By Chris Satullo

Let me open with a statistic and a question.

The stat: Last weekend, more than 370 rallies were held across America to protest the likelihood that the U.S. Supreme Court will soon overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.

The question: Does anyone really believe that even five times that number of rallies would make any difference in what the high court will do?

I recognize mine is very much a minority opinion, but here it is: In modern America, marches, rallies and protests are mostly exercises in political futility. Potentially, they even can damage the causes they claim to uphold.

Does anyone really think Justice Samuel Alito will watch footage of those Bans off Our Bodies rallies on YouTube, slap his forehead and say: “Goodness, look at all those people. I’d better go rewrite my draft opinion so as to preserve Roe.”

Dear reproductive rights defenders, I’ll let you in on a little secret:

Alito and his five Catholic compadres in the Dobbs majority do…not…care…what…you…think.

In fact, they think you are worse than merely wrong. They think you are evil. They think you have committed murder or countenanced it in those who have.

They regard themselves as the 21^st century equals of antebellum anti-slavery crusaders like William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Like those abolitionists, they see themselves as heroes bravely standing up to oppose a dark tide of history, to squelch an evil advanced by an immoral majority in a nation that has lost its way.

Beyond that, as a constitutional principle, we should never want Supreme Court justices to flip-flop simply because of a few big rallies. Think: What if millions of evangelicals decide to march against gay marriage? Does that mean the court should then reverse its 2015 ruling in Obergefell?

I do understand that rallies serve a purpose. They provide a venue to vent righteous rage and frustration. They help people feel less alone and helpless. They build solidarity, might even foster connections that could eventually prove politically productive.

But you should not mistake them, in themselves, as something particularly useful to the political or policy outcomes you seek.

Here’s the trap: In a social-media-drenched society that so often chooses the performative over the productive, rallies and protests contain a potential downside. This arises if people think (as many seem to do) that, by showing up for a rally, chanting slogans and brandishing fiercely clever signs, they’ve done something titanically useful to advance a cause. This can lead them in essence to check that emotional box. I showed my values; I expressed my rage; I did my part.

To which I’d say: Yes, you did, in the most self-indulgent, politically pointless way possible. To the degree that rallies use up the limited enthusiasm, time, resources and mental bandwidth that busy Americans have to devote to public policy, they can become a negative.

With the abortion issue in particular, here’s the most vital point: The Supreme Court actually is not about to outlaw abortion, because there’s a nuance. What its Catholic majority wants to do is to permit any one of the 50 states to outlaw abortion if it so chooses.

Their likely ruling will set up decades of political trench warfare in 50 state capitols. This means the key victories in the fight must occur in the state legislative races that for years America’s liberals have typically and devastatingly ignored.  Instead, progressives tend to swoon over and send money to Rachel Maddow darlings like Beto O’Rourke and Jaime Harrison who live in states where those liberals don’t have a vote and those candidates never had a chance in hell of winning.

The future of reproductive rights in America will now be decided, bit by grinding bit, in unglamorous cities like Trenton, N.J., Springfield, Ill., Augusta, Me., Salem, Ore., and Harrisburg, Pa. It will be decided by a horde of small-time politicians you’ve never heard of who live in towns where you’ve never been.

And, dear liberal friends, the whole battle will hinge on whether, state by freaking state, the small-time pols who hold the majority in those capitol buildings share your values.

Conservatives, spurred originally by Roe and other Warren Court rulings, have grasped this for decades. It’s been an organizing principle of their movement, leading them to regular – and damaging – statehouse victories on topics such as gun control, school funding, health access and gerrymandering.

So it’s time that you, the protestor, start boning up on how those state elections work, how they are won, and who you should help elect to those offices, so that the coming, fierce, well-funded push to outlaw abortion in your state can be thwarted.

Nothing about the work of winning those elections is fun or glamorous or provides the kind of emotional high that chanting clever slogans amid a mass of like-minded neighbors does. It involves researching arcane local issues, donating money to people you never hear about on MSNBC, staffing phone banks and canvassing door to door in towns whose names you barely know how to pronounce.

And, oh, for you big-city advocates of “choice,” this is a key point: Sending re-election campaign money to the incumbent Democratic state lawmakers from your home city is a waste of your wallet and time. For sure, they’ll pepper you with texts and emails proclaiming their unyielding support for reproductive rights, then ask you for cash. But, in their slam-dunk safe districts, they don’t need your help to win re-election. Their votes on abortion bills are already baked into the calculus.

No, the candidates you need to get to know and stoutly support – the ones whose votes on a state Senate floor might turn defeat into victory – live in the Great Beyond outside your city’s borders. Maybe they’re in the outer ‘burbs, but more likely they live in the “there be dragons” reaches of your state where you never go on vacation. 

It’s going to be hard work and a novel experience, defending reproductive rights in the way it will have to be done for decades to come.  

But the deal is simple: Either you learn these moves and do them well, or you lose.

Let me finish this way:  I imagine, if you’re still reading, your mind has tossed up this objection to what I’m claiming: How can this yahoo diss marches this way? Doesn’t he remember Martin Luther King Jr.? Doesn’t he remember the Vietnam War?

Why, yes, I do remember the ‘60s. I was actually alive back then, teen-aged but still devouring news reports from both Selma and Saigon. And I still revere MLK in a way many do not today – not as a plaster saint, but as a righteously angry young man who had the Bible-inspired genius to channel his rage into brilliant, nonviolent strategy and tactics.

Those times, however, were so different from today. No social media, just three broadcast networks. Uncle Walter would give the reports from Alabama straight to the entire nation; no Fox News to filter, obfuscate and fear-monger. No Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan or Parlor to inject false narratives into the civic bloodstream.

Also, King and his legion did not march in some foolish hope of changing Bull Connor’s mind. They marched first to proclaim their human dignity but, as importantly, to accept the beatings and firehosings – hoping the video of that brutality might just look awful enough to prick the conscience of white liberals. You know, the ones who knew segregation was wrong – but couldn’t summon the energy to do anything about it. Crucially, as well, King was maneuvering to goad a sympathetic Democratic president and a strong Democratic (albeit somewhat Southern) congressional majority into action.

What about the anti-war marches? Weren’t they powerful? (And such good music.)

Well, they did contribute – along with his chronic depression – to LBJ deciding not to run again. Which brought us…Richard Nixon. Who exploited the anxiety and rage the Vietnam protests spawned in Middle America to give the antiwar candidate in 1972, George McGovern, an historic, 49-states-to-1 thrashing.

No, the Vietnam protests, raucous as they were, didn’t end that war. Military defeat did.

Boomer nostalgia for a lost sense of solidarity and purpose is not a strategy. Filling rallies does not create change. Winning elections does. 

Far too many people to the left of center, particularly younger ones, exalt the performative while cynically pooh-poohing the decisive power of their vote.

That’s a great plan for bringing about The Handmaid’s Tale.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia