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.
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"
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]
"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)
“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.
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.
In the age of centralized broadcasting where everyone watched the same TV channels, smaller protests could have outsized impact. That was an anomaly of the 20th century, not a timeless rule.
Some still haven't gotten the memo and are now framing declining effectiveness as somehow the "other side's" fault. But how could it be? The people you actually need to convince are those in the middle, and it seems like many protests aren't even trying to reach them anymore.
I genuinely don't understand what a lot of modern protests are attempting to accomplish in terms of persuasion. I see their political goals, but why would going outside and complaining change any minds? Why would blocking traffic and ruining someone's day make them sympathetic to your cause? How is shaming people who aren't already supporters supposed to win them over?
It was always naive to think 3.5% of the population could force the other 96.5% to do whatever they want by making enough noise. It's even more naive to suggest it's everyone else's fault for not listening. And it's completely unhinged to imply that roughly 35% on the opposite political side are somehow bamboozling the remaining 60%.
If you're asking what they should do instead, I honestly couldn't tell you. But not having a better answer doesn't mean the current approach is working. Maybe try doing something that would actually make people like you? Pick up litter, volunteer visibly, something that builds goodwill instead of resentment. I don't know. But whatever this is, it isn't persuading anyone who wasn't already on board.
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.
I think protests are good since it requires you to go outside and interact with other people, it requires a higher level of commitment than the slacktivism of the 2010s that was so prominent in online spaces. Polls are gamed all the time and social media is dominated by bots, but you cannot fake a large crowd in a protest. If a protest is large enough it creates a force that cannot be easily ignored.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
It seems more of a fetid cesspit. It promotes anger, division and controversy rather than shared ideas, cohesive action and positive social change. I think I need an example of the good social media can do for society and collective action.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
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 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.
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.
Keith McHenry of "Food Not Bombs" made an argument for nonviolent anarchism 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.
(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.
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...
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]
"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.
> 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.
In the age of centralized broadcasting where everyone watched the same TV channels, smaller protests could have outsized impact. That was an anomaly of the 20th century, not a timeless rule.
Some still haven't gotten the memo and are now framing declining effectiveness as somehow the "other side's" fault. But how could it be? The people you actually need to convince are those in the middle, and it seems like many protests aren't even trying to reach them anymore.
I genuinely don't understand what a lot of modern protests are attempting to accomplish in terms of persuasion. I see their political goals, but why would going outside and complaining change any minds? Why would blocking traffic and ruining someone's day make them sympathetic to your cause? How is shaming people who aren't already supporters supposed to win them over?
It was always naive to think 3.5% of the population could force the other 96.5% to do whatever they want by making enough noise. It's even more naive to suggest it's everyone else's fault for not listening. And it's completely unhinged to imply that roughly 35% on the opposite political side are somehow bamboozling the remaining 60%.
If you're asking what they should do instead, I honestly couldn't tell you. But not having a better answer doesn't mean the current approach is working. Maybe try doing something that would actually make people like you? Pick up litter, volunteer visibly, something that builds goodwill instead of resentment. I don't know. But whatever this is, it isn't persuading anyone who wasn't already on board.
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.
I think protests are good since it requires you to go outside and interact with other people, it requires a higher level of commitment than the slacktivism of the 2010s that was so prominent in online spaces. Polls are gamed all the time and social media is dominated by bots, but you cannot fake a large crowd in a protest. If a protest is large enough it creates a force that cannot be easily ignored.
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.
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".
> 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.
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...
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.
I'm not sure it's an anomaly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aqBls-qpRM
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.
A reply on social media is taking a stand?
It seems more of a fetid cesspit. It promotes anger, division and controversy rather than shared ideas, cohesive action and positive social change. I think I need an example of the good social media can do for society and collective action.
> 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.
> You're describing how protests energize people who already agree. I'm asking how they persuade people who don't.
That's not the intent.
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.
well, aside from alleged riots there have been actual ones and those have unfortunate effect of making it easier to dismiss the cause
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.
So far, if estimates are accurate, neither in Iran with 90 million population, more than five percent turned out.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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%.
This seems anti democratic. How can we prevent small minorities from hassling everyone until they get their way?
In the US? You'd probably need to repeal the first amendment. Good luck with that.
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.
"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 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.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
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.
(2019)
Some previous discussion:
2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40378867
2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32458241
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.
(2019)
* Except when the 3.5% is entirely geriatric women.
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.
Hong Kong proved this wrong too...
Keith McHenry of "Food Not Bombs" made an argument for nonviolent anarchism 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.