How 3.5% of People Can Change Everything

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Crooked Media. I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.
If there are 10 steps to autocracy and authoritarianism, there are 10 steps to freedom and power.

Speaker 1 One of the first steps is to commit, to know that we are facing a true struggle for the soul and the future of America.

Speaker 1 But another step is disruption, refusing to be silent in the face of what feels like overwhelming odds.

Speaker 1 Last week at the No Kings protest, we heard the voices of disruption across the country, and they weren't shy.

Speaker 1 The act of protest is a vital, visible, and essential ingredient to resisting the fall of democracy.

Speaker 1 But it is only part of the equation. Protest allows us to articulate grievance, to show solidarity, to demand redress.

Speaker 1 In fact, my parents were active protesters in the civil rights movement, but their actions didn't stop there. They actively registered black voters, which was an illegal act at the time.

Speaker 1 In fact, my dad was arrested for doing just that as a teenager.

Speaker 1 In the 1980s, as the boycott of companies supporting apartheid in South Africa was growing, my parents staged our own mini-protest slash boycott at a shell station in Gulfport, Mississippi.

Speaker 1 Mom and dad and their six black kids weren't going to topple a regime by refusing to buy gas, but we were part of a larger coalition that absolutely did.

Speaker 1 My parents understood that they could organize us as a cohort of eight and mobilize us to show our demands.

Speaker 1 I carried their example with me to college, where I forswore my favorite cereal, Raisin Brand Crunch, for my entire tenure, four years.

Speaker 2 Why?

Speaker 1 Because I'd learned about the grape boycott led by the United Farm Workers.

Speaker 1 The first grape strike and boycott lasted from 1965 to 1970 and was led by Cesar Chavez, and it resulted in historic collective bargaining agreements.

Speaker 1 But there was a second round against table grapes that didn't end until the passage of California legislation that strengthened farm worker labor laws in 1977.

Speaker 1 Now, I was a participant in the third boycott, which began in 1984 and ended in 2000 after 16 years.

Speaker 1 Not every boycott results in immediate effect. Not every protest leads to a transformation of society.

Speaker 1 However, we do know that protests and boycotts, combined with other actions, including strikes, litigation, mutual aid, and nonviolent civil disobedience, can work.

Speaker 1 Civil resistance to authoritarianism can absolutely succeed.

Speaker 1 Yet, in a time when Republicans willfully destroy our democratic systems, systems, when our supposed democratic fail-safes continue to fail us, and our separate solutions seem inadequate, what must we do to stand up against and ultimately defeat an autocratic authoritarian regime?

Speaker 1 Well, we don't have to guess. Historians, movement leaders, dissidents, and researchers have answers for us, but they can be hard to find and sometimes harder to believe.

Speaker 1 But one of our leading resistance scholars has a theory. If 3.5% of the nation's population participates in nonviolent civil resistance, it will likely succeed.

Speaker 1 And so today I'm joined by one of the scholars behind this calculation, Erika Chinoweth.

Speaker 1 They are a political scientist and professor of public policy, but they are appearing here today in their individual capacity.

Speaker 1 Erika Chenoweth, welcome to Assembly Required.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much. Delighted to be here.

Speaker 1 Well, I know you have been busy traveling every podcast in the universe because you are one of the leading scholars on nonviolent civil resistance.

Speaker 1 And you are best known right now for the 3.5% rule, which is the idea that to create real lasting change, a movement needs to mobilize sustained nonviolent participation from about 3.5% of a country's population.

Speaker 1 Now, we'll get into into the details of that rule and the research behind it, but first I'd love for the listeners who might not be familiar with your work to know a little bit more about your background and how you came to this space.

Speaker 2 Sure, thank you. My work in this area started back in 2006 when I was finishing my doctoral dissertation in political science.

Speaker 2 I was somebody studying questions about political violence, where and how it happens, why it happens, how to stop it.

Speaker 2 And I was accidentally maybe invited to a workshop that was on called People, Power, and Pedagogy.

Speaker 2 And it was put on by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which is an educational foundation devoted to spreading knowledge about nonviolent resistance.

Speaker 2 And when I went to that workshop, I was really amazed by two things.

Speaker 2 One is there was a very rich scholarship on the theory and applied nature of nonviolent resistance with lots of interesting cases like the People Power Movement in the Philippines, the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins that led to the desegregation of Nashville, the Serbian Oatpoor movement that helped oust Slobonan Milosevic from power.

Speaker 2 But nobody yet had really tallied whether over time in a very wide range of countries, nonviolent methods like where ordinary people are using protests, strikes, boycotts, and lots of other methods to promote change was as effective or more effective than armed struggle.

Speaker 2 And so I left that workshop with a commitment to study that question with a colleague I met there named Maria Stefan.

Speaker 2 And she and I, over the next two years, sat down, collected the data, did the analysis, and ultimately wrote a book about this topic called Why Civil Resistance Works, where my skepticism about the power of nonviolent resistance was overcome by the data, which speaks to the fact that it has been in the past

Speaker 2 not just as effective, but quite a bit more effective than armed struggle in achieving, especially democratic change around the world.

Speaker 1 And I appreciate how you are using the language and the terms. And I know one of the challenges we're having in this moment is a tendency to conflate terms.

Speaker 1 I've spent a lot of time on the show explaining the difference between authoritarianism and fascism.

Speaker 1 These are all things that can exist, but they are not the same things.

Speaker 1 And on the side of resistance, we know that protests are absolutely tools of civil resistance, but civil resistance is not simply the act of protest.

Speaker 1 And you just alluded to it, but can you go into a bit more detail explaining what constitutes civil resistance and then give some examples of resistance tactics?

Speaker 2 Sure.

Speaker 2 This is a great question.

Speaker 2 And you're right that protest and persuasion are one set of a broad set of tactics and actions that constitute the toolkit for people engaged in a campaign of civil resistance.

Speaker 2 So civil resistance is a technique of struggle.

Speaker 2 It is a kind of method of active conflict where ordinary people come together in a sustained and coordinated way and they figure out how to change intolerable conditions without hurting anybody.

Speaker 2 And there is a huge range of strategies and campaigns and mechanisms and tactics available to achieve those types of goals.

Speaker 2 Sometimes it's literally just through using the existing institutions, which provide a very stable and predictable set of ways to seek redress, whether that's through the courts or whether it's through elections or whether it's through championing and advocating advocating for fairer practices across the board.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, in some sense, democracy itself is a set of institutions meant to accommodate conflict without hurting anybody. And that's the ideal.

Speaker 2 So civil resistance is doing that on the civil society side. It's where ordinary people are basically demanding such democratic changes using these tools.

Speaker 2 And the methods are like protest and persuasion, which is very familiar to people, street demonstrations, rallies, and the like. But there's also non-cooperation.

Speaker 2 And that's where you get into the strikes, the boycotts, different types of campaigns of social non-cooperation where people are ostracized in their communities, for example, which has been used everywhere from in the Irish independence movement through shaming campaigns and things like that of the contemporary era.

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 there are methods of what Gene Sharp calls nonviolent intervention and what a lot of other people call alternative institutions.

Speaker 2 So, this is building mutual aid, building different types of community organizations of parallel institutions to provide the services that the government is refusing to provide through neglect or malign toward the population.

Speaker 2 So, examples of places where a whole range of those methods have been used can be found in basically every country in the world.

Speaker 2 And in our own country, in our own history, we have had, we're inheriting legacies of civil resistance campaigns

Speaker 2 for almost every type of demand

Speaker 2 at almost every point in our country's history to some degree or another.

Speaker 1 So, one other piece I want to lean into is nonviolent and what that means.

Speaker 1 And there's also this conversation that tactics that are nonviolent should not involve confrontation, cannot create discomfort.

Speaker 1 And I would aggressively push back against that, but would love to have you weigh in.

Speaker 1 Because as we talk about what nonviolent civil resistance means, we know that civil resistance is often prey to the opposition really trying to reshape language and limit what it has to face.

Speaker 1 So we'd love to have you talk about that piece as well.

Speaker 2 That's right. So when I say nonviolent resistance, what I mean is that people are unarmed and they're engaged in a series of tactics that don't do physical damage to people

Speaker 2 and harm people or threaten to harm people physically.

Speaker 2 But within that is a very broad range of sometimes highly confrontational tactics, right?

Speaker 2 That

Speaker 2 the opponent of the movement would not at all receive as polite or civil, as it were,

Speaker 2 because they're deliberately meant to build pressure. They're building political pressure, social pressure, economic pressure, cultural pressure.
on the opponent.

Speaker 2 And the purpose of it is to make the opponent's own coalition begin to sort of fall apart.

Speaker 2 And so sometimes, absolutely, a wise strategy could be having some component of the movement using more

Speaker 2 inducements or, for lack of a better term, treating a certain segment of that coalition in a way that is inviting it into

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 resistance campaigns coalition. So this might be where

Speaker 2 it does make more sense to

Speaker 2 say, appeal to people's common interests and try not to be too antagonistic. But then, on the other side, it may make a ton of sense to call out and be very disruptive and

Speaker 2 contentious when

Speaker 2 the purpose of the action isn't actually to

Speaker 2 persuade, but instead to prevent something really bad from happening.

Speaker 2 And so there's sort of a very broad range there, and

Speaker 2 it's sort of a both and when it comes to levels of disruption versus

Speaker 2 other means of trying to break apart the loyalty within those pillars of support.

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Speaker 1 One of the key points in your research is that non-violent civil resistance campaigns have historically been twice as successful as violent ones.

Speaker 1 And that's based on resistance data spanning from 1900 to 2006. What makes them more successful? And I'd love for you to talk a little bit about the critiques of your work and how you respond.

Speaker 2 Sure. So,

Speaker 2 Maria and Stefan and I, when we wrote our book, we were working with 323 cases of what we call maximalist campaigns.

Speaker 2 And what that means is campaigns that were trying to oust the incumbent national leader, bring down a dictator usually,

Speaker 2 or they were trying to create territorial independence.

Speaker 2 So in other words, they were trying to create new countries from out of occupied countries or colonies or through self-determination in some form or another.

Speaker 2 And the reason I mentioned that is because 323 cases sounds like a small set, but if you look at those very kind of extreme revolutionary contexts, there was a relatively small set through that time period.

Speaker 2 And even in those revolutionary contexts, we saw that, as you said, the campaigns that relied more on people power, so the sort of Gandhian techniques and its later iterations, were the ones that were the most likely to succeed.

Speaker 2 And they become increasingly so over the course of the 20th century

Speaker 2 during the period that we saw decolonization around the world, et cetera.

Speaker 2 And the reason is because we think, and we argued in that book, that nonviolent methods, so the techniques that we talked about,

Speaker 2 are more accessible to a much wider range of potential participants. And so, people from all walks of life are participating in people power movements, whereas a very small and

Speaker 2 highly committed and very risk-acceptant population is participating in armed revolutionary action.

Speaker 2 So, because of those very large numbers, it supplies the movement with so many other levers of political power, whether those are political, economic, social, or cultural levers.

Speaker 2 And it also supplies the movement with the ability to use and wield the types of methods that really impose direct material costs on the opponent, like the general strike, which is very hard to do if there's only a tiny segment of the population that's very committed to the movement.

Speaker 2 Large-scale movements that are very diverse are also more likely to be able to be resilient to repression that's directed against them, which in almost every case there was because these were again kind of revolutionary movements.

Speaker 2 And we found that in the cases where people were using nonviolent resistance, it was much more likely that repression against them would backfire and actually get the movement more support internally.

Speaker 2 So the most important thing to know about the reasons these movements were winning is because they were much more likely to elicit defections from within the opponent's pillars of support.

Speaker 2 In our case, what we measured for that book was security force defections, which means that members of the military or the police or other security forces refused to go along ultimately with orders to repress them or orders to shore up the regime with a coup or something like that.

Speaker 2 And that played a critical role in the success of these campaigns. So what I would say about the critiques is that there are lots of different ways to critique these findings.

Speaker 2 One is, you know, do they hold over time?

Speaker 2 There's a lot of variation over time, and we're trying to better understand why that's the case now.

Speaker 2 Another critique is, did we include, you know, can you really create a binary between campaigns that primarily use nonviolent resistance and those that use armed struggle?

Speaker 2 I would argue yes, you can actually observe these things pretty closely and if there's some mixing of techniques you can account for that and look at its effects on the overall outcome.

Speaker 2 And I think that the sort of third set of critiques is, well, are there cases in which these

Speaker 2 these findings just don't apply, either because the country context is different, because what the demands of the movement are different, because of the constituency that's trying to mobilize and whether it's different.

Speaker 2 And I'll tell you, there's been over a decade now of research exploring exactly those critiques and those questions. And

Speaker 2 I would say, you know, what's really interesting, and I should say, in a sense, validating, is that even when you break things down to lots of different levels and look at different cases in different contexts, there's some pretty extraordinary kind of regularities that emerge empirically.

Speaker 2 And one of them is that movements that are trying to create a democracy or sustain a democracy or improve a democracy

Speaker 2 generally only get to do that if they are

Speaker 2 if they're primarily using nonviolent resistance and people power methods to get there.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much, because I think that set of critiques are bubbling up, especially on TikTok and in social media.

Speaker 1 And it's very helpful to have you contextualize it for those who are hearing all of this.

Speaker 1 And one of the things they're also hearing is the 3.5% figure, which emerged in part to examine the veracity of political scientist Mark Lickback's 5% rule.

Speaker 1 And he argued that you rarely see more than 5% of a population actively participating in an uprising and that it might be... you know, that might be all it takes to create change.

Speaker 1 And you say that, you know, 3.5% is a number. To the average person, 3.5%, even 5% don't sound like large numbers.
And in a nation the size of the U.S., that would be roughly 12 million people.

Speaker 1 So when we think about major historical movements like the civil rights movement, I know it's hard to quantify how many people were involved.

Speaker 1 Can you talk about the quantitative measure and the qualitative side of that measure? So what's required for participation to be meaningful?

Speaker 2 So a couple of things on the 3.5% rule. Its genesis

Speaker 2 actually came from a conversation I was having with an activist after Maria's and my book came out. And I was at a workshop with somebody and they

Speaker 2 kind of question came up of, is there a critical threshold for popular participation after which none of the movements that you studied has failed? And I didn't know the answer to that, but I had read

Speaker 2 Lickbach's book, The Rebel's Dilemma, and remembered that he mentioned a 5% rule. And so during the break, I went and

Speaker 2 sort of opened my laptop to look at our data and to see if it approximated the 5%. And actually, none of the cases had failed after achieving 3.5%.

Speaker 2 So that is where it came from. And it was a very helpful interaction with an activist with a good question that led to that.

Speaker 2 And so the first thing I'll say about the 3.5% rule is the way we measured it in that data set was that we just looked at the peak participation.

Speaker 2 so the number of people that were reportedly observed participating actively in the campaign at its highest level.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that was the most reliable way to get at a question of participation size in the movement across such a huge range of countries and time across so many decades of time.

Speaker 2 It's limited in the sense that, as you kind of inferred,

Speaker 2 it doesn't get at broader levels of support for the movement. It doesn't get at people who weren't participating but who

Speaker 2 sympathize with the movement. And it's very hard to gauge participation in things that are like non-cooperation.

Speaker 2 So say it's a stay-at-home demonstration, people are banging pots and pans at night at the same time of day. That's really hard for us to observe.

Speaker 2 how many people might have participated in something like that compared to how many people you know were reported to have participated in a massive demonstration in the nation's capital or something like that, and in all the major cities around the country.

Speaker 2 So, I just think that

Speaker 2 in terms of the number itself, we use the best estimate, the most credible estimate we could find reported historically about basically street demonstration participation.

Speaker 2 I often say it requires sustained participation in part because

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 cases that we studied were cases where people had been mobilizing already for, in many cases, years, right? And so they were building to that level of participation.

Speaker 2 And it doesn't just kind of usually occur overnight.

Speaker 2 And, you know, I think the way to think about it now is

Speaker 2 that is a really important and impressive historical observation.

Speaker 2 And whether or not

Speaker 2 it provides a sort of meaningful target

Speaker 2 in terms of a threshold is a separate question. I'm not sure it has predictive or even prescriptive power.
What is a useful and hopeful thing to know about the 3.5%

Speaker 2 rule is simply that it feels like something that's within reach for people when they are thinking about trying to mobilize

Speaker 2 against a very challenging set of circumstances that

Speaker 2 it feels, it makes people who are doing the organizing and the mobilizing feel like

Speaker 2 that what they're doing is within reach of historical precedent. And so

Speaker 2 I think that it is a hopeful statistics. And as you said, you know, it's a much larger number of people in absolute terms than it sounds as a proportion.

Speaker 1 Erica, I so appreciate you laying out the difference between the prescriptive and the psychic.

Speaker 1 And before I lead into my next question about no kings, I would love to have you talk about moments where the 3.5%

Speaker 1 didn't quite work.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 as we talked about earlier, the book covers the period 1900 to 2006. And since then, I've been updating the data myself and together with colleagues, depending on

Speaker 2 the timeframe.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there's at least one case that has confirmed to sort of have broken the rule, which is Bahrain from 2011 to 2014.

Speaker 2 And we also back-added a case into our data set of Brunei back in the 1960s, which had a very small uprising that was another example of that. And I think the main thing to know about those

Speaker 2 two cases is they, again, quite unique contexts, like both were monarchies in which the responses to the movement displayed an ability to prevent defections from within the security forces in particular.

Speaker 2 And there was also very powerful international backing for those monarchies and things like that.

Speaker 2 And so, you know,

Speaker 2 there are some things to learn about that, about the sort of survival of

Speaker 2 monarchical regimes in particular, as a category of authoritarian regimes, perhaps. But

Speaker 2 the other thing is just that it speaks to the fact that the movements that achieved 3.5% 3.5%

Speaker 2 popular participation didn't win because of that.

Speaker 2 They won because the numbers that they were able to attract allowed them to activate all of the other kind of mechanisms of why these movements succeed, in particular by getting the pillars of support to defect.

Speaker 2 And so if a movement doesn't have a strategy for that,

Speaker 2 it may not even matter, right, if they blow past the rule and get into like 7%, 8%, if there's no strategy for how to translate that popular participation into political power,

Speaker 2 then it may not hold.

Speaker 1 So speaking of that, on October 18th, nearly 7 million people participated in the No Kings rallies nationwide, making it one of the largest single-day protests in U.S. history.

Speaker 1 But given what you've just laid out,

Speaker 1 Can you talk about how you understand these protests in the context of what we're facing in America as we think about and and strategize around civil resistance.

Speaker 2 Sure.

Speaker 2 So the first thing I'll say is that, as you mentioned, it was a historic day of mobilization. My team is still tallying

Speaker 2 our records, and it'll take us a couple more weeks to do that. We check everyone carefully.

Speaker 2 But you're right that without a doubt, it's one of the largest single-day demonstrations in U.S. history.

Speaker 2 What I point out about it is that it follows on several other

Speaker 2 mass demonstrations that have happened in the United States since Trump's second inauguration, which also were very, very large, among the top 10 probably

Speaker 2 mass demonstrations in U.S. history.

Speaker 2 The second thing I'll say about this movement is it is,

Speaker 2 despite what

Speaker 2 many different

Speaker 2 political leaders are saying right now, it's an overwhelmingly nonviolent movement. So

Speaker 2 we can track things like injuries, property damage, things like that, and all of these events.

Speaker 2 And doing so, over the entire course of the period since Trump was inaugurated, the protests that have happened that have been

Speaker 2 against Trump or his agenda, over 99.5%

Speaker 2 of those actions have featured no injuries, no property damage, or anything.

Speaker 2 So it's like a remarkably disciplined movement for the numbers of people who've been participating, which is a staggering amount.

Speaker 2 It's also much greater protest volume than we saw during the first Trump administration at this point, which is, again, not something that hits the headlines very often.

Speaker 2 But my team's tally suggests that it's something like four times more protests have happened now,

Speaker 2 as had happened by the end of October in 2017

Speaker 2 in the first administration. So we are in like a historic period of mass mobilization.

Speaker 2 In terms of like translating that into meaningful political power,

Speaker 2 there are a couple of things that one would look for. One would look at whether the movement was attracting people from a broader range

Speaker 2 than just people who are typically what would be on their side anyway. So what are we seeing there?

Speaker 2 Well, you know, a couple of weeks ago, my team put out an analysis that suggested that there has been more protest and more higher protest participation in counties that voted for Trump in 2024 than there were in any kind of meaningful way, in a sustained way, during the first administration.

Speaker 2 So it is reaching more into Trump country,

Speaker 2 which I would associate as,

Speaker 2 you know, so too early to tell like how that affects the political scene, but certainly would be a necessary component of having more of a political presence in some of those places than happened certainly during the first administration.

Speaker 2 The other thing we would look for is: is the movement innovating new techniques, right? So, not just using protests, but using different forms of non-cooperation.

Speaker 2 Well, the group that has organized the No Kings protests has also put out trainings that were specifically on non-cooperation over the summer and trying to develop a capacity for that longer term.

Speaker 2 The next thing we'd look at is: are we seeing defections, right? Are we seeing loyalty shifts within the economic and business community, within

Speaker 2 Republican leadership at the state, state, local, county level? Are we seeing prominent cultural authorities, faith leaders, labor? Like, where are they and what are they doing?

Speaker 2 And interestingly, the week running up to No Kings,

Speaker 2 there were some really interesting signs of people being quite uncomfortable going along with what I would call autocratic consolidation.

Speaker 2 For example, a number of universities rejected the so-called higher ed compact.

Speaker 2 A number of airports put up signs saying

Speaker 2 they didn't endorse what Christy Noam was saying in her TSA message about the shutdown, right? The Chamber of Commerce sued the Trump administration.

Speaker 2 This one was like buried way down in the news, but they sued him over the H-1B policy.

Speaker 2 And in the suit, didn't just say this is because it's going to cause material harm to our business, but also the president doesn't have a right to change this. Congress must change this.

Speaker 2 And so we want Congress to weigh in, right? So that's the Chamber of Commerce, right? Like these are powerful, powerful institutions who are starting to say no.

Speaker 2 And that, I think, is where we will see whether the movement is able to express its power is through how it both invites different behavior from within these pillars of support or how it pressures them to behave differently over the long term.

Speaker 2 And, you know, as I said, and the movements that we've studied can take years to build the momentum and the mobilizational kind of power that elicits that change in behavior.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 from what I can tell, the movement that's emerging in this country is resilient and

Speaker 2 trying to be very well organized so that it can be a long-haul movement,

Speaker 2 not just a movement that is devoted singularly to protest.

Speaker 1 I appreciate you laying that out. One of the questions I have as we watch this, and you lifted up the need for innovation.

Speaker 1 We know that the last time we had a sustained nonviolent movement, the civil rights movement, part of the tipping point was the media coverage.

Speaker 1 It was people seeing the brutality of what was unfolding and at whose hands. But today's media ecosystem is radically different.

Speaker 1 People live in these information bubbles that are rife with misinformation and disinformation. The right has captured major media conglomerates.

Speaker 1 And we know that tech platforms at best are censoring and at worst are actively seeding right-wing propaganda.

Speaker 1 So how do you think about that effect on the movement's ability to break through in the U.S. at this moment?

Speaker 2 I think it's a very challenging terrain.

Speaker 2 The information environment

Speaker 2 is

Speaker 2 very complicated.

Speaker 2 and unpredictable. And I think maybe that's one of the key differences between what it was like facing

Speaker 2 misinformation delivered by the state, which would have been called propaganda, you know, back in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and autocratic regimes,

Speaker 2 and what we face now, which is just all kinds of different misinformation coming from many different

Speaker 2 kinds of points of view and

Speaker 2 also just a very segmented information environment where people

Speaker 2 consume information that makes them them have a totally different set of fact bases than their neighbors.

Speaker 2 So, what to do?

Speaker 2 This is definitely an area where I feel a deep humility. I have, it's not my area of expertise, and I don't exactly know what to do because I think we're in somewhat uncharted territory.
But

Speaker 2 if the sort of theory and logic of civil resistance is correct,

Speaker 2 regardless of the nature of the information ecosystem, then I think one of the things that was learned by Gandhi and by the leaders of the civil rights movement, et cetera, is

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 the message has to be captured in order for it to break through. And so I think that just means having a capacity to continue to document and share what is going on.

Speaker 2 So, you know, even if it's hard to break through the noise, having folks who are recording ICE operations, having folks who are recording what happens at protests and the like is so important

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 it can serve as the basis for later documenting exactly how things went down and accountability and other things like that, even if in the immediate term it doesn't look like it's breaking through.

Speaker 2 So I just think

Speaker 2 we have a very unpredictable information ecosystem. We don't know which things go viral and which things don't.
We don't know when they go viral, who they go viral to.

Speaker 2 Like all these things just need to be studied more and strategy calibrated accordingly.

Speaker 2 But I also think people shouldn't give up. Like they shouldn't just think that

Speaker 2 this doesn't matter and it's not going to break through. They should continue to record what's going on.

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Speaker 1 Part of what you just laid out, Erica, is how tech must play a role in movement work.

Speaker 1 And on the other side, we know there's a popular app to track ICE that helped alert people to its presence in their communities.

Speaker 1 The nonprofit Tech for Palestine is an incubator for technical innovation that supports Palestinian liberation.

Speaker 1 And yet on the other side, we know that Apple has removed technologies from their app store, especially the ones focusing on the U.S., at the administration's request. How should we respond?

Speaker 1 I mean, we're seeing how corporate power will acquiesce to the state in ways that stifle resistance. How should we think about our response to their response?

Speaker 2 So I think about the tech titans as pillars, and each of them individually is a pillar, and then they collectively form one as well.

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 there's some really interesting examples from the past where very powerful corporate interests have, you know, been themselves treated as having their own pillars of support, and for campaigns to make them more accountable or to make them deliver more fair work practices and things like that have been successful.

Speaker 2 And I think about the case of the grape farm owners during the grape boycotts and the California Farm Workers Movement and the strategy of understanding that it wasn't just farmers engaging in their status quo corporate practices that the movement needed to target.

Speaker 2 It was the distributors,

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 managers, the

Speaker 2 people who

Speaker 2 actually

Speaker 2 were the wholesale retailers that were selling grapes. And so Cesar Chavez and his movement

Speaker 2 focused on building the capacity to pull those pillars away from the grape owners.

Speaker 2 They worked with the Longshoremen's Union to get them to refuse to ship the grapes and put them on the boats. And they left them on the docks and they brought it.
They first, I think, asked Safeway

Speaker 2 not to carry grapes. And then when they were ignored, they had a boycott of Safeway.
And then, Safeway stopped carrying the grapes, right? So,

Speaker 2 every opponent has pillars of support that are required for it to do what it wants to do.

Speaker 2 And they can all be sort of vulnerable to a movement strategy that encourages them to behave a different way. And then,

Speaker 2 that is what happens when movements win: they remove the opponent from its pillars of support. I mean,

Speaker 2 the movement against apartheid in South Africa is another really good example of

Speaker 2 a movement that built a strategy to influence multinational corporations to not go along with apartheid. And yes, it took years,

Speaker 2 very complicated case. But in the end,

Speaker 2 it was the economic pressure that was put on South Africa, both externally and internally, by black townships engaged in full-blown non-cooperation, non-cooperation, strikes, work stoppages, refusal to buy,

Speaker 2 that is what led to the end of the apartheid regime.

Speaker 2 So, like, I do think that it's useful to think of corporate power in the same way that a movement might think of otherwise unaccountable political power and knowing that there are always ways to influence the behavior of people whose cooperation is required for them to succeed.

Speaker 1 Erka, I appreciate you pointing out how long sometimes it takes for movements and for civil resistance to work.

Speaker 1 I think it also takes time for people to recognize the collapse of democratic systems, which is what we're facing in the U.S.

Speaker 1 And I think part of the challenge of attacking those pillars is really grounded in people not understanding that we are already in the midst of an authoritarian regime.

Speaker 1 I would love for you to talk for a second about how we continue to move the needle on recognition, let alone getting people to understand that it's going to take some time to align the three and a half percent of the population.

Speaker 1 And so, what advice would you give to people who are feeling both impatient and expect rapid and coherent response?

Speaker 1 And what advice would you give to those of us trying to convince people that we are in the midst of a government takeover?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 I think that many people think of something like an authoritarian takeover as something that would be obvious when it happened because there would be some bright line crossed where a person goes to bed one night and a certain person is the president and they wake up the next day and somebody else has been declared the president, right?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that's what happens with an actual military coup or something along those lines. Now,

Speaker 2 what's helpful to know is that that's generally speaking not the way that autocratic takeovers and consolidations are taking place right now.

Speaker 2 In the past 18 plus years, year over year, we're in a global democratic recession, which is largely driven by elected authoritarians.

Speaker 2 As you've, I think, rightly pointed out in some of your writing on this,

Speaker 2 the fact that what happens is that people elect leaders with autocratic tendencies and once they're in power, it's actually not that hard if a person is not committed to the sort of rule of law and the sort of norms of restraint and forbearance that are required to maintain a democratic system, it's not that hard to bring them down from within.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 that's the primary way in which democratic backsliding is taking place around the world today. And because of that,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 the psychic experience of it is that people keep waiting. They keep waiting for a bright line.
They keep waiting for a moment in which it's obvious that

Speaker 2 the autocratic consolidation is complete or something. And the reality is

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 every kind of major observatory around the world that classifies regime types has already downgraded the United States.

Speaker 2 So early on in the Trump administration, because of the assaults on the rule of law, the lack of regard for the separation of powers, the lack of regard for elections and respect for election outcomes, the willingness to use the levers of government power

Speaker 2 as mechanisms of personal retribution for the president and

Speaker 2 lack of commitment to civil liberties and the like. And so

Speaker 2 we're already in, like, deep into a backsliding episode.

Speaker 2 And to your question about like how do people who are impatient for change like articulate this to their friends and neighbors, I mean, I actually think more talk, more people articulating shared common values of just like, here are my minimal points of

Speaker 2 what I consider to be a free country. And I'm deeply concerned.
about this in our country and like just really starting to have those types of conversations

Speaker 2 with their neighbors and their communities.

Speaker 2 And then understand that, in fact, all of the polling that we have suggests that most people in our country want to live in a democracy and,

Speaker 2 in fact, prefer

Speaker 2 there to be a democratic form of government to anything else. And that the key job is to align folks from all walks of life and all different stripes around a pro-democracy movement.

Speaker 2 And that's a little bit different from the way that people in our polity have typically tried to organize themselves politically, where they've tried to organize themselves into political parties, and that's the dominant like structure.

Speaker 2 And now we're in a situation where effective civil society response to backsliding means organizing ourselves

Speaker 2 without too much regard for which political party a person is in and more regard for whether we share the minimal points of unity around the kind of country we want to live in and the things that must be in place for that to be true in terms of separation of powers, rule of law, civil liberties,

Speaker 2 free and fair elections,

Speaker 2 and how we can work together to get there. So, I think

Speaker 2 it's a very promising time for an alignment of that kind that could really renew the fundamental values and principles that so many people have said they wanted in this country and that we actually get to try to renew together.

Speaker 1 Ericinowitz, thank you so much for joining us today on Assembly Required and we will get to talking.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much. Pleasure.

Speaker 1 Likewise.

Speaker 1 As always on Assembly Required, we're here to give you real actionable tools to face today's biggest challenges.

Speaker 1 If you enjoyed my conversation with Erica about the power of civil resistance, go check out their book, Why Civil Resistance Works, The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. Next, solve problems.

Speaker 1 As we discussed in this episode, physical protest is one tactic of many in the act of nonviolent civil resistance.

Speaker 1 As we lay out in the 10 Steps Campaign, on the road to freedom and power, we don't all need to do the same thing, but we can all do something.

Speaker 1 So donate to causes you care about, participate in economic boycotts, vote in local elections, or contact your local elected officials.

Speaker 1 But if you do decide to physically protest, remember to know your rights and stay safe. Visit the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, for a guide to knowing your rights as a protester.

Speaker 1 And Wired has an excellent article on how to protest safely, which we will link to in the show notes.

Speaker 1 And third, do good.

Speaker 1 The Trump administration and Republicans refuse to tap into a $6 billion contingency fund to cover SNAP benefits if the shutdown continues into next month.

Speaker 1 That means in November, 42 million Americans will not receive food assistance. This unprecedented cruelty demands action.
Please consider making donations to your local food bank or volunteering.

Speaker 1 Organizations like Feeding America can help you find places to volunteer near you and get your kids involved.

Speaker 1 Feeding America has an age-appropriate guide for ways families can help together, like hosting a food drive.

Speaker 1 And finally, call your governor and ask them to urge the Secretary of Agriculture to reverse this devastating decision.

Speaker 1 So one of my favorite parts of Assembly Required is hearing from you. And so joining today to help me answer another one of your your questions is our producer, Farah.

Speaker 6 Hi, Stacey. How are you?

Speaker 1 I'm doing fine. How are you?

Speaker 6 I'm doing great. I'm excited for today's listener question, which comes from Patty Gron Lee from California.

Speaker 6 And she asks, so everyone is talking about how exciting it is that Mamdani was the winner in the Democratic primary for a New York mayor. No one is talking about how this primary was ranked choice.

Speaker 6 I live in California where we don't have statewide ranked choice voting, but instead we do jungle primaries.

Speaker 6 It's great for counties that are blue, but it sucks when you're trying to flip the county or pull in a more progressive direction.

Speaker 6 What are the steps we can take to bring ranked choice voting into national elections?

Speaker 1 Patty, thank you so much for the question. And I want to start by saying, as you may know, that was actually the topic of our very first inaugural episode of Assembly Required.

Speaker 1 We talked about ranked choice voting. But one of the reasons we talked about it is that solving these problems at the macro level is nearly impossible.

Speaker 1 And that was before the authoritarian takeover of our democracy. But

Speaker 1 where I want us to always return to every time we have these questions is local action.

Speaker 1 The best way to get to national ranked choice voting is to make sure we are adopting it at the state and local level wherever possible.

Speaker 1 And so this isn't just about can we get Gavin Newsom and the General Assembly in California to adopt it.

Speaker 1 It's how many local governments do you have that are willing to adopt ranked choice voting where they are?

Speaker 1 Because as you pointed out, if you have the jungle primaries, yes, that serves a purpose, but it doesn't serve the ultimate purpose, which is allowing us to have more than one shot at making the best choice.

Speaker 1 And we saw that play out in Cal, sorry, and we saw that play out in New York. What I would argue is that every person

Speaker 1 who believes that ranked choice voting matters should be asking their city council, their county commission, and their state legislature to pass legislation to approve it.

Speaker 1 The more we get it done at the local level, the more likely it is to take effect at the state level.

Speaker 1 And once we have a critical mass of states doing this, that's how we start to move towards actually having national ranked choice voting as an option.

Speaker 6 Yeah, and as a refresher, what's the difference between ranked choice voting and jungle voting, as Patty asks?

Speaker 1 Sure. So a jungle primary simply means that you don't compete in separate primaries.

Speaker 1 Right now in our system, we have primaries, and some of those primaries are closed, meaning you can only run against people in your own party. Other ones are open, meaning that you can switch parties.

Speaker 1 You can vote for Democrat one year, vote for Republican another year.

Speaker 1 But what a jungle primary actually says is that everyone goes on the same ballot in the primary run, in the first round, and that the top two who get the top votes move on.

Speaker 1 The difference is that in a ranked choice voting system, you're not hoping that your person emerges.

Speaker 1 You're saying, this is the person I want, but if they don't get enough votes, here's the next person I want. And in some communities, it's up to five choices.

Speaker 1 You get to go all the way down or at least halfway down the ballot.

Speaker 1 It makes more sense because it gives you not just the opportunity to get your person out, it gives you the opportunity to help support someone who may not be exactly your cup of tea, but at least is in the right caffeine flavor.

Speaker 1 And that's what we really want. We want the ability to continue to be a part of the process and not have to repeat the process over and over again or worse, get locked out of choices altogether.

Speaker 6 Okay, I love that explanation. Thank you so much, Stacey.

Speaker 1 Absolutely.

Speaker 1 As always, if you like what you hear, please be sure to share this episode and subscribe on all of your favorite platforms.

Speaker 1 And to meet the demands of the algorithms, please rate the show and leave a comment. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you go to listen and learn.

Speaker 1 Please also check out my sub stack, Assembly Notes, for more information about what we discussed on the podcast and other tools to help us protect our democracy.

Speaker 1 And I want to say a real deep thank you to the thousands of you who have signed up for the 10 Steps Campaign at 10stepscampaign.org we've recently updated the site to add more resources a glossary and a spanish language version we have a toolkit coming online shortly and we're constantly adding new organizations and examples of how to get involved Of course, I'd love to hear more from you about how you're processing the current regime and what tools and resources would be helpful to you.

Speaker 1 And please practice step two and share the site with your friends and family. If you have a report, a question, or a comment for me, send it in.

Speaker 1 You can start with an email to assemblyrequired at crooked.com or leave us a voicemail. And you and your questions and comments might be featured on the pod.
Our number is 213-293-9509.

Speaker 1 Well, that wraps up this episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams. Please be careful out there, and I'll meet you here next week.

Speaker 1 Assembly Required is a crooked media production. Our lead show producer is Lacey Roberts, and our associate producer is Farah Safari.
Kirill Polaviev is our video producer.

Speaker 1 This episode was recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Our theme song is by Vasilis Photopoulos.

Speaker 1 Thank you to Matt DeGroat, Kyle Seglin, Tyler Boozer, Ben Hethcote, and Priyanka Mantha for production support. Our executive producers are Katie Long and me, Stacey Abrams.

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