Why Protest Works—The 3.5% Rule with Erica Chenoweth

Summary

Podcast Summary: We Can Do Hard Things Episode: Why Protest Works—The 3.5% Rule with Erica Chenoweth
Release Date: July 8, 2025
Hosts: Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, Amanda Doyle
Guest: Erica Chenoweth, Professor at Harvard University

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Introduction

In this insightful episode of We Can Do Hard Things, hosts Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle welcome Erica Chenoweth, a renowned Harvard professor specializing in political violence and its alternatives. The conversation delves deep into the current state of American democracy, the rise of authoritarianism, and the potent effectiveness of nonviolent protest in reclaiming and strengthening democratic institutions.

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Understanding the Current Political Landscape

Amanda Doyle opens the discussion by questioning the state of American democracy:

“Are we still even a democracy? Are we officially in authoritarianism?”
[03:03]

Erica Chenoweth responds by defining democracy not as a perfect system but as a process that ensures political views are expressed and power is shared:

“Democracy is about the process by which people express political views and engage in political conflict in a way that results in compromise, power sharing, respect for the rights and the well being of our neighbors.”
[05:59]

She highlights the indicators of a backsliding democracy, such as the erosion of the rule of law, separation of powers, and respect for civil liberties. Chenoweth points out that when these institutions fail to check executive power effectively, a nation teeters on the brink of authoritarianism.

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Defining and Identifying Authoritarianism

Chenoweth elaborates on the concept of "competitive authoritarianism," where elections occur but lack fairness due to the suppression of opposition:

“Elections happen, but there's no meaningful opposition. The opposition is too weak, too cowed, or too bullied to participate fairly.”
[09:59]

She draws parallels between the current U.S. political climate and other contemporary authoritarian regimes, using Hungary as a prime example. Hungary's centralization of power, suppression of dissent, and manipulation of the judiciary mirror troubling trends in the United States.

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The Power of Nonviolent Resistance

Central to the episode is Chenoweth's groundbreaking research on nonviolent resistance. She explains the 3.5% Rule, which posits that only 3.5% of the population needs to engage in sustained nonviolent protest for significant political change to occur:

“Nonviolent resistance works way more often than its detractors want people to believe that it does.”
[16:46]

Key components that make nonviolent movements successful include:

1. Inclusive Participation: Accessible methods like protests, strikes, and boycotts allow diverse groups to engage without requiring total life overhauls.
2. Defections: Shifts in loyalty among institutions and individuals that reduce support for authoritarian practices.
3. Economic Noncooperation: Imposing material costs on opponents through actions like consumer boycotts.
4. Organizational Discipline: Maintaining resilience and strategic discipline to respond effectively to repression.

Chenoweth emphasizes that nonviolent movements can achieve their goals more effectively than violent revolutions, often leading to lasting democratic outcomes.

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Historical Case Studies

Serbia’s Bulldozer Revolution (2000): Chenoweth recounts how hundreds of thousands demanded Slobodan Milosevic's resignation through mass protests. The police's non-response to orders to use lethal force demonstrated public support for the movement, leading to Milosevic’s eventual resignation.

“Milosevic resigned to spend more time with his grandson, as he said.”
[20:40]

U.S. Civil Rights Movement: Highlighting strategic nonviolent resistance, she describes how disciplined responses to violence—such as the silent march following the bombing of Reverend James Lawson’s house—forced political leaders to confront the injustices and initiate desegregation.

“The silent march is such a brilliant tactic because ... it's symbolically so powerful to see a movement in such pain exercising such powerful discipline and moral kind of, I don't know, it's morally very powerful.”
[29:17]

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Strategies for Modern-Day Activism

Chenoweth offers actionable strategies for contemporary movements aiming to reclaim democracy:

1. Identifying Pressure Points: Focus on economic noncooperation, such as consumer boycotts, to influence corporate and political structures.
2. Building Broad Coalitions: Engage a wide array of allies, including unlikely partners, to strengthen the movement's foundation.
3. Strategic Defections: Encourage key institutions and individuals to withdraw their support for authoritarian practices, thereby weakening the regime's hold.

She cites the 2024 U.S. elections as a critical moment where mobilizing the non-voting population could significantly alter political outcomes, demonstrating the potential impact of strategic nonviolent actions.

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Signs of Hope and Ongoing Efforts

Despite the challenges, Chenoweth remains optimistic. She shares data from the Crowd Counting Consortium, revealing a surge in protest activities since 2017, with over three times the number of protests by May 2025 compared to May 2017. Notably, 99.6% of these events remained nonviolent, showcasing disciplined and effective resistance.

“There's a lot of resistance happening that isn't widely recognized, and it's incredibly disciplined.”
[53:41]

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Conclusion

The episode underscores the enduring power of nonviolent resistance in effecting political transformation. Chenoweth’s research and insights offer a roadmap for individuals and movements striving to defend and strengthen democracy against authoritarian threats. By leveraging inclusive participation, strategic defections, and disciplined organization, We Can Do Hard Things illustrates that reclaiming democracy is not only possible but within reach.

Final Thought from Chenoweth:

“The United States has all the ingredients, and it's just a matter of being able to pull together the people and the commitment and the knowledge and the discipline and the energy to create something that will be just generationally transformative.”
[54:15]

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Connect with Erica Chenoweth: For more on Erica Chenoweth’s work, visit her Harvard profile or explore her publications on nonviolent resistance and political transformation.

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We hope this summary provides a comprehensive overview of the episode. To gain deeper insights, we encourage you to listen to the full conversation on We Can Do Hard Things.

Transcript

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[Amanda Doyle]

Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things High Pod Squad. I wish I could give you all a big hug right now. I think we all need it. Instead of a hug. Today we are going to be talking to Erica Chenoweth who is a professor at Harvard University and who can tell us once and for all where we are in this American moment. Are we still even a democracy? Are we officially in authoritarianism? We're going to answer that question today and then we are going to talk about exactly what are the most effective ways to that we the people can reclaim our democracy. What can we do better today to make change? Let's go.

[Erica Chenoweth]

Erica Chenoweth is a professor at Harvard.

[Abby Wambach]

University who studies political violence and its alternatives.

[Erica Chenoweth]

Erica directs the Nonviolent Action Lab, an.

[Abby Wambach]

Innovation hub that provides empirical evidence in support of movement led political transformation. Erika has authored nine books including Civil.

[Erica Chenoweth]

What Everyone Needs to Know as well as with Maria why Civil Resistance Works. Erika meticulously studied a period of 106 years and each of the 323 civil resistance campaigns worldwide during that time, 1900 to 2006, and discovered every single civil resistance campaign that mobilized 3.5% of the people to be engaged in sustained nonviolent protest. Every single one of them achieved its.

[Abby Wambach]

Stated aim within a year.

[Erica Chenoweth]

This is some good damn news. Hope on a perpetual bad news day. That's a hope.

[Glennon Doyle]

Full sentence.

[Erica Chenoweth]

It's a hopeful sentence. We're just going to close out the podcast with that. Thank you so much everyone.

[Glennon Doyle]

Thank you for coming and listening to our TED Talk.

[Erica Chenoweth]

We have Erica Chenoweth here with us today. We are very, very thrilled to have this. And here is what we are thinking. It feels like we should have the humility to learn from the other side that those who have spent the last 50 plus years meticulously studying, planning and preparing for the moment that we're in. That feels to us a bit like chaos, but is in fact the opposite of chaos. It is strategic and meticulously planned. So Erica is here to help us understand that we need to not only have our hearts in the right place, but also probably our minds and our organizations to be strategic, methodical and so that we can be disciplined and sustained and data driven in our approaches to what we need to do next. Erica, we were talking a little bit about this before, and I wonder if you could help us set the stage for what the new empire looks like. I think a lot of us are used to being like, oh, Hitler, dictator. Oh, someone comes in and declares themselves a dictator. And could you just walk us through, like, what the modern world looks like right now? It feels like Hungary's ties to Trump are very strong. Like, what is it actually looking like now in the modern world when we do this kind of massive backsliding?

Sure. So thanks so much for the conversation and I think that first things first. Democracy is not a destination and there's no such thing as a perfect democracy. But democracy is about the process by which people express political views and engage in political conflict in a way that results in compromise, power sharing, respect for the rights and the well being of our neighbors. And you know, it's a form of government that actually provides some constraint on the overreach of the powerful. So at its basic core, we've always been trying to get to a place of a more perfect union and never got there. But what a backsliding democracy does is it starts to remove all of those constraints within the institutions, within the way that people even express the role of government vis a vis the society. And who benefits really from what the government does in ways that can be very hard to come back from. So, to put it really concretely, the basic minimal standards of democracy are things like the rule of law, separation of powers, checks and balances, and respect for the rights of inhabitants, like free expression, assembly, conscience and due process that allows for the pursuit of many possibilities and collective futures. And the issue is that democratic states only really work when the leaders believe in those things and themselves restrain themselves from overreach. So when they don't try to break separation of powers, when they don't try to break the judiciary, when they don't try to break or cow Congress, when they don't try to destroy state governments, when they aren't in line with the federal executive, for example. And so I think what this looks like in today's global landscape, of which the United States is just one example, is that those institutions remain. So the Constitution still exists in a country, there's still something called the judiciary, there's something called the Parliament or the Congress, but they're effectively not checking the executive power in the way that they're actually meant to. The rule of law is applied arbitrarily, so in a way that's discriminating against those that might be in opposition to the executive. And it's arbitrary in the sense that like, it's quite unpredictable whether a person is going to be on the sharp end of the stick, or whether they're just going to be able to go about their daily lives. So it's true that a lot of people in contemporary authoritarian regimes are just going about their lives in an uninhibited way. But maybe they think twice before they do something like speak out about something they don't like going on, because there are high costs to opposition, which is it's literally our First Amendment, is that we're supposed to be able to have a very broad range of dissent in our expression, in our speech, be respected and specifically protected by the federal government. So when those types of things start to come apart, what it means is that there are A lot of people, usually it's the most vulnerable people in the society who feel the effects of the authoritarianism first. And while there may be an opposition party, it's not a single party state. The opposition party is kind of bullied off the scene. My colleagues Steve Levitsky and Luke and Wei call this competitive authoritarianism, which is that there are still elections, but there's no meaningful opposition. That is, the opposition is too weak, too cowed or too bullied in order to participate in a fair way. So even though elections might look free, they're not fair. And, and that is the sort of manner in which we've seen a lot of contemporary authoritarian regimes operating. Another way to call them is electoral autocracies. Elections happen, but all the trappings are there, but it's not meaningfully a democracy where people enjoy equal protection under the law, where the rule of law applies to everyone, and where the people are genuinely choosing their leaders.

[Amanda Doyle]

So, Erika, where are we right now, in your opinion? That's what I want to know.

[Erica Chenoweth]

I think the consensus is we're in a very acute backsliding episode and there's some debate, as you might not be surprised to know, about how far down we are. My own personal view is that we are in a period where there has been basically an authoritarian breakthrough at the national level and that is attempting to consolidate at the nationwide level. So there are a number of different observatories around the world that study whether countries are democracies or autocracies or somewhere in between. There's many varieties, of course, and some of the study leaders of those observatories have said they will downgrade the United States into clear non democracy during their next coding of these cases. So I think that's the general consensus. And it's also useful to note that this is not our first time being an autocracy in the United States. A lot of political scientists don't Even consider the US to have been a democracy until 1965, which is when Jim Crow was effectively dismantled by, in that case, the federal government against many southern states. So what we've had in the past is what political scientists called sub national authoritarianism, which means that we've had authoritarian states, but not a federal government that was authoritarian. So this is kind of an unprecedented moment for us.

You've just described what happened in Hungary, right? I mean, that's effective. That's the same thing. And when you look at the steps that they took, it reads like the New York Times right now. I mean, it's the centralizing the power in the president, the weakening the press, the targeting higher education, targeting vulnerable groups like suppressing dissent. And didn't Orban speak at CPAC in 2023? Yeah, he's like their hero.

He's the leader of Hungary, and he's spoken, I think, at a number of different CPACs, but he's basically been in charge for a number of years. He's survived a number of electoral challenges over the years. Actually, there's curiosity about whether he'll survive the next one, but there's never been an effective ability to mobilize behind a candidate that could actually beat him since he, you know, you brought up the example, Amanda, but, you know, driving out one of Europe's best universities, and it's now an exile in Vienna as a result of not being able to operate there.

I mean, on a personal level, the president of my university, University of Virginia, was just pushed out by demand of an official at the Department of Justice. I mean, it is happening.

[Amanda Doyle]

So is this just a playbook? Was Project 2025, was that their way of following these other places and turning it into. Is that what we're getting at here? They just studied other places and then they made a plan to turn this into an authoritarian regime?

[Erica Chenoweth]

I'm not sure how coordinated the learning was. I know that Project 2025 is a political project that was pulled together by a lot of conservative groups and kind of conservative public figures in the US before the election. And I'm sure that there were things that they found in Orban's kind of vision of illiberal democracy, which is what he proudly calls Hungary these days, that they found could work in the United States. But I'm sort of speculating there because I haven't actually studied the sort of genesis of the project other than just the hundred plus interest groups that contributed to it with their ideas. And obviously a lot of authoritarians don't claim to be authoritarians while they do authoritarian things.

That's the tricky thing about America.

Yeah, but I think the manner in which they're attempting to govern right now is very difficult to characterize as anything else. Just the manner in which lawsuits that go against the administration are then turned into a talking point where the problem was the judge. And there's like a whole kind of narrative on the GOP side now that the entire judicial system is just a bunch of activist judges that is sort of unconstitutionally constraining the power of the executive and these people need to be impeached. Or, you know, they just got this ruling last week from the Supreme Court that significantly, in my view, curtails the ability of district federal judges to hold the executive to account to the rule of law. So I think, like, we are in that consolidation phase where the constraints are dropping week after week about what it is the President can do. So that's a very alarming degree of consensus among a certain ideological cohort in the US about just a very radical vision of what the chief executive of the US should be able to do, having not even been elected by a majority of the country.

Okay, so that really sets the table of where we're at. Let's talk about your research that is really so profoundly helpful right now in what is strategic, strategically, actionably important to do and not do. I really, really appreciated that about your work. Your first discovery is that nonviolent resistance, like, if this is a flowchart and we're deciding, what do we do next, the first step is do we make a violent or nonviolent resistance movement? This is good news for us that nonviolent is twice as likely to be effective as violent, correct?

Yeah. So with Maria Steffen, my book, why Civil Resistance Works, found that in that 106 cases that you pointed out that the nonviolent campaigns are the ones in which civilians were mobilizing out front using a variety of unarmed methods. So protests, strikes, boycotts, and the like, and that was sort of the primary mode of resistance, were the ones that were winning at a much greater degree and pace than the armed revolutions of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. And it's still true now that nonviolent resistance has a very formidable track record, even though in recent years there's been a bit of a decline. But I think the main takeaway is that it works way more often than its detractors want people to believe that it does. And even if it doesn't always work, it is a much more viable path for many, many places.

[Amanda Doyle]

And how and why does nonviolent resistance work? And what are you talking about? Protests, boycott, how does that work?

[Erica Chenoweth]

Basically, the main argument that we made in our book in 2011 was that the thing about methods like protests or boycotts or stay at home demonstrations is that anybody can do them. Basically, there are so many different types of methods that are so accessible that it makes the campaign very inclusive of people from all walks of life, of varying levels of commitment to the cause or to the movement. It doesn't require people to completely radically change their life most of the time to participate, they can draw in people who are more casually oriented toward the movement in key moments that really make them matter. And the size and diversity that can result from effective mobilization of that kind starts to shift the balance of power. The reason it starts to shift the balance of power is because when movements get very large and they represent a cross section of a society, they start to tap into the networks that uphold the power. So they start to tap into the business sector, the economic elites, the state media, the security forces even, and start to activate quite personal networks that, even if they shift a little bit in their loyalty away from an autocrat, can completely tilt the table in the other direction. And that's because there's always a spectrum of loyalty within any of these different pillars, Whether they're the social pillars or economic pillars or security pillars. There are always people who are kind of uneasy about what's going on, and they're not standing in the way, but they're not doing anything about it either. They're not sort of actively helping with the consolidation, but they're also not actively opposing it. And even if those people become slightly less sympathetic to autocratic consolidation, they move just one notch over. That can be very profound in removing a potential cooperator, you know, from the scene, or somebody who would just look the other way. And so the way that this plays out is by producing what we call defections. But what really just means is, you know, shifts in the loyalty or the willingness of people to just go along as if it's okay. So in concrete terms, this is like in Serbia, where in 2000, there were like hundreds of thousands of people coming to demand that Slobodan Milosevic leave power after he fraudulently claimed that he won an election. And there were people from villages and towns from all over the country who were coming to Belgrade. They called it the bulldozer revolution because they were like farmers bringing their gear to block the roads and stuff to prevent the military from coming in. So at this key moment of a face off between the demonstrators and the police in the parliamentary square, basically the police got an order to shoot live fire on the demonstrators, and they pretended they didn't hear it. So it was obvious they'd gotten the order because some activists had stolen a walkie talkie and heard it and then noticed they didn't do anything. They might have looked at each other, but nobody moved, and they realized it wasn't going to happen. And they just walked through the police line and into the presidential palace. And Milosevic resigned to spend more time with his grandson, as he said. And the upshot of that was journalists and others went in to ask these police, what, what were you thinking when you got that order? And they said, well, I thought I saw my kid in the crowd, or I thought I saw my wife's brother in the crowd, or I thought I saw my cousin or a guy who sells me liquor at a discount. And all those social networks get activated in a movement that is very large and cross cutting. And it's only the mass unarmed movements that have the capacity to get there most of the time.

[Amanda Doyle]

So.

[Erica Chenoweth]

It'S all about defections. It's not just about huge numbers, it's about numbers that then activate those networks and then those networks beginning to unravel. And then the third thing that successful movements do is they don't just rely on protests. Protests is a very important method for lots of reasons, but it often doesn't impose any direct material costs on the opponents or begin to change the minds of these would be defectors very often. But things like mass non cooperation, like where people refuse to do things they're expected to do, especially buying things or going to work or whatever, that imposes direct material costs. And people in our generation understand that after living through Covid and understanding what it does to a town if people all are in their homes for three days, not working at a time. So we know the drill and we know the direct material impacts of that. And so I think movements that are able to think through what is their strategy and how can they begin to have a capacity to impose costs, not just demonstrate their visual and symbolic power, are likely to get the goods. And then the fourth thing that the successful movements do is they maintain their own organizational discipline and resilience because repression against them is likely to escalate. And when the repression against them escalates, if they are able to respond in a way that that makes the repression backfire, then they're much more likely to get the defections and they're much more likely to invite the public into a conversation about how unjust the repression was and how disproportionate it was, and how much it dramatizes the overall system that is not working for so many people. So there are different ways that effective movements have prepared to make repression backfire, but when they do so, they're much more likely to turn a horrible tragic moment into something that demonstrates what the movement is for and what it's about and what it can deliver, as opposed to forcing it into disarray and a period of sort of unwanted retreat.

[Glennon Doyle]

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[Amanda Doyle]

So as an example of that, like during the civil rights era, knowing that there would be violence coming at these people and then they knew that would happen and they had a plan to immediately turn it into media and get it in front of everybody so that people could see the violence that was happening and that would change public opinion. Is that an example of that? And do you have any other examples of using heightened repression to change hearts and Minds.

[Erica Chenoweth]

Yeah. I mean, the civil rights movement, I think, is a very good example of this because it's played out unfortunately, so many times. And different strategists were aware of the need to be able to respond to such moments in ways that built the movement's power and appeal. And MLK himself would often talk about this, that he felt like there was a need to dramatize the injustice because otherwise people would not understand or they'd not be willing to believe what black people experienced on a daily basis. And he said this and the media many times, movements from the civil rights era, and I should say some movements in our country still today, I think, will prepare for the possibility of violence against them through trainings where they learn de escalation or they learn ways to avoid reacting when somebody insults them or when somebody tries to hurt them and gives them other ways of responding that both keep them safe and avoid sort of playing into the moment. And so that did go on. And there's a powerful documentary called A Force More Powerful that I highly recommend, that shows a 20 some minute clip of the Nashville campaign and the church basement trainings that the Reverend James Lawson conducted with many students from Nashville and beyond to just teach them how to sit at the lunch counters and be basically abused without responding. And when their lawyer, when his home was bombed, because he was defending these students who were being arrested for not committing a crime, just violating the Jim Crow codes of segregation by sitting in at the lunch counters. And this black lawyer was bombed, his house was bombed. The way that the SNCC movement responded in that moment was by basically organizing a silent march from his home to the steps of City hall and got like 5,000 people involved in. And the silent march is such a brilliant tactic because you can figure out who the provocateurs are at a silent march very easily, but you can also. It's symbolically so powerful to see a movement in such pain exercising such powerful discipline and moral kind of, I don't know, it's morally very powerful. And they confronted, on the steps of City hall, the mayor of Nashville and Diane Nash, who was a student at Fisk University and a participant in this movement, who'd done these church trainings, very calmly, asked him, do you believe that it's right for a person to be denied service or denied sold goods just based on the color of their skin? And in the face of all of these people, he said, no, I don't believe it's morally right. And they got him on the microphone saying that. And that initiated a series of negotiations between the movement and City hall and the downtown business owners to desegregate Nashville, which they did as a result. So that's an example of building pressure and responding to attempts to terrorize people and make the movement end into a moment where it's basically a moment of an ultimatum to the mayor with this powerful movement of people behind them demanding change. And in that case, it worked.

It's such a good example of the difference between what is justified versus what is strategically disciplined and smart. Because it's a complicated thing to tell a bunch of people who are being oppressed to be sweet and quiet and non confrontational. Right. In a certain sense. But this idea that you flesh out so well is that the regime is just always trying to justify itself. And so you're just trying to make it harder for them to justify themselves. When you're have children and your neighbors peacefully congregating and there's a crackdown, it's very hard for an authoritarian regime to justify its existence. Whereas if there is some kind of violence, they can say, look, see, that's why we need to exist. How do movements establish that kind of discipline? Like what results in that level of discipline that people don't do, what would come naturally, which is to defend themselves, which is to be enraged. How do you get that?

One thing I would say is that nonviolent resistance as a technique is, I think, about understanding that the purpose of a movement in times of great confusion is to provide clarity. And authoritarian regime is always, as you say, going to try to depict a movement in a certain way. And what the movement wants to do is be very clear about what it is and what it's about. And so it's not so much about being docile or it's not being a pushover at all, but it's about refusing to back off the claim and making sure that by method and by means and by the ends of the movement, it's all very aligned and very clear. And so actually it was Gandhi who talked about the power of civil resistance is in part that it's a bringing together of ends and means, that if the goal is liberation, then the method has to be itself liberatory, like it has to be itself something that doesn't produce greater harm to oneself or others, more destruction. And there were debates among anti colonial leaders at the time about whether that was how people would achieve liberation. And Frantz Fanon had a different idea about that. Or at least Sartre read that Fanon had a different idea about that. But. But the Idea is that, and this is true, Maria and I in our book, actually found that movements that struggle against authoritarianism using primarily nonviolent resistance are much more likely to land in a country that's a democracy, as opposed to movements that struggle with armed resistance, which almost never results in a democracy. Wow. Almost never. I think maybe one case is Costa Rica, which the winners of its civil war came to power through armed resistance, but then immediately abolished the military. That's maybe the only case from the last hundred years that's sort of a clear democracy that emerged out of an otherwise armed revolution. So I just think that's a really critical piece. And so the question of how does a movement get that level of discipline? I mean, clearly organizational capacity is just really big here, because being able to prepare a population and communities for the ability to engage over the long term in some form of collective action needs organization. Good organization needs people who are very committed and can be there for the long term. It needs people who are willing to go door to door and sit in people's kitchens with them and have long conversations that seem frustrating, but then they go back and have another one the next month and it's less frustrating. It sort of builds over time. And then training is something that a lot of movements come to offer that allows them to practice experiencing intense conflict and being able to either de escalate it or assign different roles so that people can manage it. And good leadership is very helpful. I think movements that have had a single charismatic leader or something are not necessarily the comparison here. It's more movements that have had a rich base of good leaders that is the model to follow, because that's what a democracy emerges from or renews from, is a huge number of civic leaders who are willing to stand up and help their communities mobilize together for something that's really needed.

[Amanda Doyle]

Erica, when you talk to your very smart friends, which I know you're doing all the time, do you have any ideas about how a bunch of people who would like to put all of these things into motion and might be considering specific boycotts that would affect deeply the specific people who need to become defectors? What are your smart friends talking about? What might that look like in a moment like this effective boycott?

[Erica Chenoweth]

I mean.

[Abby Wambach]

No.

[Erica Chenoweth]

Tesla was pretty good.

Yeah, I mean, I think the. The instinct to think about tactics as they relate to producing defections is very positive because I think that people become frustrated when they feel like they're doing a lot of things and nothing is happening, or they're preaching to the choir. Or they've given a lot and nothing is budging in the polity. So the idea of trying to experiment with tactics that actually do try to elicit defections, I think is productive. I think that the thing that's true about economic non cooperation, which is what boycott is, is that it does require a pretty high level of participation in order to make an impact. And I think the general strike is sort of the most powerful of the forms of economic non cooperation that humans have ever developed. And that's very challenging to pull off in most countries, especially a country of our size. But things like consumer boycotts are I think done and have been done already. The sort of boycott of Target early on was an example of that. I think there are other types of corporate influence that are possible, like shareholder votes that I don't know if you saw. John Deere had a vote on whether to back off of its DEI policies and its shareholders came in and said, no, you need to uphold.

Same with Disney.

Yeah, exactly. So every corporation has its own pillars of support, right? So it's got shareholders, it's got workers, it's got distributors, ad people, it's got consumers. So I would say movements that have won often think through all of those different pillars within a corporate entity and think about which might be the low hanging fruit to get influence with before using more kind of concrete methods of resistance. But I think the overall idea is thinking about what the goal is and then reverse engineering the strategy from there so what a win actually looks like and then who needs to defect in order to get to the win? And then okay, for each of the defectors, what is the different toolkit that's needed to build pressure while also minimizing people's exposure to risk while doing it.

[Glennon Doyle]

Have you written up a proposal for us? Because I think that that would be nice.

[Erica Chenoweth]

RFP to save democracy.

[Glennon Doyle]

Yes.

[Erica Chenoweth]

I can send something to you.

Great, wonderful. You said that we don't need to bring everyone over to our side, we just need to move everyone over a tick to our side. When you say defections, and I know in like the specific military case or the police state, whatever it may be, that's a very specific area. But like, does that statement apply to the polity? Does that apply to like all of America? That if we were able to move everybody over a tick, that is a tipping point to where there is not enough adherence to the other side that that makes a difference. It's not like we have to actually be like, come over from your line and stand in our line. What Are you talking about when you say that?

Okay, let me. I'll give one historical example that's concrete, and then I'll talk about the US today and our two parties. So the historical example maybe helps us understand that it's not like the object is to get the opponent to melt their heart and come to their senses and have a totally different moral frame. It's more constraining their options and removing their sources of power and support. And so a very concrete example of where this happened was in South Africa during the anti apartheid movement, which in the late 80s, South Africa was on a trajectory of civil war or just fully consolidated white supremacist totalitarian system. The future was very grim. And what the anti apartheid movement did through developing this big umbrella formation called the United Democratic Front, which involved the anc, but also many other civic groups and entities, was basically help develop and then implement a strategy to get the business community to put pressure on the National Party, which was the pro apartheid party, to reform itself. And so the way that that went down is that black townships engaged in unbelievably high levels of participation in boycotts of white owned businesses during periods in which they would call for these things, strikes, and then lots of different demonstrations and other things to keep spirits up. But this was like under the context of martial law, it was really, really, really bad. And people were being killed every day by the government who were participating in this level of opposition. But the economic pressure that built on the white business owning community there was so intense that they did go to the National Party and say, you have to figure out how to do business with Nelson Mandela and the anc because it's completely unsustainable to live in this country. We're headed down a path of either civil war or just an unsustainable future. And so when the leader of that National Party, Botha, had a stroke and needed to be replaced, they elected themselves a reformer who was De Klerk, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela for unbanning the anc, entering negotiations with him, and ultimately paving the way for their democratic transition. So there it was, the business community that defected, but they didn't go to the. They didn't become members of the anc. You know, they just basically put the pressure on their own party or a party that was in power to reform itself with this strong argument that was made out of their material concerns. So that's what defection can look like. It looks like getting pillars to either step out of the way, as in the case of Serbia or begin themselves to put pressure internally in the US today. So the idea of why would we need to just go one tick over? Well, if you even look at the election, the 2024 election, the largest voting block in that election was the people who didn't vote, the 90 million people who decided not to vote. Then there's something like high 70 million that voted for Trump and then a couple million fewer that voted for Harris. So that's why, I mean, you don't need to get any hardcore Trump voters to change their mind. But getting the huge number of the plurality of voters who sat it out to become interested, even a few million of them, to go one notch over and getting people who maybe are not that enthusiastic about Trump, a few millennia of them, to change, and then that could have completely altered the outcome. So I think the way that our system works is that we're in this. The technical term is that we're in a minoritarian political system, which means that our institutions favor powerful political minorities. That is, the population that wanted to elect Donald Trump or the Senate is a minoritarian institution. Small populations get as much influence as huge states. Right? The Electoral College is a minoritarian institution. Gerrymandering produces minoritarian institutions within many states. And so these are like broader structural issues that can and maybe will someday be dealt with. But in the meantime, we can just look at the sort of reality of the landscape of people who are engaged and non engaged and think about moving some of those people in a way that is totally feasible. Mmm.

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[Amanda Doyle]

How do we move Senators truly like, and I would love to get your take on how it feels is that the GOP has just decided, I guess we're going with fascism and they're all just caving. They're all just like, okay, I guess I'm on this train now. And they don't care anymore about representing the will of the people. What I feel scared of is because they don't think that the will of the people is going to matter in any way because they have all made this deal behind the scenes that they don't have to respond to us anymore because maybe there won't be elections. Give us any hope or framework for understanding how do we make that less comfortable for those senators? What do we do there?

[Erica Chenoweth]

So some of the senators clearly are uncomfortable and so have said that this is it for them. Right. And that's interesting. It would be interesting to learn from them the various influences that made that their decision and maybe with some haste. I think you're right to be worried about the role of Congress as such, like not just senators, but really the House as well. Because, you know, I think of the idea of Congress is that it's supposed to be, you know, the holder of the purse and the primary check on executive power is not supposed to be an arm of the executive branch.

[Amanda Doyle]

Exactly.

[Erica Chenoweth]

And it is acting like that. It's clear that a couple senators at least are so uncomfortable with it as to state that they will not run again. A couple of House members have said the same thing. But the map, the electoral map in 26 is pretty favorable to the GOP maintaining majorities. And I expect that many people will be motivated to vote in the midterms in ways that we haven't seen before. And so what will be useful is to also lay out what they expect Congress to do if Congress does flip and become an institution that has a possibility of checking presidential power. There's a political scientist named Adam Javorsky who is an expert on kind of comparative democracies and autocracies, and he has a substack and in today's entry, he talked about how he's pretty worried about what happens even if Congress flips in 26 because of the setup, which is if the main thing to do is to then raise taxes to try to bring down the deficit, that's going to be considered deeply unpopular. And then the President can just blame the Democrats for all of the economic pain that's about to follow, whether they're in the House or not in the majority. And so it's a very difficult kind of political moment, I think, for the big D Democrats. And so what I think would be helpful, in my opinion, is to sort of think beyond Big D Democrats and start thinking like Small D Democrats and just say, like, okay, how can we, as civically engaged people, begin to identify, promote and help to empower people who are committed to the core principles of democracy and like, have that be an interesting national conversation and an interesting movement going forward that's beyond political party? So, you know, having center right people in that conversation feels as important to me as anyone else. And so that's why I'm interested about, you know, the folks that seem like they can't go on serving the GOP right now, like, you know, what they have learned and what they know and what they want to do with their lives is very interesting to me right now.

[Amanda Doyle]

Me too.

[Erica Chenoweth]

It does feel like that I want to get to what you said about there's so much that going out on the street does for the overall movement, like how that becomes fuel for unleashing all of this other participatory effort. But if we stay there on the kind of alliances you were alluding to, like, if we're looking for defections, if we're looking for moving one tick away from wherever your current stand is, what.

[Abby Wambach]

Do you see in our environment as.

[Erica Chenoweth]

Pressure points that are ripe for that? Because I feel like patriotism, I feel like the don't tread on me. I feel like there is so much room right there to attach to that ethos and say, this is what y' all were talking about.

Yeah.

What other points do we have where we might need to broaden our vision of who is with us, where we can bring some people along?

Yeah. I mean, I think in an anti authoritarian coalition, the idea is to get as big as possible, so as capacious as possible and understanding, like who might be unlikely allies and that kind of thing. Certainly in kind of building the vision for where people want the country to go, that can be a more complicated and long term kind of conversation. And that's where these things can play out in very political ways, but in the actual stopping of authoritarian consolidation. It's sort of like anybody who wants to come along is important. One of the things I've been very curious about lately is the Declaration of Independence, because a lot of people know the beginning of it and learn about. Well, I feel like I probably was taught the whole thing in school, but I only really remember the beginning, which is about life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and all people are created equal. And all that. All that good stuff, which I think are still really powerful values, and even if we never fully lived up to them, are where the country might still be able to get behind going. Right. The thing is, the second part of the Declaration of Independence lists the crimes of the tyrant. And I really think it would be useful for people to revisit that because the crimes of the king that they declared independence from are shockingly resonant with what's happening today. There is a line about the crime of transporting people beyond seas to be tried beyond our territory.

Does that sound like disappearing people to foreign maximum security prisons? Does that sound like that to you, Erica? Because it did to me.

Yeah.

[Amanda Doyle]

Okay. What else?

[Erica Chenoweth]

It talks about appointing judges to allow them to exercise the rule of law arbitrarily. It talks about not even following their own laws. It talks about, you know, expansions of power that are not respecting the consent of the government. I mean, there are so many different things in there.

Standing armies without local consent.

Exactly.

You might be familiar with that in California, Glennon.

Yeah. Setting up new courts. It sound like that. It's just really powerful to read it and to recognize that given how many Americans really identify with the political project that was set underway when they declared independence, which wasn't actually when we became independent. Right. It was before. It was the end of a long period of nonviolent resistance. They didn't call it that then. They didn't call what they were doing nonviolent resistance, but it was things like setting up alternative institutions, an alternative currency, which they set up 250 years ago, which was illegal, I think. They set up their own courts, they generated compacts and did trade with people on their own accord. That was part of what made them really angry about the king, is that he ended trade with other nations. And they didn't like that. You know, they wanted to be able to do their own. And so there were lots of different alternative institutions they set up. But then things like the Boston Tea Party were literally like economic non cooperation. They did embargoes on exporting goods that they had made in the colonies and that they wanted to consume in the colonies rather than send back to the king. I mean, around here in New England, there's a lot of talk about the. The size of the boards, and old houses couldn't be bigger than 35 inches, because anything bigger than that had to be sent to the king for ships. There was all kinds of stuff that wasn't allowed and that they wanted to be allowed to do. And then he started to clamp down on them, and that's when the Declaration was signed. The sort of founding of the country and the ideals that many people relate to could be promising to resurrect. Especially at this time in our country's history, when certain ways of telling that story are going to be told, there could be an alternative way that it's told as well.

[Amanda Doyle]

Very interesting. Okay. You are amazing. I am so grateful for your work. I feel like this episode is going to help so many people. Put all of this in context. Leave us with one thing that you have seen recently that made you go, hmm, that's interesting. Little teeny flicker of hope. Maybe they're onto something.

[Erica Chenoweth]

Yeah. I mean, there's been so much. My team at the Crowd Counting Consortium, we've been tallying protests in the United States every single day since the Women's March of 2017. So we have a pretty good sense of the ebbs and flows of these things and who's turning out and whatnot. And before even the no Kings protests happened, we kind of published our data through May. And first of all, there are well over three times as many protests that have happened in the US by May of 2025 as it happened by May of 2017.

[Amanda Doyle]

Wow.

[Erica Chenoweth]

So there's actually way more going on than is commonly discussed. A lot of people are like, where's the resistance? And my team is like, I mean, we are working overtime to tally it. So there's a lot going on. The second thing about it is that in that piece, we were able to identify that 99.6% of these events that have happened in April and May had no injuries, arrests, or property damage. So that is an extraordinarily high level of what I would classify as nonviolent discipline in this movement, especially given the scale of what's going on and all of the potential for things to get otherwise. And then the third thing that we've really noticed is how nationwide the protest activity is. So it's happening in towns and hamlets. Right. Not just in the major cities, like the beginning of Trump won. And so that, I think, is a sign, or at least evidence of a pretty widespread shared appetite for the country being in a better place. A lot of Trump's policies are very unpopular beyond his base. And I think that this is a moment not to waste in terms of trying to energize the population in taking responsibility for our collective future. And that's really what I think these movements are about, is inviting the conversation, inviting the public into a conversation about what our collective future is and inviting them to help spell it out. So, like, we can definitely do that even under deeply authoritarian conditions. Many countries have literally freed themselves from authoritarianism by doing this once it was already fully consolidated, you know, So I think the United States has all the ingredients, and it's just a matter of being able to pull together the people and the commitment and the. The knowledge and the discipline and the energy to create something that will be just generationally transformative.

And, Erika, if someone's saying, what the hell does it matter if I go to a protest or a march or a rally? We're not getting anything done. There's no change that's happening there. Can you explain what is actually happening there in terms of the overall movement, why that is important, why bodies in streets are required for everything else that needs to cascade from that?

Well, people's participation is so essential because it's what sends the message, and the message can be heard, even if it isn't immediately responded to. So making sure that people know that this issue is still on the agenda that people care about is one indicator of the impact of protest. Changing electoral outcomes and then voting behavior are other things that people have linked to protest participation. Shifting public opinion on an issue is linked to protest participation. And I just think, like, on the organizational side, people participating in protest often find themselves then drawn into, like, a wider organization that can help them to express their political views and power in very effective ways with others. So sometimes a protest is just the best way for people to enter into a movement. Other times, it itself has huge impact. And so I do think it's dangerous to overestimate the power of just protest by itself, but it's also dangerous to underestimate it and pooh, pooh it. Cause it's really. It's a substantial part of the way that people participate in politics between elections.

[Amanda Doyle]

Thank you, Erica.

[Erica Chenoweth]

Damn.

[Amanda Doyle]

I feel like we should just let you go to do whatever the hell it is you're gonna do next.

[Glennon Doyle]

Save us.

[Amanda Doyle]

No, we will save.

[Erica Chenoweth]

We will save ourselves.

[Amanda Doyle]

All right?

[Erica Chenoweth]

We will do it.

[Glennon Doyle]

Also save us.

[Amanda Doyle]

Thank you, Erica. You are amazing.

[Erica Chenoweth]

Thank you, Erica for the work you're doing.

[Amanda Doyle]

We're going to link to all of your work and we're grateful.

[Erica Chenoweth]

Grateful for you.

Thank you. Really great conversation. I really appreciate it.

[Amanda Doyle]

All right, POD Squad, get to work. You know what to do. Bye. If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us if you'd be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the POD helps you because you'll never miss an episode, and it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right hand corner or click on follow. This is the most important thing for the pod. While you're there, if you'd be willing to give us a five star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much. We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey. Our executive producer is Jenna Wise Berman and the show is produced by Lauren Legrasso, Allison Schott and Bill Schultz.