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How to Stop a Power Grab
As democracy hangs in the balance, activists are drawing lessons from the study of civil resistance.
November 16, 2020
About a week before Election Day, Erica Chenoweth, the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, hosted an impromptu Zoom meeting for students, alumni, and colleagues—a free-form conversation in which people could ask questions, express anxieties, and try to gauge, from a comparative-politics perspective, whether the United States was totally screwed or just moderately screwed. As rectangles on the Zoom grid flickered to life, Chenoweth played "Freedom," by Beyoncé ("I break chains all by myself / Won't let my freedom rot in Hell"). Chenoweth is an expert in civil resistance, a term that Chenoweth uses interchangeably with "nonviolent mass action," or "strategic nonviolent conflict," or "unarmed insurrection." Most political scientists study how political institutions work; Chenoweth and other scholars of civil resistance study what happens when mainstream political institutions break down and the people rise up.
Eventually, three dozen participants joined the Zoom, some from the Boston area and others from the pandemic diaspora—Nashville; Tunis; Kenosha, Wisconsin. The song ended, and Chenoweth, who speaks methodically and calmly about even the least calming subjects, walked through a few potential post-election scenarios. "The ideal, obviously, is that there's a clear result that is quickly and widely accepted," Chenoweth said. But what if President Trump were to declare victory prematurely? What if his Administration were to flood the courts with specious lawsuits, attempting to slow or stop the vote count in various states? What if the results were undeniable, but Trump loyalists—in the legislature, in the media, on the streets—refused to accept them?
In the event of any major violation, most people would be inclined to keep refreshing their news feeds, waiting fretfully for those in charge to decide what should happen next. Chenoweth argued that such a situation would require more than passive vigilance: "Regular people should know that there are steps they can take to uphold democracy." This is a core tenet of civil-resistance theory, also known as people power—that citizens, working in concert, have more agency than they are led to believe.
In the past fifteen years, there has been a marked global increase in what international-relations scholars call "democratic backsliding," with more authoritarians and authoritarian-style leaders consolidating power. "There's no one moment when a country crosses from a democracy into an autocracy," Chenoweth told me in October. "The norms and institutions can grow weaker over years, or decades, without people noticing. But there are sometimes decisive moments of contestation and confusion, and would-be authoritarians can stoke and exploit that confusion." Some landmarks are more obviously fraught than others. In the run-up to the election, Trump's opponents constantly said that democracy was on the ballot—a partisan cliché that also happened to be true. Trump spent the past four years fomenting racism, spewing lies, and praising dictators around the world; in the weeks before the Zoom, he announced repeatedly that he would not accept an unfavorable election result, and that he had no particular allegiance to the American tradition of a peaceful transfer of power. On several occasions, he issued veiled threats of violence; during his first debate with Joe Biden, for example, he appeared to instruct loyalist street thugs to "stand back and stand by." Chenoweth told me, "There's never been any real justification for the American exceptionalist myth that it can't happen here. What we've seen from Trump is straight out of the authoritarian playbook." Not only can it happen here, Chenoweth continued; if it did, "this is what it would look like."
Chenoweth is forty, with a spiky hairdo and a gap-toothed smile. On Chenoweth's Web site, along with the usual links to syllabuses and recent op-eds, are several warmly written form letters offering advice on such topics as how to take care of yourself during your first year of graduate school—the sign of a public intellectual who is inclined to give thoughtful counsel to anyone who asks, but who long ago lost the battle with their overflowing in-box. (Another piece of information on the site: "I am pretty indifferent to pronouns and don't strongly identify with any of them. If pressed, I prefer being called by my name or they/them.") The most poignant form letter is written in response to almost daily requests from activists all over the world. "It is my current practice not to offer advice or guidance to people involved in ongoing conflicts outside of my own country," the letter reads. "If you are dealing with a seemingly impossible situation . . . by using peaceful methods to struggle for rights, security, and access, know that your bravery and persistence inspire me and the countless others who are watching." In "Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know," which will be published early next year by Oxford University Press, Chenoweth writes that "nonviolent revolutions have indeed created major societal breakthroughs," but that "there are still many people around the world who have not yet been exposed to these ideas or who remain more sympathetic to violent alternatives—and, as a result, default to apathy or to violence as their only options."
During the previous decade, Chenoweth has written, they have "evolved from being a detached skeptic of civil resistance to becoming an invested participant in nonviolent movements at home," including "anti-racism campaigns, the movement for immigrant rights, the sanctuary movement, the climate movement, the LGBTQ+ rights movement, and the democracy movement in the U.S." (It's worth remarking on how unremarkable it seems, in 2020, that the U.S. is a country badly in need of a democracy movement.) Chenoweth disclaims a central role in any of them, however. "As a scholar, I think I've made some original contributions," Chenoweth told me. "In terms of movement stuff, it's really just me trying to follow other people's leads." If a friend wants feedback on an action plan or a press release, Chenoweth makes comments in the Google document, sometimes suggesting a relevant historical detail. When there is a Black Lives Matter rally or a march against child separation, Chenoweth shows up. The image that comes to mind is that of Gregor Mendel volunteering at his local community garden.
During the Zoom, Chenoweth mentioned several ad-hoc groups (Hold the Line, Choose Democracy, Protect the Results, and others) that were creating contingency plans for the election and the post-election period. Chenoweth rattled off a few cases of civil-resistance campaigns that had managed to reverse post-election power grabs—Thailand in 1992, Serbia in 2000, Gambia in 2016—and said that such successful campaigns generally did four things: "They mobilized mass popular participation. They encouraged defection by people in positions of authority, like economic and business élites, security forces, even members of the opposition party. They tended not to rely solely on mass demonstrations but instead used methods of dispersal and noncoöperation, like boycotts and strikes. And, finally, they stayed disciplined, even when repression escalated."
Chenoweth opened the floor for questions. Enrique Gasteazoro, an activist from Nicaragua and a recent graduate of the Kennedy School, asked, "Do you think that this resistance muscle that is being activated now, or potentially activated, could also be used as a deterrent?"
Chenoweth nodded and grinned—the satisfied reaction of an educator whose student has independently arrived at the right answer. "The best way to prevent a power grab is to keep it from happening in the first place," Chenoweth said. "If Trump loses, and his lawyers are trying to decide how hard to fight the results, maybe they look around and see people mobilizing and decide it's not worth it. That could make all the difference."
When we spoke the next day, Chenoweth used a metaphor that was both nonviolent and quite urgent: "If a bunch of us pull the fire alarm on our democracy now, and it turns out that this wasn't the moment of emergency that we were all fearing, in no way would that be a waste of time." After all, there are good reasons to hold occasional fire drills, especially when you live in a building that's more than two hundred years old and full of structural flaws. "Whatever happens in this moment, it's not as if our very deep problems go away, and it's not as if the global trend toward authoritarianism goes away," Chenoweth continued. "Maybe, next time there's an emergency, we won't have to waste time looking for the fire extinguishers and figuring out how to use them."
When Americans talk about nonviolent protest, they usually have in mind the spiritual lineage connecting Jesus to Thoreau and Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Nonviolence is often conflated with pacifism, the faith of robed ascetics and secular saints. The caricatures are familiar: flowers placed in the barrel of a soldier's gun; Instagram hashtags intended to "raise awareness"; an emphasis on principle over pragmatism. But the "civil" in "civil resistance" refers to civic engagement, not to decorous quiescence, and "nonviolent conflict" is hardly an oxymoron. "Nonviolent action means that the movement is not initiating or threatening violence," Maria J. Stephan, a political scientist who studies civil resistance, told me. "There's no guarantee that violence won't be initiated by the state." Omar Wasow, a Princeton University professor who studies the American civil-rights movement of the nineteen-sixties, told me, "King and others understood that, when protesters initiated violence against the state, in the eyes of the public the protesters lost legitimacy. When the state initiated violence against the protesters, the protesters won public sympathy. So that became part of their strategy."
"It's getting serious—he left his stuff."Cartoon by David SipressContemporary protesters, Wasow added, "sometimes complain that the media has its own interests. And they're right: a thousand people march peacefully, three people set a car on fire, and the car is the lead segment on TV news." This is hardly fair—nor is it fair that reactionary militias are often portrayed as defending "law and order," whereas anti-Trump protests may be portrayed as undermining it—but, Wasow notes, civil-rights protesters in the sixties dealt with a similar dynamic. Today, there's Fox News; in the sixties, there were pro-segregation newspapers. Wasow said, "King is remembered as an idealist, but his attitude on this stuff was much closer to Realpolitik: How can we use the media to advance our goals?"
As you dig into the civil-resistance literature, the notion of people power starts to seem less "Kumbaya" and more Sun Tzu. Lissy Romanow, the executive director of the activist training institute Momentum, said, "In theory, it might sound wishy-washy—Repressive regime, please take pity on us!—but actually it shows how to strategically wrest power away from people who have no interest in conceding any power. There's nothing more hard-core than that." Andre Henry, a thirty-five-year-old musician and organizer, told me, "As a Black person from the South, of course I knew all about the civil-rights movement, but it was taught to me as history. Then I started reading about how the same strategies of civil resistance are being used, within my lifetime, to topple totalitarian regimes all over the world."
Hardy Merriman, the president and C.E.O. of an educational organization called the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, told me that, during the Cold War, "if you were a scholar of terrorism, or of Kremlinology, you could be a professor in a prestigious international-relations department. But, if you wanted to research how people win rights for themselves without blowing things up, you were basically on your own." Even well into the two-thousands, the study of nonviolent struggle was often confined to departments of history or religion, or else it was banished from the academy altogether, relegated to musty church basements and sparsely attended Webinars. "A decade ago, if you'd asked me to list the major experts working in this field I could have named them all off the top of my head," Merriman went on. "Now I can't, because the mainstream is finally taking it seriously."
As the subdiscipline has crept toward the center of academic discourse, it has also been recast as a science. One of Chenoweth's projects at Harvard is called the Nonviolent Action Lab. Last year, in the online journal Nature Human Behaviour, Chenoweth and the international-relations scholar Margherita Belgioioso published a paper titled "The Physics of Dissent and the Effects of Movement Momentum," which compares the properties of social unrest to the laws of Newtonian mechanics. "We propose that the momentum of dissent is a product of participation (mass) and the number of protest events in a week (velocity)," Chenoweth and Belgioioso write. They even include some back-of-the-envelope equations that dissidents can use, in the heat of nonviolent battle, to "easily quantify their coercive potential."
In "Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know," Chenoweth describes the standard, top-down theory of power, which "focuses on the near-invincibility of entrenched power and implies that only militant and violent action can challenge the system." Chenoweth and other civil-resistance scholars propose an alternative theory, one in which "political power comes from the ability to elicit others' voluntary obedience." (As Frederick Douglass put it, "The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.") According to this view, even totalitarian states rely on the consent of their citizens, especially those who make up the regime's "pillars of support"—bureaucrats, business leaders, loyalist media, and so on. When those pillars erode—when tax collectors stop filling the government's coffers; when soldiers disobey orders, or simply call in sick; when formerly triumphalist opinion columnists and TV broadcasters start to waver—the colossus of state power can collapse, sometimes within a matter of days. The study of civil resistance, then, is in large part the study of how movements can win "defections"—how they can turn obedient subjects of the regime into allies of the disobedient majority.
In the mid-nineteen-fifties, James Lawson, a Methodist deacon from Ohio, travelled to India to study with Gandhi's disciples. When Lawson returned to the United States, he became a close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr., who called him "the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world." In 1959, Lawson planned and led the lunch-counter sit-ins in Nashville, the remarkably successful desegregation campaign that became a template for many of the future actions of the civil-rights movement. Just as the Indian independence movement had wielded economic power—for example, by boycotting British salt and textiles—Lawson targeted white-owned department stores. "At the beginning of 1960, I would guess we had only ten or fifteen per cent of the local Black population on our side, and far less, obviously, of the white population," Lawson told me recently. "People said, 'Reverend Lawson, it's not enough.' I said, 'We stay disciplined, and we stick to the plan.' By May 10, 1960, the 'Whites Only' and 'Colored Only' signs started to fall."
Now ninety-two, Lawson teaches workshops on civil resistance at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at an independent retreat called the James Lawson Institute, which has been held in various cities in the past six years. (Chenoweth, who has spoken at the retreat several times, refers to Lawson as a mentor.) In the summer of 2014, soon after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a young organizer named Nicole Carty attended the James Lawson Institute in Nashville. "A few hours away, protests were popping off in Ferguson," Carty told me. "Getting to sit with James Lawson and pick his brain in that moment, it transformed my thinking about what I should do next." The following year, after a Minneapolis police officer shot a Black man named Jamar Clarke, Carty helped organizers there plan their next series of tactics, which included an occupation of the Fourth Precinct that lasted more than two weeks and protests that shut down the security line at the Minneapolis airport. A few weeks later, the county prosecutor announced that he would no longer use grand juries in police-shooting cases, a decision that drew praise from activists. "It's easy to be reactive—something bad happens, you take to the streets," Carty said. "The real craft is in the planning, the strategizing. Having an entire sequence of tactics in mind—if I do this, then this, how do I ultimately win?"
In 1973, the political scientist Gene Sharp published "The Politics of Nonviolent Action," a three-volume work based on his Oxford University doctoral thesis. The second volume was a sweeping taxonomy—an attempt to do for civil-resistance theory what Linnaeus had done for biology. Drawing on centuries of examples, Sharp identified a hundred and ninety-eight "methods of nonviolent action": vigils, mock funerals, "collective disappearance," and so on. Some were "methods of concentration," such as street demonstrations, but the majority were methods of dispersal or noncoöperation, such as strikes and boycotts. In the sixteenth century, Iroquois women won political rights within their tribe through a coördinated succession of actions: refraining from sex and childbirth, striking when it came time to harvest crops, refusing to make moccasins for male soldiers. In the Iranian Revolution of 1979, some of the most decisive gains against the Shah came from acts of bureaucratic slow-walking, and from employees at nationalized oil fields working at half speed. In the American imagination, an uprising looks like a throng. In the Sharpian tradition, the winning combination of tactics may look like an absence—or, to the untrained eye, like nothing at all.
As the 2020 election approached, I kept asking Chenoweth whether, in their expert opinion, American democracy would survive. In response, Chenoweth gave me names of activists to talk to. Mass uprisings may seem like harbingers of chaos, but many civil-resistance scholars argue the opposite: countries with a stronger culture of nonviolent resistance tend to be more equitable and democratic. Chenoweth said, "If the systems hold, it will be because organizers held the systems to account."
Erica Chenoweth has never been a pacifist. "I grew up in Dayton, Ohio, in what I guess you'd call a pretty typical Midwestern context," they told me. As an undergraduate, at the University of Dayton, Chenoweth considered joining the R.O.T.C., intending to enlist in the military and become a diplomat. They ended up enrolling in graduate school instead, but retained an interest in "things that explode, bullets flying through the air"; the new plan, they recalled, "was to be a terrorism expert, or a mainstream security scholar." During Chenoweth's final year of grad school, they attended a four-day workshop at Colorado College, hosted by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.
Merriman, who was one of the workshop's facilitators, recalled, "It became clear pretty quickly that Erica was going to need more than the usual amount of evidence." Chenoweth put it more bluntly: "I sat in the back and quickly became the least popular person in the room." For every historical example of a successful nonviolent uprising, Chenoweth could think of a failed one. "They brought up the Solidarity movement, I brought up Tiananmen Square," Chenoweth recalled. "I kept saying, 'Case studies aside, who has studied this systematically?' " Attendees slept in campus dorms, where Chenoweth's suite-mate was Maria Stephan, then an I.C.N.C. employee. Stephan said, "One night, I just challenged Erica directly, along the lines of: If you think the efficacy of this stuff remains to be tested, then what kind of study would convince you?" Within a few hours, Chenoweth and Stephan had drafted a crude version of a research proposal.
During the next five years, Chenoweth and Stephan built a database called Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes, or navco. It aimed to account for every attempted revolution worldwide, between 1900 and 2006: the Carnation Revolution, in Portugal; the Blancos rebellion, in Uruguay; the Active Voices campaign, in Madagascar; and three hundred and twenty others. "I took for granted, as did all the political scientists I was familiar with, that the serious thing, the thing you do if you're a rebel group that really wants results, is you take up arms," Chenoweth told me. "Then I ran the numbers." Much of Chenoweth's career since then has consisted of interpreting and explaining what those numbers showed.
In 2011, Chenoweth and Stephan published their findings in a book called "Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict." It included detailed narrative case studies in which the authors hypothesized about why, say, the Philippine People Power movement of 1986 achieved its goals whereas the Burmese uprising of 1988 did not. (In Burma, activists over-relied on "methods of concentration, such as election rallies and protests," leaving themselves vulnerable to state repression. The movement in the Philippines alternated rallies with strikes and boycotts; it also drew the participation of a wide array of civil-society leaders, including clergy and teachers, many of whom eventually turned against the regime.) In the database, Chenoweth and Stephan condensed each campaign's months or years of struggle into a binary line of code: violent or nonviolent, success or failure.
Chenoweth and Stephan selected only "maximalist" resistance campaigns—big movements, with a thousand or more participants, that sought to fundamentally alter a nation's political order, either by seceding or by overthrowing a foreign occupier or a head of state. The American civil-rights movement of the nineteen-sixties was not included in the navco data; although there were secessionists and insurgents within the movement, its main demands were reformist, not revolutionary. Moreover, campaigns were counted as successful only if their goals were achieved within a year of peak activity, without an unrelated intervention. The Greek resistance to the Nazis was coded as a failure, because although the movement contributed to the Nazis' retreat from Greece, Allied troops seemed to contribute more. The Indian independence movement, the popular archetype of nonviolent insurrection, was classified as a partial success—for one thing, the British did eventually quit India, but not within a year. Even taking these restrictions into account, more than half of the civil-resistance campaigns in the navco data set were successes, a much starker result than Chenoweth had anticipated. Tom Hastings, a longtime activist and scholar of nonviolence, told me, "I've been at this since the sixties, and I can break that time up into two periods: B.C. and A.C., Before Chenoweth and After Chenoweth. For a long time, there have been those of us who had a philosophical commitment to nonviolence, or an intuition that nonviolence puts you at a strategic advantage. Erica and Maria took that intuition and empirically proved it."
Since 2011, Chenoweth has overseen the expansion of the database, and published dozens of journal articles, book chapters, and monographs. (Chenoweth and Stephan remain friends and occasional collaborators, but Stephan worked for several years at the United States Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan body founded by Congress, which limited what she could say in public.) Many of Chenoweth's articles are quantitative and technical, but the upshot is simple enough: civil-resistance movements prevail far more often than armed movements do (about 1.95 times more often, according to the most recent version of the data). This seems to hold true across decades and continents, in democracies and autocracies, against weak regimes and strong ones.
In September of 2000, Slobodan Milosevic, who had been the dictator of Serbia for more than a decade, attempted to falsify election results in order to stay in power. In response, a student-led movement called Otpor coördinated a variety of tactics—highway blockades, subversive street theatre, a coal miners' strike. The resistance was widely perceived as nonviolent and legitimate, and it grew quickly, gaining support among Serbs of every age and from all parts of the country. A Serbian policeman, ordered to shoot into a crowd of protesters, held his fire; he later told journalists that, given the cross-section of people present, he couldn't rule out the possibility that one of them was his child. By early October, Milosevic had no choice but to leave office. The following year, he was brought to The Hague and tried for war crimes. Ivan Marovic, who was one of the leaders of Otpor, told me that, when he recounts the story of the movement, people often argue that its success must have been a fluke. He added, "Now I can just show them Maria and Erica's book and say, 'Don't argue with me, argue with the numbers.' "
Andre Henry, the musician and organizer, has been active with several groups in Pasadena, California, where he lives. They include the local chapter of Black Lives Matter, an interfaith group called L.A. Voice, and the Jenga Club, a name that refers to the goal of toppling unjust social structures by removing pillars of support. In October, after a Pasadena police officer shot and killed a Black man named Anthony McClain, Black Lives Matter Pasadena wanted to pressure the mayor into releasing the officer's body-camera footage. "Normally, we would probably just do a march, but because of covid we had to get creative," Henry told me. Someone remembered No. 42 on Sharp's list of nonviolent actions: motorcades. "We drove really slowly, gaining more visibility the whole way," Henry said. "It became a big enough deal that the mayor committed to releasing the footage the next day."
Henry and I were speaking, over Zoom, shortly before Election Day. "I'm talking to organizers about what they've got planned if Trump uses outright Fascist tactics to stay in power," he said. "I hear a lot of 'We'll stay in the streets until our demands are met!' To which I go, 'Yeah, getting in the streets is good, and it looks good on Instagram. But it's not magic, where you chant "We don't like this" until the powers that be have a change of heart. Who's researching the real points of economic and social leverage?' " Henry leaned out of the frame for a moment. When he came back into view, he was holding a short book, co-authored by Sharp, that he was in the process of rereading: "The Anti-Coup."
Sharp, who died in 2018, was nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize, and he had a research appointment at Harvard, but his primary job was director of the Albert Einstein Institution, a small nonprofit that he ran out of his row house in East Boston. A pamphlet-size précis of his findings, "From Dictatorship to Democracy," was published in 1993 and circulated in Burma, Serbia, Egypt, and several other countries on the brink of revolution. In 2011, at the Occupy Wall Street encampment, in New York, activists set up a community kitchen, a library, and a media hub to disseminate live streams generated by the movement—all examples of what Sharp called "alternative social institutions." If protests are expressions of what a movement is against, then alternative institutions can be manifestations of what a movement is for, a glimpse of how the world might look once it has been transformed.
During the Egyptian Revolution, activists occupied Tahrir Square, in Cairo, staffing ad-hoc checkpoints and building a stage with a professional-grade sound system. Musicians held concerts in the square, helping to sustain a festive atmosphere and attract a wide cross-section of visitors, some of whom became active in the struggle. Chenoweth told me, "If I had to pick one characteristic that correlates with a movement's success, it's the extent to which everyone in society—children, disabled people, grandmas—feels that they can either actively or passively participate."
"Babyproof this table!"Cartoon by Zachary KaninWhile at the University of Oslo, in the nineteen-fifties, Sharp crossed paths with George Lakey, another American activist and student of nonviolence. Lakey went on to work as a civil-rights organizer during the Freedom Summer Project of 1964, as a blockade-runner during the Vietnam War, as an environmental organizer fighting mountaintop removal, and, in 2020, as a democracy activist advising Americans on how to forestall a potential coup. In the two-thousands, Lakey taught at Swarthmore, where he and several students started the Global Nonviolent Action Database, a list of activist campaigns throughout history. "Sharp's oldest example, in 'The Politics of Nonviolent Action,' was the plebeian uprising in ancient Rome, 494 B.C.E.," Lakey told me. "Imagine how thrilled one of my grad students was when he found one that was centuries older"—a strike among Egyptian laborers building a tomb for Ramesses III, in 1170 B.C.E. Throughout history there have been wars, and, at least since Herodotus, there have been military historians. Likewise, Lakey pointed out, "nonviolent struggle has always been with us, but for a long time, as a species, we've been blind to it."
Some American historians argue that the Revolutionary War was only the violent culmination of a longer and more consequential nonviolent struggle. "What do we mean by the revolution?" John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1815. "The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and a consequence of it." Adams went on to refer to a period of "fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington," during which the colonists boycotted British goods, destroyed British property, distributed illegal pamphlets, and set up alternative institutions such as the Constitutional Convention. "Civil resistance repeatedly shows up in undemocratic moments and contexts," Romanow, of Momentum, told me. "It's not a coincidence that Black Americans have led when it came to bringing civil-resistance tactics into American organizing, because Black Americans have not been living in a democracy for four hundred years." Romanow and I were speaking in late October. "Many people now rightly think that, if things go off the rails during or after this election, the institutions alone might not necessarily save us," she continued. "Once you realize that, you can go pretty quickly from despair to exhilaration: the institutions can't save us, but maybe we can save ourselves."
Like many academics, Chenoweth is wary of being prescriptive. "I don't think it's my job to tell people how to liberate themselves," Chenoweth told me. "I do, however, think it can be useful to document patterns." Sometimes the task is as simple as highlighting tactics that have been successful in the past, enabling future activists to think more creatively. During a recent lecture at Wellesley, Chenoweth described an anecdote relayed by a colleague, Stephen Zunes, about an action undertaken by a group of dissidents advocating for the autonomy of Western Sahara, a territory occupied by Morocco. Under Moroccan law, it is illegal to fly the flag of Western Sahara. To protest this law, instead of engaging in civil disobedience directly dissidents tied flags to the tails of dozens of feral cats. Chenoweth called this "a dilemma action," because the government troops had to "either chase cats around the alleyways or let the flag fly. It's a terrible set of choices for the opponent, and it's humiliating."
The first version of the navco data set, now known as navco 1.0, was, in Chenoweth's words, "chunky data." Subsequent iterations have yielded more granular findings. For example, when a civil-resistance campaign does succeed in overthrowing an oppressive government, the new government it installs is far more likely to remain stable and democratic. The data also yielded a pattern so simple and catchy that Chenoweth revealed it, in 2013, in the form of a ted talk—the 3.5 Percent Rule, which states that in every case where a mass-resistance campaign has attracted the "active and sustained participation" of at least three and a half per cent of the country's population, the campaign has achieved its goal.
The 3.5 Percent Rule is meant to be descriptive, not predictive, a caveat that Chenoweth often repeats but that activists do not always hear. Since the talk, Chenoweth has become aware of two campaigns, in Brunei and Bahrain, that failed despite engaging more than three and a half per cent of the country's population. Although civil-resistance campaigns in the past decade have continued to succeed more often than the armed ones, the success rate of all maximalist campaigns is dropping, as regimes become more proficient at surveilling and subduing rebellions. "I really blame the Internet," Chenoweth said recently on a podcast. Although the Internet is good at "getting people to the streets quickly, in large numbers," its costs to movements may outweigh its benefits. Also, momentum can be difficult to sustain without the more painstaking work of person-to-person organizing.
One of Chenoweth's side projects, the Crowd Counting Consortium, attempts to quantify, in close to real time, the depth and breadth of the American protest movement, including both anti-Trump and pro-Trump demonstrations. Without such a count, if the anti-Trump resistance did reach the three-and-a-half-per-cent threshold—about eleven and a half million people—how would anyone know? The project is a collaboration between Chenoweth; Jeremy Pressman, a political scientist at the University of Connecticut; and a rotating crew of volunteers who verify reports of protests, in the press or on social media, and convert them into raw data. One of the most diligent volunteers is Zoe Marks, a scholar of African politics at the Kennedy School, who happens to be Chenoweth's partner. "A lot of our date nights involve spreadsheets," Chenoweth told me, a bit bashfully.
According to the Crowd Counting data, 97.7 per cent of Black Lives Matter protests this past summer were free of violence, with no injuries reported by protesters, police, or bystanders. "These figures should correct the narrative that the protests were overtaken by rioting," Chenoweth and Pressman wrote in a recent Washington Post article. Of course, in a world that includes social media and Rupert Murdoch, the narrative that should prevail is not always the narrative that does. At pivotal moments, such as after a police shooting or during an attempted authoritarian power grab, organizers may find themselves facing a paradox. If nobody mobilizes in response to egregious abuses by the state, the abuses may appear to go unanswered. If people do mobilize, and if a tiny minority of protesters initiate violence, then that violence can be used, cynically or otherwise, to cast the movement as illegitimate, making it more likely to lose. There is no consensus, either among academics or among activists, on what constitutes violence—some disavow property damage, others argue that a few smashed windows can sometimes help the cause. Under normal circumstances, an image of a protester throwing a rock could go viral, prompting a negative press cycle. In a volatile post-election moment, a single violent incident might give a flailing autocrat a pretext to ramp up repression by police, or even to declare emergency powers. Shortly after the 2020 election, as armed militias, white nationalists, and other Trump supporters planned a march in Washington, D.C., Lakey's group, Choose Democracy, wrote an e-mail to its network of volunteers. "We don't believe this is the moment for activation in the streets," it read. "Let's keep breathing, staying attentive, and be ready for action if things escalate."
navco 1.0 counted three hundred and twenty-three maximalist campaigns that occurred up to 2006. The list has been updated continually since then, and now comprises six hundred and twenty-seven examples—including, for the first time, an American campaign. In the prepublication copy of "Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know" that I received in October, the campaigns were laid out chronologically in a table at the back of the book. Appearing shortly after "Anti-Gnassingbé," a campaign in Togo, and shortly before the "Yellow Vests," a movement in France, was the "Anti-Trump resistance." Under "Primary method," it was coded as nonviolent. Under "Outcome," instead of "success" or "failure," was the word "ongoing."
In September, 2017, Merriman, of the I.C.N.C., wrote a blog post recommending more investment in what he called "democracy insurance." Just as American taxpayers keep the Federal Emergency Management Agency staffed in case of natural disaster, he argued, so should nongovernmental organizations in free societies fund "civil resistance capacity" in case of a lurch toward authoritarianism. This argument was impossible to separate from Merriman's interests—he was, after all, the president of an organization that specialized in building such capacity—but it was also substantiated by robust evidence. In his blog post, Merriman wrote that "democracies in many countries are backsliding, such as in Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, South Africa, and the United States." He wanted to insure that, should this backsliding continue, the people would be ready to mobilize.
In late May, a video of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd's neck set off a wave of protests around the country. On June 1st, near the White House, federal agents pepper-sprayed peaceful protesters, clearing the way for President Trump to pose for a photo op; a few weeks later, federal agents drove through Portland, Oregon, in unmarked vans, snatching protesters off the streets without warning. It seemed that the slide toward autocracy was rapidly accelerating. Merriman, who lives in a suburb of Washington, D.C., expressed his concerns to Romanow, who introduced him to three activists who specialize in digital organizing: Ankur Asthana, in Hoboken, New Jersey; Marium Navid, in Los Angeles; and Kifah Shah, in New York City. "Hardy has been immersed in civil-resistance theory for years," Shah said. "Marium, Ankur, and I know how to get that information out to people and train them on how to use it."
The four activists met on Zoom throughout July and August, whenever all of them could spare time from their day jobs. By the end of August, they had put together a fifty-five-page document called "Hold the Line: A Guide to Defending Democracy." The guide established a few "red lines" ("Trump may declare victory even if the election day results are ambiguous") and proposed some collective responses in the event that those lines were crossed—a combination of standard methods, such as calling elected officials to ask that they respect the democratic process, and Sharpian methods, such as boycotts and civil disobedience. One section, written primarily by Merriman, was a crash course in the consent theory of power which cited several experts in the field, including Chenoweth and Stephan. The rest of the guide was studded with worksheets and sample meeting agendas. (The title page included a disclaimer: "The views expressed here are solely personal to the authors and do not represent the views of any employer.") In October, the organizers began hosting Zoom trainings, encouraging volunteers to form local Hold the Line groups. By the end of the month, each session was attracting hundreds of people.
In late October, I visited Shah, in her sunlit two-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights. At the time, she was corresponding with dozens of Hold the Line volunteers, both by e-mail and in one-on-one "office hours" by phone, attempting to usher them away from generalized terror and toward a specific plan of action. She paraphrased their worries: " 'The election is going to be stolen!' 'The Supreme Court is going to stop counting our votes!' I go, 'I'm scared of that, too. But neither of us knows anyone on the Supreme Court. Who do we know?' " Shah referred to this as a "sphere of influence" exercise—a sort of grassroots version of the Serenity Prayer. "Maybe you know your local law-enforcement officials, and you can ask them to pledge that they'll prevent militias from intimidating voters," Shah said. "Maybe you get more people in your group, and maybe one of those people knows a state legislator." Shah referred to this slow, modest work as "building movement infrastructure," or simply "building"—a necessary component of any movement, not only the movement to prevent Trump from stealing power but also the movements that would continue agitating for progress as soon as Trump was gone.
Shah, who is thirty-two, was born in Pakistan and moved to Palm Springs, California, when she was three. "Knowing what has gone on in Pakistan and many other countries," she said, she did not assume that election results are the final determinant of who takes power, even in a putative democracy. Her bookshelves were a pleasant jumble—"Organizing for Social Change" next to the Quran, "Good and Mad" not far from a stack of gastroenterology journals. (Her husband is a second-year medical fellow.) In the course of an afternoon, over the hum of Broadway traffic outside her window, Shah conducted calls with two community organizers in Houston, a group of tech employees in Silicon Valley, and a Muslim Students Association at Yale. In Virginia, a woman named Margaret had single-handedly solicited pledges from more than two dozen state officials, both Democrats and Republicans, affirming that they would honor the will of the voters. "You rock, Margaret!" Shah said. "You are a natural!"
In Erie, Pennsylvania, a Benedictine sister named Anne McCarthy and a church volunteer named Juan Llarena were organizing a prayer vigil at an Episcopal church across the street from the county courthouse. The vigil would be held on Election Night while the ballots were being delivered to the courthouse to be tallied. "We've got about thirty people signed up," McCarthy told Shah over the phone. "They're all trained in de-escalation tactics." McCarthy is a member of Pace e Bene, a national network of clergy and lay Christians who teach nonviolent resistance. At the group's most recent annual conference, in August, Chenoweth was one of the keynote speakers.
"I love this idea, Anne," Shah said. "Do you all want help sending a press release to local media?"
"We don't want to risk a backlash," McCarthy said. "There are armed militias based about half an hour away, and they might see us on the news and come looking for a confrontation." Shah raised her eyebrows. When the call was over, she said, "One of my mantras is: If you're organizing something locally, you know your turf better than I do. How am I supposed to know, sitting in New York City, where all the Pennsylvania militias are?"
Two days before the election, I attended a Hold the Line training on Zoom. Shah and the other organizers shared some recent accomplishments by local Hold the Line chapters, heralding each small advance with the kind of unqualified enthusiasm usually reserved for a middle-school dance recital. "Thanks for showing them love in the chat, guys!" Shah said. "Y'all are doing some amazing work."
"Feeling inspired," Molly, in Tucson, Arizona, wrote in the Zoom chat. "Go, Democracy!"
Susan, in Iowa, wrote, "I heard Gene Sharp back in the 70s and am glad you all are carrying on!"
Others seemed to find the whole thing baffling: If the country was on the brink of collapse, how were nonbinding pledges from local officials commensurate with the scale of the problem? Mark, a sixty-seven-year-old college professor from Michigan, asked about the "end game," in the event that "Trump clearly steals the election and gets the Republican governors and Supreme Court to fall into line. In that frightening but possible scenario, do we take to the streets and attack? Wouldn't that be the end of nonviolent strategies?" He added, "I've been a liberal Democrat since 1971."
Roula, in California, wrote, "Mark, I'm interested in that 'what if' and specifically want to know how we can organize *economic* resistance."
Laura, also in California, wrote, "What we've learned is that non-violence is essential to unseating a coup."
"Sometimes I feel like the whole world is out to get me."Cartoon by Suerynn Lee"Mark, have you read the Hold the Line guide? Nonviolence is a core principle," Jamie, in Colorado, wrote. "Nonviolence is also what's most able to be successful! Check the writings of Erica Chenoweth for some interesting stuff on why it's so important!"
On Election Day, Shah wore a red striped turtleneck, a blue hijab, and white jeans and sneakers. "This is about as patriotic as I get," she said. As part of a mutual-aid group, she had spent the morning helping elderly neighbors get to the polls, and had voted herself. Now, like roughly half of the American adult population, she was alternately claiming that she'd paid no heed to the election forecasts and fantasizing about a swift and uncontested Biden landslide. "I hope people don't come away with a sense of: 'See, the institutions did work in the end—what was I so paranoid for?' " she said. "Americans are way too good at amnesia and apathy."
Late in the afternoon, Shah's husband, Ali Soroush, returned from a shift at the hospital wearing blue-green scrubs. "My attending started asking, 'How do we stop Trump if he starts doing crazy things?' " he said. "I told her, 'You may enjoy the Hold the Line guide.' "
"Love it," Shah said.
Soroush, whose parents lived through the Iranian Revolution of 1979, is generally wary of sweeping change. "I like to think about what's possible within the existing systems," he said. "Thinking outside of that makes me a bit uncomfortable." During the summer, when Shah first described Hold the Line to Soroush, he found the power-grab scenarios difficult to fathom. "He went, 'None of that is gonna happen. We have a constitution,' " Shah recalled. "I said, 'Babe, it's just a document!' "
"I'm the institutionalist in our house," he said.
When darkness fell, Shah turned on the TV, and the results began coming in. Virginia was called for Biden, then briefly un-called. Trump had an early lead in Pennsylvania. Someone on ABC News mentioned the prospect of recounts; someone else mentioned the possibility of an Electoral College tie. "This is fine," Shah said. She stood up and started pacing. "This is what we've been talking about for months. This is what we planned for." Soroush went into the bedroom to lie down.
The next day, I spoke to Chenoweth. While the rest of the country was poring over the latest vote tallies from Allegheny County, Chenoweth was thinking about pillars of support, trying to gauge which key figures seemed unshakably loyal to Trump and which seemed prepared to defect should Trump's loss start to look definitive. That morning, Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, had tweeted, "Taking days to count legally cast votes is not fraud. And court challenges to votes cast after the legal voting deadline is not suppression." The tweet was "kind of both-sides-y," Chenoweth said. "He seems to be hedging, waiting to see which way the wind blows."
On Friday, at Marks's suggestion, Chenoweth and Marks began channelling their anxiety into a Google spreadsheet. One tab, documenting public statements of support for the vote-counting process or repudiations of Trump, was titled "Counting Commitments to Democracy." A separate tab, containing defiant statements from Trump loyalists, had the heading "Counting Complicity." When Sean Hannity, on Fox News, asked Senator Lindsey Graham whether states should put forward alternative slates of electors, Graham responded, "Everything should be on the table." Graham was added to the "Complicity" tab. (Later in the interview, Graham claimed that elections in Philadelphia were "crooked as a snake"; in the spreadsheet, this was filed under the "Alleges Fraud" column, though it could just as easily have gone under "Supports Misinformation.") The following night, the Fox anchor Laura Ingraham, speaking directly to the camera, urged President Trump to leave gracefully—a surprising and significant addition to the "Commitments to Democracy" tab. Every few hours, Chenoweth sent me an update by e-mail—"Extremely clear repudiation from Carlos Curbelo"; "McConnell refusing to comment"—treating the election as a volatile and fluid process, a matter not only of math but also of momentum. Everyone else I knew was waiting for the final result to be revealed; for Chenoweth, there was no such thing as a final result, at least not until the Inauguration.
On Saturday, November 7th, Shah and I had plans to meet at Columbus Circle, in Manhattan, for a rally that was originally billed as a reaffirmation of the sanctity of the democratic process. I was still at home, in Brooklyn, when I heard cheers erupting outside my window. I headed north toward the Brooklyn Bridge on my bike. Suddenly, somehow, everyone was carrying banners, tambourines, huge American flags, portable stereos playing "We Are the Champions" and "Philadelphia Freedom" and the timeless rap anthem "FDT (Fuck Donald Trump)." The bleating horns of mail trucks and taxis, for once, heralded not frustration but peace and good will. I received a flurry of texts, all containing exclamation points or emojis. The only two exceptions were Chenoweth and Shah, who remained cautious. "Momentum is definitely in Biden's favor," Chenoweth wrote; as for Trump, "we'll see if he has any enablers left."
At Columbus Circle, Shah stood between a young man in a T-shirt, carrying a bullhorn and railing against Biden's centrism, and a middle-aged woman in a pink feather boa, dancing with her eyes closed on top of a parked S.U.V. A very tall drag queen in a witch's hat roamed through the crowd, shouting, "You're fired, honey!"
"The whole Democratic coalition is out today," Shah said, smiling. "This is a victory, but not a permanent victory. It's, like, Let's celebrate for an afternoon, and then let's go home and make sure there isn't a power grab happening under our noses."
The week after Election Day, members of the Trump Administration continued to act as if the election results were still in doubt, or simply to pretend that Trump had won. A reporter asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo whether he would start coöperating with Biden's transition team. "There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump Administration," Pompeo responded. Trump fired the Secretary of Defense and other top Pentagon officials, replacing them with loyalists. "There will be others," Chenoweth wrote to me. In October, Chenoweth had told me, "If Trump does leave office safely, we might not be in immediate crisis mode anymore, but the struggle doesn't end. That's when the real work begins." ♦
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