Jimmy Kimmel and the Power of Public Pressure

23:06But now I don't need to spend my evenings guessing at tax forms or tracking down onboarding documents. Gusto handles all of that for me, so I can spend time doing the thing I actually love, which is cartooning. Gusto is an online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use, so you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. You've got automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, workers' comp, 401k, you name it, Gusto makes it simple and has options for nearly every budget. One of my favorite subjects to cartoon is Sisyphus, endlessly pushing that boulder up a hill.

23:44And I've felt like Sisyphus in the past with paperwork, forms, and logistics. But now, thanks to Gusto, I don't need to live that existential dread. I can just draw about it. Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash newyorker and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash newyorker. One more time, gusto.com slash newyorker.

24:15Hardy, you mentioned earlier that the No Kings protest was enormous by historical standards in this country, one of the things in your work is that you draw this important distinction between individual protests and movement building. You know, I just, as we're talking about this, I think a lot of listeners would say, God, this is all kind of language that I used to associate with things very far away. This is sort of what we would talk about in, you know, the Arab Spring or these movements on the other side of the world. And so it takes some recalibration to imagine, okay, well, what does this mean in an American contest?

24:47Can you explain the difference between a protest and what is actual movement building? When we talk about civil resistance, this term that comes up over and over in your work, what are we really talking about?

24:57Hardy Merriman:Sure. So, I mean, to define civil resistance is it's a way for people, often people without any special status or privilege, to wield power without the use of violence or the threat of violence. And there's basically three kinds of acts. One is what we call acts of commission, where people do things that they're not supposed to do, not expected to do, or forbidden from doing for somehow, right? So protest when you're not supposed to protest. Display a symbol when you're not supposed to display a symbol. The not supposed to could be like a cultural expectation, a political expectation, an economic expectation, but you go outside of what you're ordinarily expected to do.

25:29Hardy Merriman:And then the second is an act of omission where you don't do something that you're supposed to do or expected to do or required to do, right? So divestment or working slowly or a strike or a boycott. And then the third is sort of a combination of both, Like a boycott, deliberately boycotting one place but buying from another, for example. A boycott. That's not a term I'd ever heard before, but it's an interesting one. Yeah. Right. And so within that definition, there's a huge range of tactics. That's the thing, right? It goes way beyond just protest. There's lots of ways that people can choose to shift their behavior and obedience patterns in strategic and targeted ways to exert pressure.

26:05Hardy Merriman:And every movement around the world creates their own. And indeed, even just within that category of protest, there's lots of different ways people can do it. They can do it in centralized ways. They can do it in decentralized ways and so forth. And the most powerful uses of civil resistance are through movements. And movements are, they involve widespread voluntary participation of people. So unlike a structured organization that may have staff and that are paying their staff and so forth, movements just depend on people showing up. People vote with their feet to support movements. They do it because they believe in what the movement stands for.

26:41Hardy Merriman:They do it because the movement is a community where maybe they have friends and feel respected and heard. And when you start to build a movement, you can actually create situations where you can actually get thousands and millions of people who say, you know what, I have confidence. I haven't normally protested in the past or taken an action, but I have confidence that when I work with my community members in this movement, that it's going to make a difference and people do it. Within movements, there can also be organizations. So, for example, if we look at the civil rights movement, there was like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP and SNCC and various like entities within it.

27:20Hardy Merriman:But the movement was bigger than just the entities within it. It was all the people who showed up and took action to support it. But it also had leaders. You had Martin Luther King, eloquent, brave, charismatic. Can you have a movement without a leader like that? And are we seeing those kinds of leaders in the United States? Sure. So in terms of a single charismatic leader, no, there's not right now. And that's not actually essential. And what's, I think, important to remember in terms of movements is that people ultimately choose the leaders, right? somebody who takes courageous action, who inspires confidence, where people feel like it's worth my time to support this person, they will elevate that person naturally to leadership by following them.

28:07Hardy Merriman:And so oftentimes movements do produce their leaders, and the leaders are people who have shown courage and inspire a great deal of confidence. The fact that there is not a single leader yet does not concern me. And again, I think there are many leaders of the community and state level as well. And I want to be very clear here, too, as I talk, there's some differences between the United States and what we're experiencing and, say, Egypt or these other places you mentioned, which I think we can learn a lot from. But the United States is not an authoritarian dictatorship. It is a backsliding democracy.

28:39Hardy Merriman:And that context is quite different. We still have elections. We still have a legal system. They're not working as well as they should, but it still works and we need to use as much as possible the institutional options available to us for sure, right? They're valuable. We need to protect them. We need to use them. I think the core insight though is that we need to also develop popular pressure so that the institutions function the way they should. Because the default in an authoritarian regime is that they're trying to bend every institution. Unless there is countervailing pressure, the institutions do tend to bend.

29:18Hardy Merriman:And there's a great piece of research on this that I love to share. So there was a study of about 35 cases of democratic backsliding from 1991 to 2021. And the researchers, when they do the regression analysis on those cases, they find that when you try to protect democracy primarily with institutions without a broader movement, the predicted probability of success is about 7.5 percent, very low. Institutions by themselves do not stand up well to autocrats. But when you have a broader civil resistance movement, the predicted probability of success goes up to about 51.7 percent. So that popular aspect of participation makes a huge difference.

30:02Hardy Merriman:It is not sufficient by itself, but neither are institutions. You really need both. Hardy, I'm so glad that you brought this up around the context of having a movement. I'm very struck in the couple weeks since the killing of Charlie Kirk and one of the rights movement leaders that the response from Donald Trump and those around him has been to sign executive orders and to appear to launch a campaign against the possible sources of funding and support for the kind of popular movement that you're talking about. How serious do you think this move by Trump and Stephen Miller is to go after sources of institutional and organizational support for civil society and for the kind of political organizing that would be necessary to counter what Trump is doing?

30:51Hardy Merriman:So we should not buy into incredulous claims that nonviolent protesters are somehow a threat that needs the government to crack down on them in the way that they seem to be proposing to. That is actually against what this country has stood for. So the attempt to claim that one's opposition is, you know, a violent threat. Authoritarians frequently use the word terrorism where it's completely inappropriate. or sometimes they'll claim this is actually a foreign-backed agenda and so forth. I mean, these claims have been made by the likes of Vladimir Putin and others for years. What's going on is that people are frustrated and they are exercising their First Amendment rights to push back.

31:34Hardy Merriman:They are acting in the highest traditions of what our Constitution stands for, which is they're using their rights, they're using their freedoms to redress the government grievances. This is what they should be doing. Many of the greatest achievements we've made internally in this country in terms of progress have come about through public pressure. It's not just that the institutions worked, it's that public pressure was a core part of it. So it's not surprising that an authoritarian sees this as a threat and tries to find a pretext to crack down. They want to spread fear. That is like their first main thing.

32:07Hardy Merriman:And so when they grant themselves these emergency powers, illegally by the way, when they just decide they're going to start ruling by decree even though we have no kings in this country, when they start targeting, again, particular groups through politicized prosecution or politicized investigation, it is very important that it be met with a mobilization response, that it be met with solidarity. It is very important that others not shy away when one group is singled out and attacked for political reasons, but rather come to them and say, look, you come for them, you come for all of us. That is part of how, again, you try to deter this kind of activity from continuing.

32:47Hardy Merriman:So, yeah, I mean, we will see how things play out. I want to be very clear that what really works is nonviolent resistance. Violence has no place here. I'm reminded of something that was in your work. I think there was a study that looked at these kinds of movements to advance democracy going back a long way, you know, from 1900 all the way through the turn of the 21st century. And what you find is that more than half of the time, it is the nonviolent movements that succeed. It's not the violent movements. You know, Susan and I have both, and Jane has studied it, we've lived in and worked in countries that have gone through moments like this.

33:24I was in Egypt back around 2004, 2005, when there was a movement there called the Enough Movement, which was intended to try to bring about the end of the Mubarak regime. And it didn't work at the time, but you had to fast forward another five or six years to 2011 when you had the Arab Spring. And in that context, it did, in fact, bring about the end of the Mubarak government. And I wonder, as you look at that and a host of other examples, going all the way back to Pinochet or to Marcos in the 80s in the Philippines, how much does the passage of time, the accumulation of dissatisfaction, How much does that matter?

34:03And how much does the external context, the way that the rest of the world is also talking about and looking at the affairs in that country, how much does that factor into the end result?

34:13Hardy Merriman:So the primary domain in general is what's going on domestically within the country. And it's based on a very simple premise that ultimately authoritarians can't rule if people disobey. If large numbers of people choose not to buy, not to work, to shift the way they interpret orders, the authoritarian actually has no power. They're quickly revealed to be not effective. And this is how many authoritarians have fallen, by the way. I mean, if you look, for example, at Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, the quote-unquote butcher of the Balkans, right, who launched multiple wars and was brutal and had political opponents killed.

34:48Hardy Merriman:Milosevic, when he lost an election in 2000 and tried to subvert it and people said, we're not going to go along with it, and then the coal miners struck and it came to a head, security forces didn't obey. When he pushed the repression button, so to speak, and said, okay, time to crack down. It didn't work. They didn't obey. He had no options left. And so, authoritarians are vulnerable in this way. I'll say one other thing on that, too. So, a lot of times in a backsliding democracy, people didn't like the way the democracy worked before it was backsliding, before the demagogue took power. And I think it's really important to recognize that that's probably not where we want to go back to as a country.

35:27The system that we had was a democracy that was pretty flawed,

35:31Hardy Merriman:had some pretty antiquated parts to it, had some frankly undemocratic parts to it where actually every vote doesn't matter equally, right? And so there needs to be a deeper look at where we're going as a country. People don't want to go back. If you look at the way that this country has produced unbelievable amounts of wealth and income inequality, is that if you want to build a movement of people who want to mobilize against authoritarianism, you're not going to get people to mobilize to say, yeah, let's go back to the system that hasn't helped me in any kind of meaningful way in my day-to-day life.

36:07Hardy Merriman:You want people to come because they are supporting making the system better, moving us forward. And I think there is a improving our democracy aspect of it, but I also think there is going to be an improving the way our economy functions aspect so that people can get their needs met. I was looking at a report by the Congressional Budget Office a few days ago. It was released late last year. And it found that 10 % of the country owns about 60 % of the wealth. About 50 % of the country owns about 6 % of the wealth. We have to deal with that as a country as we move forward. If we want to build a movement that gets people to participate, starting to think not just in terms of the democracy aspect, but also the economic aspect.

36:54Hardy Merriman:And how actually, if you improve one, you will improve the other. And how we go forward, what are the demands? What is the vision for where we're going, I think is going to also be really important here. This was exactly what I was hoping to ask you about, because I saw an interesting study by Adam Bonica, who is, I guess, a professor at Stanford. And it was about how the issue of corruption is an economic injustice, is an issue that the Democrats should pay more attention to. But in order to do that, they have to clean their own house too. And so I guess what I wanted to ask you about was whether fighting corruption has been a viable and effective issue in bringing down autocrats, because autocrats seem to go hand in hand with huge corruption.

37:41Does that mobilize people?

37:43Hardy Merriman:It can. It can when it's accompanied by acts of courage, right? So a lot of people in the United States, in my view, have come to almost expect their leaders to be corrupt. So a corruption scandal by a leader doesn't seem to move the needle for a lot of folks. That may not always be the case. I've seen corruption go on in countries for years, and then suddenly some scandal, people are ready, and they say that's enough. That can always happen. But I think more deeply what people want is not just a leader who's not corrupt. They want a system they can trust. They want a system that they feel works for them.

38:17Hardy Merriman:There's a level of feeling like the system is inherently corrupt. I think some of that came from the financial crisis and people realizing, wait a minute, I lost everything and the system didn't look out for me. And so I think people can get active on corruption if they feel like you are really genuine about tackling the problem, not just saying, hey, vote for me. I'm not going to be corrupt as the last guy, but actually I'm going to take on the system. So I would agree with what you're saying. We are in a toxic polarization in this country. It has been deliberately created as a way to try to, for certain groups to try to rise to power.

38:52Hardy Merriman:They try to foment a red-blue division, an urban-rural division, and so forth, or a racial division. And we have a choice. We can play into that existing polarization. Sometimes politicians do, and they might get a little bump from it. But ultimately, playing into that polarization doesn't get us out of the ditch that we're in. We can primarily try to depolarize people. Say, you know, we're not a red America or a blue America or the United States of America. I think Barack Obama was prodigious at depolarization, extremely good. I think the challenge with over-relying on depolarization, though, is that people are angry.

39:30Hardy Merriman:and when you are constantly trying to depolarize them and they're angry, they sometimes don't feel listened to and they're not really going to mobilize after a certain point. They're not going to feel like you're listening to them. And so there is a third option, which we call repolarization. You say, okay, polarization is going to happen. People are angry, but we need to shift the lines here. We need to shift the polarity. And in a country with income and wealth inequality, the way we have it, a logical line for repolarization is along those lines. It is about people who work for a living, and then some who are extraordinarily wealthy who have really started buying and selling our system.

40:05Hardy Merriman:And we are the collateral damage to that. This is not just like being against every wealthy person. I'm not saying that. And I don't want repolarization to become toxic. But democracies need a healthy level of polarization. And I think saying, look, this is bigger than Democrats and Republicans. This is about a huge swath of people, those who have not been able to get ahead. Those who were living paycheck to paycheck a few years ago, but now because of the cost of the rise in cost of living, can't even make it. But it's also even about those who are working and doing okay, but recognize just how precarious their situation is.

40:39Hardy Merriman:They're one job loss away from falling through a trap door and possibly losing it. There's a huge group of Americans in that situation. There's an opportunity to repolarize and say, yes, we are taking on not just a corrupt leader, but a system that has had unaddressed corruption for too long. So if you lost your job, we want to get your job back, but we also want to change the system that made you lose your job to begin with, for example. Well, Hardy Merriman, we know there are a lot of people who want to talk to you these days. Your time is limited. We are just thrilled to have had you today thinking about the mechanics, the potential for resistance, what it sounds like, what it looks like in history, and as strange as it sounds, what it means now in the United States.

41:19We're grateful for you coming on and we'll hope to talk to you again.

41:22Hardy Merriman:Hey, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we'll debrief on our conversation with Hardy Merriman. The political scene will be back in just a moment.

41:36Wired has always put a microscope on the people, power and forces shaping our world. Uncanny Valley brings that same fearless reporting straight to your feed. Is Doge finally over? Will AI actually democratize American healthcare? Each week, Wired journalists from across the newsroom are going to unpack where politics, technology, and Silicon Valley collide. From conversations with tech leaders across Silicon Valley, internet fandom investigations, and government crackdowns on rigged gambling, we're taking you all over the news cycle going straight inside the priorities, pressures, and power plays driving today's biggest decisions.

42:14Uncanny Valley tackles the questions keeping you up at night and helps make sense of the future taking shape right now. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

42:36Well, I have to say that was fascinating. I mean, the shows that I always find the most interesting are where there's a body of work that has been out there that smart people and experts and historians and scholars have been putting together that never felt especially relevant to people who are so closely following American politics. But suddenly you open it up and you realize, oh, there's things in here that help explain what's happening and not happening right now. I thought, you know, also being here in Washington, in some ways, we're the last people to see what's happening in the rest of the country if this is about something coming from the ground up.

43:13We study the top down in Washington. And what he's saying is what happens at the ground level and the local level is sometimes just as important, if not more so. More so. I mean, the history on this is kind of amazing. If you look at these movements that go back, let's take just a study of the last several decades done by Freedom House, three quarters of these successful movements against autocracy, three quarters of them were bottom up. They were not top down. And we miss that, I think, sometimes with our focus on institutions. Well, that's right. I mean, you know, the interesting question, and I really appreciate in particular his ability to offer us a language and a ways of framing and categorizing and understanding these events that we're seeing sort of unfold in this very chaotic way.

44:00So I think just naming the problem is going to be the key for those who are seeking to resist. You can't do that unless you have a framework for understanding it. And I thought he was really terrific at pointing that out. However, Freedom House has also documented the direction of travel overseas and in the U.S. And, you know, I think we're at well over, I think we're approaching two straight decades of fewer democracies in the world than there were at the start of this period of democratic retrenchment. And it's a marker of that moment that we're having this conversation, right? You know, when you and I became foreign correspondents, Evan, the United States was still in the very tenuous business of exporting democracy overseas.

44:40Now we're trying to import the lessons of how to resist democratic backsliding here into the United States. And it's that tragedy, you know, that has even given us the reason for having this conversation, unfortunately. Well, and talking about resistance rather than just a sense of resignation, that this is just a kind of meteorological fact that goes on without anybody interfering with it. I think that's an important mindset. You know, one of the things that I found really interesting was when he said, you have to look at different metrics. Yeah. Because there's a kind of conventional system for measuring power and how it's working, especially if you're a Washington reporter, which is getting what you want in Congress or executive orders or all the rest of these kinds of things, winning elections, obviously.

45:27But what he's saying is there are other metrics you need to think about if you're looking at the power from the ground up that have to do with unity and local protests and all these other things that he mentioned. And I think, you know, it was eye-opening to think, OK, there are probably other metrics that we should be thinking about when we don't see it here in Washington. Yeah, although I have to say I did not come away feeling that the criterion for a successful civil resistance to what's happening in the country have yet been met. I thought that he offered a lot of very important kind of frameworks for understanding or, you know, looking at it.

46:08But it's hard to see, even by reframing the metrics, that what has been mounted so far in the kind of shock and awe period of Trump 2.0 has been so far a successful resistance. And, you know, he acknowledged that. He said it can take years in many cases. The question is, what's going to be the damage done in that period of time, whether it's the time horizon of a single presidential term or it's longer than that? No, absolutely. I mean, I have to agree that what he was saying is if you look at those metrics, they haven't been met. But what he's saying is, you know, you're beginning to see the spring being pushed down.

46:46You're beginning to see some unity. That's what you sort of saw with the Jimmy Kimmel situation. I think one of the interesting tests to me is, is the press going to actually pull together and unify against what the Pentagon is trying to do in terms of— No, because they haven't. And, you know, these are the things that matter. And you're right. I mean, and I think he made a very important point, which is in this country, we are accustomed to thinking in terms of competition, including in the press. We compete with each other. We don't work together. And that is our culture, is competition. But I think also, as he said, you know, sometimes you can't predict what are the moments that are galvanizing.

47:26In this case, look, the fact that Jimmy Kimmel is in people's minds, he's on their screens every night, that made it a more urgent, a more accessible issue than something that is of great interest to us, like what the conditions are that reporters at the Pentagon will work under. That's a harder thing for the public to feel attached to. It doesn't make it less important. It just means that it's harder to predict what those moments will be. I think, look, Susan, to your point, there's no question. These are early days. That was one of his takeaways. I mean, this is a work in progress. This could go on.

47:57In more ways than one. And by the way, can I just throw out a question for us since we framed this around Jimmy Kimmel? I don't have the answer. And I don't even know that I have a point of view about what my answer might be. But I'd like to revisit this in a year because it's not clear to me that Jimmy Kimmel will still be on the air a year from now. And it's not clear to me that this is a skirmish that might have been won by the forces of liberal democracy and free speech. But if you look at the general trajectory of both consolidation in our big media enterprises and the incredible financial pressures on television in particular right now, you know, Stephen Colbert is still off the air at the end of his time next year.

48:41I don't know what the future is actually for a kind of network comedian who spends every night skewering Donald Trump on the airwaves a year or two years or three years from now. So I remain open to the question of whether this is a battle won or a skirmish in a much longer war. I don't think anyone would say this is a battle won. All it was was a spark. But that is basically what he's saying is what it would take is real sustained pushback, creative pushback. And I don't know if we'll see that. I think we're going to leave it here for this week. We have no doubt there will be more material for us next week.

49:21and I'm very pleased we'll be together to be able to talk about it. Thank you, Susan, and thank you, Jane. Well, great to be with you guys. Great to be with you guys. All right, this has been The Political Scene from The New Yorker. I'm Evan Osnos. We had research assistance today from Alex D 'Elia. Our producer is Nora Ritchie, mixing by Mike Kutchman. Stephen Valentino is our executive producer, and Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of global audio. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thank you so much for listening.

49:57This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at O-D-O-O dot com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.