You’ve probably seen footage or photos of people protesting the Trump regime. Some data suggests that the volume of protestors is higher than in Trump’s first term. But at the same time, you might be wondering if we’re seeing enough civil resistance to preserve American democracy. Our guest this week is one of the authors of a study that found that just 3.5% of the population taking to the streets is enough to block authoritarian takeover. Erica Chenoweth is a political scientist at Harvard. They join to discuss historical and contemporary strategies for protesting, democratic backsliding, global comparisons and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
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Erica Chenoweth: People often find out what the world they’re in after the fact, and that’s what makes this wave of global autocratization, as they call it, much more like the one that was in the 1920s and ‘30s than the one that was in, like, the 1960s and ‘70s. Because in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there were bright lines. There was a coup outright by the military declaring themselves the caretaker government, or there was an armed revolution that won and ousted, you know? And so it was very obvious. You were in one country, and then now you’re not. We’re in a different world where most of the autocrats or aspiring autocrats today are elected authoritarians.
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Chris Hayes: Hello, and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. You probably have seen footage of protests in the first 100 days of the Trump administration. I’ve played them on my program. Rachel Maddow has been doing an amazing job, sort of collating different protest footage. And at one level, it’s incredibly heartening to see lots of people out on the streets. I’ve gone to, sort of in a reportorial capacity, to go see some of these protests as well. There’s a few of the Tesla takedown protests I’ve gone and checked out. And there’s some data suggests that in terms of the volume of protests and the places they’re happening, it’s actually more widespread now than it was in Trump’s first term. And that at the same time, it also feels like there’s nowhere near as many people in the streets as I kind of feel like there would be or should be.
It’s particularly true when you look at some of the protests that have happened recently, for instance, in Hungary, where there’s hundreds of thousands and millions of people in the streets. So there’s a kind of weird disconnect. At one level, there clearly is a vigorous protest movement in the United States that is growing. And you see it growing, I think, just in sort of anecdotally, and we can talk a little bit about the data. And at the same time, a weird disconnect between what to me feels like the scale of the aggression towards the democratic order and the amount of people that are responding by joining protests, particularly when you compare it to, say, 2020, where we had, you know, millions of people quite literally in the streets. In fact, by some measures, the biggest civil rights protest nationally that had ever happened.
And obviously, there was the combination of the sort of intensity of that COVID period, the acuteness of the horrific footage of what had happened in Minneapolis to George Floyd. But just in terms of numbers sense, like, we don’t have that same specific acute visual provocation and human provocation of this awful cold-blooded murder that we’re witnessing. So that’s part of it. But I’ve been wrestling with this question of, like, why aren’t there more people in the streets? And what would it mean if there were a million? Like, is that the way to protect American democracy? Does it matter that those numbers are low? Or does it matter they grow? I’ve been sort of thinking through this. And one thing that maybe you’ve seen floating around the internet is this idea, it’s kind of been meme-ified, that, like, if 3.5% of a population are in the streets, that’s sufficient to block an authoritarian takeover.
And I was, like, I saw this, I’ve seen it a bunch of places. It’s become almost one of these, like, if you get your 10,000 steps in sort of things on the internet. And I was like, what, is that real? What’s the deal with that number? Where does it come from? Well, it is real. It comes from real research by a scholar who, along with a few collaborators, has been probably one of the most in-depth and sustained scholars studying exactly this question of civil resistance, nonviolent civil resistance in societies undergoing authoritarian backsliding, or even societies in open democratic societies, and how basically people in the streets, people using nonviolent civic protest work. When it succeeds, when it fails, under what conditions. And Erica Chenoweth is one of the authors of the piece that found that 3.5% number. They’re a political scientist at Harvard University, and their work has been studying exactly these questions, both in the US domestic context and some international comparative questions, about basically protest and the power of protest, particularly to stop authoritarian backsliding. So I thought Erica Chenoweth would be a great guest for WITHpod.
So Erica, welcome to the program.
Erica Chenoweth: Thank you so much. So glad to be here.
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Chris Hayes: Did I get your academic work broadly right?
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah, so I would say that a lot of my work has focused, as you say, with collaborators, and solo work has focused on the question of how do people effectively struggle against authoritarianism or prevent democratic backsliding into authoritarianism using people power? And where has that worked? When it hasn’t worked, why not? And that’s been a kind of primary focus of my work. And on the question of thresholds, how many people does it take? I would say we don’t know exactly. What we know is what has happened in the past and other places in similar contexts, one might argue.
And at least from 1900 to 2006, I don’t know of any nonviolent mass movements for democracy that failed after achieving 3.5% active participation in a peak moment of that movement’s cycle. But there are some important caveats, as you would expect. The first is that we can’t be sure that we’re always observing the full range of both participants and especially sympathizers. So 3.5% sounds like a low number. It’s a massive number in absolute terms.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: Right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: And it usually suggests that there is a much broader range of support for the movement than just people actively participating in that movement. What does that mean? It means that this is at a peak of a movement that has been building over the years. Building, organizing, engaged in lots of other low-level tactics, protests, non-cooperation, everyday forms of resistance, staying relatively under the radar to build that level of capacity to where there is some big breakthrough moment that you see those really spectacular numbers of people participating.
So it’s a descriptive number, I would say, but not necessarily a prescriptive number for what we might expect.
Chris Hayes: Based on the data that you’ve compiled, this is something you and collaborators have done sort of the first time, right? Is one of the things you’ve done is actually just assemble a kind of, my understanding, a kind of database of different forms of nonviolent protest, civil resistance in different societies and when they were happening and how they were happening and how many people were participating, basically.
Erica Chenoweth: Exactly. So Maria Stephan and I first established what’s called the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes Database or the NAVCO database. And what it is, is it’s just looking at every case of a mass movement that was demanding the ouster of a dictator, usually an incumbent national leader, or the creation of a new country through secession, anti-colonial action, anti, you know, military occupation campaigns. So they’re maximalist or revolutionary campaigns, if you will. These are like everything from the Algerian Revolution on the sort of armed conflict side to the Polish Solidarity Movement, right? That was breaking through an authoritarian regime there in the ‘80s.
So basically, what we’re looking at there is we’re comparing, our initial study was to compare the effectiveness of the ones that were using people power techniques as their primary mode of resistance. So unarmed ordinary people engaging in civic action compared with armed insurgency. And our study that was published in 2011, Why Civil Resistance Works, just reports the fact that the unarmed resistance movements of the 20th century were much more likely to succeed than their armed counterparts, and that they were much more likely to result in democratic transitions, like way more likely to result in democratic transitions than armed insurgencies.
So what happened then is that after that book came out and there was opportunity to engage with activists on key questions about why this is happening and what their experience was, one activist at a workshop asked me, is there a critical mass of people that’s required to have nonviolent movements succeed? And I said, I don’t know, but there’s a guy named Mark Lichbach, another political scientist at Maryland, in his book about what he calls “The Rebel’s Dilemma” there is a mention of what he calls a 5% rule that probably you don’t get more than 5% of the population ever participating in an uprising, and also that’s probably all it takes. And he sort of casually mentions this and speculates that in his book, and so that’s probably a fair guess, but let me open our database and see if that’s true. And I saw that actually above the 3.5% figure, we hadn’t seen any failures at that point. And so that’s what then motivated a talk that I gave and then some writing that I’ve done later on the 3.5% rule.
Chris Hayes: I want to stay with this comparative stuff ‘cause I think it’s really interesting, just on the, you know, we’re talking about the Algerian independence movement, which was an armed movement for sure, versus solidarity, which was nonviolent. Why was it, in your understanding, in this comparative sense, that nonviolent movements, A, had more success, and B, led to democratic transitions?
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah, so in our book, “Why Civil Resistance Works,” Maria and I say that there are really four things that nonviolent movements do better than armed campaigns. The first is that they get way more people involved. So you’re just —
Chris Hayes: That makes sense.
Erica Chenoweth: Right. It’s just a much more inclusive set of methods of resistance that are accessible, familiar, visually obvious, of where you even go to participate, how you would get involved. It’s not a secret. It’s actually usually quite open. At a certain point, how people would participate. People can come in casually. They don’t have to commit to be fugitives for the rest of their lives. And there are all kinds of reasons why that then allows it to build the sort of base participation that is often quite confounding for armed movements.
The second piece is that because of that very large participation, which is usually inclusive of lots of people from all walks of life, that activates political, social, and economic networks that leverage into power, right? So the more people you have, the more networks you can tap into to start breaking apart the opponent’s pillars of support, whether that’s the economic and business community, whether that’s security forces, whether it’s state media, cultural and religious authorities, civil servants, et cetera, everybody’s related to somebody at some point in society. And so that starts to activate those networks.
And you’ll see in dramatic cases like the Serbian Otpor movement that helped to bring down Milosevic. It’s often described how at a key point in Belgrade when hundreds of thousands of Serbs went to demand that Milosevic leave office after a stolen election, the police did receive an order to fire on the demonstrators and ignored it. And a bunch of journalists and academics went in to interview them and find out what happened. And they would say things like, “I thought I saw my kids in the crowd.” Right?
So that’s what happens when you get very large and diverse numbers of people participating is that you can’t disconnect those relationships with the state, right? And that starts to break down those pillars of support.
So these contexts we’re giving, the Milosevic is interesting because it was ostensibly a democracy at that point, and he, you know, tried to steal an election. In the case of Poland, obviously, you’re dealing with a state that was under both sort of domestic communist party, one party rule, and also, you know, Soviet influence. In the case of South Africa, you have a, at first armed and then nonviolent movement to displace the apartheid system. None of those feel like perfect analogies to what we’re going through, obviously.
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: How do you think about what we’re experiencing now in the context of that kind of broad spectrum of different civil resistance movements you’ve studied?
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah. So you’re right to say that every case is different, and the United States has had its own experience with authoritarianism.
Chris Hayes: Absolutely, yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: Right? And so usually the best reference point for what a country is going through is its own past.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: So Jim Crow is the obvious example of where we had like sub-state, is what you’d call it, like sub-national levels of authoritarianism. And before that in different periods, we had authoritarianism for, that was much more nationwide, and we also had authoritarianism for different groups and things like that.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: So this is not like unfamiliar territory for the United States. What I would say is that the way I’d describe the moment we’re in is in a backsliding episode. And I think that there are a lot of other political scientists out there who study democracy and authoritarianism who agree with that.
There is a lot of debate about how acute the episode is and how far down it might go. I think the conventional understanding is that the likeliest scenario is that the US winds up in some kind of competitive authoritarianism system, which is what Steve Levitsky and Lucan Way would call it. And that just basically means that all the trappings of democracy are there. There’s still a constitution, there’s still elections. There are nominal, you know, freedoms on the books and things like that, but they’re sort of arbitrarily enforced and protected. And the opposition is so effectively bullied off the playing field, is their analogy, that basically, it’s very difficult for them to compete in elections. It’s very difficult for people to speak out and oppose what’s going on. And it just becomes more costly to be —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: — part of the opposition. And the costs start to degrade the willingness of people to actually compete. So that’s what people say is sort of the likeliest end point to where we might end up. You know, I don’t know what the likelihood is of getting there and actually that state consolidating, but I do know that in such situations, the problem is that the institutions themselves are often so compromised or sidelined that they can’t themselves provide the protection for democracy. And in their book that they wrote about eight years ago, Steph Haggard and Bob Kaufman argue that in cases of near misses, that is countries that were sliding and then reversed course, the reason they did so is because of strong civil society mobilization.
Right. So the fact that people basically were able to form some kind of united umbrella of civic institutions, grassroots groups, and they were able to push back in every domain of society against intrusions by authoritarian aspirants.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, so the idea that, I’ve read some of your work on this, which seems pretty crucial to me, even a mass movement, right, is not a majority of people in the streets. It’s some kind of vanguard, but a very large one, not like the sort of much smaller cadres of say an arm cells, which are for a whole bunch of reasons, very small.
So even a mass movement, hundreds of thousands of millions of people participating, it’s still a small percentage of the population, but it can be effective in A, representing larger mass opinion, and B, crucially, there are pillars of power that are not the regime —
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — that can be brought over. And talk a little bit about what those are, because again, I think everyone’s in a new, people have an old framework for America, and an incomplete one, right? I mean, all civil society was corrupted in the Jim Crow South, you know, all the stuff we’re talking about was present there in its own ways.
You know, universities weren’t like, “Sure, come have a, you know, black professor come lecture in an integrated classroom at Ole Miss.” Like, that wasn’t happening, right? So civil society was co-opted as part of the authoritarian regime down there that’s not totally alien to our history. And yet at the same time, I think we do take an open society for granted. We take civil society for granted so much so that we don’t think about what it is. And I do think it’s worth talking about what it is, because I think once you talk about what it is, it is so clear how much that is the target of what the first 100 days of the Trump administration has been.
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah, okay, good question. What is civil society? So, you know, a lot of times it’s the sort of institutions of learning, of culture, of, you know, the sort of associational life of a country. So it could be everything from nonprofit sector to, you know, religious institutions, to the sort of business community and networks of business, like chambers of commerce, professional associations, things like that.
So it’s really everything that isn’t the state as a formal organization, but it’s a way that people organize themselves in associational life to try to make the democracy thrive, right? And educational institutions are a part of that for sure. And I think the business community is really important in most cases, like where it decides to put its lot is often very decisive. I mean, you brought up South Africa.
What’s really interesting there is that unlike the case of Serbia, it was not going to be the case that Black activists organizing out of the townships, strikes, boycotts, stay-aways, marches, were going to be able to get the police to defect, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Erica Chenoweth: That was just not an option. It wasn’t —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: — part of the strategic landscape of possibility there. And so the methods reflected that. They weren’t about actively confronting security forces. They were about putting huge amounts of pressure on the business community. And so that was through the withholding of buying. You know, the anti-apartheid movement had multiple campaigns that were just fully economic non-cooperation. No buying, no working, and then building the types of networks that were necessary to sustain the community in periods of deprivation over the long term because of that.
And then at the same time, there was a huge international campaign of pressure, right? So that’s multinationals divesting and sanctions that were coming from other countries and international institutions. So in the end, it was the business community that went to the national party and said, “You have to elevate a reformer here to do business with the ANC. Like, we cannot, we have no choice. There’s no way out of this.” And that pressure is what resulted in the shift, the balance of power shift there.
So I think that’s very instructive because I think so many people have learned this thing, including autocrats, by the way, that you don’t want your security forces to defect. So those aren’t the only pillars, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Erica Chenoweth: There are lots of other pillars and the business and economic community are probably one of the most decisive.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, it’s interesting because when I think of civil society, I don’t think of the Chamber of Commerce. In my own way of thinking of it, it’s like the state and then there’s the business world and then civil society is kind of everything else from PTAs to churches to universities to museums to arts organizations to everything. But all those don’t have as much power as the business community. And so it’s probably important that, it’s important to think about the business community as probably the key, one of the key fulcrums of power after the state.
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think that they’re one of the pillars, right? So and there are other pillars. And in some societies, it may be that, you know, state media is the most important one.
Chris Hayes: Right, right.
Erica Chenoweth: Without being able to fray a little bit the loyalty of state media, it’s going to be very challenging no matter what the business community says. It’s too easy to intimidate and co-opt the business community in some places.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Erica Chenoweth: Because it’s so far down, right? So I think there’s lots of varieties of this.
And I think the key insight from a lot of scholars of civil resistance is just that there’s no such thing as a monolithic entity against whom a movement would resist. So there’s always going to be the need to replenish loyalties, the need to make sure that the people who have to go along in order for the autocrat to get their way were going to continue to go along. And that just, you know, creates infinite opportunities for them to second-guess whether that’s in their own personal interest to do that. And the reason why so many movements have won is because they’ve made a pretty good argument that it was not in their personal interest to continue, you know, whether it’s because they saw their kids in the crowd or because they realized there was no possibility for economic prosperity in this country that they wanted to live in and there was a path out of it, you know?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Erica Chenoweth: If they took a different direction. Those are the types of points of pressure that successful movements create. And so I think that gets a little bit back to your own kind of question at the outset, which is, does protest matter? Well, it really matters if it builds pressure and if it builds base and if the mass that’s assembled from that translates into real pressure.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: How much does mass opinion matter? This is something I’ve been really wrestling with. And I’ll give a quick gloss on this. Like, Orban has won a series of elections. Steve Levitsky, who you referenced before, I think has a great way of thinking about this competitive authoritarianism, which is like elections that are free but not fair.
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like, there’s no, they’re not stuffing ballot boxes. They’re not, you know, doing even what Erdogan did, which is arresting the opposition leader. But they’re not fair elections because of how the system’s been essentially rigged to make it very, very difficult to be the opposition.
But in the case of Orban, like, he’s popular to the best that we can measure public opinion there. Like, he has been a popular figure. Narendra Modi in India, to the best that we can measure public opinion is quite popular. Bukele in El Salvador, again, to the best, again, all this stuff is imprecise, but to the best we can measure is fairly popular. Trump is not popular to the best we can measure. And I think that matters, but I can’t tell if I’m just desperately clinging to some life raft of hope. It seems to me to matter, but I wonder as someone who studies this, whether you think it matters.
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah, so what’s interesting about our country and our country’s institutions is something that Steve Levitsky and Dan Ziblatt wrote in their more recent book, “The Tyranny of the Minority”.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: Which is that we have institutions that are minoritarian institutions. In other words —
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Explicitly.
Erica Chenoweth: Right, and so, you know, the implication of that is that, like, maybe popularity matters slightly less in this country than it would —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: — in another that didn’t have the same kind of setup already structurally in our institutions.
So I do think it matters, but I think there’s a lower floor here than there might be in a lot of other authoritarian regimes because of this, the sort of protection that incumbents get from the benefit of our minoritarian institutions.
Chris Hayes: That’s interesting. Meaning that, like, the way that I see this, which really manifests is the Republican Party’s gotten very comfortable at sort of at 40% approval.
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah, that’s it.
Chris Hayes: But 80% to 90% approval among Republicans, the biggest threat is primaries, and, you know, the Senate, right now, the way the Republican Party coalition works gives them a kind of advantage with that body. And so, altogether, it’s like, the sky’s not falling if it’s 40%, whereas if a Democrat’s at 40%, you get a lot more panic.
Erica Chenoweth: Exactly. Yep.
Chris Hayes: In terms of our institutions, and in terms of this moment, how strategic versus haphazard do the moves made on the other side from Trump look to you? Here’s my read on it. I’ve been unnerved by how methodically they have gone after civil society. Like, law firms, universities, parts of the business community that they can then cut tariff deals with. It really does seem like they do not believe in a free and open society, and they want to bring it under their control. And they’re taking the steps they can to use the levers of power they have to do so.
At the same time, they also just seem to be shooting themselves in the foot on a lot of stuff, particularly starting a trade war that might send the economy into recession. But given that you’ve sort of studied this kind of game theory back and forth between how regimes deal with civil resistance movements, what’s your read on what they’ve been doing?
Erica Chenoweth: My read is that there are a lot of assertions of executive power, right? So EOs —
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Record-setting assertions.
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah, they’re not laws, but they’re assertions of executive power. They’re assertions of a political project. They are kind of a roadmap for where the administration would like the country to be, right? And so if we take it at its word, then I think it’s very clear that the administration wants to bring civil society to cooperate with implementing Donald Trump’s vision for the country. And I think precisely because it’s been done through executive orders, the primary way that civil society is pushing back is through litigation, and primarily litigation that questions the authority —
Chris Hayes: Right. Right
Erica Chenoweth: — of the executive to make and do these things. So in a sense, that’s sort of appropriate, but I think that’s also why there’s an attempt to bring the legal profession on side.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Erica Chenoweth: And to have this army of lawyers at the ready to do all of the litigating, because I think his own experience, maybe as a businessman too, is simply that litigation is sort of how it happens. Everything is litigated.
Chris Hayes: How everything happens, yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: And you just have to win a handful of suits and all, right? And so it’s sort of not very costly to just do stuff all the time that is going to invite litigation because probably some of it you’ll win. And if you win a few really important things, then you really go far in expanding people’s understanding of what your authority is, right? So that is sort of like moving the Overton window.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: And the problem of the fact that a lot of the litigation won’t be sorted for a few years.
Chris Hayes: That’s the other thing, the time part of it, right?
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like, oh, yes, oh, well, and this is why all this fight over injunctions, but like, oh, you know what? You got to reconstitute USAID and start giving everyone their HIV medication in the global south three years from now.
Erica Chenoweth: Right, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Oh, okay.
Erica Chenoweth: This is like lawfare. It’s jawboning is like a word that some legal scholars use to describe just, and it’s something we’ve seen in other countries where people just get tied up and sort of distracted by like how much they have to defend what they’re doing and, you know, the First Amendment itself and things like that. And yet it’s so important in countries where this is happening that people do do that because they’re also asserting rights and they’re also asserting the rule of law by doing that.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that was going to be my question because I do think in certain, you know, in certain lefty circles, you’ll hear this phrase, the courts won’t save us. And there’s a little bit of this like, doomerism about the rule of law and about the courts and particularly, I think, understandably, a 6-3 Supreme Court in which, you know, there’s three members who have been appointed by him and two more who have not been appointed by him who are zealots ideologically and incredibly aligned with his vision in Alito and Thomas.
And so it’s interesting for me to hear you say, no, actually the civil litigation is part of, I guess what I’m hearing you say is, institutions using civil litigation, whether that’s Jenner & Block, the law firm, or universities like Harvard or others that are going to sue, are examples of people power in a different channel, essentially.
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah, and there are two really direct impacts that litigation can have. The first is that it enters into the public record documentation of the facts.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: And that kind of thing is just so important in a world in which that people are trying to figure out what is true. You know, having suit filed, like, establishes facts, and that’s really important.
The second way that it has a direct impact is that sometimes there are pretty immediate rulings that protect space for dissent and assembly, and, you know, things that are, like, so foundational in our constitutional order that, like, if they’re not going to hold, it’s better to know.
Chris Hayes: Right. Right.
Erica Chenoweth: As soon as possible. But actually, so far, seem to be pretty unanimously supported by the courts.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: And then the question is, okay, what do you do when the courses can’t enforce the law?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Erica Chenoweth: Because they don’t have that constitutional authority. And that is the question, right? If the administration starts to violate Supreme Court orders or ignore them, or ignore a few of them, more than one, and ones that are really important, then, you know, we are in a different, we’re a different category of country at that point. But again, in my opinion, on a sort of strategic level, better to know sooner than later.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, as I’m speaking to you now, and I don’t know what will be the case when people hear this. You know, they’re kind of ignoring the Supreme Court on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who’s the Maryland man who’s been wrongfully or in error deported to El Salvador and immediately imprisoned in a notorious prison there, CECOT, which we’ve all seen the pictures of. The court has ruled 9-0 that sort of upholding the notion of the district court judge, they have to facilitate his removal. A little bit of a question of what facilitate means, but I think it’s fair to say they’re not facilitating his removal, and in fact, you know, the president just said in an interview, I could get him back if I wanted to.
And part of the thing that’s a little weird to me, and I’d love to hear you talk about this. Trump is weirdly good at testing lines in a way that is crescendo-less, if that makes a sense. It’s sort of like, see if he can get away with it, maybe taking a step back, taking another few steps forward, testing. January 6th was the, there was no kind of plausible deniability, even that it was go down and protest peacefully. He’s not going to get up on the balcony and give some thundering, sort of obviously authoritarian/fascist speech about how he’s defying the court. If he does it, it’s going to be in exactly the way it’s happening now, which to me, it makes it harder to galvanize public opinion precisely because of that.
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah, I mean, one of the difficult things about backsliding in general is that there are no bright lines.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, right.
Erica Chenoweth: And so people often find out the world they’re in after the fact.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: And that’s what makes this wave of global autocratization, as they call it, much more like the one that was in the 1920s and ‘30s, than the one that was in like the 1960s and ‘70s. Because in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there were bright lines. There was a coup outright by the military declaring themselves —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Erica Chenoweth: — the caretaker government, or there was an armed revolution that won in Austin.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Erica Chenoweth: And so it was very obvious.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that’s a good point.
Erica Chenoweth: You were in one country, and then now you’re not. We’re in a different world where most of the autocrats or aspiring autocrats today are elected authoritarians, and that’s like it was in the ‘20s and ‘30s, where, you know, they’re actually put into power through elections generally, and then actually begin to dismantle the state and bring it under their control. And so that’s what we’ve seen in similar, or we’ve seen similar attempts around the world in the current wave of autocratization. You brought up the case of Hungary and attempts that we saw to do similar types of executive kind of auto coups or things along those lines in Brazil and in Poland. We’ve also seen civil society mobilization pushing back against that in several of these cases and doing so effectively, at least temporarily. But it is very disorienting for people because they expect one morning to wake up —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Erica Chenoweth: — and the sun is not out. It feels dark. It feels dangerous.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: It feels different. And actually, most of the time, most people’s lives just kind of keep going until all of a sudden, they realize that stuff is happening —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: — that is much less predictable. They can’t figure out why so-and-so isn’t showing up at work anymore, and they begin to be afraid. And the sense of fear and social silencing happens even before people know.
Chris Hayes: This to me, I mean, partly our cultural vocabulary on this tends to be either communist dictatorships or the Nazis.
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And, you know, there’s a reason that the notion of totalitarian is distinct from authoritarian. And like, we tend to think in totalitarian terms partly because of the Cold War, the popularity of 1984, because of Hannah Arendt’s work on this, that like I’ve been to Turkey under Erdogan. It is not a free society in the way that I would want to live in a free society, but I’ve been to art galleries and to universities. I’ve met with students. I’ve met with members of the opposition party. I went, like, I wasn’t being followed by a minder. It felt not that different from other places. So that almost tactile feel that people have this image in their head of like, yeah, one day to the next, you know, that that’s not there, I do think is like a huge part of the difficulty of communicating to me the scope of what their ambition is in terms of how much they want to undo the constitutional democratic order.
Erica Chenoweth: I think Masha Gessen has written some really useful things about this lately. Chris Hayes: Yeah, I agree.
Erica Chenoweth: Which is just about that, that sometimes it is a subjective thing. The people who are the most vulnerable can tell you about it the soonest.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: Right, so the people who are like the ones named in the executive orders —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: — as being out of line or, you know —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: — being criminal or whatever can tell you the soonest, whether it feels like an authoritarian —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: — context or not. And people ought to listen to them because in a democracy, nobody feels like they live in an authoritarian regime.
Chris Hayes: Right, right, that’s well said. Right, that’s really well said. You use this term non-cooperation, which is something that runs through your work and the work of other people who work on civil resistance. What does that mean? Unpack that concept a bit.
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah, so non-cooperation is part of the kind of tactical toolkit that Gandhi brought to bear on the Quit India campaign. And he had actual whole campaigns of what were called the non-cooperation campaigns. And what in his context it was about was not going along with unjust laws at all. So for example, the Salt March in, I think 1930, was an attempt to go and break the British monopoly on salt and the exports of salt from India without people living there being able to consume it themselves. So he went and broke the salt law and was arrested eventually and everything. And so the idea is just to withhold participation or withhold cooperation from things that benefit effectively the opponent.
The way people often talk about it now is more like direct economic non-cooperation. So methods like strikes or boycotts are forms of economic non-cooperation. And that just means that people won’t buy things. They won’t go to work.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: And these methods, the reason that they matter so much and whether campaigns end up winning or not often is precisely because they impose direct material costs, like almost immediately.
Chris Hayes: I got to say, like, I am kind of amazed by the Tesla takedown movement in this respect because it essentially, as far as I can tell, and I’ve talked to some people working on it, entirely grassroots. Like, there’s not really any professional organizers or NGOs and maybe some money’s come in, but ironically enough, it’s the opposite of what the White House and Musk have said about it. Like, it’s genuinely grassroots. And it has imposed incredibly striking material costs —
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — on the world’s richest man in a very short period of time through something that is not, nowhere near as dramatic an ask as going on strike, which is forfeiting your pay. It’s just like —
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — don’t buy this dude’s cars. And it’s been, I mean, in just dollar terms, when you look at the share value of Tesla, when you look at the sales, when you look at the material cost it has imposed, it is really striking how effective it’s been.
Erica Chenoweth: The term boycott itself comes from the tactics first target, a guy named Captain Boycott, who was an absentee British landlord in County Mayo, Ireland. And a bunch of women associated with the Irish Ladies Land League realized that if they refused to sell him products, they refused to launder his clothes, they refused to clean his house, they refused to make him comfortable in any possible way when he came to town to collect rents, he would not come back. And that’s what they did.
Chris Hayes: Wow.
Erica Chenoweth: And the term boycott caught on from there. He was so ostracized from the society, he never returned. So that is the sort of origin of the technique.
Chris Hayes: Wow. Like one really malevolent rich dude is literally the origin of the term.
Erica Chenoweth: That is correct.
Chris Hayes: So non-cooperation can, you know, when it imposes material costs, obviously can have a real effect. Litigation can have an effect. What is the actual power of people in the streets? Yeah. What is it? What is it doing? I mean, why does it work when it works?
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah. At so many levels it operates. So at the personal individual level, a lot of people first recognize their agency and the sort of collective power —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Erica Chenoweth: — of showing up and doing something for the first time when they attend a protest. And, you know, scholars have talked about the sort of educative potential —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Erica Chenoweth: — of just even one person showing at a protest and seeing that others care about the same issue, they’re committed to it, like a person isn’t alone, you know, about their concerns. And maybe it’s fun, maybe it’s interesting, maybe it’s novel, and you learn something from it. You learn new ways of articulating the demands that meet where you’re at.
And so there are actual findings from research in India by Christian Davenport that shows that when people participated in protests against untouchability, that they were much more likely to see untouchability and then discrimination toward Dalits later.
Chris Hayes: Interesting.
Erica Chenoweth: So in other words, they learned from being at the protests with their feet to look for it, and they can see it more often. So that’s just like on the very micro level.
Chris Hayes: That’s fascinating.
Erica Chenoweth: And then, you know, at the macro level, there’s all kinds of impacts. I mean, we have lots of political science scholarship that shows the impacts of participation in protests on electoral outcomes. It affected the 2010 midterm elections when the Tea Party kind of insurgents —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: — took over the GOP. That was like directly tied to how many people turned out at the 2009, April 15th Tea Party protests. There’s research showing a very similar dynamic on the other side with the 2018 blue wave being directly tied to the number of people turning out at women’s marches in 2017. And then, you know, you mentioned the summer of 2020 and the number of protests and people participating in protests that summer, unprecedented in this country. And a paper came out two weeks ago showing the direct impacts that that had on vote share in the 2020 presidential election.
So, you know, even the electoral impacts are massive. And in this country, you know, even having 1% or 2% of a vote share change in election, you know, calls the whole game, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: In competitive elections. So that matters there. And then, you know, it matters in articulating kind of new ideas, things that need to be on the agenda that people aren’t paying attention to. It provides opportunities for people to even have arguments and debates about what we should be doing.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: And forcing our elected officials to be part of that conversation and be accountable to their constituents between elections. So I just think there are so many documented reasons why protest is really important. It’s just that in the context of a backsliding episode, in the context of authoritarianism, protest alone, that is like street demos alone, in the absence of other things like non-cooperation and the ability to elicit defections and these sorts of things, and a plan for when repression escalates, the movement doesn’t get thrown off course. You know, those things are also really crucial capacities. And street demonstrations rarely can do the trick by themselves.
Chris Hayes: You just said a plan for when repression escalates. And let’s talk a little bit about that.
You know, there’s some work, Omar Wasow, who’s a scholar who also studies civil resistance in the context of the civil rights movement, has some great work about just how powerful, you know, backlash to police repression and violence towards civil rights protesters was. And he does some amazing work, kind of measuring this empirically. If you read the great book, “The Race Beat,” which is about sort of Northern New York Times, Northern newspaper reporters reporting on civil rights movement, you’re, you know, one of the things that comes through is just how incredibly focused King and civil rights leaders at that time were on media representations of the movement and eliciting sympathy from particularly Northern white audiences towards protesters because they were getting their brains bashed in.
They understood exactly what was happening.
A, how often does repression come, like physical repression, violence? How do movements deal with it? And how much does that backlash effect matter?
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah. So in the database that Maria and I collected, something like 88% of the campaigns experienced some form of violent direct state repression. The range of lethality varied. And an update to that database that I published a couple years ago with Christopher Shay, we found that just as sort of a point of fact that the average nonviolent campaign, so one that stuck to, you know, a people power path, suffered something like 22 times fewer casualties or fatalities than the average armed campaign. So like, there’s like a significant —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that makes sense.
Erica Chenoweth: Right? But not zero fatalities, right?
Chris Hayes: Right. Right.
Erica Chenoweth: So, but just way fewer. And part of it is exactly because of this backfire effect that there’s almost like a higher probability, not a guarantee, but a higher probability that people will see the violence toward unarmed people who are very disciplined as unjust and disproportionate and worthy of, you know, condemnation. And sometimes those moments are where you see the defections happen among security forces or important people in the business sector or whatever. And it’s also sometimes where more people start to pour into the movement to support it because it just is such a galvanizing thing for people to see.
I mean, kind of worldwide, there’s two things, I think, that are often like standard triggers for mass mobilization. One is a stolen election, a really stolen election.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Erica Chenoweth: One that kind of everybody agrees, including supporters of the tyrant, was probably stolen. The other is an episode of state violence. An episode of state violence, including, you know, police brutality or whatever, mobilizes, you know, in a much more predictable way than other triggers like, you know, price shocks or something like that.
Chris Hayes: That’s really interesting. So those two things are the kind of, that signal stands out in your data.
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: How good a job do you think we’re doing, American civil society, right now?
Erica Chenoweth: Well, I would say that the United States civil society has all the ingredients it needs. And Zoe Marks and I wrote a paper a couple of years ago just saying that if there was some kind of major backsliding episode, it would be very useful to think about what other countries have done in that context, and trying to think about bringing civil society together —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: — into some kind of united pro-democracy alliance or network of some kind so that there was some coordination. But that, you know, even in the recent past, even during the first trump administration, American civil society was quite awakened and there was a very high level of coordination, there’s a lot of real talent and experience in the country and I think the country has all the ingredients it needs.
One of my mentors is the reverend, Dr. James Lawson who passed away a couple of years ago, sort of a towering figure in the national campaign of the civil rights movement. And at some point, he said to me that when they were planning their actions during the early days of the civil rights movement, he said we had Gandhi’s autobiography and the bible. And you have training manuals, and you have all the research, you’ve got everything you need.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Erica Chenoweth: So that’s encouraging too, and I sort of often hear him in my head, the sort of implication that we have everything we need.
Chris Hayes: You said coordination, which strikes me as a really key word here, I mean, watching the development of first Trump issuing these just facially unconstitutional, issuing these just facially unconstitutional, like ludicrously authoritarian executive orders directed at a specific law firm orders directed at a specific law firm because of who they hired, right? Because of who they work for. It’s like squarely First Amendment protected freedom of association. And seeing it work and watching law firm after law firm kind of cut deals with him, and then seeing the people who wouldn’t, you know, roll over, and then watching some of those firms start to coordinate and amicus briefs. Watching some of those firms start to coordinate and amicus briefs. Watching the same thing with universities with Columbia and then watching Harvard’s response and then watching now a sort of mutual aid pack coming together. I mean, this coordination element seems to me just obviously essential. And it’s what’s key is that it happened at the level of these pillars where there’s already huge repositories of social capital and political power.
Do you agree?
Erica Chenoweth: I think that’s right. That’s absolutely right. And, you know, I think we have, you might call that grass tops coordination. And then there’s also grassroots coordination that’s really important too, because you know, the effects of these things are going to be felt where people live and work and are trying to be together as families. And so I think that, that, you know, it’ just sort of an interesting moment in American history to see, to see people actually really trying to ask these questions and find the right reference points, both for themselves, both for this country and with regard to comparisons elsewhere to figure out how best to respond to this moment. And you could make the argument that that the response is quite slow, but it still is the first hundred days of the administration.
Chris Hayes: Right. That’s true.
Erica Chenoweth: And I think actually that people have been trying to figure out exactly what kind of, and groups and institutions have been trying to figure out exactly what kind of situation they are in. And like you say, pulling together and learning from others is a really good way to get to that answer quickly and then find appropriate responses that will actually like amplify and magnify the power of everyone at once.
Chris Hayes: One of the things that comes through in a lot of the chronicles of the civil rights movement, which I think is, you know, the most successful American example of nonviolent non-cooperation civil resistance, probably one of the most successful in the history of the world, like I was saying, was this focus on the media and mass opinion, and particularly this kind of Archimedean leverage of the big network nightly news. Right? Like the dogs being unleashed to children or the water hoses, and then that gets broadcast, and it gets broadcast to 80 million people. And 80 million people all see the same images. And we just live in a totally different information environment now.
And that’s true in, it’s true in Hungary, it’s true in Turkey, in those places that are much further down the road, huge amounts of the information environment have just been co-opted and brought alongside to essentially reflect state media, even if they’re not state media. We’re watching tons of attempts to do that in real time from the right-wing influencers brought into the, you know, into the briefing room to attempts to threaten and bully media outlets. How much does that information environment matter? And how much does it connect to what, my understanding is that some of your work recently has been about the sort of, a little bit of the decline in the success of some of these movements in the last decade.
And you see this in Hungary and Turkey, where there really are popular movements. I mean, Turkey’s had huge protests that are having a harder and harder time dislodging authoritarians. How much is that, the changing information environment, part of the story here?
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah, no, it’s a huge part of the story. I mean, Satyagraha, one of the meanings is truth force.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: And, you know, Gandhi called his autobiography, “My Experiments with Truth.”
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: And Vaclav Havel talked about the irresistibility of the truth —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: — as something that, you know, could help bind together people who could, you know, wanted to be free in spirit because they were seeking the truth. And so, like, you know, the sort of authoritarian adaptation to that and our digital information kind of world is just to co-opt and effectively trash the information space, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Erica Chenoweth: So, dominating the information ecosystem, whether it’s through social media or traditional media, is part of the story, but so is just the enhanced surveillance capacity that our current environment provides. I mean, you know, on the one hand, people leave digital traces of their political opinions and activities all the time on social media and whatever, but on the other hand, they barely even need to because they’re carrying around their cell phones all the time and, you know —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Erica Chenoweth: — it’s sending information to various apps, you know. So, the difference between the sort of propaganda era of the 20th century authoritarian regimes and what we’re in now is that people actually just volunteer their information much more —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Erica Chenoweth: — than they did at that time. You could sort of just go under the radar and just not listen to the news, not participate in a lot of political talk or whatever now, but you weren’t really volunteering your movements and stuff, right? And so, that’s just a different beast altogether.
There are also governments that are very good at just manipulating the availability of the internet at all. So, like, in Myanmar after the coup, there was this big civil disobedience movement that rose up and that was gathering a lot of momentum early, and the government crackdowns were extremely intense and violent and very brutal towards some of the key kind of emergent leaders, shall we say?
And so, what they did was shut down the internet when they would do raids and things like that and then they would turn it on so that there was an announcement of what had happened to some of the people, and that was just terrible, awful, torturous stuff. And then they would shut it down again so that people would be terrorized, but not able to use the internet to coordinate a response.
Chris Hayes: Wow. That is devilish.
Erica Chenoweth: So, like, there’s a very sophisticated understanding about manipulating that information environment to demoralize and demobilize people and maybe a less capacity on the part of movements to adapt to that.
Now, it’s adaptable, but it requires a lot of awareness and strategic forethought and some capacities for building new media.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Erica Chenoweth: And new narratives and things like that that can break through. And so, it’s just, it’s tougher terrain. There’s no doubt about it.
Chris Hayes: I mean, I’m sort of impressed by how analytical and dispassionate you are about all this. You know, I try to be too. I mean, people are always like, “Oh, what’s your job like?” And I try to be to a certain extent just because I’ll get filled with, I’ll overrun my, you know, somatic system if I don’t. But, like, where are you right now about how we’re going to come out of this?
Erica Chenoweth: I always got to keep the faith, Chris, and take it a day at a time. And, you know, today you and I are talking on your show, and, you know, I had a pretty normal day at work, and, you know, it’s just one day at a time. That’s how I’m feeling.
Chris Hayes: All right, I think we can, I think we’ll take that, one day at a time.
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Erica Chenoweth is a political scientist at Harvard University. They study nonviolent civil resistance. Author of numerous books and studies, and it’s really a great pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much.
Erica Chenoweth: Likewise.
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Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Erica Chenoweth, really enjoyed that conversation, even if it was bracing. You can check out a new MSNBC premium episode of “Main Justice” that’s releasing this Friday, and in it, Mary and Andrew have an intimate conversation about the latest from the Trump administration’s Department of Justice in front of a live audience in Washington, D.C. And in case you missed it, “WITHpod” episodes are now on YouTube. You can watch by going to msnbc.com/withpod. You can email us, withpod@gmail.com. Get in touch with us using the hashtag #withpod on social media sites. Follow us on TikTok by searching for “WITHpod.” Follow me on threads. I’m Chrislhayes on threads and Blue Sky, and the site formerly known as Twitter.
New episodes come out every Tuesday. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC. Produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. Engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio.
You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to msnbc.com/whyisthishappening.