According to the often-cited 3.5% rule, if 3.5% of a population protests against a regime, the regime will fail. Developed by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, who researched civil resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006, the rule has seen renewed interest in leftist circles recently, especially with No Kings protests attracting historic numbers.
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This shows the outsize impact a single protester can have, the study’s authors say. That’s because having one more attender at a demonstration rallies more support for a political cause than acquiring one more vote during an election does.
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In the context of civil rights, the movement’s ability to elicit violence from its opponents – such as in 1965, when armed police violently attacked peaceful protesters crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama – only strengthened public support for the cause. “When the state is perceived as engaging in excess use of force, that tends to generate very sympathetic coverage, and that drives concern,” explained Wasow.
According to George Lakey, we need strategic campaigns with clear demands, not just weekend vent-sessions!
Protesting by itself is absolutely useless. What it’s useful for is legitimzing and showing public support for less peaceful action later on.
MLK achieved nothing but he built a movement which then joined the Black Panthers. A movement which would be snubbed instantly if they all started with those actions.
One of the recent examples of pulling more mindsets to your side is the “copy paste” trick with the Epstein files.
Some have theorized that the person who redacted them knew this, and that they were achieving malicious/minimal compliance by highlighting in black. It’s likely that no one would have risked such an act if they didn’t already believe such a large number of Americans would be on their side.
They might not believe that if protests were so rare that the administration’s control of journalism allowed them to pretend them absent.
I’ve heard old stories of people doing No Kings protests in red states, and getting more on the next go; because the dissent was already there, but needed a bit of public encouragement.
The amount of people on fedi who rage against protests for being useless displays will never cease to confuse me.
people don’t understand that part of a successful movement is accumulating enough critical mass to make your actions more direct. the first step, really, is convincing people they’re not alone in seeing the problem. you do that by getting in the street and saying as loud as you can that there’s a problem. that’s why fascists always crack down on public displays of dissent. it breaks their narrative that they are in full control and that if you see a problem, the problem is with you.
while you are there, you will be surrounded by other people who, like you, see the problem. exchange contact info. these are your new cooperative as you face off against the problem. talk to each other. what groups are you part of, what recruitment opportunities do you have outside of protest, what things do your groups need more of? this will become the backbone of mutual aid as your groups coordinate to assist each other in meeting the problem.
from here your movement will become more dynamic and more equipped to meet the problems, and the authorities you face will have less control over you. eventually, you will have stripped enough power from the authority that you and your coalition will be able to fight back more and more directly against the authority as it directs more and more powerful assaults against your solidarity.
the greatest power you have though is faith. not faith in others, not faith in god, not even faith in any kind of higher power, just faith in that better things are possible. we know that they are because we study history. a consistent theme of pre-colonial societies is that they viewed themselves as post-hierarchy (not universally, obviously). further, we are currently turning to fascism, and fascism has never survived long because it’s a really stupid way to run things. so we know that better things are possible even if all the faith we can muster for that is remembering when things were better than they are now.
but that last statement is the killer. we will have to coalition build and work with people who think returning to how things were before fascism will be good enough. it won’t be. liberalism consistently leads to fascism. the better way forward is not to return to the way things were, but to push for systems that protect us from fascism. of particular interest to me right now are pre-colonial histories of the Nez-Perce, Taino, and Hawai’ians
Especially when protests are how affinity groups are made.
People usually don’t just go from the couch to getting an AK and marching on the capital unless something drastic happens. The goal of all tyrants is to minimize the odds of that happening. Protests are a form of escalation. It increases buy in and majesty the protestors feel they have increased odds of actual support should things escalate. It’s the staging ground from which escalation occurs.
The blm protests each began peacefully and most remained so. They didn’t get everything they wanted but they did demonstrate a capacity to change narratives and to force opposition to expend resources to counter those narratives. The biggest failure there is that there wasn’t significant pushback to the pushback.
That’s a completely reasonable take, but the article (and most of the comments here) aren’t arguing that; they’re arguing that protests on their own are are likely to lead to political or social change and therefore further escalation is not necessary, which is of course complete baloney. Now back to reality, what does your argument say about protests in America right now, where no significant escalation has occurred since April (save for that week or so period in Los Angeles back in June)?
A record number of officials are not seeking reelection, Democrats are winning or nearly losing in Trump-winning districts, and Republicans are starting to join with Democrats on Epstein and anti-tariff legislation. If you think protests in no way contributed to these things you’re as delusional as MAGA.
There are less brown people in the US.
That’s a MAGA win…Now how many of those Democrats are demolishing deathcamps?
Why would I think protests contributed to these things? The simplest explanation would be that Trump just pissed a lot of people off, but more importantly these are surface level gains that don’t matter in the long run. Trump is building up a fascist dictatorship and you’re here bragging about tariff laws. Hell, 50% of project 2025 has already been implemented and there’s still more than a year before Congressmen elected in the midterms take their seats.
How many more deathcamps have been created since your protests?
How many death camps have you stopped from being formed? You should share your experiences and methods.
Last time I did, your moderators silenced me.
You protest for fascists, not liberate.
I feel the effectiveness of the protest is proportionate to how afraid they are of the protesters. And, today, they are not at all afraid—and therefore the effectiveness is nil
There’s a reason why the person remembered most for Stonewall is the one who threw the brick. There’s a reason why you were never taught about the Railway strikes, or the Battle of Blair Mountain, or Haymarket Square.
The wealthy love peaceful protests. So much easier to just ignore.
And don’t you dare tell folks all of these direct acts of political action were, and still are illegal!
Liberals in this network hate being pointed out the facts that law really is for the rulers, not the people.
If they weren’t afraid of them they would just let them protest.
They seem terrified to me.
As this article is related to the US, I don’t see much fear from them at all. No King? Nothing happened. ICE protests? Meh, normal reactions outside of Los Angeles, and even that has cooled off entirely.
They saw nothing came of a year of protesting. They have no fear.
One could argue that the excesses of ICE against peaceful protests have helped somewhat in that they’ve created a legal basis for the judiciary to limit their power.
But, that only matters if there is a material change, and there certainly hasn’t been enough of that. Innocent people are still being rounded up and the concentration camps are still running.
Bu-but some meanie heads are gonna quit their jobs and be replaced with other meanie heads!!! That means we win right???
I think they become a lot less afraid of us when they know they can easily justify violent responses because of violent acts by protestors.
It is way scarier to them when any violent act they take to force protestors to shut up delegitimizes them in the eyes of any observer.
Courts have at very least issued temporary restraining orders (TRO) against excessive force like after they shot that pastor in the head in Chicago.
Just one example but I think there are plenty more.
California passed that “No secret police” bill.
If it wasn’t effective why would so many governments suppress protesting so much and so harshly?
Because it can lead to more militant (and more effective) action? Especially under dictatorships maintaining tight control over public discourse is an issue of life and death. However, as a completely separate issue, if the protests don’t lead to more effective action they’re just hot air.
Well that is certainly part of it. But I think that’s just a piece of the whole. Protest, and more importantly long-term consistent protest, is the most effective means of change. Not for the protest in and of themselves but for the effect they have on society around them. They can as you mentioned Inspire more militant action, which sometimes is helpful in spreading the goals of the protest, but not always. More than that they can change National consciousness. Which is something we forget. Something in our current instant gratification age we don’t seem to remember.
Most change is done at extremely slow pace. Years and even decades. I’m reminded of English abolition, the destruction of the English slave trade which destroyed chattel slavery in most of the western world. That took decades. Decades of consistent action. Of small victories. Of constant pressure. Slowly changing the awareness and minds of the entire Empire.
I’m reminded of civil rights in America, which most of us don’t seem to remember very well. Cuz they think it started with Martin Luther King, as if he was source of it. When in reality he was chosen to be the face of civil rights movement by people who had been working for years and years. And without those people we don’t have Martin Luther King and we don’t have Malcolm X either. We don’t get to that point until National Consciousness begins to change. Until awareness, yes awareness, changes.
Which is the real reason why governments want to choke them out. One protest doesn’t upset a government. Continued protest upsets the government. Entrenched power would love it if you have one protest and then lose heart immediately. The second protest seems likely to continue is when they start cracking down heavily.
Sure, but what if awareness already exists? Basically any progressive platform is supported by the vast majority of Americans and has been for years if not decades, yet invariably nothing happens, or minor victories are made which are almost immediately overturned when conservatives take power. About Trump specifically, there’s no shortage of opposition to Trump and GOP fascism, and frankly anybody who is going to oppose him already is unless things get much, much worse economically. If protests are meant to raise awareness, then they’ve already fulfilled their purpose a long time ago.
I love this fallacy, because then it means governments support enriching civilians, and are actually servants of the public will. How else would they know their demands haven’t been already met?
Next you’re going to explain why hate crimes, libel, and slander aren’t suppressed equally.
That was just completely incoherent. I have no earthly idea what you were trying to convey here.
Neither do you it seems.
Why would a government made of representatives you elect suppress something you elected?
Neither do I what? You see what I mean, that doesn’t make any sense?
A government made of Representatives you elect oppress something you elected? What? That doesn’t make any sense. Not the concept, whatever that may be, the sentence doesn’t make sense.
Wait, are you not aware how your government works?
The idea that the Civil Rights Movement was primarily a protest movement is absolutely inane (this is a non-exhaustive list of inane claims made in this article).
Dr Luther King had a dream and everyone was like “Yo, that’s awesome!” and then racism ended
So it is the sympathetic coverage that matters? Well let me just look at our media… wait … nope, not gonna happen.
Well this is one of the functions social media plays which is why we should ban it for young people and only have corporate news outlets as sources of information for most!
