Published 14 May 2019
Gonna be real, imo 3.5% is bullshit, like 5% of the country participated in BLM and all it accomplished was trump lost reelection. Not saying stop but this shit isn’t magically over because 12 million people protest, there’s no magic number you hit and fascism is doneand we shouldn’t act like 12 million is it.
It has to be used the right way too. If you just hold a sign and go home then nothing changes. That’s the consensus building and demands phase. When you have critical mass and demands aren’t met you burn down police stations and setup autonomous zones. The problem with both of those wasn’t that they happened it was that the people fell for the media’s demonization of them.
There’s stopping Trump and then there’s stopping fascism. We can probably do the first one with a consistent 3-5% of support. Stopping fascism will take much more because it requires reworking our government and economy in ways that the right, at least, will vehemently oppose. Trump’s biggest blunder is doing too much too soon. His base wants fascism, they just wished it would be less painful than it is.
Organized, consistent and ya you’re right we probably need 10% of the country protesting by the summer.
Civili rights movement protests. not holding little signs and speeches.
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I keep telling people this. To add, armed conflicts have a nasty habit of hardening a country. Getting rights back after it’s over is a pain, even if the “good guys” win. If you can manage change by overwhelming numbers in the street then it’s far better.
I wonder what our Revolution of Dignity would fall under.
At the peak, I believe Kyiv alone had 500K protesters (with many regional centres also being major protest hotspots). But we also had armed rebellion closer to the presidential office in Feb 2014.
In Chenoweth’s data set, it was only once the nonviolent protests had achieved that 3.5% threshold of active engagement that success seemed to be guaranteed – and raising even that level of support is no mean feat. In the UK it would amount to 2.3 million people actively engaging in a movement (roughly twice the size of Birmingham, the UK’s second largest city); in the US, it would involve 11 million citizens – more than the total population of New York City.
A quick search suggests US has twice achieved the 3.5% threshold, the record being in 2020 with the George Floyd protests (15M to 25M) and Earth Day in 1970 with 20M protesters (assuming this was the biggest US protest in recent history on a population adjusted level).
Perhaps the difference relative to other countries was that Americans didn’t explicitly protest for removal of the existing regime.
So is Trunp and his whole admin gonna step down now?
