Tides Turn

The #Resistance reemerges, and thank goodness.

Photo by Duncan Shaffer on Unsplash

What does it take for an authoritarian to fall? There’s no single answer, but according to one researcher, there is a 3.5% rule: If 3.5% of the population engages in nonviolent protest, that is just as effective at bringing down a regime as armed resistance. The US is a country of roughly 340 million, and an estimated 5 million turned out for the No Kings protests on Sunday. Have we hit the 3.5% mark yet? No. But we’re millions closer than we were on Friday. And protesting this regime, Americans will hopefully soon learn, will be a sustained practice, not a one-off day.

I don’t live in the US anymore, which has been mostly a relief in the second Trump era, less because I live somewhere “better” than America than because I live in a place where I am just not nearly as invested in the politics and have basically no ability to change them. But there are moments when I wish I was in the US: times I wish I could stand in solidarity; times I wish I could better support those who are standing up. This weekend was one of them. The No Kings protests that popped around the country were the first moment of hope and sweetness I’ve felt since this president took office.

It’s been months of kowtowing and capitulation, of striking cowardice and terrifying encroachments. I worried, quite genuinely, that we were perhaps too far gone; that America’s authoritarian streak had finally overtaken our better impulses, that too many people were too despairing and our institutions too battered to support those who still relied on them to keep us on the side of democracy.

We’re obviously not out of danger yet. But Americans suddenly seem a whole lot less willing to go quietly.