Chenoweth has backed off her previous conclusions in recent years, observing that nonviolent protest strategies have dramatically declined in effectiveness as governments have adjusted their tactics of repression and messaging. See eg https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/07/erica-chenoweth-demo...
One current example of messaging can be seen in the reflexive dismissal by the current US government and its propagandists of any popular opposition as 'paid protesters'. Large attendance at Democratic political rallies during the 2024 election was dismissed as being paid for by the campaign, any crowd protesting government policy is described as either a rioting or alleged to be financed by George Soros or some other boogeyman of the right. This has been going on for years; the right simply refuses to countenance the possibility of legitimate organic opposition, while also being chronically unable to provide any evidence for their claims.
Some still haven't gotten the memo and are now framing declining effectiveness as somehow the "other side's" fault. But how could it be? The people you actually need to convince are those in the middle, and it seems like many protests aren't even trying to reach them anymore.
I genuinely don't understand what a lot of modern protests are attempting to accomplish in terms of persuasion. I see their political goals, but why would going outside and complaining change any minds? Why would blocking traffic and ruining someone's day make them sympathetic to your cause? How is shaming people who aren't already supporters supposed to win them over?
It was always naive to think 3.5% of the population could force the other 96.5% to do whatever they want by making enough noise. It's even more naive to suggest it's everyone else's fault for not listening. And it's completely unhinged to imply that roughly 35% on the opposite political side are somehow bamboozling the remaining 60%.
If you're asking what they should do instead, I honestly couldn't tell you. But not having a better answer doesn't mean the current approach is working. Maybe try doing something that would actually make people like you? Pick up litter, volunteer visibly, something that builds goodwill instead of resentment. I don't know. But whatever this is, it isn't persuading anyone who wasn't already on board.
Everyone already knows dissent exists. Polls, social media, elections make that clear. The question is whether street protests add anything to that awareness, and whether the way they're conducted generates curiosity or just irritation. For a lot of people it's the latter, and waving that off doesn't make the problem disappear.
I don't know if it can be proven or whatever, but I do know it has changed me.
There have been many events where I thought "hey, why is everybody whining about X thing?". "things are fine the way they are". Until I read more about it and changed my mind.
If it was purely online, I wouldn't take it so seriously.
So whether it can proven empirically or not, I know it changed me.
> A crowd showing up doesn't automatically translate to minds changed or policy moved.
Strawman much?
> If the tactics alienate more people than they persuade, visibility alone isn't doing much.
What tactics? What evidence is there that people are being alienated by the peaceful protests, rather than by the murders and other violence and lying of administration officials?
From the top of my head I can think of news reporting both "few (tens of) thousands" vs "hundreds of thousands" (different news reporting different numbers/estimates/etc) in 2025 protests in Serbia/Belgrade, as well as those comparisons of Obama vs Trump inauguration news/photos.
Meanwhile to you as an individual there on the spot - both crowds of say 50K-100K and 1M+ look basically the same = "huge amounts of people in every direction that you look".
No, they really don’t. Have you never heard someone say that they have never met anyone who is X so it can’t be that popular? My own sister thought 2000 was going to be a landslide for Gore because she “hadn’t met anyone who was going to vote for Bush”.
This is not an accurate or thoughtful characterization of what you're responding to; it's not even in the same ballpark.
> is a convenient way to avoid asking whether the criticism has merit.
Pure projection.
The point is to demonstrate "we are not alone in this feeling", that's it...
Those TV channels were virtually always (and to this day still are) controlled by "the government".
Meanwhile other TV channels, if there even were any, and if enough people even had chance to watch them (because limited frequency/transmission allocations, artificial limits on cable distribution ..etc) - were and still are labeled as "funded by foreign (state) actors that are trying to destabilize our independance/values/etc".
And it's more of the same online.
---
This reminds me of an old website that's an absolute gold mine.
Knock yourself out https://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/minority_inf...
Motivating other people to take a stand -- I do not think this is true either. A fraction of the folks who would support the issue regardless may join the protest on the street. But that would be those who support the issue already.
Change comes from the ballot box. Enough people in the street might influence the next election (sometimes for the issue they are advocating; sometimes in the opposite direction). But 6+ months from the next election the effect I suspect is small. My 2c.
It seems more of a fetid cesspit. It promotes anger, division and controversy rather than shared ideas, cohesive action and positive social change. I think I need an example of the good social media can do for society and collective action.
No. I only said that spreading information that there is dissent does not require taking to the street.
Obviously this requires the protesters to make a bit of a judgment call. Do I think the typical person leans so strongly towards my side that they'll take it when I force the issue, even if I annoy them? Sometimes the answer is no, and I've definitely seen people do counterproductive protests that way. But sometimes the answer is yes.
That's not the intent.
Protests are one way We the People remind the government who they're supposed to be representing. Who has the real power in a democracy.
Edit: https://www.yourdictionary.com/rent-a-crowd (Rent a crowd/mob is often used to claim the protest is attended by people paid to be there, and was first coined in the mid 20th century, but apparently the actual accusation (though) is as old as demonstrations)
Did you read that link? It’s hardly damming.
“Through a fund, the foundation issued a $3 million grant to the Indivisible Organization that was good for two years "to support the grantee's social welfare activities.” The grants were not specifically for the No Kings protests, the foundation said.”
If 7 million people protested, that 3 million over 2 years sure went a long way. They work for pennies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2025_No_Kings_protests
Thank you for articulating the accusation, giving me the opportunity to respond, but try to take your own advice and read what's actually being said.
The thesis is once mass mobilization of non-violent protesters occurs, it reduces the threshold for elite defection because there are multiple different veto groups within a selectorate, and some may choose to defect because they either view the incumbent as unstable or they disagree with the incumbent's policies.
I also recommend reading Chennowith's discussion paper clearing up the "3.5%" argument [0]. A lot of mass reporting was just sloppy.
Tl;Dr - "The 3.5% figure is a descriptive statistic based on a sample of historical movements. It is not necessarily a prescriptive one, and no one can see the future. Trying to achieve the threshold without building a broader public constituency does not guarantee success in the future"
[0] - https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/2024-05/Eric...
2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring
2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity
2018: https://www.occrp.org/en/project/a-murdered-journalists-last...
2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aqBls-qpRM
2026: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/01/iran-authorit... -- outcome TBD ?
The Slovakian incident worked, because Slovakia has a working representative democracy.
In a deeply flawed, or downright nondemocratic system, like Serbia or Georgia, it's very hard to drive change through nonviolent protests.
It also bears mentioning, that the key issue with protesting, is that it, legally speaking does nothing. Legal representatives are under no obligation to do anything in response to protests.
The Arab Spring turned into The Arab Winter in a wave of repression. Some good has come out of it but the link you have provided says this:
Although the long-term effects of the Arab Spring have yet to be shown, its short-term consequences varied greatly across the Middle East and North Africa. In Tunisia and Egypt, where the existing regimes were ousted and replaced through a process of free and fair election, the revolutions were considered short-term successes.[337][338][339] This interpretation is, however, problematized by the subsequent political turmoil that emerged in Egypt and the autocracy that has formed in Tunisia. Elsewhere, most notably in the monarchies of Morocco and the Persian Gulf, existing regimes co-opted the Arab Spring movement and managed to maintain order without significant social change.[340][341] In other countries, particularly Syria and Libya, the apparent result of Arab Spring protests was a complete societal collapse.[337]
I am just pointing out that nonviolent protests usually get it done, especially after crackdowns.
There’s a big difference between funding organizing groups like Indivisible (which, yes, foundations linked to Soros do - although I suspect not at the magnitude you’re imagining), and directly paying protestors (which doesn’t happen to any notable degree)
Want to understand this? Go to a local Indivisible or Democratic Party meetup and you will see the normal people with your own eyes. Go to a big protest like ‘No Kings’, or a rally during campaign season and you’ll be surrounded by ‘normal people’.
I’d personally be fine with restrictions on where funding for political organizations comes from (although I’m not sure how you make that compatible with the 1st amendment) - but what you’re saying is ridiculous, and it’s a worrying symptom of our current political climate that people can be so out of touch as to believe it.
On top of being false, that's kind of a non-statement. You probably don't see average people around you protesting because if the average person was engaging in this then that'd imply close to half the country protesting. But they're definitely out there even if a small minority.
The average person doesn't have the time to protest (because how do you protest when you need to go to a job to put food on the table and keep health insurance). Or they're doing fine with the current state of affairs even if they don't like what's happening. Protesting is naturally always going to be a fringe thing and you better hope for everyone's sake that it stays that way or else you end up with a coup or revolution like in less developed nations.
both sides have paid activists because it's a full time job. but those paid activists aren't the crowd.
Instead what I found were a bunch of kind mostly elderly people sharing news that I had read online a week before, and some folks gathering signatures for positions running for office.
You are doing a huge disservice to yourself by staying indoors and making assumptions about stuff that you aren't investigating in person.
Of course organizing takes time and money. The amount can vary.
This is like complaining about water being wet.
If you're just going and printing flyers and putting them on poles that still takes time and money.
So if a single dollar goes to a cause, it’s funded?
You can apply this to protests of all political causes.
The major No Kings events were in June and October last year. January is not a great time for outdoors protests in much of the country. Does it somehow make the protests inauthentic if focus has now shifted towards ICE?
I guess I'm not a normal person then. I didn't realize that I was a hyper activist because I drew on some cardboard and that my group of friends was being financed. I better go demand for my Soros-check from them.
Perhaps the protests were less about Twitter than you may be assuming, and more about something else that happened much later than the Twitter acquisition?
That was the point.
If the goal was to "trigger" him I don't think the protests succeed in any meaningful way. Innocent Tesla owner where the primary victims followed by share holder, (damaged) property owners and people affected by insurances premiums due to the vandalism.
And then of course there are still a handful of people in jail for crimes committed in relation to the Tesla protest. Arguably not victims but still a negative effects that clear outweigh any perceived positive effect it all had on Musk.
He left his position as planned from the beginning, the protest had zero effect on what he did trough DOGE.
The negative effects were on all the people fired, thus why Virginia swung massively toward the Democrats in the 2025 elections.
You said the protest lead to him no longer be part of the administration which is factually incorrect. His position was limited from the start and he left as planned.
Elon Musk's role in DOGE was limited because he was designated as a "special government employee", a federal employment category defined under 18 U.S.C. § 202 that restricts service to no more than 130 days in any 365-day period.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/202
This was publicly know back in February. The exact date wasn't know since it was not public when he because such a "special government employee". It turns out they started counting days straight from the inauguration date or rather the Executive Order 14158 (Creation of DOGE) date which was on the same day.
It is totally accurate to say he left as planned and thus also totally accurate to say that one of the statements above claiming the protest "won" by pushing him out of the administration is factually incorrect.
Even the DOGE was opaque and its status unclear. Having him with a black eye and chainsaw organising anything was madness. Even Trump eventually saw it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Effic...
I wasn't paid anything. I rode the bus downtown, thinking it'd be easier than driving / parking, which wasn't quite the brilliant strategy I thought it'd be. I marched down the street with literally tens of thousands of people.
There were definitely some people there who seemed to be the activist type (who find something to protest every weekend), but it was mostly normal people. I saw at least three people I know. I saw regular-looking men in cargo shorts and women in straw hats. It was during the football game, and I saw many people wearing team colors and one sign that said, "It's gotten so bad I'm missing football to protest." One guy was wearing a "Jesus is King" t-shirt. A woman was carrying a "Hicks Against Facism" sign. Another guy was carrying his vinyl copy of Rush's "A Farewell to Kings" as a protest sign.
So, not paid protesters carrying boilerplate signs supplied to them by some organization. Just regular people who are not OK with what's going on.
I see them regularly just driving around.
And then they lost and the odds of those people being paid actors seems less ridiculous.
Essentially the statement is 3.5% succeed unless there's meaningful opposition.
It did (ie. Revolutionary thresholds) until 10/7 and Hezbollah's shelling of the north changed the calculus.
There was increased pressure from senior IDF careerists, industry titans, and intelligence alums (oftentimes the 3 were the same) against the government's judicial reforms which was about to reach the tip over point (eg. threats of capital outflows, leaking dirty laundry, corporate shutdowns/wildcat strikes, and resignations of extremely senior careerists), but then 10/7 happened along with the mass evacuation of the North, which led everyone to set aside their differences.
Israel is a small country (same population and size as the Bay Area) so everyone either knows someone or was personally affected by the southern massacre or the northern evacuation.
It's because I called 10/7 a massacre, which it was.
> the judicial reform did not pass as proposed.
Yep. Exactly.
Also, funny you bring up Evangelicals. I've had this same sort of argument brought up when they do some awful shit and are called out for it. "But we don't all believe/do this!" It's implicit in the very core of your religion/ideology. If you truly didn't agree with what they did, you wouldn't be one. Evangelicalism is a plague and should be treated like one. Evangelicals should be sent to quarantine centers and deprogrammed (if possible).
Others here note it's really "3.5% if there's no one seriously opposing their objectives" but in my opinion that's a meaningless rule. Of course in those cases non-conflict resolves the issue.
Those 3.5% are encouraging for all social movements, who suffer (and/or have friends/family who suffer) from some issue in the system, have perhaps developed a good plan out of it, but think they are too small to make a difference.
From that perspective it becomes clearer what a 3.5% rule is getting at - 3.5% of the population mobilised is enough to overwhelm any ruling class that isn't on top of its game, especially if mass shooting of people is still of the table or if the 3.5% includes a lot of people from the upper classes. It isn't about whether an issue is supported by 3.5% of the population or more, it is a question of whether that fraction of society is actively trying to topple a government system.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Even then there's like a fine balancing line where some level of state violence is "acceptable", as in it crushes the spirits of those out on the streets before they manage to organise enough, and yet doesn't get nearly enough attention or wide-enough condemnation (both within and outside of the country). This buys the regime some time even when they're nowhere near 50% of support, and then the very next elections become even more of a sham than they were before. The regime still magically gets as close to 50% of the votes as possible, while still winning with a wide-enough margin that you have no legal recourse to challenge the elections, which only crushes people's spirits even further.
For post-2019 examples, see Georgia (ruling party won with 53.93% in 2024) and Serbia (has yet to have an election, despite largest protests in its history calling for early elections for the past 15 months).
My point being, to overthrow such a regime via a ballot box, 55% against just doesn't cut it. At the very least you need 70%.
3.5% might work sometimes. At other times, it achieves as much as pissing into the wind.
It is privileging 200 of history verses several thousand years of human history.
Not only progress, sadly, but almost any change. Those who care are few and far between, and this is why they wield outsized power.
Governments apparently learned how to assimilate protests and burn people down without any apparent violence, but still destroying their causes.
Some previous discussion:
An assassination is also an acknowledgement of the magical power of one individual, which I think is counter to the goals of most revolutionaries, who want to instead demonstrate to the general population that power is within the capital p People, and communities, and organized resistance.
Assassination is saying "actually this one person is so powerful that it'll solve a lot of our problems if they're dead." Which I don't believe can be true since to be true that would mean that one person would basically have to be a wizard with supernatural powers. In reality anybody with a lot of political power derives that power from people's willingness to comply with that person's wishes. A system like a government may have made people used to the idea of obeying authority, but the reality remains such that if everyone suddenly decided to stop holding up the system of government, the power vanishes into thin air.
Thus a despot's power is able to be nullified by anyone able to convince a lot of people to refuse to implement the despot's desires.
[1] https://voicesofvr.com/1182-recreating-philosophical-moral-d...
His argument was not really a neoliberal "just protest bro trust me bro fascists are so scared of protests" one and more an argument against armed uprising by leftists, thinking they can establish communism or anarchism with this method. He pointed to other attempts to do so in history and how even when these attempts succeeded in overthrowing the establishment, it inevitably established a system of rule predicated on violence. A famous example can be the successful communist revolution in what became the PRC, that degraded into the cultural revolution and police state, and resulted in a bourgeoisie state with spicy capitalism.
Andreas Malm also took a relatively anti violent perspective in "How to Blow Up a Pipeline," though he analyzed the usefulness of a small subset of incredibly violent people functioning as a contrast to the vast majority of dissidents who then look much more reasonable. He also spent a lot of time arguing for the importance of having a mind for marketing - no, Extinction Rebellion, you have not done praxis if the most visible outcome of your Action is a photo of a white protestor in a suit kicking a black blue collar worker off a ladder.
I can't really argue with McHenry's chops as a praxis anarchist, he after all does more in a week than I've done in my life, feeding people constantly and helping to organize the global Food Not Bombs movement and all its spinoffs. I also agree logically with his arguments that bringing violence to dissident movements invited hyper violent state suppression applied as a blanket against all dissidents, violent or otherwise, so basically nonconsensually subjects everyone to violence. That said, in his own words, it took two decades of being super duper polite to the SFPD before they finally, and only occasionally, backed his group up by neglecting to enforce orders to disperse their food giveaways. Other than that, there's been no establishment of any Food Not Bombs autonomous zones, no reliable farm to mouths food supply chain, no syndicalizion, no significant political organization. I doubt many here have even heard of Food Not Bombs despite them being founded in the heart of Silicon Valley. Their immediate mutual aid effects: undeniably some of the most widespread in the world in the last few decades. Their long term impact? More doubtful, imo.
See also: no communist revolution with any teeth in the last 70 years. The only anarchist breakaway with any success is the Kurds who aren't really even anarchists or communists (but are very interesting to study), and in the last two decades plenty of successful examples of utterly suppressed mostly nonviolent resistance: Hong Kong, the PRC bank run protests and COVID protests, all Palestinian resistance bombed to oblivion, Venezuela's failed resistance to Maduro's election fraud. An exception I'm aware of is the student uprising in Taiwan known as the "Sunflower Protests" which completely halted the government's attempt to sell itself to the PRC. But one decade later a similar protest occured which failed to prevent the KMT from seizing a ton of new extra legislative power so, win some, lose some.
I feel like we can always learn from the past, but the methods of States to persist themselves is evolving, and so dissidents need to evolve as well. I emailed Cory Doctorow about this because his "Walkaway" novel illustrated a method to me that seems the most viable in the modern era: basically techno-anarchism, leveraging technology to establish post scarcity zones where "the right to well-being, well-being for all" is established and State incursions are repelled by highly targeted appeals to the family and friends of gestapo agents found through facial recognition. It's a good bit of speculative fiction with other fun technology, strong recommend to nerds. Anyway, he suggested the same general advice: solidarity first, then methodology.
> Broadly: find groups that are bound together by solidarity and join them. Then, if you think they're not doing effective things, work with those people, in solidarity, to do more effective things. Mutual aid groups. DSA. Anti-ICE patrols. Unions. Solidarity first, tactics second. Solidarity will get you through times of bad tactics better than good tactics will get you through times of no solidarity. Your spectacular lone actions will get you nowhere if no one is willing to post your bail or de-arrest you at a protest. Getting from small groups that are bonded by solidarity to a profound change in the American system is hard, and a lot of work, which is why we need to start now.
So lacking any other ideas, I continue to do this, but I'm always keeping my eyes peeled for new strategies. As much as I'm interested in highly impactful things individuals can do (like making fake Lockheed Martin verified Twitter accounts and posting things that wipe billions off their stock value), it's seeming more and more to me that the most valuable skill any individual can acquire in service of resisting oppressive governments is rhetoric (which includes e.g. marketing ability).
I'm stating, to quote you "I disagree with the article's claims as poorly founded happy talk".
Additionally I'm stating that it really vastly depends on which 3.5% of the population you're talking about, as to weather they have the ability to make major changes to world wide economic policy.
To me, this seems to contribute much more substance than "pull your head out of your rear"...