The 3.5% Protest Rule That Could Bring Down Trump

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Welcome to Pod Save America.

I'm John Fabra.

I've really been looking forward to the conversation you're about to hear, which I've wanted to have for a while, but has turned out to be extremely timely after the events of last week and this weekend.

Massive immigration raids that have led to protests, that have led to our own government deploying American troops on the streets of Los Angeles, all leading up to a weekend of nationwide protests that were originally planned in response to Trump's military parade in Washington, D.C.

It's a lot.

It's a lot to process.

And one thing I've struggled with since January is finding the time and space to have conversations about the most effective ways to fight back.

Trump floods the zone, we react in the moment, and then everyone moves on to the next outrage.

I also feel like even though most of us know that this isn't normal politics we're dealing with, the reference point for our response is still basically normal politics.

Make Trump and MAGA unpopular, block what we can, fight them on the issues where they're weakest, and then organize ahead of the midterms and eventually 2028.

But I think a lot of us feel like we've reached a point where that may be insufficient and that maybe we need a new playbook to help us through this reality.

Our guest this week has been working on that playbook.

Some of you may be familiar with the 3.5% rule.

I was not until about a month ago.

It comes from extensive research done by Harvard political scientist Erika Chenoweth, who studied the last hundred years of global activism and came away with two really important findings.

Number one, nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts.

And number two, every nonviolent protest movement where at least 3.5% of the country's population is engaged has succeeded in bringing about social or political change.

The success could be toppling an authoritarian regime, it could be preventing democratic backsliding, it could be achieving a goal like civil rights, but the number is 3.5%,

which here in the United States would require engaging about 12 million Americans in a sustained nonviolent protest movement.

So for obvious reasons, the 3.5% rule has gone viral on TikTok and other social media platforms just over the last few months, mainly because it's given a lot of people hope and a goal to organize toward and a sense of agency.

So I'm going to talk to Erica all about what makes protests work, how regimes are catching on to these tactics, and what we can do to build a unified, organized, and disciplined pro-democracy movement in the weeks and months to come.

Erica Chenoweth, welcome to Pod Save America.

Thank you so much.

Glad to be here.

I've been very excited to talk to you, and I really want as many people as possible to listen to what you have to say because since Donald Trump became president again, you're the first person who has helped me really see a realistic path out of this.

Not an easy path, not a sure thing, but your findings are grounded in a lot of compelling research and data and the experiences of millions of people all across the world over the last hundred years.

You have coined what has now become a viral sensation known as the 3.5% rule, which is the idea that no authoritarian regime has been able to withstand an opposition movement where at least 3.5% of the country's population engages in sustained nonviolent protest.

I, of course, want to get into why that is and what the caveats are and all that.

But just for people who don't know, what do you do?

What's your background?

And what is the backstory behind the 3.5% rule?

Sure.

Thank you so much.

So I'm a political scientist, and for the better part of the last 15 plus years, I've been studying how people confront authoritarianism

and

respond to democratic backsliding episodes in ways that do minimal harm and, in fact, create something new and better, which is a more democratic renewal or a country in which they emerge from a political crisis in a better place.

So,

the sort of backstory behind the 3.5% rule is that my colleague Maria Stefan and I together wrote a book in 2011 called Why Civil Resistance Works.

And what we did there is we looked at 323

campaigns that you would call, say, maximalist campaigns.

So they were trying to oust dictatorships.

They were trying to expel foreign military occupations or achieve independence against a colonial regime.

And we found in that book a couple of important things.

One is that the campaigns that had relied on people power, which is civil resistance, nonviolent civil resistance, where unarmed civilians prosecute the conflict using strikes, protests, boycotts, and other unarmed methods,

were more than twice as likely as their armed counterparts to have succeeded.

So, cases like the Philippines People Power Movement or the Polish Solidarity Movement or even the

latter part of the South African anti-apartheid movement were actually using a technique of struggle that was more effective than, say, the Algerian revolution or even the Cuban revolution, which many people had held up as sort of a hallmark of the success of armed revolutions.

So, in other words, the nonviolent campaigns had a better track record and were much more likely to have created democratic breakthroughs, like way more likely than their violent counterparts.

So, where the 3.5% rule comes in is that in our book, we argued that mass participation is a critical reason why nonviolent resistance is more likely to win.

It's easier to get huge numbers of people participating in nonviolent resistance from all walks of life, and it's a much more inclusive technique of struggle.

And so, after the book came out, and I was talking with an activist at a workshop who was just interested in exploring these ideas, he asked me, is there a critical threshold of people required in order to create that change?

And I said, I don't actually know.

There is a scholar named Mark Lickbach who has coined something called the 5% rule, where he just basically mentions that no government probably could withstand a challenge of 5% of the population.

He also kind of mentions that it's usually unlikely for a movement to get more than 5% of the population participating.

And so maybe that's close, but I could actually open our data set and just look.

And so I looked and it turned out that none of the campaigns that had surpassed 3.5% of the population had

failed.

And so that is then what coined the 3.5% rule,

which I first talked about in a talk I gave in 2013.

You mentioned nonviolent movements being more inclusive and more likely to get more people to participate as one factor in why they were more successful.

What are some other factors

that you found that made the nonviolent movement so much more successful than their armed conflict counterparts?

Yeah, so

the most important thing that they are able to do is they're able to build enough political power and influence, and sometimes economic and social and cultural power and influence that they begin to elicit defections from the opponent's pillars of support.

So there's no tyrannical regime, no matter how dictatorial, that's monolithic.

Every autocrat has to rely 100% 100% on the cooperation, obedience, and help of people in different pillars of support, whether that's the kind of economic and business community, the security forces, writ large state media, civil servants,

people in their own political party or in opposition parties that are more kind of conciliatory, et cetera.

And so

nonviolent resistance movements that get very large are capable of tapping into networks that begin to pull apart the loyalties of those pillars.

And so you start to see defections.

And defections can mean everything from, you know, in the case of Serbia, police refusing to fire on huge crowds of demonstrators and indicating a signal moment in which the police and armed forces were not going to defend Slobodan Milosevic, for example, in 2000 when he had to resign.

But it can also just mean a more quiet refusal to engage in compliance with the sort of status quo autocratic orientation.

So there are all kinds of ways that people defect, some kind of overt, others kind of behind the scenes.

But successful nonviolent resistance movements

win because they elicit those defections and it makes it very difficult for the autocrat to stay in power.

So nonviolent campaigns are just better at doing that.

They're better at doing it because they have the numbers.

Those numbers tap into social and cultural and economic networks, and those result in defections.

The third thing that successful movements do is that they're able to make repression against them backfire.

And as a general matter, people around the world, at least for the last hundred years, have been more repulsed by repression against unarmed people than they have been by repression against armed actors.

And so it is more likely that when state violence escalates against a serious nonviolent movement that the government perceives as threatening, that that attempt to repress and low backfire.

And then the fourth thing is that very large and inclusive movements are capable of using much more powerful techniques of struggle, like a general strike.

So general strikes are very powerful.

They're one of the potentially most powerful forms of collective action we have discovered as

a species.

And yet,

they can't really be pulled off unless a movement has that really broad base of support.

And so, the larger a movement is and the more tapped into different networks it is and different organizations, the more likely it is to be able to pull that off.

So, really,

that's the basic argument that Maria and I articulated in our 2011 book.

Your point on defections is interesting, and it's the size of the movement that helps elicit the defections.

Is that because,

like, for example, in the case of security forces not wanting to fire on the crowd, that because the movement is so large, I think I've heard you say that it becomes more likely that people who support the regime start having relationships with people who are in the opposition movement and then, you know, don't want to hurt them.

Aaron Powell, absolutely.

In Serbia, that was clearly articulated by police who refused to fire on demonstrators in Belgrade in October of 2000.

And journalists were asking them after it was obvious that they were refusing to back Milosevic all of a sudden, why they didn't follow an order to fire on the crowd.

And they did say things like, I thought I saw my kid in the crowd, or I thought I saw my neighbor or my sister's brother.

Or, you know, you do start to tap into those relationships, or they recognize somebody that they respect in the society that they don't know, but that they realize they have an affinity with and if that person is saying that milosevic has to go then you know i identify with that person you know so so it's it's really about tapping into the sources of influence and the social power um that uh that exists in very large broad-based cross-cutting networks

then you know the question always comes like how do you even get to that point how do you build that broad-based movement um with all of of those cross-cutting networks?

And there's certainly no shortcuts.

It's not something that happens overnight.

But I think in our book, at least, our argument is that movements that resort to methods that are accessible, that are inclusive, are going to have a shot at it, whereas movements that don't don't.

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Have you looked into what differentiates the movements that choose nonviolence and the ones that choose armed conflict?

Like what factors lead certain movements to go one way or the other

yeah i mean as you can probably imagine there's a huge literature about this um and uh lots of different arguments um about it i think that

just one observation i'll make about that literature is that

there's a general finding that

fragmented movements, that is movements that aren't able to sort of unite in a way, are more susceptible and vulnerable to having certain factions within the movement escalate to armed conflict.

It's also the case though that

that sometimes happens even if there is a relatively united kind of nonviolent movement and then there's sort of a violent flank that emerges outside of it or that has been there for a long time and just isn't part of the broader movement.

And so I think the point I'm trying to make here is just that

one of the things that autocrats do is they try to paint an entire movement as a violent movement when there are what in the scholarship is sort of called violent flanks.

And that's just part of the authoritarian toolkit.

And it's almost never the case that that's true.

It's almost always the case that a vast majority of people in the movement

would not be even kind of,

would not volunteer to be part of like an armed wing.

But it's a very cynical move that governments who are trying to suppress these movements and delegitimize them will often use to try to do so.

Aaron Powell, I'd love to talk about sort of the movement's response to that tactic from the regime.

I don't think a significant number of people are calling for armed conflict in this country.

I have heard people argue that protests are difficult to control and there will always be some violence and who really cares about vandalism when the state is committing violence and repression and does it really matter whether our movement is seen as peaceful and committed to nonviolence if the regime is just going to paint us all as violent anyway?

What would you say to that?

I think there are sort of two things to think about.

One is the power of kind of organizational and tactical discipline, and the other is the power of narrative discipline.

So on the organizational and tactical discipline side, I think the most important thing is for movements

to be able to build the capacity to

prepare and train

and strategize and build power with the people that they have.

And that is, you know, often in history, what puts them in the best position to be able to

execute the tactics they want regardless of what's happening around them.

So I think like

that just speaks to the power of organizing organizing and organizations in helping to build the capacity for sustained nonviolent resistance regardless of everything else.

In terms of the narrative discipline piece, I think what can be a danger for many movements is that

the autocrats always want movements to have to distract from their overall goals

by defending their tactics and or debating their tactics or doing that that kind of thing.

And I think the sort of narrative discipline piece is

many movements in the past have tried to just not take the narrative bait and instead say, this is what our movement is for.

The movement is not going to succumb to the violence and chaos being imposed upon the movement by the sort of autocratic forces.

And we are a nonviolent movement who's carrying on or something like that.

So I just like not even, you know, indulging in

the justification of this or that or whatever.

I think that it's

anytime like tactics are being debated in the sort of public media space,

it distracts from the broader claims of the movement.

And so, yeah, those are just kind of capacities that many movements have built in the past to try to avoid falling into those traps.

So, So, the key is to be loud and clear both about the goals of the movement and advertise it as nonviolent, and to be clear and repetitive about that, and not to really get dragged into the debate over who's violent and who's not, and whether it's good or bad.

Yeah,

I also think that

it can be useful to sort of call out the cynical misrepresentations, but only in such a way that it keeps the light shining on the sources of the violence, like which is to say

state attempts to infiltrate, repress, escalate, provoke,

which are straight out of the toolbox of autocrats as exactly a way to try to challenge the movement's legitimacy and its perceptions in the public eye.

Aaron Powell, I heard you say something like movements don't necessarily have to get most people on their side.

They just need to shift most people slightly towards them.

And that the most successful movements are the ones that invite the public into the conversation as opposed to the movements that are constant nuisances to the public.

Can you talk more about the importance of persuasion as a strategy?

Because I think sometimes people look at movements and they think, okay, there's persuasion, and that's for voters in an election, and then there's protest, and that's separate from persuasion.

That's just bodies in the streets.

But it seems like they really are, they need to work together.

Yeah,

that's a good question.

So, Gene Sharp,

who is considered by many as being a really

potentially the key intellect in the latter part of the 20th century on nonviolent action and the theory of civil resistance, kind of makes the

kind of categorizes methods of nonviolent action into three buckets.

And the first bucket is what he actually calls protest and persuasion.

Like, that's the first bucket.

The second bucket is non-cooperation.

And the third bucket is what he calls alternative institutions

or methods of nonviolent intervention, which includes alternative institutions.

And the reason in the first bucket he puts protest and persuasion in the same category, I think, is because of this kind of tacit acknowledgement that protest is a largely symbolic action.

Protests as such, as opposed to, say, strikes,

are there to

make a point.

And protest, protest, it sort of depends on what the movement is trying to do.

Is it just trying to make a point or is it also trying to articulate new values?

Is it trying, or the movement's own values?

Is it trying to set the agenda?

Is it trying to put pressure, you know, on particular policymakers to advance new policies or plans

or to get on their side or whatever?

So there's lots of things that can be done with protest, but it's largely a sort of communication device between the movement and the public.

Sometimes it can serve an organizing function because it's a way of people to find themselves in a movement and then

they can be further engaged through mass organizations and things like that.

But it's largely like a communication and signaling device.

That's compared to things like mass non-cooperation, like the strike, or different types of social ostracization campaigns and things, which are meant to impose direct costs.

And they do do impose costs, right?

So if you look at things like the Tesla sellbacks and the

suggestion to people that they should not buy Teslas or to make showrooms like uncomfortable places for people to be, and therefore they don't go,

that's imposing direct material costs.

That's more than just a communication device.

It's an invitation for people to use their own

material resources to impose costs or withhold benefits.

And so

this is all to say to your sort of earlier question,

I think it depends on where in its life a movement is and what it's trying to achieve with the different techniques that are available.

And I would say that movements that win, they do invite the public into a bigger, a broader conversation.

They invite more and more people into the movement over time.

But there isn't any one tactic that's sort of the best tactic to do that.

It's more a question of, you know, if the movement was thinking about the project of eliciting defections

over time and then reverse engineering a strategy to get there, like what sequence of tactics makes the most sense in their context?

And there's not like a formula.

It's just, you know, it's a sort of strategic question in each case.

Well, let's talk about where we are today in this country.

We're recording this late Friday after a pretty alarming week, even by the standards of the Trump era.

The president deployed 4,800 troops here to Los Angeles over the objections of the governor, troops that have been accompanying masked federal agents to conduct warrantless enforcement raids in neighborhoods.

A U.S.

senator, who one FBI agent escorted to a public press conference, was then tackled and handcuffed by other FBI agents because he interrupted the Secretary of Homeland Security to ask a question.

And then, of course, Trump is giving himself a military parade this weekend for his 79th birthday.

How would you characterize where America is right now in comparison to other countries that have gone through some level of democratic backsliding?

Like, where would you say we are on the spectrum?

Yeah, I mean, I think we are in an acute backsliding episode.

I think most

scholars in this field agree that there's not like usually a bright line that you cross.

It's more that a lot of things go on at the same time.

There's sort of an unraveling.

We're in the unraveling.

And I think there's sort of

a common term that's emerging that some of my colleagues use to describe contemporary autocratic systems.

They call it competitive authoritarianism, which means that there are the trappings of democracy, like elections that are scheduled and held.

There might be some nominal kind of freedoms and liberties and rights still on the books, but they're sort of arbitrarily enforced and applied.

And then there's a lot of kind of privation and abuses of rights

happening all over the place.

And the elections, when they are held, they might be free, but not fair, is sort of how the colleagues describe them.

And so I think there's a conventional or sort of growing understanding that competitive authoritarianism is the sort of most common form of autocracy we have in the world today, and that it's sort of where the US

it's somewhere in that landscape.

I would argue that while it's true that competitive authoritarianism

has been the dominant mode around the world over the past 20 or so years,

it can actually get worse from there.

And so we've seen countries like Russia go from

relatively kind of competitive authoritarianism in the 2000s to like full autocracy over the last five years, for sure.

And so

this is just to say,

regardless of where we are on the sort of downswing, like

the deeper it goes, the harder it is to climb out.

And I think that

we are in a pretty acute and alarming kind of political emergency right now.

Aaron Powell,

there are also long-planned widespread protests scheduled for this weekend, no Kings protests.

You've done some work that shows, contrary to popular belief, or at least my belief, there were more protests in the first few months of Trump's second term here in 2025 than in Trump's first term in in 2017.

Say more about that, and why do you think that's not the general impression people have?

Yeah,

so my team at the Crowd Counting Consortium, which is a group that I've been engaged in, started just me and Jeremy Pressman back on the Women's March in 2017.

And then we've had a group of volunteers working with us, and now we have a small group of staff and research assistants who work with us.

We have been collecting data on protests and police response in the United States in every day since the Women's March of 2017.

So we have, I think,

the most comprehensive database on patterns and kind of flows of protests.

And what we have documented is

that by now, that is sort of the end of May of 2025, which is the latest data that we've cleaned and released, we've had something like more than three times as much protests in terms of the volume of protests around the country as had happened at this point in 2017.

So it's actually like a quite a large difference.

And I think there are a couple of reasons why it's not getting picked up and isn't sort of the conventional wisdom.

The first is that even though the volume of protest events is higher, there haven't been any real signature events like the Women's March of 2017, where there were dozens of cities that were brought to an orderly standstill for a day because of the huge numbers of people who were

blocking streets because it was so packed with mass participation.

And so

I think

that sort of set a high bar for what people considered really newsworthy.

At the same time, what we have seen is this huge volume of events, and it's much more geographically dispersed.

So we're seeing many more events in small towns,

and we're seeing many more events happening on a regular basis, sort of generating a sense of regularity, continuity, momentum, and capacity and commitment, right?

So those are actually quite important trends.

The other thing that I think is going on is that there's just a huge volume of news and kind of drama coming out of the White House on a daily basis.

And that is distracting.

And, you know,

there's a question about just limitations of people's attention abilities and everything.

And so I think it actually, it's very hard to have the capacity to cover what is building in this country.

But, you know, from where I sit, the two most important things that we have seen are this huge volume of events.

We have had these signature days, like the April 5th hands-off protest nationwide.

And then tomorrow's, you know, No Kings protest seems to be planned in something like 2,000 different localities around the country.

And that could possibly be the largest day of mass mobilization we've ever seen in the country.

I also point out that the

April 5th demonstrations were the largest single day demonstrations we've had, at least since the summer of 2020,

which was itself, according to our data, the largest and broadest mass mobilization in U.S.

history.

So we are

in kind of historical levels of mobilization,

even if

the sort of muzzle velocity of the news coming out of Washington obscures the fact that people are mobilizing in these historical numbers.

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So, I'd love to talk about sort of the road from where we are now,

where we have seen sort of a little under the radar, at least in the media, this, you know, sort of spontaneous, organized protest in a lot of different localities all around the country to 3.5%.

And sort of the challenges that we face that are specific to this country.

You know, it's the challenges of organizing a nonviolent movement that begins quite decentralized, fairly spontaneous at first, different factions with different priorities, and maybe most important, at least from where I sit, an information environment where it's become, as you just pointed out, really hard to get attention, partly because of the regime, but also just partly because of the information environment we have, which is quite polluted and broken at this point.

What does the path look like to 3.5%?

And here, you know, you could talk about some examples from history that might be good comps for us or also just strategies that you've been thinking about and talking to people about over the last several months.

Yeah, these are great questions.

I'm afraid I don't have great answers, but I can give you some

maybe historical examples that can serve as useful reference points.

So,

and also maybe it's a good time for me to mention just a couple caveats about the 3.5% rule.

So,

as I mentioned earlier, it was based on like a very particular set of historical examples, those initial 323 cases that Maria and Stephanie and I had identified of maximalist campaigns from 1900 to 2006, which is when our data set ended.

And so, one way to look at that is that that was a threshold that applied in that sample of cases for that period of time.

And in none of those cases was the population actively thinking, we just need 3.5% of us to get out there,

right?

It was not a self-conscious organizing

goal.

And I actually don't know what happens if it becomes a self-conscious organizing goal.

Like if people think about it as a prescriptive number,

like what, you know, whether

the same assumptions would hold.

And I think part of that is because, you know, if you think about 3.5% of the population, that is

a huge number of people in absolute terms.

So we would be talking about something that, as far as I can tell, has not been achieved on a single day of protest in U.S.

history.

But it's also

the case that if it was achieved, for example, if the U.S.

was in one of those historical examples that I mentioned,

and we saw that, we'd probably also look back at that case and notice that there were 3.5% of the population out at a peak moment, but then there was like a huge,

you know, group of people who were not out, but who sympathized with the movement, or like public opinion was shifting, or they had the initiative, they had built momentum, they'd been organizing for years to build to that peak moment.

And so

the problem with the threshold is it obscures all of the different capacities and infrastructure and time that go into building that kind of muscle.

So, this is all just to say there's no shortcut, and it's not exactly a magic number.

But what it does do is it helps us understand the sort of theory of change here, which is that, you know, the main function of civil resistance movements is to mobilize sufficient mass

with sufficient momentum to effectively begin to disrupt the opponent's coalition, right?

And that it doesn't require 70% of the population or something like that in order to engage in things that they're very unlikely to do in order to begin to build the sense that there's a major shift in the balance of power underway.

And so, anyway, that's kind of the way I would sort of add caveats and also kind of hold on to the nuts and bolts of what it tells us.

How do we get there?

You know, the four ways that these movements succeed, I think, are, you know, useful to to look to here.

So, movements that win, as I mentioned at the outset, win because they build an ever-broadening base of people who are willing to sort of stand up for what they believe in.

And

they begin to arrange themselves into formations that are able to strategize to elicit defections,

and they are able to withstand attacks upon them.

And they are able to maintain their resilience and their own organizational, tactical, and narrative discipline as those attacks escalate.

And they are able to shift, they build a capacity to shift so that they're not just doing protests, like mass protests in the streets, which over time can become very difficult to manage and can become very risky as repression escalates.

And so they can begin to do things like mass non-cooperation,

the ever-popular stay-at-home demonstration,

which is another way of referring to a general strike, and which we all found out during COVID is something that can be done.

So

I think

those are the four capacities.

The capacity to build mass mobilization, the capacity to elicit defections, the capacity to

withstand repression with resilience, and to build tactical innovation that doesn't over-rely on the street demonstration as the main show of power.

So movements that do that can shift the balance of power.

And many of them do it without even getting 3.5% of the population.

Most of the movements in our database never got to that threshold and still won with like 1.8% or something like that.

I would love to break down each of those factors in successful movements and sort of start with non-cooperation, economic non-cooperation.

You've mentioned it a few times, and I think that, you know, you use the example of the Tesla takedown, as it was a very successful, sort of, you know, smaller but limited effective campaign.

We haven't had in this country, at least in my lifetime, a lot like sort of mass non-cooperation, economic non-cooperation movements.

Can you say a little more about

these types of tactics?

There's boycotts, there's bycotts, there's strikes, and how they've been used in other movements and sort of why you think,

whether you think they can be effective movements here, and whether they're realistic tactics to employ here.

Yeah, so I'll tell two stories about this.

The first is the origin of the term boycott at all.

So the term boycott actually comes from the Irish independence movement.

The late part of the 19th century, century, so after the famine,

there was building

kind of agitation for independence.

And

in the face of that, there was a

broad range of repressive techniques that the British used there.

And one of them was banning the Irish Land League.

because they felt like they were getting too organized and too effective.

But they failed to ban the Ladies Land League, which they didn't think was very threatening.

The Ladies Land League is the one that originated the term boycott.

And the way it happened was that there was an absentee British landlord named Captain Charles Boycott, who had a

wealthy, you know, he was very wealthy and he had a home in County Mayo.

And when he would come to collect rents,

you know, it was always viewed as coming to people who just suffered under the famine and taking their food and their stuff, right?

So it was like very exploitative, shall we say, just colonial regime.

So

there was an episode in which Captain Charles Boycott was going to come back and collect rents from his tenants and everyone else.

And the Ladies Land League started organizing these amazing campaigns

where they would withhold their

services.

So no cooks would show up.

No one would sell him food when he went into town.

No one would clean his house.

You know, people would just refuse to engage with him at all, sell him things, provide him things.

And so he found himself completely ostracized in his town.

People wouldn't even look at him.

And so he left and never came back.

That's where we get the term boycott.

Wow.

And so it's actually about, it was basically isolating him from access to anything that was being provided in that place.

So the way we use it now is slightly differently, which is don't buy someone's product.

Right.

I will say that

the second story is based on that anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, where I think there's a really powerful demonstration of how, you know, when things like street demonstrations or mass demonstrations become simply too dangerous,

because there was never going to be a defection of the white supremacist security forces to

the anti-apartheid movement, that movement had to shift to the business and economic community as the sort of targets of their aims to get defections.

And so over time, there were campaigns, even under martial law,

to

not buy

from white-owned businesses for sustained periods.

So that was the sort of boycott campaign.

But there were also strikes.

So people also wouldn't go to work in the white-owned businesses, or they would go work and take their paycheck, but not buy anything.

And those were sort of alternating to put lots of instability and pressure on those businesses from within.

So, you know, if a huge number of the population,

in that case, like over, you know, 88% or 90% of the population is not buying,

then you're going to have an economic crisis.

And then combined with the divestments of multinational corporations and sanctions by different countries against the South African apartheid regime, then you just see this economic squeeze on really the white-owned businesses.

And those business owners went to the National Party, which is the pro-apartheid party,

and basically said, you have to elect a reformer, you have to do business with the United Democratic Front and

ultimately the ANC.

And so

they did.

They elected a reformer.

When Bota died, they elected de Klerk, and de Klerk immediately unbanned the ANC and began to

negotiate and formulate

the new

system with Mandela and all of his negotiators.

So basically, I think the key story there is that even in situations where there's this actual, just like overwhelming

state violence that is

continuing in a way that is very difficult to interrupt, there were still these other tools that impose direct material costs that produced the outcome.

And it was by understanding the landscape and focusing the defections on the business community.

So,

in this country,

you know, we've seen,

especially in the second Trump administration, that a lot of the sort of resistance to him from the business community that we might have seen in the first term sort of dissipated.

He has a lot more support from the business community.

The idea of economic non-cooperation would be to pressure the business community to either defect from the administration if they are supportive or speak out against the administration or put pressure on the administration themselves because

strike or non-cooperation or boycotts are sort of hurting their bottom line.

I think that's right.

And I think it's important too to recognize this.

It's not always necessarily like engaging with the White House, but what about the enablers, right?

So like GOP electeds and we're like really starting to break into that

coalition.

So, it sort of depends on the sort of

like the dynamic changing arrangements, but

the main thing to know is that

there's no regime that's monolithic, and there are always actors that are sort of available to

be pressured, to be persuaded, et cetera.

And

it's not always about getting the autocrat to change their mind.

Sometimes it's about getting,

sort of limiting their options because they can't get others to go along with them.

Yeah, and I want to talk about defections because that seems to be an area where Trump has also learned lessons from the first administration.

And, you know, this has been reported, and he had a lot of defections in the first term, and he has been prizing loyalty above all else this time around so that he doesn't have as many defections.

All that said,

I'm wondering what you make of Elon Musk not necessarily defecting, but certainly no longer actively participating in the regime.

I think a lot of the media focus,

certainly my focus was on the drama between them and the breakup and all that.

But I did wonder if Elon leaving

might make other business leaders think, do I really need to be part of this?

He left.

You know, was it a little crazy in there?

And give people second thought.

But I don't know what you make of that.

Yeah, I think it's hard to know.

I mean,

I think that on the one hand, you know, there might be some business leaders that think now that he's gone, I can get in there

and

they can benefit and they, you know, they can have more influence now that he's not there blocking their influence.

I think there could be also

business leaders who

didn't want to be in there in the first place,

but also want to continue to benefit and

so will not fight because

they don't want to be.

I mean, Trump has been like putting people into the spotlight and engaging in extremely aggressive tactics to try to coerce loyalty throughout civil society,

and retaliating against those that dare to say no.

And so,

I think

that

there are costs to doing it, and whether business leaders come to a place where they're willing to

accept some costs

is sort of a question.

And what would make them do that, I think,

is a big strategic question.

The other thing I'll say is that no business is monolithic, right?

So there are shareholders, there are customers, consumers, there are advertisers, there are distributors, there are suppliers.

And all of those right, have people who are in various ranges of kind of loyalty and fidelity to their commitments to the business.

And so, you know, I think it's an opportunity to really think about how can businesses be impacted.

And we've had many campaigns in this country in the past in which unscrupulous business owners have been, you know, forced to behave better because of movements like, you know,

unscrupulous grape farm owners during the California farmers workers movement and things like that.

So there's lots to learn from

the way that

people kind of can shift around

points of pressure and influence within even the smallest business.

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I'm curious how you think about the relationship between

America's pro-democracy movement and federal security forces,

ICE agents, federalized guard members, the U.S.

military now.

So in addition to being on the streets of L.A.,

there were troops at Fort Bragg who attended Trump's speech this week.

They were reportedly screened for loyalty, and those who passed the test were behind Trump booing the Democratic leaders he attacked in the speech.

Senator Padilla was handcuffed by FBI agents who are standing by their actions.

What is the right way for a nonviolent opposition movement to deal with increasingly loyal security forces?

I don't know if there's a right way.

I don't know, but I will say that

as encounters with security forces become more dangerous,

that is risky just physically or even politically, because

it can be difficult to maintain control of the narrative.

Again, it can be, this is why many movements try to develop the capacity to actually shift away from those encounters and engage in other methods of resistance

that don't actually require people to have encounters with

security forces.

So that's the stay-at-homes and the go-slows and the stayaways and the different forms of not being places where those encounters are more likely.

And

yet not stopping resisting either, right?

So just shifting the sort of targets of different campaigns that would be meant to elicit defections

to keep...

people in the movement safe and to prevent encounters that could be misrepresented, shall we say.

Yeah, and it's made me think, which I never thought I would be having to think about here in America, but over the last couple of weeks,

you know, making sure that

a nonviolent movement doesn't

rhetorically target security forces necessarily, knowing that we want to make sure that

there is space for defection and that at some point they think, if they think they have to choose between, you know, the regime and, and,

you know, a growing movement, that they choose the growing movement.

And I, you know, I just saw a piece in The Guardian today about how they just interviewed families and organizations that deal with a lot of National Guardsmen.

And they said that almost uniformly, the California National Guard is very uncomfortable and upset that they have been put in this position, which to me was like, okay, well, that's a good sign.

And that's that we should sort of use that somehow to build on.

But I don't know what you think about that.

Yeah.

So, you know,

there can be real dangers with trying to sort of split the military and things like that.

I think, though, you know, the way you put it was like, do they have to choose between the government and the movement?

I would say

that

in 2021, we actually saw a really useful way of making that dichotomy, like really unsettling that dichotomy.

And it was on January 3rd of 2021, the seven living former secretaries of defense issued a letter, an open letter,

in which they said, and this was, you know, three days before January 6th, they said,

the U.S.

military does not decide the outcome of elections.

The people decide the outcome of the elections.

And the U.S.

military's job is not to intervene in that.

And the U.S.

military won't intervene in that.

And so in that letter, they made clear that the U.S.

military's duty was to fend to the Constitution, right?

So it's not actually about choosing between the movement and the regime.

It's about choosing between the regime asking it to do something that's

in contradiction to the oath and something that is consistent with their oath.

And so the more that that can be reinforced, the more it's clear that actually the movement doesn't want the military to pick sides.

It's the regime that wants them to pick sides.

And the movement simply wants them to respect the Constitution.

Yeah, that's very well said.

Where do parties and politicians fit into these movements?

Right now, a lot of Americans who are opposed to Trump, I think, are frustrated with the Democratic Party and Democratic politicians for not doing even more to fight this regime, at least not successfully.

Where do they fit into some of these movements?

And is the right move to keep pressuring elected officials, or is it better to focus energy on building sort of a grassroots opposition movement?

What do you think about that?

You know, I think it really, there's such a variety of ways that this plays out, depending on the type of party system that a country has and all of that.

I mean, in a lot of the cases that I'm aware of that I've studied,

there's sort of situations in which the opposition party was fully banned, right?

And some of these movements had to just go with or without

the promise of having,

you know, a party to run a campaign that they could get behind and things like that.

And part of what they argued for was the ability to form an independent political party.

You know, that was true in

Poland and in South Africa

and many other places.

And then more contemporary movements, part of the issue is that the opposition is so divided.

that like in Serbia, there were something like two dozen political parties that were just every one of them super weak.

And the object of the Oatpor movement and of the democracy movement more broadly in Serbia was to get the 32 opposition parties to back one candidate, a unity candidate.

And they did do that.

He ended up being a terrible politician and very weak.

And he only served like one term, and it was kind of an unstable time.

But, you know, they got Milosevic, he was elected and Milosevic was out, you know, and that was like really important.

So in those, you know, in that instance, the parties were following the pressure the movement was creating on them to get together.

I think in the U.S., you know, a colleague said this sort of in a conversation I was having earlier, that because we have a two-party system,

it's actually just because of our voting rules.

It's not because of like the fact that there shall only be two parties or something like that in the U.S.

Like we could have a different system if we had different voting rules and we could have different voting rules if Congress passed a law, law, you know, saying we could have, you know,

PR,

multi-member districts, then we'd have more parties, right?

But we don't.

Instead, we have factions in different that sort of kind of organize very uncomfortably under two parties.

And

so I, you know, in the two-party system,

I don't know exactly how,

like, what role the parties play.

I mean, I think in general,

in the case of the U.S., it feels like Democratic Party leaders really want a movement to tell them what to do and to give them wind under their sails and everything.

This is sort of how I what my perception is based on just what I'm seeing.

But

that may simply be because

the party, the Democratic Party is like in a very like historically unpopular moment for itself.

And so

thinks that maybe a movement can realign

a coalition in a way that

could be more powerful than what it could do.

I don't know.

I also think that

to the extent that there are people who have been elected that represent people and who swore an oath also to the Constitution, that it's pretty important for them to get out there and defend it.

So

I'm kind of out of a couple different minds about it.

No, me too.

I keep going back on forth.

And this is sort of an age-old debate, but it's like, what's more important?

Do you need charismatic leaders to sort of lead movements, or is it more important to have the movement that, you know, and then you have a whole bunch of different leaders and it's okay and you don't need just one leader or a couple leaders?

Like, what is the, what is the importance of having like really charismatic, inspiring leaders that people will follow?

Yeah, right.

And I think that's a separate question from whether it's a political party leader, right?

Okay, yeah.

But I think it is helpful often for movements to have people who raise their hand and get out there and help to steer.

I don't think it's always necessary for there to be like a single charismatic leader, but I think movements definitely need leadership in the sense that they need some, you know, some formation to step forward and say,

we can lead.

Like in South Africa, there's the United Democratic Front, and that was like hundreds, if not thousands of civic organizations that came together in one like very broad-based united coalition that had like a leadership council,

which included

the ANC, but the ANC was not like necessarily the dominant or only, you know, notable political actor there.

There was like unions and movements and grassroots groups and community organizations and faith groups.

And like it was just a, it was the United Democratic Front.

You know, so to the extent that there's some kind of leadership that emerges,

I think that, you know, that does help movements to build power and to be able to move in a coordinated way and even engage in very difficult things like negotiations down the line when those moments present themselves.

Aaron Powell, I mentioned earlier our extremely polluted information environment.

I've personally felt like it's more difficult to coordinate, share good information, even

shape public opinion

now that there are so many more outlets and platforms with smaller and smaller audiences.

And that's just a difference between this Trump term and the first Trump term.

Have you come across movements and strategies that are successfully adapting to this reality, the information environment reality?

That is really tough.

I mean,

yeah,

one of the other elements of the authoritarian playbook is just continue trashing the information ecosystem, right?

So dominating it, and then just trashing it, right?

It's just, it's very hard to navigate through that, both because of the sort of attention economy, but also just because it's trashed, right?

So I don't know.

I mean, as I look around the world, one of the things that strikes me as a very promising sign is actually people getting a little analog about these things.

In Serbia right now,

as I understand it,

students are literally riding bicycles into like every single village in Serbia to like have conversations with

people and their neighbors.

And like, it's a one-on-one in the kitchen kind of conversational mode.

And that is part of the way that they're they're breaking through, you know, in that case, like a highly kind of Russian sympathetic and Russian dominant information ecosystem that is equally difficult to deal with.

And so, you know, that's interesting because it's basically relational organizing, but it's also, you know, relying like basically not at all on digital infrastructure.

The other thing that I've heard about, or let me just say,

a way that movements often encounter problems of information, which are not new.

It's just that, let me just say, what is new?

What is new

is not propaganda.

Propaganda is something that like every movement has had to deal with

against authoritarian movements or regimes.

What's different is the,

I'd say, digitization and volume and volunteering of

information that people do now because we carry in our devices so much data about ourselves and

also offer data about ourselves and consume constantly data.

So

that is new because people could just opt out of propaganda if they didn't want it and then select into some new revolutionary mode of information or something if it emerged.

So the question is: how would we do that now?

So, how would we create some novel,

very interesting, hard to resist

mode of information that

acknowledges the sort of

attention limitations of our time,

but also is like too fun to avoid.

So I guess that's like why the TikTok thing kind of took off, right?

Is because

it kind of served, it met the moment of people's information attention

span and also

was fun.

So I think, you know, Solidarity,

some people don't know that Solidarity is actually named after its newspaper.

Solidarity is the name of a newspaper that was an independent news that came out and started to say stuff that was like not allowed in the country and was banned promptly, went underground, continued printing, had like 20 million subscriptions within a couple of years because it just was like the thing that was going on that wasn't allowed that was cool, you know, and that became the irresistible information alternative.

So, I haven't wrapped my mind around

what the sort of version of that is in our time, but that's the category of thing that has to come in order to really seize people's interest and attention.

I do think that your point about sort of going analog is important and well taken.

It also makes me think that

it's

one of the many valuable things about protesting is you go someplace in person, you meet other people, you sort of feel the inspiration of the crowd.

And I think, and especially if you haven't protested before, that sort of helps get you into it.

I think that we're seeing, at least in campaigns, that relational organizing, talking to people in your social network in person

is becoming more effective than just random door knocks or phone calls or text banking or all the other stuff.

And so

I do wonder if part of this is going to be getting back to a place where we are actually meeting with people in person,

organizing, planning, which are again, are all easier to do when you're in person than to just do with big groups of strangers over the internet, where there's a lot of other people who can screw that up for you.

Totally.

Yeah, I would say the only thing more dangerous than overestimating the power of protest is underestimating the power of protest.

Exactly for this reason.

I mean, what people experience

when they participate is not only their own agency, but they experience a collective agreement about the things that trouble them.

And they see others who are equally committed.

And that's just a really important thing.

I mean,

for human beings, that kind of information creates, you know, common knowledge.

And common knowledge is really powerful

for us.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So much of how we think about protest today is informed by the nonviolent approach of Dr.

King and the American Civil Rights Movement, maybe certainly the most successful nonviolent movement in the United States, one of the most successful nonviolent movements in the world.

What lessons from that time period do you think are still worth remembering today?

I would definitely encourage

people who listen to or watch your podcast to check out the documentary series, A Force More Powerful.

And there is one episode in it that covers the Nashville campaign during the civil rights movement.

And it's only like 27 minutes.

It's really worth watching.

In it, there are so many things that I think are the key lessons from that movement.

The first is the deep level of preparation that went into

preparing a community to confront segregation and, in fact, end it

in Nashville in the late 50s

before segregation was functionally ending most places in the country.

And James Lawson,

who was the sort of young minister who was asked by King to organize Nashville, did trainings in the church basement in which he was teaching people about the theory of nonviolent action, in which they did role-playing and they prepared people for confrontations and encounters with white supremacists and with police who were going to be abusive to them, who were going to arrest them, who were potentially going to beat them, and

did so to basically instill

levels of discipline, which they sort of described as like a nonviolent West Point.

like that they were preparing for something that was requiring the level of strategy and discipline as a military

without arms.

And so he trained huge numbers of people for that.

That includes, you know, including John Lewis, who came to join that campaign.

And they did lunch counter sit-ins.

They boycotted the downtown district.

The primary aim of the campaign was actually to desegregate the shopping area of downtown Nashville and the department stores.

That was their first target.

And then they were doing the lunch counter sit-ins and all kinds of things.

And

the ability to respond to violence when it did happen in a way that was so,

shall we say, undeniably disciplined, is part of what forced the crisis in Nashville that

the Nashville authorities could not avoid.

So to to give an explicit example, Alexander Luby was a black lawyer who represented many of the students as they were arrested for the lunch counter sit-ins.

And because he was representing them, his home was bombed by the Klan.

And after his home was bombed,

the movement organized a silent march.

So

this is incredibly

clever tactic because in fact, even though people are feeling incredible pain from what has happened, it is easy to detect infiltrators and provocateurs at a silent march.

So they organized the silent march from his home to the steps of City Hall.

And something like 5,000 people joined in to this extremely somber silent march.

And at the front of the crowd was Diane Nash, who was a young black student from Fisk University.

And she just happened to be the one who encountered the mayor, Mayor Webb, who came out to meet them.

And she put the microphone to his mouth and said, Um, do you believe that it's right to deprive a person of business just because of the color of their skin?

And in front of a crowd of 5,000 people, he said, No, I don't believe it's right because what else are you going to say?

And in that moment, uh, they caught it on camera, everybody applauded.

And what happened next is there was a negotiation between

Lawson's group and the white business community in Nashville to desegregate their stores and take down the signs without a public announcement of it because people were worried about white supremacist backlash.

But they agreed and came to that commitment, and that was that.

So, you know,

there's a lot to learn.

And that episode, I think, pulls out some of the key lessons about the capacity and the strategy

to make even an incredibly violent and

hundreds of years enduring situation And

well, I think that is a perfectly hopeful and inspiring place to leave this conversation.

Erica Chenowit, thank you so much for all the work you've done on this topic and for

joining Pod Save America and sort of giving us a path forward.

Appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

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Matt DeGroote is our head of production.

Naomi Sengel is our executive assistant.

Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Ben Heathcote, Molly Lobel, Kirill Palavive, Kenny Moffat, and David Toles, our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

Hi, I'm Angie Hicks, co-founder of Angie.

And one thing I've learned is that you buy a house, but you make it a home.

Because with every fix, update, and renovation, it becomes a little more your own.

So you need all your jobs done well.

For nearly 30 years, Angie has helped millions of homeowners hire skilled pros for the projects that matter.

From plumbing to electrical, roof repair, to deck upgrades.

So leave it to the pros who will get your jobs done well.

Hire high-quality pros at Angie.com.

What does possibility mean to you?

Um, that's a hard question.

Something that you can strive for.

I'm able to do anything I set my mind to.

You're confident in yourself and you believe in yourself.

Stuff that you could achieve.

I feel at Saida.

Eddie Ling is possible when you're more confident.

Shoes are a huge part of that.

They are the most important part of my style.

You can like express yourself in the right shoes.

Anything is possible.

DSW, countless shoes at bragworthy prices.

Imagine the possibilities.