Hello and welcome to Why Is This Happening? with me, your host, Chris Hayes. Um, you probably have seen footage of protests in the first 100 days of the Trump administration. I've played them on my program. Rachel Maddow has been doing an amazing job sort of collating different protest footage.
And at one level, it's incredibly heartening to see lots of people out on the streets. I've gone to sort of in a reportorial capacity to go see some of these protests as well. There's a few of the Tesla takedown protests I've gone and checked out. Um, and there's some data suggests that in terms of the volume of protests and the places they're happening, it's actually more widespread now than it was in Trump's first term.
And then at the same time it also feels like there's nowhere near as many people in the streets as I kind of feel like there would be or should be. Um, it's particularly true when you look at some of the protests that have happened recently, for instance, in Hungary, where there's, you know, like hundreds of thousands of millions of people in the streets. Um, so there's a kind of weird disconnect.
At one level, there clearly is a vigorous protest movement in the United States that is growing, and you see it growing, I think, um, just sort of anecdotally, and we can talk a little bit about the data. And at the same time, a weird disconnect between what to me feels like the scale of the aggression towards the democratic order and the amount of people that are responding by joining protests, particularly when you compare it to, say, 2020, where we had, you know, millions of people quite literally in the streets. In fact, by some measures, the biggest civil rights protest nationally that had ever happened.
Um, and obviously there was the combination of the sort of intensity of that COVID period, the acuteness of the horrific footage of what had happened in Minneapolis to George Floyd. But just in terms of numbers sense, like, we don't have that same specific acute visual provocation and human provocation of this awful cold-blooded murderer that we're witnessing.
So that's part of it, but I've been wrestling with this question of like, why aren't there more people in the streets, and what would it mean if there were a million? Like, is that the way to protect American democracy? Does it matter that those numbers are low, or does it matter that they grow? I've been sort of thinking through this, and one thing that maybe you've seen, um, floating around the internet is this idea, it's kind of been memified that like, if 3.5% of a population are in the streets, that's sufficient to block an authoritarian takeover.
And I was like, I saw this, I've seen it a bunch of places, it's become almost one of these like, if you get your 10,000 steps in sort of things on the internet, and I was like, what, is that real? What's the deal with that number? Where does it come from? Well, it is real, uh, it comes from real research by a scholar who, along with a few collaborators, has been probably one of the most, um, in-depth and sustained scholars studying exactly this question of civil resistance, nonviolent civil resistance in societies undergoing authoritarian backsliding or even societies in democratic, open democratic societies, and how basically people using nonviolent civic protest work when it succeeds, when it fails, under what conditions.
And Erica Chenoweth is one of the authors of the piece that found that 3.5% number. They're a political scientist at Harvard University, and their work has been studying exactly these questions both in the US domestic context and some international comparative questions about basically protest and the power of protest, particularly to stop authoritarian backsliding. So I thought Erica Chenoweth would be a great guest for the pod. So Erica, welcome to the program.
Thank you so much, so glad to be here.
Did I get your academic work broadly right?
Yeah, so I would say that a lot of my work has focused, as you say, with collaborators and solo work, has focused on the question of how do people effectively struggle against authoritarianism or prevent democratic backsliding into authoritarianism, um, using people power, and where has that worked, when it hasn't worked, why not? Um, and that's been a kind of primary focus of my work.
Um, and you know, on the question of thresholds, how many people does it take, um, I would say we don't know exactly. What we know is what has happened in the past in other places, um, in similar contexts, uh, one might argue. And, um, at least from 1900 to 2006, we didn't know of any, uh, or I don't know of any nonviolent mass movements for democracy that failed after achieving 3.5% uh active participation in a peak moment of that movement's cycle.
But there are some important caveats, as you would expect. The first is that we can't be sure that we're always observing the full range of both participants and especially sympathizers. So 3.5% sounds like a low number. It's a massive number in absolute terms, right? And um, it usually suggests that there is a much broader range of support for the movement than just people actively participating in that movement.
What does that mean? It means that this is at a peak of a movement that has been building over the years, building, organizing, uh, you know, engaged in lots of other low-level tactics, protests, non-cooperation, everyday forms of resistance, staying relatively under the radar to build that level of capacity to where there is some big breakthrough moment um that you see those really spectacular numbers of people participating.
Um, so it's a descriptive number, I would say, but not necessarily a prescriptive number for what we might expect.
Based on the data that you've compiled, and this is something you and collaborators have done sort of for the first time, right, is one of the things you've done is actually just assemble a kind of, my understanding, a kind of database of different forms of nonviolent protests, civil resistance, um, in different societies, and when they were happening and how they were happening and how many people were participating, basically.
Exactly. So Maria Stephan and I first established what's called the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes Database, or the NAVCO database, and what it is is it's just looking at every case of a mass movement that was demanding the ouster of a dictator, usually an incumbent national leader, or the creation of a new country through secession, uh, anti-colonial action, anti, you know, military occupation campaigns. So they're maximalist or revolutionary campaigns, if you will.
Um, these are like everything from the Algerian Revolution on the sort of armed conflict side to um to the Polish Solidarity movement, right, that was breaking through um an authoritarian regime there in the 80s. So basically, what we're looking at there is we're comparing, uh, with our initial study was to compare the effectiveness of the ones that were using people power techniques as their primary mode of resistance. So unarmed ordinary people engaging in civic action, um, compared with armed insurgency.
And our study, which was published in 2011, Why Civil Resistance Works, just reports the fact that the unarmed resistance movements of the 20th century were much more likely to succeed than their armed counterparts, and that they were much more likely to result in democratic transitions, like way more likely to result in democratic transitions than armed insurgencies.
So what happened then is that after that book came out and there was an opportunity to engage with activists on key questions about why this is happening and what their experience was, um, one activist at a workshop asked me, is there a critical mass of people that's required to have nonviolent movements succeed? And I said, I don't know, but there's a guy named Mark Lichbach, another political scientist at Maryland, um, in his book about what he calls the rebel's dilemma, um, there is a mention of what he calls a 5% rule that probably you don't get more than 5% of the population ever participating in an uprising, and also that's probably all it takes.
And he sort of casually mentions this and speculates that in his book. And so I, that's probably a fair guess, but let me open our database and see if that's true. And I saw that actually above the 3.5% figure, um, we hadn't seen any failures at that point. And so that's what then motivated, um, you know, a talk that I gave and then some writing that I've done later on the 3.5% rule.
I want to stay with this comparative stuff because I think it's really interesting. Just on the, you know, talking about the Algerian independence movement, which was an armed movement for sure, um, versus Solidarity, which was nonviolent, um, why was it, in your understanding, in this comparative sense, that nonviolent movements, um, A, had more success, and B, led to democratic transitions?
Yeah, so in our book Why Civil Resistance Works, Maria and I say that there are really four things that nonviolent movements do better than armed campaigns. The first is that they get way more people involved. So, um, you're just much more, right, it's just a much more inclusive set of methods of resistance that are accessible, familiar, visually obvious of like where you even go to participate, how you would get involved. It's not a secret, it's actually usually quite open, um, at a certain point, how people would participate. Um, people can come in casually, they don't have to, you know, commit to be fugitives for the rest of their lives, um.
And there are all kinds of reasons why that then allows it to build, um, the sort of base participation that is often quite confounding for armed movements. Um, the second piece is that because of that very large participation, which is usually inclusive of lots of people from all walks of life, that activates political, social, and economic networks that leverage into power, right? So, uh, the more people you have, the more networks you can tap into to start breaking apart the opponent's pillars of support, whether that's the economic and business community, whether that's security forces, whether it's, you know, state media, cultural and religious authorities, civil servants, etc.
Everybody's related to somebody at some point, um, in society, and so that starts to activate those networks. And you'll see in dramatic cases like the Serbian Otpor movement that helped to bring down Milosevic, it's often described how at a key point in Belgrade when hundreds of thousands of Serbs went to demand that Milosevic leave office after a stolen election, um, the police did receive an order to fire on the demonstrators and ignored it, and a bunch of journalists and academics went in to interview them and find out why, what happened. And they would say things like, I thought I saw my kids in the crowd, right?
So that's what happens when you get very large and diverse numbers of people participating is that you can't disconnect those relationships with the state, right? And that starts to break down those pillars of support.
So these contexts we're giving, the Milosevic is interesting because it was ostensibly a democracy at that point, and he tried to steal an election. Um, in the case of Poland, obviously you're dealing with a state that was under both sort of domestic communist party one-party rule and also, you know, Soviet influence. Um, in the case of South Africa, you have a, uh, at first armed and then nonviolent movement, uh, to displace the apartheid system. None of those feel like perfect analogies to what we're going through, obviously. Um, how do you think about what we're experiencing now in the context of that kind of broad spectrum of different civil resistance movements you've studied?
Yeah, so you're right to say that every case is different, and the United States has had its own experience with authoritarianism, right? And so usually the best reference point for what a country is going through is its own past. So Jim Crow is the obvious example of where we had like sub-state, is what you would call it, like subnational levels of authoritarianism, um, and before that in different periods we had authoritarianism that was much more nationwide, and we also had authoritarianism for different groups and things like that. So this is not like unfamiliar territory for the United States.
Um, what I would say is that the way I describe the moment we're in is in a backsliding episode, um, and I think that there are a lot of other political scientists out there who study democracy and authoritarianism who agree with that. Um, there is a lot of debate about how acute the episode is and how far down it might go. I think the conventional understanding is that, um, you know, that the likeliest scenario is that the US winds up in some kind of competitive authoritarianism system, which is what Steve Levitsky and Lucan Way would call it, um, and that just basically means that all the trappings of democracy are there. There's still a constitution, there's still elections, um, there are nominal, um, you know, freedoms on the books and things like that, but they're sort of arbitrarily enforced and protected, um, and the opposition is so effectively bullied, um, off the playing field.
Uh, is there an analogy that basically it's very difficult for them to compete in elections? It's very difficult for people to speak out and oppose what's going on, um, and it just, you know, it becomes more costly to be part of the opposition, and the costs start to degrade the willingness of people to actually compete, right? So that's what people say is sort of the likeliest endpoint to where we might end up.
Um, I don't know what the likelihood is of getting there and actually that state consolidating, um, but I do know that in such situations, um, you know, the problem is that the institutions themselves are often so compromised or sidelined that they can't themselves provide the protection for democracy.
And in their book that they wrote about eight years ago, Steve Haggard and Robert Kaufman argue that in cases of near misses, that is countries that were sliding and then reversed course, um, the reason they did so is because of a strong civil society mobilization. Right, so the fact that people basically were able to form some kind of united umbrella of civic institutions, grassroots groups, um, and they were able to push back in every domain of society against intrusions by authoritarian aspirants.
Yeah, so the idea that I've read some of your work on this, which seems pretty crucial to me. You know, there's sort of, you're never even a mass movement, right, is not a majority of people in the streets. It's some kind of vanguard, but a very large one, not like, you know, these much smaller cadres of, say, armed cells, which are for a whole bunch of reasons very small. So even a mass movement, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of people participating, it's still a small percentage of the population, but it can be effective in representing larger mass opinion. And crucially, there are pillars of power that are not the regime.
That can be brought over. Whether that's, you talk a little bit about what those are, because again, I think everyone's in a new, people have an old framework for America and an incomplete one, right? I mean, all civil society was corrupted in the Jim Crow South, you know, total, all the stuff we're talking about was present there in its own ways. Um, you know, universities weren't like, sure, here's, come have a, uh, you know, black professor come lecture in an integrated classroom at Ole Miss. Like, that wasn't happening, right? So civil society was co-opted as part of the authoritarian regime down there, that's not totally alien to our history.
And yet at the same time, I think we do take an open society for granted. We take civil society for granted so much so that we don't think about what it is. And I do think it's worth talking about what it is, because I think once you talk about what it is, it is so clear how much that is the target of what the first 100 days of the Trump administration has been.
Yeah, okay, good question. What is civil society? Um, so, uh, you know, a lot of times it's the sort of institutions of learning, of culture, of, um, you know, the sort of associational life of a country. So, um, it could be everything from nonprofit sector to, um, you know, religious institutions, uh, to, um, the sort of business community and networks of business like chambers of commerce and professional associations, things like that.
So it's really everything that isn't the state, um, as a formal organization, but it's a way that people organize themselves and associational life to try to make the democracy thrive, right? Um, and educational institutions are part of that, uh, for sure, um, and I think the business community is really important, um, in most cases, like where it decides to put its lot is often very decisive.
I mean, you brought up South Africa, um. What's really interesting there is that unlike the case of Serbia, um, it was not going to be the case that black activists organizing out of the townships, strikes, boycotts, stayaways, marches, um, were going to be able to get the police to defect, right? That was just not an option. It wasn't part of the strategic landscape of possibility there. And so, um, the methods reflected that. They weren't about actively confronting security forces. They were about putting huge amounts of pressure on the business community.
And so that was through the withholding of buying, you know, um, the anti-apartheid movement had multiple campaigns that were just fully economic non-cooperation, no buying, um, no working. Um, and then building the types of networks that were necessary to sustain the community in periods of deprivation over the long term because of that.
And then at the same time, there was a huge international campaign of pressure, right? So that's multinationals divesting and sanctions that were coming from other countries and international institutions. So, um, in the end, it was the business community that went to the National Party and said, you have to elevate a reformer here to do business with the ANC, like we cannot, we have no choice, there's no way out of this, and that pressure is what resulted in the shift, the balance of power shift there.
So I think that's very instructive because I think so many people have learned this thing, including autocrats, by the way, that you don't want your security forces to defect. So those aren't the only pillars, right? There are lots of other pillars, and the business and economic community are probably one of the most decisive.
Yeah, it's interesting because when I think of civil society, I don't think of the Chamber of Commerce. I, you know, in my own way of thinking of it, it's like the state, and then there's the business world, and then civil society is kind of everything else from PTAs to churches to universities to museums to arts organizations to everything, but all those don't have as much power as the business community. And so it's probably important that it's important to think about the business community as probably the key, one of the key fulcrums of power after the state.
Yeah, I think that's right. Uh, I think that they're one of the pillars, right? So, and there are other pillars, and in some societies it may be that, um, you know, state media is the most important one, you know, that without being able to fray a little bit the loyalty of state media, that it's going to be very challenging no matter who, you know, what the business community says, that it's too easy to intimidate and co-opt the business community in some places because it's so far down, right?
So I think there's lots of varieties of this, and I think the key insight from a lot of scholars of civil resistance is just that there's no such thing as a monolithic entity against whom a movement would resist. So there's always going to be the need to replenish loyalties, the need to make sure that the people who have to go along in order for the autocrat to get their way are going to continue to go along, and that just, you know, creates infinite opportunities for them to second guess whether that's in their own personal interest to do that.
And the reason why so many movements have won is because they've made a pretty good argument that it was not in their personal interest to continue, you know, whether it's because they saw their kids in the crowd or because they realized there was no possibility for economic prosperity in this country that they wanted to live in, and there was a path out of it, you know, if they took a different direction, you know, those are the types of points of pressure that successful movements create.
Um, and so I think that gets a little bit back to your own kind of question at the outset, which is, does protest matter? Well, it really matters, uh, if it builds pressure, um, and if it builds base, and if the mass that's assembled from that translates into real pressure.
How much does mass opinion matter? This is something I've been really wrestling with, um. And I'll give a quick gloss on this, like, Orban has won a series of elections, um, Steve Levitsky, who you referenced before, I think has a great way of thinking about this competitive authoritarianism, which is like elections that are free but not fair. Like, they're not stuffing ballot boxes, they're not, you know, they're not doing even what Erdogan did, which is arresting the opposition leader, but they're not fair elections because of how the system's been essentially rigged, um, to make it very, very difficult to be the opposition.
So, but in the case of Orban, like, he's popular to the best that we can measure public opinion there, like he has been a popular figure. Narendra Modi in India, to the best that we can measure public opinion, is quite popular. Um, Bukele in El Salvador, again, to the best, again not all this stuff is precise, but to the best we can measure, is fairly popular. Trump is not popular to the best we can measure, um, and I think that matters, but I can't tell if I'm just desperately clinging to some life raft of hope. Um, it seems to me to matter, but I wonder, as someone who studies this, whether you think it matters.
Yeah, so what's interesting about our country and our country's institutions is something that Steve Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote in their more recent book, The Tyranny of the Minority, which is that we have institutions that are minoritarian institutions. In other words, right, and so, you know, the implication of that is that like maybe popularity matters slightly less in this country than it would in another that didn't have the same kind of setup already structurally in our institutions.
So I do think it matters, but I think there's a lower floor here than there might be in a lot of other authoritarian regimes because of this, the sort of protection that incumbents get from the benefit of our minoritarian institutions.
That's interesting, meaning that like, meaning just that, you know, the way that I see this, which really manifests, is the Republican Party's gotten very comfortable at sort of at 40% approval, where, but 80 to 90% approval among Republicans, the biggest threat is primaries, and you know, the Senate right now, the way the Republican Party coalition works, gives them a kind of advantage with that body. And so altogether it's like, the sky is not falling if it's 40%, whereas if a Democrat's at 40%, it's, you get a lot more panic.
In terms of our institutions, um, and in terms of this moment, how strategic versus haphazard do the moves made on the other side from Trump look to you? Um, I've been unnerved by how, well, here's my read on it. I've been unnerved by how methodically they have gone after civil society, like law firms, universities, parts of the business community that they can then cut tariff deals with. It really does seem like they do not believe in a free and open society, and they want to bring it under their control. And they're taking the steps they can to use the levers of power they have to do so.
At the same time, they also seem to be shooting themselves in the foot on a lot of stuff, particularly starting a trade war that might send the economy into recession. Um, but given that you've sort of studied this kind of game theory back and forth between how regimes deal with civil resistance movements, what's your read on what they've been doing?
Yeah. My read is that there are a lot of assertions of executive power, right? So EOs, record settings, right, yeah, they're not laws, um, but they're assertions of executive power. They're assertions of a political project. They are, um, they're kind of the roadmap for where the administration would like the country to be, right? And so if we take it at its word, um, then I think it's very clear that the administration wants to bring civil society to cooperate with implementing Donald Trump's vision for the country.
And I think precisely because it's been done through executive orders, the primary way that civil society is pushing back is through litigation. Um, and primarily litigation that questions the authority of the executive to make and do these things. Um, so in a sense that's sort of appropriate, um, but I think that's also why there's an attempt to bring the legal profession on side and to have all this army of lawyers at the ready to do all of the litigating, because I think his own experience, um, maybe as a businessman too, is simply that, like, litigation is sort of how it happens.
Everything is litigated, and you just have to win like a handful of suits, um, and right? And so it's sort of not very costly to just do stuff all the time that is going to invite litigation, because probably some of it you'll win. Uh, and if you win a few really important things, then you really go far in expanding people's understanding of what your authority is, and right? So that it's sort of like moving the Overton window.
And the problem of like the fact that a lot of the litigation won't be sorted for a few years. That's the other thing, the time part of it, right? Like, oh yes, oh, well, and this is why all this fight over injunctions, but like, oh, you know what, you gotta reconstitute USAID and start giving everyone their HIV medication in the Global South three years from now.
