This is a 22-minute video of me offering suggestions and diagnostic questions for activists in nonviolent, pro-democracy movements in the USA right now, and for those want to get involved.
I have been offering these ideas in interactive webinars and in-person meetings. In those settings, I don’t lecture; we discuss. For this publicly accessible video, I have extracted some of my own thoughts and questions.
It’s not yet clear whether the US has entered an authoritarian period or a right-wing period (or both), because the political struggle is still underway and by no means resolved.
But it is pretty clear that we have entered a period of instability or unrest, which is quite common in global perspective but especially dangerous in a superpower. As I wrote on this blog in 2023, “We will know that we are in that situation if the daily news often includes reports of violent clashes, dubious arrests and prosecutions, threats, firings or resignations connected to politics, and occasional assassinations and politically-motivated mass murders.”
All those boxes are checked in 2025.
I also wrote: “I believe we need broad-based nonviolent social movements to get us through any unrest and ideally to bring us to a better place. Such movements will generate protest actions, some of which will involve reported violence–if only as a result of hostile responses by other groups or police. Thus we should be striving for a high ratio of nonviolence to violence.”
I wrote that it was “time to plan, educate, organize, and train” for nonviolent mobilization in the context of unrest and state violence. I tried to do some of that work– for example, at the 2024 Frontiers of Democracy conference. I do not think I succeeded or was part of larger efforts that were successful. I wish we had prepared better.
It’s not too late. As many people as possible must participate in broad-based, visible, nonviolent political resistance. Please feel welcome to join me at a Crossroads and Connections Webinar on Thursday September 18, 2025 from 6:30 – 8:00 PM Eastern to discuss tactics and strategies. I am happy to do other events like that if I can be helpful.
The graphs show incidence of political violence in the USA recently, per The ACLED Explorer. See also: nonviolence in a time of political unrest; a checklist for democracy activists; the current state of resistance, and what to do about it; tools people need to preserve and strengthen democracy; learning from the Great Salt March: on civil disobedience and breaking through to mass opinion; countering selective harassment in the Trump Administration; building power for resisting authoritarianism etc.
Many Americans are working to defend democracy, but we need even more. People with diverse agendas and various diagnoses of our current problems must take action right now. There are several legitimate theories of our crisis. We need people to address whatever aspects resonate most with them, coming from their diverse backgrounds and viewpoints.
I think these (below) are our most important tasks. And I believe that if many people do them, our disagreements about diagnoses and strategies will not matter very much, because a stronger civil society will preserve democracy:
| One-to-one interviews: Fanning out in a community and asking people what they care about, looking for individuals who have various kinds of leadership potential and networks, and bringing them together in meetings. Use a guide like this one. |
| Local news: Collecting information that would otherwise go unreported because of the collapse of local journalism, and sharing it. Local news is highly relevant to national events, because everything from budget cuts to ICE raids plays out in locations. |
| Caring for affected people: Raising money, serving food, driving people where they need to go, taking care of their children and pets, helping them find work. |
| Advocacy in local institutions: We need concerned citizens to meet with their school superintendent to ask how undocumented children are being protected, their local college president to ask about free speech, and their local TV station to ask about biased news coverage. Some of this advocacy can be friendly and low-key. Sometimes, local leaders just need our quiet support. But some issues may have to escalate to public conflict. |
| Registering and turning out voters: It is fine to do this in a partisan way: party activism is an important aspect of democracy. It is also possible to register and motivate voters in a genuinely nonpartisan way to expand the electorate and protect everyone’s right to vote as they wish. |
| Recruiting and supporting candidates: This is important at all levels, from school boards to 2028 presidential candidates. |
| Nonviolent resistance: Civil disobedience is a spectrum, from easy and safe actions to very courageous ones. The method of banging on pots in big cities has spread globally in the last decade and has now reached Washington, DC. It is an example of a relatively safe action. Standing in the way of armed government agents is much more dangerous. Effective nonviolent movements offer and celebrate a wide range of actions. |
I did not list protests on this table. They can be valuable, but I want to suggest that they are more means than ends. For example, a march can be a powerful way of publicizing that there is a resistance and collecting the contact-information of people who might do the other tasks. I often think that the most important people at a rally are not the speakers on the podium but the folks at the back of the crowd with clipboards.
These are not tasks for individuals to do alone. None of us can accomplish much by ourselves; we can’t even think wisely unless we discuss what to do with others. Therefore, the tasks listed above require organizations, and there is an equally important agenda for building and sustaining groups:
| Recruitment: Individuals must be invited into organizations and made to feel welcome, notwithstanding their previous experience and views, and encouraged to commit to the group. (This is where protests belong on the checklist.) |
| Logistics: A group can’t get anything done unless someone finds a space, buys the pizzas, arranges childcare, and does all the other scutwork. Some of this requires skill and experience; all of it requires effort. By the way, the people who contribute in this way must be recognized and thanked. |
| Decision-making: Groups must make decisions efficiently, yet without ignoring dissenters who have genuine disagreements. Effective groups treat meeting time as a scarce resource and use it economically. They know what they are doing at any given moment during a meeting. (Are we venting? Brainstorming? Advising someone? Choosing between two courses of action?) I recommend distinguishing between contested values and merely practical questions and reserving discussion time for the value-conflicts that need resolution. I would delegate practical issues to volunteers to decide. It is also crucial to record all decisions so that it’s clear what the group has committed to do. |
| Leadership-development: Groups need leaders. Even the most non-hierarchical groups actually have leaders, although those people may not have titles or official powers. Leaders should be recognized and thanked. They should have opportunities to grow. They should also be held accountable and, if necessary, removed. |
| Raising and holding money: The typical anti-Trump resistance group raises money, but not for itself. Members pass the hat (metaphorically), and their funds go to political candidates or name-brand national nonprofits. This is unsustainable. In the first month of the first Trump Administration, 350,000 people donated to the ACLU, disproportionately funding one organization that had one strategy. Then the money tapered off. Groups need their own bank accounts and budgets, reserving some funds for their own continuous fundraising. |
| Hiring: We need more people whose jobs involve organizing for democracy, and we need pathways for those who want to do this work. Organizers can be young, part-time, and (frankly) underpaid, but they need salaries. |
| Scaling up: Once there are three resistance groups in a given county, there should be an umbrella group for the county. This should not just be forum where like-minded people share news; it should make decisions. That implies a leadership structure at the county level–and then upward from there. |
| Coalition work: There should be many flavors of organizations, and they should coordinate. I completely respect the big emerging networks, such as Indivisible and #50501, but they need company, and not everyone will want to join any given network. Groups have various identities and agendas. To work in coalition is not only to express mutual support or to agree on general principles. (In fact, it’s fine if different groups disagree on principles.) A coalition can coordinate concrete actions at key moments. That requires empowering selected representatives from the various member organizations to meet and make decisions. |
See also: “democracy’s crisis: a system map (a longer and revised version of which is forthcoming in Studies in Law, Politics, and Society); the current state of resistance, and what to do about it; tools people need to preserve and strengthen democracy; and a flowchart for collective decision-making in democratic small groups.
Erica Chenoweth, Soha Hammam, Jeremy Pressman, and Christopher Wiley Shay estimate that the No Kings protests this June were among the largest in American history, and the number of protests is growing faster than in 2017 (see the graph above).
Protesting has several purposes, including advertising a movement and recruiting people to take other actions. But protests can also influence people to change their views or behavior. For example, they can convert people who disagree or motivate people who are passive (Bayard Rustin 1965).
Inevitably, the vast majority of any protest’s audience does not observe it directly. People see it through media of various kinds. That was even true during the French Revolution (Jones 2021), and more so in an era of mass communications. It is critical whether and how media organizations (and nowadays, social media users) describe protests (Wasow, 2020).
For those protesting against Trump, two current challenges are: 1) neglect and 2) backlash. Some prominent voices in the media seem not to notice that protests are happening, which may reduce their impact. And many powerful media outlets misrepresent protesters. For example, right-wing media obsessively presented Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests as violent, when data show that they were not, and this contributed to a very tangible backlash. BLM demanded reductions in police budgets, but the presence of BLM protests was associated with increases in police budgets (Ebbinghaus, Bailey & Rubel 2024).
The power of media can be discouraging, especially given the splintered and ideologically polarized media landscape and the prevalence of media outlets that are outright hostile to resistance.
However, protest events can break through if they are skillfully designed (and perhaps a bit lucky).
Consider the apex moment of Gandhi’s career as a protest leader, the Great Salt March of 1930.
Before he launched the March, the Indian independence movement was struggling, and Gandhi was struggling against rivals who included religious sectarians, Marxists, and violent revolutionaries. The media that mattered to him (Indian and foreign) was polarized by ideology, language, and ethnicity and was widely hostile to him.
Gandhi chose to march to the sea to harvest salt because that action would dramatize the evils of imperialism, provoke police action, acknowledge the needs of poor Indians for whom salt was expensive, and turn salt itself into a powerful symbol.
When Gandhi set off on foot with a rather small group, press reports were dismissive and patronizing. The Statesman newspaper of Calcutta called the march “a childishly futile business,” and the Times of India defended the government’s salt monopoly as good for the poor. In the USA, TIME Magazine mocked Gandhi’s “spindly frame” and called his wife Kasturba, “a shriveled, little middle-aged Hindu.” (I quote these and the following snippets from Guha 2018.)
But the scale of the march and the brutality of the police response at the shore broke through. TIME switched to describing Gandhi as a statesman and even as “St. Gandhi,” whose “movement for independence” uses “Christian acts as a weapon against men with Christian beliefs.” Perhaps not all the world’s coverage was favorable, but most of the media switched from viewing Gandhi as a bit of a joke to taking him very seriously indeed. He was back at the head of the Independence movement, which now had momentum.
I am not saying that we need a new Gandhi. Centralized leadership is overrated (even in the Indian independence movement). The way to achieve a breakthrough today is to try many tactics in a decentralized way until one or more of them work. But all of us can learn from the Great Salt March, particularly:
See also: the state of nonviolent grassroots resistance; features of effective boycotts; how to engage our universities in this crisis etc. Sources: Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement” Commentary (February, 1965); Colin Jones, The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021); Omar Wasow, “Agenda seeding: How 1960s black protests moved elites, public opinion and voting,” American Political Science Review 114.3 (2020): 638-659; Mathis Ebbinghaus, Nathan Bailey & Jacob Rubel, “The Effect of the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests on Police Budgets: How ‘Defund the Police’ Sparked Political Backlash, “ Social Problems, 2024, spae004, https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spae004; Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The years that changed the world, 1914-1948 (Vintage, 2018).
I write after the Trump Administration has abducted our beloved student Rumeyza Öztürk (please read the profile of her by her department) for contributing a well-reasoned op-ed to our campus discussion.
Many of us are familiar with a framework in which the university is a powerful institution with resources and discretion. For example, it decides whom to admit to the middle (or upper) class and what to teach them along the way. A university may be complicit with other institutions, investing in South Africa in the 1980s or fossil fuels today. It is an “it”–potentially a target of our pressure–not a “we” whose actions reflect us.
Naturally, then, the activist’s toolkit prominently includes tactics like insisting that the institution speak on the issues of the day, occupying the administration building, or demanding that the college divest from certain companies or industries.
Some of this script has become almost automatic, and I hear it right now. But the traditional framework and toolkit do not necessarily apply when the federal government is making college students and employees and the institutions themselves into targets and victims.
Christopher Rufo has disclosed his goal of putting “universities into contraction, into a recession, into declining budgets …. in a way that puts them in an existential terror.” Before we occupy administration buildings, we might want to think about whether Rufo would be glad to hear about that extra pressure. Indeed, the eerie quiet on many campuses probably reflects a realization that the usual toolkit won’t work.
A university is not the enemy. It is not alien to us. To a considerable extent, it is a victim, and resistance should be directed at those who bully it. We should also recognize genuine limitations that confront administrators and other official representatives of universities.
First, they must negotiate with–and litigate against–a hostile federal government. When you negotiate or litigate, you don’t disclose your strengths and weaknesses or your strategy.
Second, the administration can target colleges one by one and pick on any that are especially bold. As my friend Archon Fung says, “If you’re just considering Harvard University or Columbia University all by itself, maybe it is organizationally rational to try to get the best deal that you can … But that might be quite bad for higher education as a whole.” The most effective actors may not be individual institutions but coalitions (like the Mutual Academic Defense Compact proposed for Big Ten Academic Alliance) or independent actors like the ACLU.
Third, administrative positions are not tenured. Of course, resigning can be the right thing to do. But the problem is not that individuals may lose their jobs; it is rather that an institution can be held responsible for what each administrator says.
These are reasons to give each university’s administration a bit of grace. On the other hand, their business is our business. As members of a university community, we have the right and obligation to debate what it should do and to express our views about that question.
Although universities are not democracies, they must have public spheres. As Hannah Arendt writes, tyrants “all have in common the banishment of the citizens from the public realm and the insistence that they mind their private business while only the ruler should attend to public affairs” (The Human Condition, p. 221). According to Eric Calvin and Calvin Woodward, Trump recently “marveled” that universities are “bending and saying ‘Sir, thank you very much, we appreciate it.’” That “sir” is yet another indication that we are renouncing republican virtues of self-respect and honesty as we slide into tyranny. It is like the sudden doffing of hats to aristocrats that marked the end of the Florentine republic.
So what does it mean to make the the business of the university our business? For one thing, we must discuss how it should respond to existential threats.
I am just back from a quick visit to Columbia University, and I suspect that Maya Sulkin’s article entitled “Columbia President Says One Thing to Trump Admin—and Another in Private” gives a pretty good flavor of the way things have played out there. President Armstrong, who resigned on the day I visited, negotiated a deal with the Trump Administration and then reportedly tried to manage “the depth of the faculty’s frustration” with the arrangement by telling them that she would not fully comply with it. This is not exactly an accountable and public process.
Much is happening under the surface. In the Wall Street Journal, Douglas Belkin writes, “Columbia University is fighting two wars at once. One rages publicly against President Trump, whose administration in recent days ordered the arrest of a student protester and canceled federal funds to the Ivy League school over allegations of antisemitism. The second conflict simmers behind the scenes: a faculty civil war that pits medical doctors and engineers against political scientists and humanities scholars.”
This conflict began last year, when Columbia’s STEM professional school faculty were (in general) more likely to oppose the anti-Israel protests than liberal-arts faculty were. The conflict has intensified now that the Trump administration is holding Columbia’s STEM funds hostage in return for actions against the protesters and their faculty allies. Such intramural conflicts will intensify when any university must make deep cuts as a result of federal actions.
Looking beyond Columbia, Ian Bogost reports that he’s “spent the past month discussing the government’s campaign to weaken higher learning with current and former college presidents, provosts, deans, faculty, and staff. And in the course of these informal, sometimes panicked text exchanges, emails, and phone calls, I’ve come to understand that the damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends—and that calamity could arrive sooner than people expect.” It would come, basically, in the form of drastic cuts in federal grants, overhead funds, and financial aid that would destroy the current business model.
As they say in community organizing, power corrupts, but so does powerlessness. It is a mark of powerlessness to be satisfied with expressing the opinion that a university should refuse the Trump administration’s demands. Are you sure that would be the right thing to do? Do you know the costs and risks? Do you have the information that you would need to decide? Should you have the information, or would secrecy better serve the university’s interests in negotiations? Meanwhile, what are you doing to weaken the government’s side in the conflict?
As Columbia’s crisis unfolded, I would have wanted to know: How likely would the university be to prevail in our actual federal courts if it refused to comply? Would a First Amendment (or statute-based) lawsuit win? Further, what else could the Trump Administration do if the university fought back in court? For instance, revoke all visas of foreign-citizen students and employees? Cancel the university’s nonprofit status so that it would have to pay corporate taxes? How likely would the university be to prevail in lawsuits against those actions?
Next, what would happen financially if the university lost its federal funding? Columbia has an endowment worth more than $14 billion, but most of that is permanently earmarked for specific purposes; it can’t be used to replace canceled federal contracts. How much is available for flexible purposes? Could the university borrow against the endowment, and on what terms?
What would it look like to fire the employees who had been covered by federal funds, versus retaining many of those people and cutting others? How would the internal politics of the university play out if the budget were dramatically cut? Would the STEM fields or the liberal arts prevail? Would the university cut early-stage faculty without tenure or could it compel senior faculty to retire? On the other hand, could the institution gain–for example, reputationally–if it went into full revolt?
I suspect these questions are quite hard. I am sympathetic to many current campus leaders–although not all, because some appear to be cowards. But their business is our business, and we need to shoulder it.
As we respond, we must acknowledge the full extent of the threat and contemplate radical responses, including restructuring our institutions to survive. But we must not yield to fatalism. Ian Bogost’s fine article might suggest–although he doesn’t say so explicitly–that the DOGE cuts (and more that will come) are permanent. On the contrary, Trump’s actions can be reversed. His successor would not even need congressional approval, because support for higher education is already required by federal law. And colleges have powerful constituencies distributed across the country.
In short, the battle is joined, but it is by no means lost. The antagonist is not in your campus administration’s building but in the White House. Individual universities may make good or bad choices; so can each of us. A robust debate is essential; consensus is impossible and probably undesirable. We must be citizens, not spectators; sober but not demoralized; realistic and also idealistic as we struggle to make our institutions better than they were before.
See also: the state of nonviolent grassroots resistance; civility as equality; time again for civic courage.
So far, Trump and Musk are at least as aggressive as I had expected and much smarter. Prominent institutions appear to be buckling–notably, law firms, universities, and Democratic senators. There is some angst about an apparent lack of popular resistance.
Indeed, we still need more grassroots opposition. However, Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman, and Soha Hammam show that “street protests today are far more numerous and frequent than skeptics might suggest”–and more frequent than in the same period in 2017.
Besides, the number and scale of street protests is only one indicator of an effective popular movement, and sometimes a misleading one. I believe that some recent movements have been overly enamored of public displays that miss their real targets. For instance, Occupy Wall Street may have occupied a park two blocks east of the eponymous street, but “Wall Street” is only a metaphor for the financial industry. Occupy put less pressure on banks and private equity than on municipal governments and college presidents. In a widely circulated 2022 article, Ryan Grimm documented how movements for racial and gender equity disproportionately targeted progressive nonprofits. And the most prominent protests against Israel last year chose US colleges (not the defense industry or Congress, let alone Netanyahu) as their primary targets.
I am not against all of these actions, but I doubt that they changed the behavior of the US government, major corporations, or Israel.
On the other hand, Kevin A. Young documents the many victories that grassroots groups did accomplish during the first Trump Administration, including successful opposition to new coal and gas projects, pressure on cities not to cooperate with ICE, and teachers’ strikes. These actions were less prominent than demonstrations against municipalities and colleges, but they effectively used “more disruptive forms of pressure.”
And such actions are happening again–most notably, at Tesla dealerships. Micah Sifry believes that “we’re seeing a qualitatively different opposition movement forming than the one that appeared in 2017, one grounded by working people and led from the center out rather than the left in.” An important component of this opposition–and one that is likely to grow–involves organizing by laid-off federal workers.
Sifry is calling the current movement “The Defiance” instead of “The Resistance” because “we need a new term to describe something new” and because “the opposition that is rising now is less about signaling cultural disapproval in polite society and then channeling voter fury into the mid-term elections and more about actually standing now in the way of the machinery that Trump, Musk, Miller and Vought have unleashed with DOGE and Project 2025.” It is being led by “federal workers who are disproportionately veterans, working-class, younger and people of color who are feeling the front-lash of the DOGE chainsaw.”
As Sherilyn Ifill wrote on Feb 9: “People are doing things. You will meet those people when you start doing things.”
See also: did the first resistance work?; the current state of resistance, and what to do about it (Jan. 22); the tide will turn (Nov 15.) features of effective boycotts; etc.
Classic boycotts have these features:
I am not posting this list to cast shade on the national boycott that took place on Feb. 28. I participated! And some of these components may have been in place. For example, people who boycotted through “Black churches with longstanding social justice ministries (like Trinity UCC in Chicago)” did have accountable leaders who articulated a message.
Also, it is possible that the seven features that made the Great Salt March and the Montgomery Bus Boycott succeed are not required in every successful action.
Nevertheless, we must think critically about strategy, or else we are less likely to win. I would recommend attention to the strategies that were so important to Gandhi and King.
A teaching case that I wrote for Johns Hopkins’ Agora Institute about the Montgomery Bus Boycott is available free here and can be used by voluntary groups as well as by students in courses. At its heart, it asks people to think about goals, targets, demands, methods, and decision-making processes.
See also: the current state of resistance, and what to do about it; strategizing for civil resistance in defense of democracy; building power for resisting authoritarianism; Rev. James Lawson, Jr on Revolutionary Nonviolence; three new cases for learning how to organize and make collective change; learning from Memphis, 1968; etc.
Historical examples of resistance by the civil service suggest that resistance is much more successful when the public is convinced that the stakes are constitutional rather than budgetary.
Jeremy Pressman is tracking various forms of opposition to the illegal and illiberal actions of the Trump administration in this document. Some are actions by civil servants. For instance, on Feb. 1, “Two officials at the the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) refused to provide non-government, pro-Trump individuals (Musk et al) illegal access to USAID security systems, personnel files, and classified information.”
In this context, it is useful to browse historical examples of resistance by civil servants that are collected in the Global Nonviolent Action Database.
In 2010, the UK Public and Commercial Services Union struck in opposition to proposed job cuts and other changes mandated by the Labour Government. I don’t have grounds to assess the unions’ complaints. Job cuts are not necessarily illegal, undemocratic, or even unwise. My interest is the unions’ tactics. In addition to a 24-hour strike supported by less than half of the workforce, the unions also organized protests and a bus tour to gain public support. On the positive side, union membership grew, but the union lost in both the High Court and Parliament, and the job cuts went through.
In 1995, French public employees organized a much larger and longer strike against similar cuts. “While the strikes were having a devastating impact on the economy and on the lives of all ordinary French citizens, [the strikers] still enjoyed public approval.” The Chirac Government came to the negotiating table and offered concessions that particularly spared railroad workers, whose opposition abated. The government’s proposal “remained relatively untouched save for adjustments to placate the railroad workers,” and it passed.
In March 1920, German right-wingers began a coup against the republic, now known as the Kapp Putsch. Heavily armed insurgents arrived in Berlin, set up machine-gun posts and checkpoints, dropped leaflets from military aircraft, and seized the newsrooms of two newspapers.
The coup’s support among local garrisons was mixed. Waiters and other ordinary workers began stalling on the job. Trade unions and elected officials called for resistance. After some civilian protesters were killed in a clash with Putschists, Berliners stopped reporting for work–probably out of fear as well as an active desire to strike. The capacity of the German state withered, and Wolfgang Kapp “resigned” from his self-appointed position. The republic survived for 13 years.
Three examples cannot support general conclusions, but we know from other research that the scale of resistance matters. If a lot of people (not just civil servants but also contractors, grantees, and regular workers) stop contributing to the normal functions of the US government, it will be hard for Trump to proceed. Most Berliners stopped working because the coup was violent and it aimed to overthrow the regime, not just to cut government jobs. Paramilitary violence dramatized the threat and undercut the coup.
If most people see Trump’s civil-service layoffs as means to cut costs, then any resistance–even from those who disagree with him–will be routine and likely to be defeated. I could be wrong, but I see his cuts as unprecedented and unconstitutional attacks on the rule of law. If the public comes to see them that way, then resistance may be broad and effective.
See also: the current state of resistance, and what to do about it (Jan 22), strategizing for civil resistance in defense of democracy (November), tools people need to preserve and strengthen democracy; Why Civil Resistance Works (etc.). The image is from Wikipedia, where it is labeled “Demonstration in Berlin against the putsch.” The caption reads: “A quarter million participants”
In this post, I’m proposing that it would be useful to develop a suite of practical tools for civic organizations. I believe this is an urgent task at the onset of the second Trump Administration as well as a more permanent need. I’ll start with a general argument and conclude with a preliminary list of needed tools.
First, the basis of a strong and resilient democracy is hands-on, local political engagement.
That is an old theory, but current evidence reinforces it. Just for example, I showed recently that Americans who participate in community groups are much less likely to dismiss the media and schools as sources of information, probably because participation gives them a feeling of agency, teaches them that compromise is necessary (it’s not a sign that leaders are corrupt), and encourages them to share and critically assess information. Direct involvement is much more important than ideology or demographics as a predictor of trust in media and schools. People who are more engaged also hold Trump in lower esteem, regardless of their ideology.
However, not very many people address community problems in groups. In 2023, 21% of Americans told the Census that they “get together with other people from [their] neighborhood to do something positive for [their] neighborhood or the community.” That is a valuable base–millions of people–but it’s too few for democracy’s urgent current needs. And 21% may be an overestimate, since you could say that you’d “gotten together” with neighbors even if you just attended one event that didn’t amount to much.
I have argued that at least one million Americans not only participate themselves but also enable others to do so. These community organizers, nonprofit board members and staff, teachers, and other civic leaders help to organize opportunities to engage in local problem-solving.
The first Trump Administration was a stress test for democratic engagement–not because Donald Trump poses the only threat to our republic, nor because all local civic action should define itself as resistance to Trump, and certainly not because civically engaged people must be Democrats. Rather, it was a test because robust local organizations would at least push back against some aspects of the Trump agenda.
We learned from the 2017-2020 stress test that the one million local leaders and 21% of other engaged citizens can generate a lot of activity and resources, but they face limitations. They tend to direct money and attention to national organizations. They don’t hire people to work locally. When they grow, they don’t federate into state and local bodies, and they rarely form truly robust coalitions. Their own members come and go; many groups fade away.
One reason for these limitations was a lack of knowledge about how to organize sustainable groups that encompass diversity.
To be successful, people need big ideals and principles, allies and mentors, and inspiring stories. But I think that tools would also make a difference for our one million (or more) local leaders. I am thinking about tools like these:
What else would be useful?
See also: “What our nation needs is a broad-based, pro-democracy civic movement” (in the Fulcrum); the tide will turn; building power for resisting authoritarianism; and strategizing for civil resistance in defense of democracy; nonviolence, state repression, and saving democracy; to restore trust in schools and media, engage people in civic life; learning from Robert’s Rules?; : a flowchart for collective decision-making in democratic small groups; civic education and the science of association; etc.
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I showed the image that accompanies this post in class recently, when we discussed these articles:
My image is meant to be a framework that can accommodate these divergent examples and findings. You can read it like this:
A social injustice (or at least a perceived one) may cause a reaction in the form of violence and/or nonviolence. This reaction may be largely spontaneous or may reflect leadership and structure. The vast majority of citizens and decision-makers will not directly witness the reaction. However, it may be conveyed in media, which may present the reaction positively or negatively and may describe, ignore, or downplay the underlying injustice. As a result, public opinion may shift, favorably or unfavorably. A substantial shift in public opinion may cause policymakers to ameliorate or to exacerbate the original injustice. This whole system may be affected by intentional state violence directed at the protesters, the media, or the public.
I used conditional verbs throughout the previous paragraph because none of this is inevitable. Sometimes people just bear injustice, or the media ignores a protest, or the public retains its opinions, or policymakers shrug off a shift in opinion. But change is possible, for better or worse.
Given the very different outcomes discussed in our readings, one might conclude that the outcomes are random. A nonviolent movement may be depicted as violent and cause a backlash. A riot may draw sympathy. A huge march may barely cause a ripple. A tiny protest can start something big.
In my view, history always involves an element of randomness, but it still pays to plan, train, and organize. The dramatic shift in public opinion about civil rights that Wasow describes was due to the Civil Rights Movement.
Looking ahead to the next 2-4 years, I think we can anticipate a significant amount of planned, structured, nonviolent resistance that will be met with state violence. The state violence is likely to pay off if the protesters (or insurrectionists) can be depicted as violent and lawless, whether that is true or not. But state violence may badly backfire on the government if it looks cruel.
It is not fair that organizers must navigate these issues, but then again, organizing would be unnecessary if the society were just. I believe this kind of analysis is necessary if you are willing to strategize to combat injustice.
Sources: Ryan Enos, Aaron Kaufmann & Melissa Sands, “Can Violent Protest Change Local Policy Support? Evidence from the Aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (American Political Science Review, 2019); Omar Wasow,. “Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting” (American Political Science Review, 2020); Mathis Ebbinghaus, Nathan Bailey, Jacob Rubel, “The Effect of the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests on Police Budgets: How ‘Defund the Police’ Sparked Political Backlash, “Social Problems, 2024. See also: the tide will turn; building power for resisting authoritarianism; and strategizing for civil resistance in defense of democracy.
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