I think it's more of just Goodhart’s Law in play: 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.'

In a case of relatively organic or somewhat spontaneous action, 3.5% of people doing something is huge. The reason is because in organic or spontaneous action, those 3.5% probably represent the views of vastly more than 3.5% of people. But as actions become more organized and less spontaneous, you reach a scenario where those 3.5% may represent fewer and fewer people other than themselves. At the extreme example of effective organization (where you get 100% participation rate), those 3.5% of people may represent nobody beside themselves.

I was perusing the dataset they used [1] for the '3.5% rule' and it seems that a more unifying theme is leaders losing the support of their own base. And it's easy to how that could strongly correlate with large organic protest since you've done things to the point of not only pissing off 'the other side' but also your own side.

I think Nixon is a good example of this. There were vastly larger protests against Nixon's involvement in Vietnam than there were for Watergate. Yet the Vietnam protests had no effect whatsoever, while he left office over Watergate. The difference is that he lost the confidence of his own party over Watergate. Had he not resigned, he would likely have been impeached and convicted. Had 3.5% of people protested Watergate, he would even be included on this list, which I think emphasizes that protests (or lack thereof) are mostly a tangential factor.

[1] - https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi...

> This has been going on for years; the right simply refuses to countenance the possibility of legitimate organic opposition, while also being chronically unable to provide any evidence for their claims.

That strategy is also typical of China. Whenever there's a protest (for example the HK protests), it's always financed by western interests. Even volunteers organically organising themselves to help victims of the Tai Po fire were deemed to be western interests trying to discredit China. It's a surprisingly effective tactic.

I just always wonder how we have so many people eating this up when the strategy is so blindingly obvious.

That's a misreading of Chenowith's argument which itself is heavily based on Timur Kuran's Revolutionary Thresholds concept.

The thesis is once mass mobilization of non-violent protesters occurs, it reduces the threshold for elite defection because there are multiple different veto groups within a selectorate, and some may choose to defect because they either view the incumbent as unstable or they disagree with the incumbent's policies.

I also recommend reading Chennowith's discussion paper clearing up the "3.5%" argument [0]. A lot of mass reporting was just sloppy.

Tl;Dr - "The 3.5% figure is a descriptive statistic based on a sample of historical movements. It is not necessarily a prescriptive one, and no one can see the future. Trying to achieve the threshold without building a broader public constituency does not guarantee success in the future"

[0] - https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/2024-05/Eric...

In many countries, it does work, and continues with some regularity:

2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring

2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity

2018: https://www.occrp.org/en/project/a-murdered-journalists-last...

2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aqBls-qpRM

2026: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/01/iran-authorit... -- outcome TBD ?

"Paid" demonstrators has been an accusation used by governments for several decades.

Edit: https://www.yourdictionary.com/rent-a-crowd (Rent a crowd/mob is often used to claim the protest is attended by people paid to be there, and was first coined in the mid 20th century, but apparently the actual accusation (though) is as old as demonstrations)

There appears to be a few factors combining in the U.S. right now that make protests less effective than they once were.

1. Politics are religion more than ever before. There is a solid MAGA core that will not turn on Trump for any reason. When confronted by uncomfortable truth, they dismiss it as lies. When they can't dismiss it as a lie, they choose not to care. The Democrats have people like this too, but they haven't been hired and turned into a paramilitary goon squad the way ICE has. Yet. The "unreasonables" on both sides of the spectrum are not going anywhere. After Trump dies they could easily be harnessed by someone else. When so many people cannot be swayed, the impact of protests are dulled. The "unreasonables" aren't swayed when the other side protests, and the mushy middle will tend to dismiss many protests as products of people they view as extremists.

2. There is a ruling class (i.e. Billionaires) with a firm grip on power (through both parties) and complete insulation from the public. In his discourses on Livy, Machiavelli observed that Roman officials who protected themselves from those they ruled with forts or castles tended to rule in a more brutal and less productive manner than those who lived among the governed. If you want good government, those governing should feel vulnerable enough to behave reasonably. U.S. billionaires, and the politicians they own, are completely sealed off from public wrath. Minnesota could burn and none of them would get more than a warm fuzzy watching it on the news. If a protest doesn't scare billionaires it will have no impact on how the U.S. is governed.

3. "Flood the zone" is just one of the tactics being used to numb people and encourage them to switch off from politics. The nastiness of hyper-partisan politics is, at times, a distracting entertainment, but it's fatiguing the rest of the time. People rightly observe that both of the U.S.'s diametrically opposed parties tend to do similar things (e.g. tax breaks for the rich) and are funded by the same billionaires every election. If people will scream at you for picking a side in what looks like a sham of false choice, why not just stay home, plug in, and tune out? When a big protest happens, people who are numb and tuned out are just going to change the channel and consume some more billionaire-produced pap.

As a Canadian, what's going on in the U.S. has been terrifying to watch. We're so culturally similar that what happens in the U.S. could easily happen here. Even if it doesn't, we're still subject to the fallout. A classic pattern of authoritarian regimes is to lash out at allies and neighbours in order to give their people threats to fear more than their own government. Well, that's us. If MAGA isn't checked, Canada will likely be subjected to far more than tariff's and threats.

It's hard for Canadians to appreciate how nations elsewhere in the world can harbour such bitter and long-lived enmities against one another. We're now experiencing how they're created. It's not hatred yet, but the trust we once had for Americans is gone and won't return for generations. For the rest of my life, we'll always be four years or less away from what could be the next round of American insanity.

> Large attendance at Democratic political rallies during the 2024 election was dismissed as being paid for by the campaign

And then they lost and the odds of those people being paid actors seems less ridiculous.

well, aside from alleged riots there have been actual ones and those have unfortunate effect of making it easier to dismiss the cause

What do you mean by "went to the streets?" If it's just show up at a protest and wave a sign on Saturday and Sunday, and go back to work on Monday, that's not enough. That's not civil resistance. People seriously underestimate the commitment levels necessary to actually matter.

It doesn't work if the opposition is also organized. For example, a March 2003 Gallup poll showed that 5% of the US population had made a public opposition to the Iraq war, but 21% had made a public display to support the war. Small minorities can't go directly against more popular movements.

So far, if estimates are accurate, neither in Iran with 90 million population, more than five percent turned out.

Also Belarus in 2020.

I have no idea how many Iranians have been involved in the protests, but it seems like they're getting past the 3.5% number as well..

Paper says non-violent is ~50/50 vs one in four for violent. So not a sure thing.

The rule doesn’t really make sense in a small country with proportional representation. The government can stay in power as long as a majority of the country wants it to stay in power.

> This rule didn't hold in Israel [...]

It did (ie. Revolutionary thresholds) until 10/7 and Hezbollah's shelling of the north changed the calculus.

There was increased pressure from senior IDF careerists, industry titans, and intelligence alums (oftentimes the 3 were the same) against the government's judicial reforms which was about to reach the tip over point (eg. threats of capital outflows, leaking dirty laundry, corporate shutdowns/wildcat strikes, and resignations of extremely senior careerists), but then 10/7 happened along with the mass evacuation of the North, which led everyone to set aside their differences.

Israel is a small country (same population and size as the Bay Area) so everyone either knows someone or was personally affected by the southern massacre or the northern evacuation.

This is far from meaningless, because if you are too far below those 3.5%, you'll fail to make a change for the better, despite having a good cause with no real opposition.

Those 3.5% are encouraging for all social movements, who suffer (and/or have friends/family who suffer) from some issue in the system, have perhaps developed a good plan out of it, but think they are too small to make a difference.

Success doesn't have to mean getting your way, but rather making a meaningful change in your direction. Even opposing groups often can find a way so that both get a better situation. For instance, taxes can overall be lowered while teacher salaries can increase on average at the same time, if excess money is taken from other activities.

Yeah but that probably isn't going to what the original research is saying. Society is basically run by a tiny fraction of people (1-5% of the population range) and the rest are just along for the ride. Democracy is a major innovation where the majority has to nod along every few years or there is a mix up in who in the upper class gets to sit at the top of the tree.

From that perspective it becomes clearer what a 3.5% rule is getting at - 3.5% of the population mobilised is enough to overwhelm any ruling class that isn't on top of its game, especially if mass shooting of people is still of the table or if the 3.5% includes a lot of people from the upper classes. It isn't about whether an issue is supported by 3.5% of the population or more, it is a question of whether that fraction of society is actively trying to topple a government system.

In the big picture, culture progresses towards equality over time, although it see-saws and moves very slowly relative to a human lifespan. Small minorities of hate groups, for example KKK, are not able to influence society in the long-run because their message is antithetical to this natural imperative. Whereas advocacy for racial minorities, gender minorities, and feminism progresses over time.

What if the small minority is being oppressed and killed? There are so many reasons why a small minority might need to protest within a democracy. "This seems anti democratic" is a bizarre take.

In the US? You'd probably need to repeal the first amendment. Good luck with that.

> and if those in power use violence against the non-violent it increases public sympathy for them.

Even then there's like a fine balancing line where some level of state violence is "acceptable", as in it crushes the spirits of those out on the streets before they manage to organise enough, and yet doesn't get nearly enough attention or wide-enough condemnation (both within and outside of the country). This buys the regime some time even when they're nowhere near 50% of support, and then the very next elections become even more of a sham than they were before. The regime still magically gets as close to 50% of the votes as possible, while still winning with a wide-enough margin that you have no legal recourse to challenge the elections, which only crushes people's spirits even further.

For post-2019 examples, see Georgia (ruling party won with 53.93% in 2024) and Serbia (has yet to have an election, despite largest protests in its history calling for early elections for the past 15 months).

My point being, to overthrow such a regime via a ballot box, 55% against just doesn't cut it. At the very least you need 70%.

Non-violence only works when there's an alternative that includes lots of violence. MLK Jr's messages only resonate thanks to the Black Panthers. Today we've got one explicitly violent political party and one who keeps writing letters politely asking them to stop the violence. Unfortunately the only language conservatives seem to understand is violence, and that is the response they deserve for their actions.

Occupy Wall Street was a turning point for me. It's staggering how many things today follow directly from the 2008 gfc and its disastrous aftermath.

The largest voting group in the US are non-voters. As bad as conservatives are, the non-voters are complicit in letting it happen. Hope they enjoy their taste of "both sides are the same".

anyone who has to look that far back in history for examples of righteous resistance… is serious about neither history or resistance.

Assassination is fascinating for its ability to abruptly change a paradigm and the fact that it can be done by a single person, but it is extremely rare for a reason - murder is bad and instinctively despicable to most humans. [1]

An assassination is also an acknowledgement of the magical power of one individual, which I think is counter to the goals of most revolutionaries, who want to instead demonstrate to the general population that power is within the capital p People, and communities, and organized resistance.

Assassination is saying "actually this one person is so powerful that it'll solve a lot of our problems if they're dead." Which I don't believe can be true since to be true that would mean that one person would basically have to be a wizard with supernatural powers. In reality anybody with a lot of political power derives that power from people's willingness to comply with that person's wishes. A system like a government may have made people used to the idea of obeying authority, but the reality remains such that if everyone suddenly decided to stop holding up the system of government, the power vanishes into thin air.

Thus a despot's power is able to be nullified by anyone able to convince a lot of people to refuse to implement the despot's desires.

[1] https://voicesofvr.com/1182-recreating-philosophical-moral-d...

Belarus too.

Rojava was pretty much wiped out in the last week. BTW I lived there briefly, outside of certain communist and brainwashing in YPG and some farm communes, if you observe the markets they are thoroughly capitalist with also massive wealth disparity. I would say, they are closer to ancaps (extremely low government burden + strong respect of property rights), the mustache jesus/ Apo stuff is more symbolic than praxis.