That is an insane statement. The civil rights era was full of protests and change. The Vietnam War ended because of protests. There are many instances of protests pushing presidents left.
Turns out when the rich and powerful set out to hamstring the ability of people to organize in the workplace, and spend a lot of time covertly policing political orgs they don’t agree with, well, people fall out of practice in being part of a community and organizing that community. If you then make every place that someone might want to build communities with other a place to extract money from, it’s real hard to build it all from scratch.
Yeah it wasn’t the protests, but the threat and follow through of violence