(2019)
Chenoweth has backed off her previous conclusions in recent years, observing that nonviolent protest strategies have dramatically declined in effectiveness as governments have adjusted their tactics of repression and messaging. See eg https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/07/erica-chenoweth-demo...
One current example of messaging can be seen in the reflexive dismissal by the current US government and its propagandists of any popular opposition as 'paid protesters'. Large attendance at Democratic political rallies during the 2024 election was dismissed as being paid for by the campaign, any crowd protesting government policy is described as either a rioting or alleged to be financed by George Soros or some other boogeyman of the right. This has been going on for years; the right simply refuses to countenance the possibility of legitimate organic opposition, while also being chronically unable to provide any evidence for their claims.
Successful protest movements are typically successful because they are organized and/or leveraged by a counter elite or foreign actor. One example is the CIA orchestrating protests to topple the PM of Iran in 1953.
Protest movements lacking elite or foreign state sponsorship (like the yellow vests in France, Occupy Wall St, or the Canada truckers) tend to wither away by attrition, get infiltrated and redirected, or else are dispersed by force.
This rule didn't hold in Israel in the last 3 years. Well over 3.5% went to the streets and the government remains in tact.
What do you mean by "went to the streets?" If it's just show up at a protest and wave a sign on Saturday and Sunday, and go back to work on Monday, that's not enough. That's not civil resistance. People seriously underestimate the commitment levels necessary to actually matter.
Blocking highways, labor strikes, conscription refusal, and other civil-disobedience tactics were used.
Sorry but not enough.
How are you going to get stuff done unless you try to get your opinion heard?
I feel we should ban social media and phones, it is a mistake. People stop caring about the things that happens near them.
It doesn't work if the opposition is also organized. For example, a March 2003 Gallup poll showed that 5% of the US population had made a public opposition to the Iraq war, but 21% had made a public display to support the war. Small minorities can't go directly against more popular movements.
I don't think those happely going with whatever the elite says counts the same way?
In political parties there are always these members that vote with the leadership. You usually need way more than 50% support among members to go against them. Dunno how much. In the long term to share is probably closer to 60% but in the short term it might be like 90%. (Made up numbers)
I agree that's what it's saying but it does make the whole statement a bit meaningless.
Essentially the statement is 3.5% succeed unless there's meaningful opposition.
It's not meaningless, as there is a difference between opposition and status quo.
So far, if estimates are accurate, neither in Iran with 90 million population, more than five percent turned out.
I have no idea how many Iranians have been involved in the protests, but it seems like they're getting past the 3.5% number as well..
Peaceful protests do not work when the government that you are opposing shoots protesters in the street and/or jails & tortures them. Didn’t work so well in Syria either. Only the government has guns in Iran and they’d rather rule over a hellish cesspool of their own countrymen starving and drying than lose power.
And quite relevantly to the analogy, in Iran, the regime controls most of the economic links to the outside world, including the ability to convert the rial to dollars or euros.
The rule doesn’t really make sense in a small country with proportional representation. The government can stay in power as long as a majority of the country wants it to stay in power.
Do you vote your governement in your country? I only vote president and parlament here, and until elections AFAIK there is no way for a majority of citizens to remove either.
Paper says non-violent is ~50/50 vs one in four for violent. So not a sure thing.
The problem is defining 'non-violent'. Is it just showing up to a protest from 5pm to 6pm with a sign? Is it a general strike that will undoubtedly harm the economy? Is it demonstrating that you could respond to violence effectively and daring them to up the scales?
So there were 323 events investigated but there's some criteria that should be taken into account for violent resistances that is not - for instance zero of the resistances to the Nazi occupations during World War 2 succeeded by their definition, and off the top of my head only the Yugoslavian resistance really put up a substantial dent in the occupation and still required the Soviet army invasion to kick the Nazis out.
> This rule didn't hold in Israel [...]
It did (ie. Revolutionary thresholds) until 10/7 and Hezbollah's shelling of the north changed the calculus.
There was increased pressure from senior IDF careerists, industry titans, and intelligence alums (oftentimes the 3 were the same) against the government's judicial reforms which was about to reach the tip over point (eg. threats of capital outflows, leaking dirty laundry, corporate shutdowns/wildcat strikes, and resignations of extremely senior careerists), but then 10/7 happened along with the mass evacuation of the North, which led everyone to set aside their differences.
Israel is a small country (same population and size as the Bay Area) so everyone either knows someone or was personally affected by the southern massacre or the northern evacuation.
More to the point, despite your downvoters, the judicial reform did not pass as proposed.
> despite your downvoters
It's because I called 10/7 a massacre, which it was.
> the judicial reform did not pass as proposed.
Yep. Exactly.
Was operation cast lead a massacre?
Also Belarus in 2020.
In my opinion, 3.5% can affect change if (and only if) the middle-class approve of such a change. The middle-class being the productive power of the country and that includes the military.
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Let's be real, the number of anti-Zionist Jews is vanishingly small and usually consists of only vaguely ethnic Jews who have been completely assimilated into the society they live in, whose only remaining distinguishing feature is one or two members of their family. It's so distant they wouldn't be accepted into Israel under the remigration laws or whatever it's called.
Also, funny you bring up Evangelicals. I've had this same sort of argument brought up when they do some awful shit and are called out for it. "But we don't all believe/do this!" It's implicit in the very core of your religion/ideology. If you truly didn't agree with what they did, you wouldn't be one. Evangelicalism is a plague and should be treated like one. Evangelicals should be sent to quarantine centers and deprogrammed (if possible).
You don't know what Evangelicalism is, since there are multiple forms of Evangelicalism. Its a Christian Cross-denominational protestant movement, not all protestants or evangelicals are fundamentalists nor do they all support Israel. But you seem to be against religion at large, or perhaps anti-western civilization.
If you have 2+ groups with opposing views, each 3.5%+ it's pretty clear that at least one of the 3.5%+ groups will fail.
Others here note it's really "3.5% if there's no one seriously opposing their objectives" but in my opinion that's a meaningless rule. Of course in those cases non-conflict resolves the issue.
This is far from meaningless, because if you are too far below those 3.5%, you'll fail to make a change for the better, despite having a good cause with no real opposition.
Those 3.5% are encouraging for all social movements, who suffer (and/or have friends/family who suffer) from some issue in the system, have perhaps developed a good plan out of it, but think they are too small to make a difference.
Success doesn't have to mean getting your way, but rather making a meaningful change in your direction. Even opposing groups often can find a way so that both get a better situation. For instance, taxes can overall be lowered while teacher salaries can increase on average at the same time, if excess money is taken from other activities.
Yeah but that probably isn't going to what the original research is saying. Society is basically run by a tiny fraction of people (1-5% of the population range) and the rest are just along for the ride. Democracy is a major innovation where the majority has to nod along every few years or there is a mix up in who in the upper class gets to sit at the top of the tree.
From that perspective it becomes clearer what a 3.5% rule is getting at - 3.5% of the population mobilised is enough to overwhelm any ruling class that isn't on top of its game, especially if mass shooting of people is still of the table or if the 3.5% includes a lot of people from the upper classes. It isn't about whether an issue is supported by 3.5% of the population or more, it is a question of whether that fraction of society is actively trying to topple a government system.
This rule was obviously silly (and Chenoweth herself didn't suggest it was a hard rule) given that we know e.g. Mississippi had an engaged, vocal opposition in active protest, and that opposition was far larger than 3.5% of the population. And yet, the authoritarianism there persisted for nearly a century.
Related: "The Most Intolerant Wins" (2016). The idea is that a small, determined group of people can change how everyone behaves because when the group won’t compromise, it’s often easier to adapt than to work around them.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
In Nepal, on Sep 8, teenagers and GenZ organized peaceful protests. They were there on school uniform -- but 21+ were killed on a single day of peaceful protest. The next day, all 3 branches of the government were burned -- the legislative, the executive and the judiciary too. Even the Fox News equivalent (Kantipur) was burned.
I think people always opt for peaceful protest at first, but when that is made impossible, people go for the violent one. MLK was successful because there was the threat of Malcolm X. Same thing with Gandhi.
This seems anti democratic. How can we prevent small minorities from hassling everyone until they get their way?
In the big picture, culture progresses towards equality over time, although it see-saws and moves very slowly relative to a human lifespan. Small minorities of hate groups, for example KKK, are not able to influence society in the long-run because their message is antithetical to this natural imperative. Whereas advocacy for racial minorities, gender minorities, and feminism progresses over time.
I think that might be wishful thinking.
It is privileging 200 of history verses several thousand years of human history.
Several thousand years of human history in fact argues for their point of tendency towards equality being a natural imperative, and artificially enforced caste systems being unnatural and instinctively distasteful to people.
See Graber's last book before he died: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything?wprov=s...
The majority of people are horrified when they become aware of what's happening in Gaza. Personally I think a large majority of those that support it are sheltered from the reality of it, e.g. avoid seeing images of assassinated children.
> natural imperative
It happens because trust me bro.
What if the small minority is being oppressed and killed? There are so many reasons why a small minority might need to protest within a democracy. "This seems anti democratic" is a bizarre take.
3.5% forcing their preferences on all the others is obviously anti-democratic.
Unless you don't know what democracy means
It seems that it's you who needs more education on the topic.
You declare what this is democratic. Declaring the same by a country from the other side of the planet also helps. Worked fine for a certain democratic country in 2014.
seems is the key word. 3.5% - or any other % - actively engaging doesn't mean that if you cast a vote, 3.5% would support. Probably an order of magnitude more. People tend to be inert, even when they agree with something.
However, sometimes it is true that small minorities can hassle everyone until they get their way. This usually happens through lobbying, corruption and misinformation though, way easier than a peaceful protest if you are a small minority; with the added benefit of appearing to have a big majority of the population in your favor. See what populist far right movements are doing right now throughout the world.
In the US? You'd probably need to repeal the first amendment. Good luck with that.
This is plausible. Non violent groups will often have wider public support (because most people would prefer not to support violence) and if those in power use violence against the non-violent it increases public sympathy for them.
> and if those in power use violence against the non-violent it increases public sympathy for them.
Even then there's like a fine balancing line where some level of state violence is "acceptable", as in it crushes the spirits of those out on the streets before they manage to organise enough, and yet doesn't get nearly enough attention or wide-enough condemnation (both within and outside of the country). This buys the regime some time even when they're nowhere near 50% of support, and then the very next elections become even more of a sham than they were before. The regime still magically gets as close to 50% of the votes as possible, while still winning with a wide-enough margin that you have no legal recourse to challenge the elections, which only crushes people's spirits even further.
For post-2019 examples, see Georgia (ruling party won with 53.93% in 2024) and Serbia (has yet to have an election, despite largest protests in its history calling for early elections for the past 15 months).
My point being, to overthrow such a regime via a ballot box, 55% against just doesn't cut it. At the very least you need 70%.
Non-violence only works when there's an alternative that includes lots of violence. MLK Jr's messages only resonate thanks to the Black Panthers. Today we've got one explicitly violent political party and one who keeps writing letters politely asking them to stop the violence. Unfortunately the only language conservatives seem to understand is violence, and that is the response they deserve for their actions.
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You're literally a clown.
in a world where getting 3 people to show up to dinner is a challenge, a coherent, organized group large enough to be visible as a percentage of the population is an exceedingly rare and powerful entity. but history shows that such an entity is usually either 1) stable and peaceful, but actively decaying due to its position of hegemony or 2) unstable and violent, using conflict to sharply define its boundaries and growing by dividing the rest of society into "insiders" and "outsiders". some days i feel like we're microbes stuck in microbiological cycles. but if we make it past this rut, we will have all that we need to lay down an even stronger foundation, to codify systems and organizations designed to scatter and suppress hate and intolerance.
> Regarding the “3.5% rule”, she points out that while 3.5% is a small minority, such a level of active participation probably means many more people tacitly agree with the cause.
The more effective you are at getting people to participate, the less effective that participation will appear to be. Because it's just a proxy for what actually matters.
I would recommend anyone interest in the topic to check out the book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_We_Burn. The author covers (in depth) a solid analysis of the failures to enact long term change across several major "revolutionary" movements over the last couple year (including the Arab Spring and Occupy among others). I think his analysis is quite good and points at significant issues in organizational leadership, co-opting, and other structural failures (or adaptations by governments) that illustrate classic approaches to mass protest are more difficult to achieve desired goals in modern times. Worth a read if you have the time.
Despite whatever the NRA says, governments have a near-monopoly on violence. They've got all the good weapons - Google "Neal Brennan Has a Plan to Test the 2nd Amendment" for a humorous take on this.
That leaves non-violence, which is perhaps a misnomer - there's often plenty of violence, but it's used by the government, not its opponents. When non-violence works, it's typically because those working for the government start refusing to kill their fellow countrymen - they defect, in non-violence scholar-speak.
There's an authoritarian playbook for countering this - you recruit your forces from ethnic minorities, often rural, who already hate the people who are protesting. Thus you see ICE recruits from the Deep South and National Guard troops from Texas being sent into Northern cities.
Written by the BBC in the years shortly after Brexit, the article had homegrown counter-evidence to its basic premise.
3.5% might work sometimes. At other times, it achieves as much as pissing into the wind.
The world seems to have changed since the events that led to this conclusion (that were mostly way before 2019).
Governments apparently learned how to assimilate protests and burn people down without any apparent violence, but still destroying their causes.
Occupy Wall Street was a turning point for me. It's staggering how many things today follow directly from the 2008 gfc and its disastrous aftermath.
The primary legacy of Occupy Wall Street is that "the 1%" became a meme. Enough so that policies are still evaluated on how they affect "the 1%" vs the rest of the population. The concentration of wealth in the US became much better known. It did not, however, reduce that concentration of wealth.
"All progress depends on the unreasonable man", by definition a minority.
Not only progress, sadly, but almost any change. Those who care are few and far between, and this is why they wield outsized power.
The largest voting group in the US are non-voters. As bad as conservatives are, the non-voters are complicit in letting it happen. Hope they enjoy their taste of "both sides are the same".
The US political system badly needs a reasonable third side. Both sides have gone really bad, and arguably lost their contact with the majority of voters.
Completely agree since both sides in the USA is two conservative parties. Luckily there seems to be an actual opposition finally arriving in the form of the Social Democrats.
Fundamentals of the electoral system make this almost impossible. See spoiler effects where your campaign and your next closest competitor are split, and your polar opposite claims the win. The majority wanted one of the two more popular options, but the person with only a fraction of overall support gets the win. There are plenty of better voting systems but entrenched powers and "American Exceptionalism" means nothing will ever change.
I'd love to abandon the Democratic party. They have proven themselves to be useless in all the decades of my voting life. But they aren't blatantly evil and corrupt like Republicans. Democrats are at best a feeble foil to Republican bullshit, but they are literally the only foil that exists to choose from.
Exactly. A third party would only be possible by altering the system, ideally by introduction of preferential voting.
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Huh, the only time I've seen the government standing up for feds killing white Americans was under Republican leadership over the last few weeks.
Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci's book Twitter and Teargas explains why, for protest movements to be successful they should have charismatic leaders and decentralized mass protest movements have a much harder time succeeding: https://www.twitterandteargas.org
Iran proved it wrong (the regime mobilized roughly 1% of the country's population to crack down on protesters) with regards to Single Party Regimes, and knowing people at the Ash Center, they are pessimistic about this as well.
Current US population: 348 million
3.5% of that: 12 million
No Kings protest attendance, Oct 18 2025: ~7 million
The right has their version of this meme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Percenters
anyone who has to look that far back in history for examples of righteous resistance… is serious about neither history or resistance.
Hong Kong proved this wrong too...
Belarus too.
(2019)
Individuals can change the world, too. Lee Harvey Oswald, for one. Elon Musk, for another (in a totally different way). And Fritz Haber. Plenty more.
Assassination is fascinating for its ability to abruptly change a paradigm and the fact that it can be done by a single person, but it is extremely rare for a reason - murder is bad and instinctively despicable to most humans. [1]
An assassination is also an acknowledgement of the magical power of one individual, which I think is counter to the goals of most revolutionaries, who want to instead demonstrate to the general population that power is within the capital p People, and communities, and organized resistance.
Assassination is saying "actually this one person is so powerful that it'll solve a lot of our problems if they're dead." Which I don't believe can be true since to be true that would mean that one person would basically have to be a wizard with supernatural powers. In reality anybody with a lot of political power derives that power from people's willingness to comply with that person's wishes. A system like a government may have made people used to the idea of obeying authority, but the reality remains such that if everyone suddenly decided to stop holding up the system of government, the power vanishes into thin air.
Thus a despot's power is able to be nullified by anyone able to convince a lot of people to refuse to implement the despot's desires.
[1] https://voicesofvr.com/1182-recreating-philosophical-moral-d...
3.5% have to go the the streets, stay on the streets and start causing enough disruption for long enough. It also needs to have barbs.
I guess BBC has never heard of Iran. They easily passed the 3.5%, so the government “reduced the percentage”. BBC, you are completely disconnected from reality.
while the non violent protests may not be as effective anymore, i think the point is that if those 3.5% are "organised and coordinated" they will be effective. can you think of any other organised minorities trying to change the world right now? ahem ahem... also explains why govts and businesses are afraid of this and why we have things like mass surveillance and union breakers.
* Except when the 3.5% is entirely geriatric women.
Yet another "trust the science" statistic.
This isn't actual science, it's tabloid news.
Keith McHenry of "Food Not Bombs" made an argument for nonviolent resistance in his version of "The Anarchist Cookbook," available for free download https://www.foodnotbombs.net/anarchist_cookbook.html He also included a choice selection of some of the most milquetoast, boring, American-coded vegan recipes I've ever seen in my life.
His argument was not really a neoliberal "just protest bro trust me bro fascists are so scared of protests" one and more an argument against armed uprising by leftists, thinking they can establish communism or anarchism with this method. He pointed to other attempts to do so in history and how even when these attempts succeeded in overthrowing the establishment, it inevitably established a system of rule predicated on violence. A famous example can be the successful communist revolution in what became the PRC, that degraded into the cultural revolution and police state, and resulted in a bourgeoisie state with spicy capitalism.
Andreas Malm also took a relatively anti violent perspective in "How to Blow Up a Pipeline," though he analyzed the usefulness of a small subset of incredibly violent people functioning as a contrast to the vast majority of dissidents who then look much more reasonable. He also spent a lot of time arguing for the importance of having a mind for marketing - no, Extinction Rebellion, you have not done praxis if the most visible outcome of your Action is a photo of a white protestor in a suit kicking a black blue collar worker off a ladder.
I can't really argue with McHenry's chops as a praxis anarchist, he after all does more in a week than I've done in my life, feeding people constantly and helping to organize the global Food Not Bombs movement and all its spinoffs. I also agree logically with his arguments that bringing violence to dissident movements invited hyper violent state suppression applied as a blanket against all dissidents, violent or otherwise, so basically nonconsensually subjects everyone to violence. That said, in his own words, it took two decades of being super duper polite to the SFPD before they finally, and only occasionally, backed his group up by neglecting to enforce orders to disperse their food giveaways. Other than that, there's been no establishment of any Food Not Bombs autonomous zones, no reliable farm to mouths food supply chain, no syndicalizion, no significant political organization. I doubt many here have even heard of Food Not Bombs despite them being founded in the heart of Silicon Valley. Their immediate mutual aid effects: undeniably some of the most widespread in the world in the last few decades. Their long term impact? More doubtful, imo.
See also: no communist revolution with any teeth in the last 70 years. The only anarchist breakaway with any success is the Kurds who aren't really even anarchists or communists (but are very interesting to study), and in the last two decades plenty of successful examples of utterly suppressed mostly nonviolent resistance: Hong Kong, the PRC bank run protests and COVID protests, all Palestinian resistance bombed to oblivion, Venezuela's failed resistance to Maduro's election fraud. An exception I'm aware of is the student uprising in Taiwan known as the "Sunflower Protests" which completely halted the government's attempt to sell itself to the PRC. But one decade later a similar protest occured which failed to prevent the KMT from seizing a ton of new extra legislative power so, win some, lose some.
I feel like we can always learn from the past, but the methods of States to persist themselves is evolving, and so dissidents need to evolve as well. I emailed Cory Doctorow about this because his "Walkaway" novel illustrated a method to me that seems the most viable in the modern era: basically techno-anarchism, leveraging technology to establish post scarcity zones where "the right to well-being, well-being for all" is established and State incursions are repelled by highly targeted appeals to the family and friends of gestapo agents found through facial recognition. It's a good bit of speculative fiction with other fun technology, strong recommend to nerds. Anyway, he suggested the same general advice: solidarity first, then methodology.
> Broadly: find groups that are bound together by solidarity and join them. Then, if you think they're not doing effective things, work with those people, in solidarity, to do more effective things. Mutual aid groups. DSA. Anti-ICE patrols. Unions. Solidarity first, tactics second. Solidarity will get you through times of bad tactics better than good tactics will get you through times of no solidarity. Your spectacular lone actions will get you nowhere if no one is willing to post your bail or de-arrest you at a protest. Getting from small groups that are bonded by solidarity to a profound change in the American system is hard, and a lot of work, which is why we need to start now.
So lacking any other ideas, I continue to do this, but I'm always keeping my eyes peeled for new strategies. As much as I'm interested in highly impactful things individuals can do (like making fake Lockheed Martin verified Twitter accounts and posting things that wipe billions off their stock value), it's seeming more and more to me that the most valuable skill any individual can acquire in service of resisting oppressive governments is rhetoric (which includes e.g. marketing ability).
Rojava was pretty much wiped out in the last week. BTW I lived there briefly, outside of certain communist and brainwashing in YPG and some farm communes, if you observe the markets they are thoroughly capitalist with also massive wealth disparity. I would say, they are closer to ancaps (extremely low government burden + strong respect of property rights), the mustache jesus/ Apo stuff is more symbolic than praxis.
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You didn’t read the article.
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Please pull your head out of your rear. I disagree with the article's claims as poorly founded happy talk, but you are not contributing anything of substance.
I don't see how your claim of lack-of-contribution is correct.
I'm stating, to quote you "I disagree with the article's claims as poorly founded happy talk".
Additionally I'm stating that it really vastly depends on which 3.5% of the population you're talking about, as to weather they have the ability to make major changes to world wide economic policy.
To me, this seems to contribute much more substance than "pull your head out of your rear"...
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I think it's more of just Goodhart’s Law in play: 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.'
In a case of relatively organic or somewhat spontaneous action, 3.5% of people doing something is huge. The reason is because in organic or spontaneous action, those 3.5% probably represent the views of vastly more than 3.5% of people. But as actions become more organized and less spontaneous, you reach a scenario where those 3.5% may represent fewer and fewer people other than themselves. At the extreme example of effective organization (where you get 100% participation rate), those 3.5% of people may represent nobody beside themselves.
I was perusing the dataset they used [1] for the '3.5% rule' and it seems that a more unifying theme is leaders losing the support of their own base. And it's easy to how that could strongly correlate with large organic protest since you've done things to the point of not only pissing off 'the other side' but also your own side.
I think Nixon is a good example of this. There were vastly larger protests against Nixon's involvement in Vietnam than there were for Watergate. Yet the Vietnam protests had no effect whatsoever, while he left office over Watergate. The difference is that he lost the confidence of his own party over Watergate. Had he not resigned, he would likely have been impeached and convicted. Had 3.5% of people protested Watergate, he would even be included on this list, which I think emphasizes that protests (or lack thereof) are mostly a tangential factor.
[1] - https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi...
> This has been going on for years; the right simply refuses to countenance the possibility of legitimate organic opposition, while also being chronically unable to provide any evidence for their claims.
Even their own. Jan 6 for example. It was a guided tour given by FBI agitators apparently.
> This has been going on for years; the right simply refuses to countenance the possibility of legitimate organic opposition, while also being chronically unable to provide any evidence for their claims.
That strategy is also typical of China. Whenever there's a protest (for example the HK protests), it's always financed by western interests. Even volunteers organically organising themselves to help victims of the Tai Po fire were deemed to be western interests trying to discredit China. It's a surprisingly effective tactic.
I just always wonder how we have so many people eating this up when the strategy is so blindingly obvious.
I can’t help but be a little depressed by this realization. But to take it a step further, while I think there are some people who are genuinely buying this propaganda, I expect that a chunk of the propaganda aligned side also don’t think there is any point correcting the misleading statements. They benefit from the overall control of their ‘side’ and so just go right along sliding toward the fanatical fringe extreme of their side. On the other ‘side’, many people seem to have decided there is no use attempting to counter message after seeing the failure to move any extremists from their positions (and a failure to get even a milk toast correction from the non fanatics who are aligned). I think that the end result of this pattern is a gradually accelerating move towards the far ends, leaving no one to have any reasonable discourse in the center.
I’m not saying I support the center positions, nor that I don’t support what is often called an extreme position, just that this seems to be a watershed moment globally.
Polarization leaves very little room for reasonable discourse at the poles too. Pure tribalism doesn't care about reason unless that reason is in service of the identity and ideology of the tribe.
What if political discourse was focused on policy not identity and couched in terms of mutual interest instead of party affiliation? There would still be tensions, trade-offs, conflicts and political strategy at play but the discourse would be infinitely more reasonable.
I think this is what we mean when we talk about "center positions": a "value-based realism" that recognizes that society is nothing but the mutual alignment of values and interests. I don't understand why "common sense" has become so unpopular.
> I just always wonder how we have so many people eating this up when the strategy is so blindingly obvious
It shouldn't be surprising considering how naive people are in general. People actually believe we live in democracies despite a century of evidence to the contrary. Propaganda and indoctrination are highly effective, and why wouldn't they be? I think it's the same reason we end up with so many unhinged people believing in reptilian conspiracy theories ir whatever: the media is always lying to them on a daily basis, so they can't trust it and without educations of their own have no way to distinguish truth from falsity anymore... why not just go with what sounds good or feels right. What other option do they have? Buy in, tune out or be lost. Those are the choices for 99% of people alive. Also, who has the energy anyway? Few are as privledged with time and energy as we are.
Thing is, someone is paying all these bills. Yes really. Trump gutting USAID funding brought a lot of this out in the open: many organizations that claimed to be independent turned out to be mouthpieces of the US government and closed down as soon as the funding dried up.
Can you please tell me which organizations are just mouthpieces because they closed down due to lack of funding vs just closed due to lack of funding?
It makes perfect sense that when an organization loses funding it ceases operations, why is this now evidence of cointelpro?
That's a misreading of Chenowith's argument which itself is heavily based on Timur Kuran's Revolutionary Thresholds concept.
The thesis is once mass mobilization of non-violent protesters occurs, it reduces the threshold for elite defection because there are multiple different veto groups within a selectorate, and some may choose to defect because they either view the incumbent as unstable or they disagree with the incumbent's policies.
I also recommend reading Chennowith's discussion paper clearing up the "3.5%" argument [0]. A lot of mass reporting was just sloppy.
Tl;Dr - "The 3.5% figure is a descriptive statistic based on a sample of historical movements. It is not necessarily a prescriptive one, and no one can see the future. Trying to achieve the threshold without building a broader public constituency does not guarantee success in the future"
[0] - https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/2024-05/Eric...
> Trying to achieve the threshold without building a broader public constituency does not guarantee success in the future
Goodhart's law
Are you aware of whether Chennowith ever discussed the presence, implied or actual, of more extreme resistance groups/factions operating in the same locations and time periods? I’ve seen some informal work discussing the ‘pressure’ on the incumbent power being supported and made more tenable in comparison to the potential for a more radical approach. I have seen anything widely popularized discussing this outside of ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’ which does have some good references and particular examples.
Yes, and the result is negative.
Violent Action only incentivizes the selectorate to not defect. This is something Kuran pointed out decades ago as did Chennowith.
The reality is the only way to affect change is to incentivize elite defection, and that requires organized nonviolent action along with exogenous variables.
In many countries, it does work, and continues with some regularity:
2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring
2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity
2018: https://www.occrp.org/en/project/a-murdered-journalists-last...
2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aqBls-qpRM
2026: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/01/iran-authorit... -- outcome TBD ?
The example of Ukraine is complicated, and that situation has become a nightmare With what followed - though in fairness to the Ukrainians, the west could have done a hell of a lot more, and still could.
The Arab Spring turned into The Arab Winter in a wave of repression. Some good has come out of it but the link you have provided says this:
Although the long-term effects of the Arab Spring have yet to be shown, its short-term consequences varied greatly across the Middle East and North Africa. In Tunisia and Egypt, where the existing regimes were ousted and replaced through a process of free and fair election, the revolutions were considered short-term successes.[337][338][339] This interpretation is, however, problematized by the subsequent political turmoil that emerged in Egypt and the autocracy that has formed in Tunisia. Elsewhere, most notably in the monarchies of Morocco and the Persian Gulf, existing regimes co-opted the Arab Spring movement and managed to maintain order without significant social change.[340][341] In other countries, particularly Syria and Libya, the apparent result of Arab Spring protests was a complete societal collapse.[337]
It's always ironic seeing Arab Spring in hindsight. I've seen western observers celebrating Arab countries society upheaval, when the very same thing will also happen to them in less than 10 years.
The tring that Ukraine and Arab Spring have in common - is that same folks that managed to bring Milošević down in Serbia (known as Resistance/Otpor), later went on to talk/teach protestors in Ukraine, Egypt ...etc.
Check out #Post Milošević; and #Legacy; sections on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otpor (couldn't figure out how to get deeplinks on mobile).
TL;DR: Besides Ukraine and Egypt, they went to a few more places, in some it worked, in others it didn't. And there were revelations of foreign (e.g. USAID) funding.
Yes. I am definitely no fan of regime change through revolution. It has an extremely bloody track record.
I am just pointing out that nonviolent protests usually get it done, especially after crackdowns.
I think the article talks about nonviolent protests - the first two were anything but.
The Slovakian incident worked, because Slovakia has a working representative democracy.
In a deeply flawed, or downright nondemocratic system, like Serbia or Georgia, it's very hard to drive change through nonviolent protests.
It also bears mentioning, that the key issue with protesting, is that it, legally speaking does nothing. Legal representatives are under no obligation to do anything in response to protests.
It in itself does nothing, but it is necessary to embolden anyone who can do something.
If nobody protests, people who have the choice to do something will see that nobody gives a shit... And why should they stick their necks out for a cause that nobody gives a shit about?
"Paid" demonstrators has been an accusation used by governments for several decades.
Edit: https://www.yourdictionary.com/rent-a-crowd (Rent a crowd/mob is often used to claim the protest is attended by people paid to be there, and was first coined in the mid 20th century, but apparently the actual accusation (though) is as old as demonstrations)
The usual boogie man.
Did you read that link? It’s hardly damming.
“Through a fund, the foundation issued a $3 million grant to the Indivisible Organization that was good for two years "to support the grantee's social welfare activities.” The grants were not specifically for the No Kings protests, the foundation said.”
If 7 million people protested, that 3 million over 2 years sure went a long way. They work for pennies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2025_No_Kings_protests
I'm not sure why you are attacking me, I am clearly replying to someone who is claiming that recent times the retort of "paid demonstrators" is effective, and I have pointed out that the claim of people being paid to demonstrate has been made for decades, if not centuries.
Thank you for articulating the accusation, giving me the opportunity to respond, but try to take your own advice and read what's actually being said.
Uhh - My client is showing that my comment was up for a couple of hours before you replied
That's around the maximum time allowed to edit a comment on Hacker News.
For the level of attack you injected in your previous comment, and now a claim of dishonesty, I would need to see some actual evidence of your claims (I know that I never posted that link, and am confused why you would try such a bizarre claim)
There appears to be a few factors combining in the U.S. right now that make protests less effective than they once were.
1. Politics are religion more than ever before. There is a solid MAGA core that will not turn on Trump for any reason. When confronted by uncomfortable truth, they dismiss it as lies. When they can't dismiss it as a lie, they choose not to care. The Democrats have people like this too, but they haven't been hired and turned into a paramilitary goon squad the way ICE has. Yet. The "unreasonables" on both sides of the spectrum are not going anywhere. After Trump dies they could easily be harnessed by someone else. When so many people cannot be swayed, the impact of protests are dulled. The "unreasonables" aren't swayed when the other side protests, and the mushy middle will tend to dismiss many protests as products of people they view as extremists.
2. There is a ruling class (i.e. Billionaires) with a firm grip on power (through both parties) and complete insulation from the public. In his discourses on Livy, Machiavelli observed that Roman officials who protected themselves from those they ruled with forts or castles tended to rule in a more brutal and less productive manner than those who lived among the governed. If you want good government, those governing should feel vulnerable enough to behave reasonably. U.S. billionaires, and the politicians they own, are completely sealed off from public wrath. Minnesota could burn and none of them would get more than a warm fuzzy watching it on the news. If a protest doesn't scare billionaires it will have no impact on how the U.S. is governed.
3. "Flood the zone" is just one of the tactics being used to numb people and encourage them to switch off from politics. The nastiness of hyper-partisan politics is, at times, a distracting entertainment, but it's fatiguing the rest of the time. People rightly observe that both of the U.S.'s diametrically opposed parties tend to do similar things (e.g. tax breaks for the rich) and are funded by the same billionaires every election. If people will scream at you for picking a side in what looks like a sham of false choice, why not just stay home, plug in, and tune out? When a big protest happens, people who are numb and tuned out are just going to change the channel and consume some more billionaire-produced pap.
As a Canadian, what's going on in the U.S. has been terrifying to watch. We're so culturally similar that what happens in the U.S. could easily happen here. Even if it doesn't, we're still subject to the fallout. A classic pattern of authoritarian regimes is to lash out at allies and neighbours in order to give their people threats to fear more than their own government. Well, that's us. If MAGA isn't checked, Canada will likely be subjected to far more than tariff's and threats.
It's hard for Canadians to appreciate how nations elsewhere in the world can harbour such bitter and long-lived enmities against one another. We're now experiencing how they're created. It's not hatred yet, but the trust we once had for Americans is gone and won't return for generations. For the rest of my life, we'll always be four years or less away from what could be the next round of American insanity.
Well also the old school civil rights stuff didn't have supporters needing to engage in linguistic gymnastics in order to drum up support. Which makes just drawing attention to the issue rather more effective.
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I think you are making assumptions that are not correct. And as a ‘normal person’ surrounded by ‘normal people’ at the last No Kings protest, I very much object to your framing.
There’s a big difference between funding organizing groups like Indivisible (which, yes, foundations linked to Soros do - although I suspect not at the magnitude you’re imagining), and directly paying protestors (which doesn’t happen to any notable degree)
Want to understand this? Go to a local Indivisible or Democratic Party meetup and you will see the normal people with your own eyes. Go to a big protest like ‘No Kings’, or a rally during campaign season and you’ll be surrounded by ‘normal people’.
I’d personally be fine with restrictions on where funding for political organizations comes from (although I’m not sure how you make that compatible with the 1st amendment) - but what you’re saying is ridiculous, and it’s a worrying symptom of our current political climate that people can be so out of touch as to believe it.
>I’d personally be fine with restrictions on where funding for political organizations comes from (although I’m not sure how you make that compatible with the 1st amendment)
Despite what the proponents of Citizen's United might have us believe, money != speech, and adding restrictions to political donations is perfectly compatible with the first amendment.
Would-be donors are allowed to advocate for political positions just the same as anybody else. Nobody is stopping them. That would still be the case with donation limits. They can still get on TV and argue their case.
There is already a precedent for limiting donations. Try donating money to ISIS or Hezbollah and see if the government considers that an exercise of your first amendment rights.
> No normal person engages in this stuff
On top of being false, that's kind of a non-statement. You probably don't see average people around you protesting because if the average person was engaging in this then that'd imply close to half the country protesting. But they're definitely out there even if a small minority.
The average person doesn't have the time to protest (because how do you protest when you need to go to a job to put food on the table and keep health insurance). Or they're doing fine with the current state of affairs even if they don't like what's happening. Protesting is naturally always going to be a fringe thing and you better hope for everyone's sake that it stays that way or else you end up with a coup or revolution like in less developed nations.
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who cares if there are professional organizers? the accusations of fake/paid protests are about the crowds and participants, not the people that paid to print the posters and get some permits.
both sides have paid activists because it's a full time job. but those paid activists aren't the crowd.
MAGA literally flew and bussed in J6 ers
As someone who really hates what this unlawful administration is doing, I went to my local progressive club meeting for the first time expecting at least a fraction of what MAGA folks fantasize about - elite schemers developing an actual strategy to fight back.
Instead what I found were a bunch of kind mostly elderly people sharing news that I had read online a week before, and some folks gathering signatures for positions running for office.
You are doing a huge disservice to yourself by staying indoors and making assumptions about stuff that you aren't investigating in person.
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> No normal person engages in this stuff, it’s hyper activists part of organized groups with real financing
I guess I'm not a normal person then. I didn't realize that I was a hyper activist because I drew on some cardboard and that my group of friends was being financed. I better go demand for my Soros-check from them.
Are you planning on going to a Tesla dealership again to protest? This was top of my Reddit algorithm for several months, no one even mentions it anymore
Doesn’t Musk own the “Nazi social media” website now? Shocking that people literally destroyed Tesla dealerships out of anger and now no one even bothers to show up anymore
They didn't care about Tesla they wanted to "hurt" Musk Musks net worth is about $270 billion more today compared to when the protests began. Does this look like winning?
yes, there's a group still goes once a week on Monday and I go when I can. There's also one on Wednesday at the main Social Security office Totally normal people there, not being paid a dime
What does it mean to "fund protests"? I'm also a "normal" person who has been to a couple No Kings protests, and no one paid me. Someone spent some money on fliers, I suppose.
The major No Kings events were in June and October last year. January is not a great time for outdoors protests in much of the country. Does it somehow make the protests inauthentic if focus has now shifted towards ICE?
I wasn’t aware that “ managing data and communications with participants” is considered to be funding the protests.
> No normal person […]
A form of:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
?
No really, I'm a normal person, and I went to the most recent No Kings protest. I've never protested anything before in my life, but now I've gone to two protests against Trump because he's just that bad and dangerous and my country is important to me.
I wasn't paid anything. I rode the bus downtown, thinking it'd be easier than driving / parking, which wasn't quite the brilliant strategy I thought it'd be. I marched down the street with literally tens of thousands of people.
There were definitely some people there who seemed to be the activist type (who find something to protest every weekend), but it was mostly normal people. I saw at least three people I know. I saw regular-looking men in cargo shorts and women in straw hats. It was during the football game, and I saw many people wearing team colors and one sign that said, "It's gotten so bad I'm missing football to protest." One guy was wearing a "Jesus is King" t-shirt. A woman was carrying a "Hicks Against Facism" sign. Another guy was carrying his vinyl copy of Rush's "A Farewell to Kings" as a protest sign.
So, not paid protesters carrying boilerplate signs supplied to them by some organization. Just regular people who are not OK with what's going on.
Many years of taking care in protests against rightwing politics and I haven’t received a single penny; meanwhile everyone else is getting paid, I really fucked up I guess…
Would you pay someone who does it for free? They aren't stupid they pay to astroturf something where the organic movement isn't strong enough or not guaranteed to draw enough people. It's also rather unlikely that they would pay people direly they rather pay for organization, transportation of people, legal fees and similar things.
Everyone who has money to spend to influencing politics this way. I personally don't think its some kind of shadow cabal. Its many people/groups/organizations with aligned interests doing these things.
Organization isn't the issue that is of course perfectly normal. But stuff like handing out printed signs, protestors posing for photos in a way that makes it look like the crowd is much larger than it actually is. These kind of things aren't necessary if there is a real significant % of people unhappy enough to go protests. There are also faces known that travel from protest to protest. It's of course their right to do so but it seem strange nonetheless. Maybe they are just filthy rich and have no hobbies or maybe they do in fact get paid and are part of an organization that lets them jet around for free to be a protest groupie.
> Where are all the new organic No Kings protests?
I see them regularly just driving around.
I've never been paid to attend a protest nor has anyone I've talked to at those protests. Most people make their own signs. No Kings was a bunch of regular citizens expressing their concern for the state of US Democracy. Why is that so hard to understand?
Incredible bait job lol. Lots of engagement.
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IMHO, the value of the protest is to demonstrate a portion of the electorate does not agree with whatever they are protesting. There are a lot of people in a bubble that seem to think the majority always views things exactly the same as they do. Maybe you will always default do doubling down on the status quo, but some people will eventually inquire as to why someone is willing to inconvenience themselves to protest. Once someone starts to be curious about other people's motivations and reasoning, it often does impact their own opinions, for good or bad.
Assuming critics are just reflexively resistant is a convenient way to avoid asking whether the criticism has merit. "They'd get it if they were more curious" is unfalsifiable.
Everyone already knows dissent exists. Polls, social media, elections make that clear. The question is whether street protests add anything to that awareness, and whether the way they're conducted generates curiosity or just irritation. For a lot of people it's the latter, and waving that off doesn't make the problem disappear.
> Assuming critics are just reflexively resistant is a convenient way to avoid asking whether the criticism has merit. "They'd get it if they were more curious" is unfalsifiable.
I don't know if it can be proven or whatever, but I do know it has changed me.
There have been many events where I thought "hey, why is everybody whining about X thing?". "things are fine the way they are". Until I read more about it and changed my mind.
If it was purely online, I wouldn't take it so seriously.
So whether it can proven empirically or not, I know it changed me.
Agreed on the slacktivism point. Physical presence means something that bots and polls can't fake. My issue isn't with protesting itself, it's that the assumed impact often seems out of proportion with what's actually being achieved. A crowd showing up doesn't automatically translate to minds changed or policy moved. And crowd sizes can be just as ambiguous as poll numbers when it comes to representing broader sentiment. If the tactics alienate more people than they persuade, visibility alone isn't doing much.
Yes, protests are fertile recruitment grounds. I have inducted many a liberal into leftist thinking after they experience the shocking violence the State is willing to deploy against them for executing what they thought was a guaranteed right.
Of course you can fake a small/large crowd in a protest.
From the top of my head I can think of news reporting both "few (tens of) thousands" vs "hundreds of thousands" (different news reporting different numbers/estimates/etc) in 2025 protests in Serbia/Belgrade, as well as those comparisons of Obama vs Trump inauguration news/photos.
Meanwhile to you as an individual there on the spot - both crowds of say 50K-100K and 1M+ look basically the same = "huge amounts of people in every direction that you look".
> Everyone already knows dissent exists. Polls, social media, elections make that clear.
No, they really don’t. Have you never heard someone say that they have never met anyone who is X so it can’t be that popular? My own sister thought 2000 was going to be a landslide for Gore because she “hadn’t met anyone who was going to vote for Bush”.
> Assuming critics are just reflexively resistant
This is not an accurate or thoughtful characterization of what you're responding to; it's not even in the same ballpark.
> is a convenient way to avoid asking whether the criticism has merit.
Pure projection.
Don't underestimate the importance of the other reason protests are effective: as a politician, it's very, very scary to look out your window and see thousands of people that are mad enough at you to forgoe their day and instead come yell at you about it. It tends to make them a bit more amenable unless they have enough military power to guaranteed squash mass resistance (which is the case for any American politician).
This, and for politicians who actually agree without fear, it creates credibility, my constituents are up in arms about this and I will be supported if I champion it.
Exactly. Piercing the bubble is the most important purpose of peacefully protesting in a day of internet silos and media monopolies.
A protest demonstrates a level of unhappiness with a group or policy. People may not believe what they see on the news, facebook, or youtube, but hopefully we have not reached a point where they refuse to believe what they see with their own eyes.
The point is to demonstrate "we are not alone in this feeling", that's it...
They didnt have to "force them to do what they want" just tip the balance of votes at the ballot box. For that aim protest seems like it could be quite effective.
In the age of centralized broadcasting where everyone watched the same TV channels ...
Those TV channels were virtually always (and to this day still are) controlled by "the government".
Meanwhile other TV channels, if there even were any, and if enough people even had chance to watch them (because limited frequency/transmission allocations, artificial limits on cable distribution ..etc) - were and still are labeled as "funded by foreign (state) actors that are trying to destabilize our independance/values/etc".
And it's more of the same online.
---
This reminds me of an old website that's an absolute gold mine.
Knock yourself out https://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/minority_inf...
> It was always naive to think 3.5% of the population could force the other 96.5%
This makes 100%, right. But how many actually care and act, what are the dynamics?
Regarding the end of centralized broadcasting, one could argue that social networks might actually act as amplifiers of "small" events.
I don't understand this comment. What protesting does is let other people know there is dissent, and some people are willing to take to the streets. Enough people do that and you have networking effects as other people are motivated to take a stand. It makes the mainstream media, and representatives feel pressure to address the issue. I've been to a number of protests over the last year, and I can tell you there are even more people honking in support who drive by.
The counter argument to that is in the age of the social media there is no need to take to the streets to show that there is dissent. Everyone the folks on the street could reach will know about the dissent anyway.
Motivating other people to take a stand -- I do not think this is true either. A fraction of the folks who would support the issue regardless may join the protest on the street. But that would be those who support the issue already.
Change comes from the ballot box. Enough people in the street might influence the next election (sometimes for the issue they are advocating; sometimes in the opposite direction). But 6+ months from the next election the effect I suspect is small. My 2c.
> The counter argument to that is in the age of the social media there is no need to take to the streets to show that there is dissent.
you can find dissent to anything and everything at any time on the internet. Dissent exists always. Dissent that causes people to take the streets and risk being murdered, gassed, beaten, arrested, or even just tracked using facial recognition and fake cell phone towers, that's something else entirely.
> Motivating other people to take a stand -- I do not think this is true either.
People in this discussion have already stated that protests have caused them to reevaluate their position on things protesters were demonstrating against.
> Change comes from the ballot box.
If that were true there'd never have been any change in countries that aren't democracies or where voting was a complete sham only to give the appearance of one. Fairly elected or otherwise, politicians can ignore mean facebook posts. They can't as easily ignore thousands of people protesting outside of their home or office.
Where democracy exists at all, protests can change people's minds about their situation, especially when those protests demonstrate and expose horrific abuses by the state. Even if I didn't support whatever was being protested, if I witness things that shouldn't happen in my country and the current administration defends those things and/or threatens worse, I'm going to reconsider my support the current administration and I won't need 7+ months to do it
> A reply on social media is taking a stand?
No. I only said that spreading information that there is dissent does not require taking to the street.
You're describing how protests energize people who already agree. I'm asking how they persuade people who don't. The honks are from your side. The people you need are either tuning out or getting annoyed. Visibility used to equal influence when everyone watched the same three channels. That's not the world we live in anymore.
Protests themselves probably aren't good at convincing people, but they can bring awareness to an issue. They can persuade politicians they need to take action on an issue.
Protests aren't trying to reach the people who've already decided they're wrong. They're trying to reach the unpersuaded masses who don't currently agree or disagree.
Obviously this requires the protesters to make a bit of a judgment call. Do I think the typical person leans so strongly towards my side that they'll take it when I force the issue, even if I annoy them? Sometimes the answer is no, and I've definitely seen people do counterproductive protests that way. But sometimes the answer is yes.
Yup, the intent is for the protesters to pat one another on the back and feel superior to the grey masses.
The No Kings protests were big enough to be all over social media as well as mainstream media. Members of the administration and Congressional Republicans tried to characterize it as far leftist radicals. The president made a disgusting AI video dumping on the protestors. So it was big enough to get under their skin.
Protests are one way We the People remind the government who they're supposed to be representing. Who has the real power in a democracy.
I'm not sure it's an anomaly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aqBls-qpRM
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> Large attendance at Democratic political rallies during the 2024 election was dismissed as being paid for by the campaign
And then they lost and the odds of those people being paid actors seems less ridiculous.
I'd separate protestors from supporters.
It's a fact that Kamala burned through $1 billion in four months, including paying tens of millions on performances (Beyonce, Lady Gaga,...) and $1 million to Oprah to host an event. That attracted supporters indirectly even though they didn't get "paid". "Incentivized" is better?
well, aside from alleged riots there have been actual ones and those have unfortunate effect of making it easier to dismiss the cause
Am American "riot" is a European city after a football game.
Would that Americans use the term more accurately.
How often do people die during football riots?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests says $1-2B in damage and more than 19 deaths.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/americans-kill... says 25 deaths.
Now look up Romanian or Israeli football hooligan incidents.
Considering Americans get shot during riots, I would say you're wrong.
Even the Rodney King riots didn't have as many deaths (gunshots or otherwise) as the worst EU football events. Guns are scary or whatever, and the US should definitely handle them better or ban them or something, but I still think I'd rather take my chances in an average US riot (give or take recent ICE murders) than something heated in the EU.