"Moral suasion" and "extortion" as you define them are basically the tools used by civil rights protestors. Now, I know enough not to assume that you support civil rights or racial equality, but come on. You essentially argue that nobody should protest anything, ever, only engage in polite, cerebral debate and never expect an actual benefit or a change in their circumstances.

So…as it happens, I don’t like protest.  I think that our discourse features far too much of it overall, and far too little in the way of polite cerebral debate.  So there’s that. 

(We can get into the reasons for this attitude, at some point, if anyone actually cares.)

But I don’t think that’s very relevant to my analysis of the topic under consideration.

OK, fair cop: “extortion” is a loaded, charged word and I probably should have found something more neutral.  “Moral suasion” is a pretty neutral term.  And I didn’t mean for either of them to indicate any kind of inherent evil in the strategy.  Sometimes, guilting people with your superior virtue is a good way to get what you want.  Sometimes, it really does work to aggravate people until they find it easier to give in than to resist you.  Hell, the whole point of the post is that within a certain well-defined milieu – the college-campus protest – these are probably the best tools to get what you want! 

And if the thing you want is a good thing (as is true for at least some protesters), well, there’s some obvious virtue in using effective tools. 

The unspoken claim underlying my post is that the broader social justice movement, and some of its associated movements, keep on using those tools even in circumstances where they’re not effective.  Y’know…this is your bog-standard assertion of “it really will not help your cause to yell about how all Trump supporters are racists for the umpteen-gajillionth time.”  I am generally inclined to believe that many well-meaning American leftists/liberals have shot themselves in the foot by employing political tactics that accomplish little but inspire tremendous resentment.  And, yeah, that includes a lot of protesting, because many of those leftists/liberals like protesting too much to bother remembering that it’s efficacious only in certain situations.  The project is to figure out why people keep on being self-damagingly stupid in this way, and I believe that I’ve provided a partial answer: “because the activist left is rooted in colleges, and its agents don’t always think through the ways that things work differently outside that environment.” 

If you want to claim that I have my facts wrong somewhere – that protest is more widely effective than I believe it to be, for example – I’m happy to have that fight.  But in the initial post I’m making a positive claim, not a normative claim.