Final estimates are still pending, but early reports suggest that Saturday’s “No Kings,” anti-Trump protests were the biggest single-day protest event since 1970 — and perhaps the largest nonviolent protests in US history. Over 2,700 events were held in all 50 states, according to organizers, which means as many as 7 million Americans joined.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren encapsulated this message during her speech at the Boston rally, saying that “standing up to a wannabe dictator — that is patriotism. … Saying no to troops that occupy our cities — that is patriotism. And peacefully protesting to protect our democracy — that is patriotism.”
But for all that energy and enthusiasm, the anti-Trump resistance still faces a dilemma: for all the protests and mass mobilizations of the first round of Trump, he was ultimately reelected with greater support. It leaves a few open questions: just how effective can organized protest be? What can protestors learn since then, and what are the limits to what mass mobilization can do? And how can these movements adapt in the face of an administration that seems eager to wield every power of the state against its perceived enemies?
To answer these questions and more, I spoke with Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University, and a renowned expert on both the history and the nuts-and-bolts of political organizing in the US. And although Skocpol, who is decidedly not a Trump supporter, is optimistic about what the No Kings protests could suggest, she is doggedly focused on what she sees as the ultimate goal of mass protests. (Hint: In the American context, she doesn’t think it has much to do with that 3.5% figure you may have heard about).
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
The No Kings protest happened again this weekend. What was your initial reaction to it? What were your expectations? Were they met, or did anything surprise you?
It was inspiring to see such a large number of people in so many [different] kinds of places. I thought that was likely to happen, but you never know for sure until it does. But, clearly, a lot of people came from different places and expressed alarm at what’s happening in the country — and [with] a kind of humorous tone, which under the circumstances is probably a good thing. So I think it’s probably a moment of mutual-reinforcement for the majority, really, of Americans who aren’t happy with the way things are headed.
Was there anything that distinguished the protests this weekend from the kind of mass protests that we saw during the first Trump administration?
My research colleagues and I looked at both the wave of Tea Party protests that spread in 2009, starting with Tax Day, which was the biggest [single-day protest] in the sense of size and numbers of places across the country. And we also looked, four years later, at the Resistance to Trump, which got going a little faster and where the peak-moment of both size and spread was the post-inaugural Women’s Marches in January 2017. And in that respect, the No Kings protests that we’ve seen so far are similar to both the Tea Party and Resistance movements, in that these were all nationwide demonstrations that were synchronized and happening everywhere. They come, obviously, from different partisan directions — 2009 compared to 2017 and now — but what they share is that they were all very widespread and very large.
I’ve seen criticism of the No Kings protests that suggest the sprawling and de-centralized nature of the whole thing, as well as its laser-focus on opposition to Trump — rather than a more positive vision — is a problem. What do you make of that argument?
It’s interesting that civic resurgence in our time has taken the form of these big waves from both sides of the spectrum — with the Tea Party protests as the first big wave and then the anti-Trump resistance four years later as the second. In both cases, these [protests] were not really policy-focused. They were really expressions of alarm about the direction of the country. The sense that these were authentic expressions from people who were alarmed about where the country was headed was what gave them their force.
Now, I will say that there’s a difference that I’m concerned about this time: The research that my colleagues and I did on the 2009 and 2017 protests found that they gave way to organizing. There were 2,000 to 3,000 local groups that were formed in both cases all over the country, and in almost every congressional district in every state, that carried on meeting face-to-face and helped the protests transform those connections into policy and political effects. In both cases, there were people who came forward and ran for office and created congressional waves, first for the Republicans (in 2010) and then for the Democrats (in 2018).
What do you make of the idea — which is credited to professor Erica Chenoweth, even though, to be fair, her argument is much more complicated than this — that in order for there to be tangible political consequences, these protests need to get at least 3.5 percent of the population involved?
A lot of the media that I saw after the protests was saying things like, Well, we got to get to 3.5 percent of the population in the next big no King’s Day. And I really think that’s a misdirection. I understand the research that says that getting to that threshold is correlated with overthrowing weak autocratic monarchies and arresting parliamentary democratic backsliding, but that’s not the point in the United States. The point is whether we’re going to see — as we saw from the right and left in the earlier big waves — a follow through in political and electoral organizing.
To judge these protests as a success, they have got to feed into electoral results and to prod America’s elite institutions to stop caving in to the administration’s corrupt demands. And that’s a bigger lift than anything that we’ve seen before. In the end, it doesn’t matter if 3.5 percent of people turn out one time or another. What matters is political power. People on the right know that.
Your concerns here seem connected to your critiques of Indivisible’s approach during Trump’s first term. Can you expand a little on where you think they made some mistakes and whether you see evidence of them adjusting in the time since?
My comments on Indivisible grew out of a very careful empirical analysis. I think that in the beginning, during year one, when Indivisible created a website in 2016 and provided encouragement for people to find one another in thousands of locations around the country, provided a kind of framework for organizing to flow into and flow out of public protest events, and played a role in orchestrating the congressional pressures that saved the Affordable Care Act during Trump’s first term — that was all splendid.
But by year two, the organizers had built a huge advocacy organization of paid people in Washington. They were using the money for that, not to sustain the grassroots groups or link them up in states, and they were also urging people to run against Democrats who were not progressive enough. But the kind of politics that works in this context is broad-tent.
Does “broad-tent” mean more moderate?
No. What I’m going to say it means is “militant inclusion.” You have to have people who are prepared to fight very hard — sometimes against threats to policy priorities, sometimes against threats to their sense of what makes America America, sometimes against threats to the rule of law, sometimes against blatant corruption. You don’t need to [pick and choose what to fight for] and you do not need to prioritize getting rid of Chuck Schumer.
In that vein, what do you think about the ongoing debates about how much, if at all, the Democrats need to “moderate”?
I don’t think any resistance movement needs to make any collective decisions about that right now. If people are coming forward to run for office, that’s a good thing. Let the primaries play out. But when the primaries are over, if it’s a banana Democrat or an orange Democrat — so what! If it’s an independent or if it’s even a non-MAGA Republican, get behind the people that have the best chance to put a stop to this.
And so that is a source of some concern for me, because these movements always have a top-down, bottom-up dynamic, and if the top takes over on the left, it usually wanders off into unproductive signaling rather than claiming power.
And I have to tell you: These Trump Republicans and their allies, they do not believe they need majority support. They believe they can wait out massive street demonstrations, or use them to invoke the Insurrection Act. That does not mean we should all stay home; but it does mean we shouldn’t mistake the demonstrations as power.
Do we expect too much from mass protests?
Mass protests — particularly the synchronized ones with an inspiring but inclusive and therefore slightly vague phrasing — they really seem to be very important to civic engagement in this entire era, for left and right. That’s certainly what my research shows, and so I don’t want to say that they’re not important. I think they are important, and they may be especially important now, because liberals and moderates — not to mention progressives — are really depressed about the drum-beat of horrors that are happening.
So, yes, they’re important. It’s just that social scientists and media people and partisans who romanticize street protest as the be-all and end-all are wrong to do so.
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