Published on August 07, 2025
The Effectiveness of Taking Action
Those of you who regularly go to anti-Trump regime demonstrations are probably often asked by friends and family, "Do they work? Are they effective? Is it really worth your time?" I know I am asked those questions and it's usually in a skeptical tone.
A recent Robert Hubbell newsletter titled "We need another 'No Kings Day' protest ASAP" addressed this issue by citing an article in Harvard Magazine, "The Professor Who Quantified Democracy", that features Professor Erica Chenoweth of the Harvard Kennedy School. She has published a study on what it takes for resistance movements to succeed in saving democracies and continues to update it with the most current data.
Hubbell's newsletter states that Dr. Chenoweth's study found that four conditions are necessary for a movement to succeed:
• They mobilized mass participation by diverse groups of people, who stayed involved over time.
·• They induced defections among those with power in the regime-economic and business elites, state media officials, security forces, and sometimes even members of the opposition party.
·• They varied their methods to keep the pressure up, relying not only on protests but also strikes, boycotts, work slowdowns or
outright stoppages, sit-ins, civil disobedience, and other forms of noncooperation.
·• They were able to maintain discipline in the face of escalating repression without falling apart or turning to violence.
The Harvard Magazine article also cites Daniel Hunter, a New Jersey based activist who has worked with nonviolent resistance movements in Africa and Southeast Asia. Hunter runs a civil resistance training organization called Choose Democracy and collaborates with a network of activists called Freedom Trainers. Indivisible is currently offering a training tool titled One Million Rising, a 3 part webinar, in which Hunter is a speaker/trainer. He says he first has to convince people it's possible to have an impact. "There's this very heavy feeling for many people of overwhelm, a distraught sense of isolation, of being too small, too
powerless."
Chenoweth's research gives him a way to "connect and help people identify their power and identify the relationship they can pull on and trust, and get in motion with." This article is definitely worth a read if you're in need of ammunition to help in persuading
those in your life who would benefit from hard facts and data. It reinforces the idea that our civil resistance must be sustained, it must grow, and it must be just one tool -albeit an important one - in our toolbox. As Hubbell states, it is a "spine stiffening perspective" which we are all in need of as we continue down this critical journey together.