doesn't have give Galen Weston money somewhere in the supply chain.  They will stay rich much longer than you can stay hungry.)

So right now, the whole US Border thing; yes, it's an atrocity.  But the point to the atrocity is to consume the substance of everyone on the left; to cost them time and money and stomach lining, because all of those things are finite and in a long war of attrition (all politics is a long war of attrition) what happens is a function of who keeps the largest choice space through paying the least for what they must do.  This kind of behaviour is meant to collapse the choice space of those on the left and render them politically ineffective due to exhaustion.  (A reference from anti-submarine warfare; you generally do not know where the sub is.  You can figure out what box it's in, so you take steps to make sure it stays in that known volume and then, when that volume is small enough, you kill the box.  This is precisely the long-term approach from the would-be-aristocrats on the right.)

The question for protest is not how to get respect, how to get voices heard, not any of that; the question is how to make this kind of behaviour so unbearably expensive the right wing can't stand to do it.