In Los Angeles, the context is different.

Younger black progressives effectively asserted that their activism ought to trump the approach of other black people who are also actively working for police reform.

The subtext comes across most clearly in the L.A. Times reporting on one prominent Black Lives Matter activist:

Pete White, of Los Angeles Community Action Network, said at Friday's Black Lives Matter news conference that Garcetti has divided black residents and aligned himself with people who won't criticize him for failing to follow through on promises. “We are going to be loud about that and we are going to engage in tactics that are meant to save our lives,” he said.

He’s implying, in other words, that the old guard of black community organizers and LAPD protestors has been coopted by deals it has cut with the city’s political leaders. From the older guard’s perspective, however, their approach is meant to save lives.

The conflict reminds me of the ongoing intra-Republican struggle over means and ends. In the GOP, a new generation of House populists is challenging older Washington hands for cutting deals with a corrupt establishment rather than more aggressively seeking reform. Like the House Freedom Caucus, Black Lives Matters is a fractious movement that brings new eyes and energy to reform efforts with its protests. But as of yet, it isn’t very good at distinguishing between useful breaks with the established order and counterproductive attacks on essential civic norms.

From the older guard’s perspective, it also ignores problems that don’t neatly fit its ideology.

Many who share the ends of Black Lives Matter and like many of their reform ideas are left shaking their heads at what looks, to outsiders, like righteousness overwhelming the pragmatism required to effect change in a pluralistic democracy. (What gives them such expansive faith in the efficacy of left-wing protest tactics?) Yet unapologetic righteousness helps explain the group’s success at awareness-raising, an achievement that the older guard could not have managed on its own.

There are no neat answers here. And the tension between these factions is unlikely to fade away.

In an interview Monday on “The John and Ken Show,” a popular Los Angeles talk radio program known for the unapologetic political incorrectness of its right-leaning populist hosts, Pete White of Black Lives Matter declared, “The practice of opening up our houses of worship for political purposes is something that needs to stop. Once you open up a house of worship for political purpose, it is no longer a sanctuary. It is a statehouse.”

How could that rationale not alienate black congregations, especially given the vital role that they’ve played in past civic advances and the attacks they endured as a result?

The abstract question of when it’s okay to disrupt political speech is thorny.