On a night in mid-December 1773, a group of about 60 men who had disguised themselves as Native Americans boarded three merchant ships at a Boston wharf and dumped dozens of chests of imported tea into the cold dark waters — an act of civil disobedience that damaged private property in protest against government tax policies.

Conservatives these days hail that moment; in fact, a faction on the right a few years ago co-opted the name Tea Party as its own. Yet conservative state legislators across the country have been behaving less like the revolutionary rebels for whom they express admiration and more like British colonial overlords by introducing, and in some states passing, dozens of laws aimed at curtailing the fundamental right to public protest.

How counter-revolutionary.The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer a year ago prompted waves of protests across the country, including here in Los Angeles. But Floyd’s killing was hardly the first such outrageous act by government officials, and the Floyd protests were not the first outpouring of anger and opposition to such acts. In fact, the Black Lives Matter movement so feared and reviled by the right began with a hashtag campaign after George Zimmerman’s 2013 acquittal in the death of Trayvon Martin.

It is in our national DNA to respond to the objectionable through public protest. Street actions in the late 1950s and the 1960s spurred watershed changes in civil rights protections and helped bring an end to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Three decades of protests also helped change public awareness and national policy on nuclear energy and weapons. And don’t forget the 1999 anti-World Trade Organization protests, or the Occupy Wall Street movement a decade ago.