How Civil Resistance Can Save Democracy with Erica Chenoweth

0:00Democracies do survive when people who are in positions of power have to account for gross violations of the law. And in fact, one of the things that is true about democracies is that they only really survive when no one is above the law, right? If there's a particular political class, there are sort of dual legal systems where there's one group of people that constantly benefit and one group of people who are constantly disadvantaged in the way that the law treats them. It's very hard to argue that is a system that is going to persist as a qualitative democracy. Good morning. I'm Guy Kawasaki.

0:38This is the Remarkable People Podcast. And as you know, we scour the world looking for remarkable people to inform and inspire you. And we found another great, remarkable person. Their name is Erica Chenoweth. And I have been pursuing Erica for a long time because I read all these references with their names. Erica is a political scientist and a leading expert in civil resistance and non-violent movements. Erica is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and co-directs the Nonviolent Action Lab. Erica's groundbreaking research shows that nonviolent campaigns are more effective, more morally compelling, and strategically superior.

1:31Welcome to Remarkable People, Erica. Thank you so much, Guy. Delighted to be here. Well, you know, through the genius of Madison's scheduling for this interview, it's now a few days after the No Kings Saturday. So I suppose I'm the first person to ask you this question. Just like no one's ever asked me what it was like to work for Steve Jobs. But anyways, give us your analysis of the No Kings Day, the number of people, the activity, the reaction, all that kind of stuff. What is Erica's analysis of No Kings Day? Thank you. Great question. I will say my team at the CrowdCounting Consortium is still tallying our own count of how many people turned out on October 18th around the country.

2:22But what seems clear is that there were thousands of locations where people gathered to engage in this coordinated single day of protest against Donald Trump's administration and its many policies. And that the crowds were massive in most major cities and extremely impressive even in very small towns all around the country. So we are talking about a massive day of protests around the country, possibly one of the largest ever in single day U.S. history, incredibly geographically diffused, perhaps record breaking ways as well. And what I really want to point out is two notable aspects of that, because a single day of protest, even with very large numbers on its own, can be an impressive show of people's opinions about something.

3:17But what's really distinctive about what we're seeing today in the United States is that October 18th came on the heels of multiple prior days of mass mobilization associated with the same movement and a growing volume and number of protests happening since Trump was inaugurated. So far more protests than had taken place by this point in the first Trump administration with far more people, according to our own tallies. The second thing that's really notable is that this movement has been overwhelmingly nonviolent. And by that, what I mean is that people are taking very seriously and preparing their communities to engage in what many people in my field refer to as nonviolent discipline, which means even when armed counter protesters come or when the government decides to say that it's a group of criminals and violent people who hate the country and whatever, People are nevertheless turning out using peaceful methods of assembly that are lawful, that are protected under the First Amendment.

4:23And they were reflecting very positive messages in many respects, almost a joyful kind of spirit of seeing others gathering and knowing that they weren't alone in standing up for the basic values and principles that they want the country to uphold. I just think that if you think about it, having that many millions of people doing something at the same time and for it to be overwhelmingly nonviolent is itself a remarkable fact. Like that doesn't happen too often in world history where you see millions upon millions of people across an enormous expanse of land engaging in a coordinated action nonviolently.

5:03Like we just don't see that much. And I think it's worth noting that is what we saw on Saturday. Now, if it had gone violent, what would be the ramifications? This is like Kent State 4 without the violence. What is the meaning of violence? Yeah, I think that the field that I'm in really tries to study the observable aspects of this and how the politics changes when people use physical violence toward other people, whether they're bystanders, protesters, police, or other security forces, or whether there's even just violent rhetoric, like dehumanizing rhetoric and things along those lines, or more radical ideologies, which is not violent, but can sometimes cue in people's minds a more threatening political movement.

5:54And then there's also cases where we can see instances of property damage, sometimes deliberate and very controlled and other times looking more chaotic. And all of those different forms of tactics and sort of contentious politics have different effects. But I think the main thing to know is that once people who are engaged in oppositional protest of any kind are seen to engage in violence of sort of across a wide range, direct violence against people or property is generally the way that this is measured in my field, it becomes much more difficult to control the trajectory of the movement. Among other things, it often alienates people within the movement.

6:37So the movement fractures along the lines of disagreement around tactics. It often repels people who are drawn to the movement but are not willing to engage in that type of behavior and don't want to be associated with a movement that does. it repels potential third parties that might be persuaded ultimately by the movement, but become very close-minded to it as soon as they witness that type of activity. And then there's also the difficult issue that elite behavior often changes quite dramatically toward a movement if it engages in violent activity. So that means that most kind of even political opposition leaders, leaders, business leaders, even faith leaders and things like that become much more tepid in their support or even shun the movement entirely.

7:24And that cuts off possibilities of influence around the politics as well. So there's just a lot of reasons why engaging in violence can be counterproductive for the type of political power that movements are trying to build. And it becomes more difficult for movements to control that or recover from it. The other possibility is that violence is directed at the movement and the movement is maintaining nonviolent discipline. And so that is a situation and a circumstance that many nonviolent movements, especially those that are actually getting traction and becoming more powerful, eventually encounter.

7:58And in those circumstances, there has been in the past sort of generalized pattern around the world and in the United States, that when movements maintain nonviolent discipline, when they are faced with repression, violent repression, that the movements are more likely to elicit sympathy and support. If they are met with repression and respond with kind of disarray or chaos or whatever, they are less likely to elicit sympathy and support. So that's just a general pattern. There's some caveats, of course, but that's a process we call backfire, which is that state repression against unarmed protesters tends to backfire for the state, whereas state repression toward armed or those who are perceived to be using violence as they're protesting tends not to backfire.

8:47I would make the case that if you think about it, there is no single leader or there's no centralized controlling organization. So basically, I don't know, 7 million or 10 million or whatever the number is, people came to their own conclusion kind of separately and independently. It wasn't Like there was some charismatic revolutionary leader telling everybody to behave or lay down their arms or anything like that, right? I do think that there has been a growing infrastructure supporting and preparing communities to engage in mass mobilization and doing so in part by training them about the theory of nonviolent action, methods for de-escalation, the importance of nonviolent discipline, and certainly those who organized, at least the nationwide, nationwide, organizers around No Kings have very clearly channeled that this is a peaceful protest and that people should come and protest if they want to.

9:47And here are the parameters for what we expect people to do. And they were very clear, for example, on their website and in their public communications not to bring weapons and to walk away from provocateurs and basically don't take the bait, don't give the administration the headline they want. And again, the fact that that happened, that the millions of people were able to coordinate, whether they were directly engaged in the sort of local chapters of these organizations or not, is a remarkable feat in and of itself. Wow. I've seen Super Bowl celebrations that are more violent than that. Let's back up, And I would like you to explain why God is so interested in having you.

10:33And it's this cross you're going to have to bear, Erica. I hate to tell you, but you've got to explain your findings about the 3.5%. I don't know if we should call it a rule because that implies that it is prescriptive, not descriptive. But like, whatever you want to call it, talk about the 3.5 % Erica Chenoweth phenomenon. Sure. Okay. So to do that, let me back up and first talk about my collaboration with Maria Stephan, which you mentioned at the top when you talked about our book, Why Silver Resistance Works. Maria and I teamed up to do this study where what we did is we gathered data on 323 mass movements from 1900 to 2006.

11:20The 2006 end date is simply because that's when we paired up and started collecting the data. It's an arbitrary cutoff date. That's the reason why it's that time period. And what we did is we looked at every country in the world in that time period and looked at every mass movement that had mobilized at least a thousand observed participants and over a duration of time demanding the removal of the incumbent national leader. So usually the overthrow of a dictator or territorial independence through anti-colonial action, self-determination or an independence movement of some kind. And the reason we looked at those campaigns is because we were going to try to compare the effectiveness of people power, unarmed resistance movements with armed insurgencies.

12:05And to do a comparison that was sort of a hard test of whether nonviolent resistance was really up to the task, we decided to limit the sample to those very challenging kind of revolutionary cases, right? Cases like Poland during the Solidarity Movement and East Timor and the East Timorese Liberation Movement and the Burmese Pro-Democracy Movement compared to the Algerian Revolution or the Chinese Revolution, etc. And what Maria and I did was we basically compared side by side the outcomes of these movements that relied primarily on unarmed people power, nonviolent resistance and armed insurrection.

12:45And we found that the nonviolent campaigns were more likely to have succeeded than the armed campaigns. Part of the reason for that was related to our observation that the nonviolent campaigns just got bigger, meaning they got more people in them for a variety of reasons than the average armed campaign, and that that then supplied the movement with all kinds of different political, economic, social, and cultural levers that weren't available to the armed campaigns. And that led to defections within the elites that were upholding the regime, et cetera. So after we published that book, Maria and I, sometimes together and sometimes separately, were talking a lot with activists about the findings.

13:25And in one case, I was at a workshop and an activist asked me, if participation is important, is there a particular critical threshold that is kind of guaranteed to lead to success? And I said, I actually don't know, but let me open up the data set literally right now while we're talking and I'll look. And I opened my computer and looked at the data and said, well, I'll be. There's a pretty low kind of threshold. It's three and a half percent that when one of these campaigns at its peak participation rate has mobilized that many people, it looks like none of the campaigns above that threshold failed.

13:59And what's really important to know about that is exactly what you said, Guy, which is that it's a descriptive historical observation. It's something that was particular to that sample of data over that time period. And that means that it's neither predictive of what happens outside that sample, and neither is it prescriptive about, say, what movements might aim for as a magic number or a guarantee of success going forward. So how can these things all be true at the same time? They can be true because there is learning that goes on, right, on the autocrats' side. And they learn that, you know, one of the things movements will do is to assemble very large numbers of people and try to generate mass and generate the political pressure that comes from that.

14:46And that if they wait that out, they might, in fact, be able to withstand very large but brief challenges. The other thing is that the reason why those movements tended to succeed is not just because they got those numbers. It's because they'd maybe done years of organizing, planning, strategic leadership development, building the capacity to really shift the sort of political power away from the autocrat. and ultimately they were able to get defections from the security forces, from the inner entourage, from the civil service, from labor, from lots of different pillars. That is what led to their success, not just that they put a lot of feet in the streets and that automatically resulted in something changing.

15:29And then it's not prescriptive in the sense that like if movements are aiming for that number, we don't actually know how that changes the threshold. Because in the historical observation, what we saw was movements that didn't know there was a threshold to cross. They just happened to hit it and succeeded after that. Whereas if movements are informed about it and deliberately aim for it without doing the other things that movements need to do to build power, we just don't know about the impacts of it going forward. So this is all to say, the thing to know about the three and a half percent rule is that it's a historical observation that speaks to the fact that it's rarely the case that a mass movement for democracy needs to actually mobilize like huge, huge, huge numbers of people.

16:16So it's within reach for most countries, most of the time, to mobilize a movement that can create significant political, social, economic, and cultural leverage with a surprisingly, you know, small proportion of the population. So that's what I would take from it, but I wouldn't necessarily use it as a guide poster, a sort of silver bullet or magic number going forward.

16:50Here's something remarkable and not in a good way. Disengaged employees cost U.S. companies almost$1.9 trillion a year. That's a lot of zeros. Why? Because when teams lack the right skills, productivity declines, turnover increases, and strategies stagnate. But it doesn't have to be that way. At Project Management Institute, home of the PMP and globally recognized certifications, your people can learn to collaborate, deliver on time, and actually get things done. The cost of not upskilling? Way higher than the investment. Project Management Institute. Find the answers at pmi.org. Just for clarity's sake, I have two simple questions.

17:36So when you say 3.5%, 3.5 % of what? Is it the total population, the adult population, the voting population? The total population. Yeah, it's like basically based on whatever the census or the UN population statistic was for that country in that peak year. And what qualifies you for being in the three and a half percent? What kind of action do you have to take? Yeah, so that's another really important point, Guy, because in our study, we were looking at peak mobilization, which usually meant observed participation in a mass street demonstration throughout the country. So like a single day demonstration that was nationwide would be an example of that.

18:17But that, of course, doesn't speak to how many people might be sympathetic to a movement, right? So it may be that in places where three and a half percent of the population historically were participating actively in kind of frontline protest, like 70 percent of the population was on side. We can't observe that. So we just don't know like what the sort of latent level of popular support for the movements were, whether there's a lot of variation across the cases and that figure, et cetera. us. So now let's say I'm the sitting guy or gal that the three and a half percent or more are protesting.

18:54So I'm watching this on Fox and I'm saying, all right, so three and a half percent of 350 million, I see 11 million people. That probably means 339 million people still love me. Why should I step aside? I mean, it's like it's only three and a half percent. The rest of the people love me. Obviously, I'm being a little bit simplistic. Why would it bother me so much that I would step aside for a mere three and a half percent? Yeah, I think you're onto something, which is to say if somebody feels like it's genuinely a tiny minority in opposition to them, they feel like they can absorb that challenge.

19:30The issue is that opposition is usually a way bigger figure than the number of people actively participating in protests, right? So protest Protest participation is a signal of a pretty high commitment and resolve to speak one's mind in opposition. It's even more of a powerful signal if opposition is dangerous. That is to say that people will pay a price for it, whether that's a political price or whether they're put in prison or facing violent repression or something like that. The more costly protest becomes, the more powerful the signal it is when people participate. All of those signals are information about the proportion of the population that might actually be opposing the government.

20:14The other thing that comes into play is that, you know, three and a half percent sounds like a small number usually speaks to a much larger body of discontent in a country. and you can look at things like approval ratings or other things like that as examples of the moving target there. But the biggest threat comes when the autocrats can no longer rely on their pillars of support because they start to become affected by the obvious growing discontent and wonder if it's in their own interest to continue supporting, or maybe they should either oppose or just stand out of the way and watch as things unfold.

20:55What a lot of people who look at how these movements unfold are paying attention to is what we call defections, but really just means shifts in behavior by people who are in influential positions. For example, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has been, I'd say, largely on the sidelines, last week filed suit against the Trump administration for its H-1B policy. And what was interesting about the suit wasn't just that it said this will have material harms on all kinds of industries, small business, large corporations, you name it. But also that suit that they filed said that the president doesn't have the right to do this, that it's actually Congress that makes the laws around this.

21:43And congressional oversight and review is required for a change like this. So they were actually saying, this is unconstitutional. And even though they were coming at it from a relatively non-adversarial stance in the suit, they were basically saying, we want to be able to make Congress responsive to us, and we want Congress to exercise its constitutional authority on this issue. To me, that is an example of a pillar, business, the Chamber of Commerce, basically taking a stand on a particular issue in a way that does trouble the administration's plans around immigration, right? And it's attempts to do these things unilaterally, which is the main concern for many who are worried about rule of law issues, et cetera.

22:29The CEO of Salesforce had to back off and backtrack right last week and apologize for inviting the National Guard to San Francisco because of public resignations from his board. There are airports that were refusing to share Kristi Noem's statement that the shutdown was because of Democrats and that they owned it. A bunch of airports were simply showing the video on mute with no captions or were literally putting up signs that said, this airport does not endorse this video and that we're a nonpartisan airport. And so these are really important indicators of opposition within institutions that the administration basically needs to go along with what's happening in order to pull it off.

23:18And that is why protest is so important, because it gives permission to people in those pillars and buoys them sort of like, there are still lots of people in this country that will come to your aid, be on your side, etc. If you stand up to if you do the right thing, if you follow the oath of office, if you, you know, uphold the law. And so that is why these movements work. It's because they begin to interfere with the autocrat's ability to get his way, even if he only thinks it's a minority. Do you think that the newfound attitudes of Marjorie Taylor Greene qualify as a defection? She's certainly defecting around a couple of key policy domains, but I also think that she has such strong anti-left credentials that she can afford that.

24:04I think the ones that are more vulnerable are people like Representative Massey, who as a relative newcomer to Congress, hasn't yet proved the sort of anti-left credentials, and so is staking out a very particular position around the Epstein files and calling out and punitive behavior from the president for this. But the Congress right now is not particularly filled with GOP representatives who are defecting from the party. I think the defections that we're seeing are more coming from prominent institutions within civil society and less so within business, but increasingly so in business that demonstrate that they are willing to stand up and even pay a price for standing up to the president so that they can maintain their independence, etc.

24:50So let's say, not that I'm obsessed with her, but let's say that Marjorie Taylor Greene continues on this anti-big beautiful bill because of the impact on healthcare costs, right? Which is clearly not exactly the party line. So now, if she gets re-elected, you could interpret that as you can defy the party. If she doesn't get reelected, it means you cannot defy the party. So I don't know what I'm hoping for anymore. Should I be hoping that she gets reelected now? Because it shows you can defy the party. It's a defection. It's a crack in the dam. Yeah, I'm not sure where I come down on that. To me, as somebody who's mostly just interested in the health and well-being of our democracy, the outcome that I'm interested in is representatives being responsive to their constituents and actually just being responsive to their constituents rather than to the head of their party necessarily.

25:54I think that that's an important indicator of a healthy democracy. It is natural to have policy differences. It's important and expected to have them in a democracy. And the best thing to have is healthy parties that have candidates and representatives who are more interested in what their constituents are interested in than what a particular extreme party leader is interested in them doing and saying. Okay. If we could go back in history a little bit, so to help me understand what you mean by nonviolent, would you say that the American civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s, Would you call that nonviolent or when the Black Panthers, who did a lot of nonviolent kind of things like daycare and stuff, but there was some violence.

26:46So would you call the American civil rights movement nonviolent or violent? Yeah, I think the standard way of answering this in my field is that it was a primarily nonviolent movement. And there were certainly some radical elements associated with it over its long duration, its kind of generations long duration. And nevertheless, the primary method of resistance when it came to policy change and the end of Jim Crow was definitely like civil resistance, nonviolent action, and a very important legal and political strategy on top of it, right? So it was not just sit-ins and things. It was also litigation.

27:29It was winning very consequential lawsuits, including in the Supreme Court. And it was dealing in the sort of inside game sense with the White House and using federal power to basically leverage over Southern segregationists' power. I think that there was really a multi-pronged approach to this one. But certainly, if you talk about the campaign to desegregate Nashville, for example, or the Montgomery bus boycott, or the Freedom Rides, these were definitely campaigns that were rooted in the theory and strategy of nonviolent action very self-consciously. For someone like you, Erica, it's like you're living in the best time.

28:15That's a double-edged sword, but you are living in the best time for the research and expertise you have, right? You don't need to go and look up old copies of the Nashville Daily News. You're living it right now, right? Maybe you wish you weren't living it right now. I think since Maria and I first published our book, and then she and I have published other things later, and I've worked with lots of other collaborators over the years, building on lots of different aspects of the dynamics of nonviolent action and trying to update our knowledge about this. I've been able to really interact with so many activists from around the world and in the United States.

28:54And I just think that really we're all living through what is a global experience. What the U.S. is going through now is something that's deeply familiar to many other places around the world right now. And I'm having old conversations with activists kind of flooding back into my memory about things that they've noticed and said about their own struggles that are so deeply applicable here. I just think that we are living through a very interesting moment in world history. And the United States is certainly not immune to the sort of broader global trends that we've witnessed and that have accelerated really in the last 15 years around the rise of far-right populism, a strong anti-incumbent orientation to many different parties and movements, and just the way that's upended a lot of kind of liberal democracies around the world.

29:45From your academic and historical perspective, do you believe that today, which is, let's call it November 2025. Do you believe that the US is now a fascist state or a performative democracy with a constitution, separation of powers, etc. as theories, but we're really not that anymore? How deep is the ship is what I'm asking you. I think that we are in an acute backsliding episode for sure. So there are lots of independent observatories that try to classify whether countries are democratic or non-democratic or somewhere in between. And among those that I follow, I've seen the sort of project leaders of these institutes kind of go on record to say that they expect to downgrade the United States into a non-democracy in their next updates.