🧵Thx for sharing this and the 25% piece. I’m familiar with Chenowith’s work but not the other
I’m going to preface this by saying I’m not critiquing to be defeatist—I’ve been an organizer my entire adult life, trained people nationwide, and I think and work on this stuff. A lot. I don’t have all
I’m going to preface this by saying I’m not critiquing to be defeatist—I’ve been an organizer my entire adult life, trained people nationwide, and I think and work on this stuff. A lot. I don’t have all
Comments
the answers but I do have some fairly educated guesses and strong opinions based on hard lessons I’ve learned
That said, I agree with Chenowith’s support for nonviolence, but I think the lessons that ppl draw from her work compels us to low-ball our organizing goals. A lot of people treat 3.5%
as a magic number or threshold, but it’s an historical observation of nations with less subdivided political environments than the US. It also doesn’t look at nations where 3.5% failed.
But the biggest critique I have is that these pieces don’t account for the agency of the remaining population
either the 96.5% in Chenowith’s or the 75% in the Sci Am piece.
Protest movements tend to activate ppl—both in favor of and opposition to those efforts. One way to mitigate opposition is to have a robust organizing program as the foundation for protest efforts. That includes a disciplined base
building program that recruits the grassroots, leadership development, skills training, issue education, research, capacity to field diverse messages and framing, systems to make it work together, and the expertise to know how to run it all.
Most protest movements lack that. They are usually
driven on social or legacy media, led and staffed by career activists or political operatives, and rely on public protest and social media to recruit people. Those are some of the reasons why those types of movements tend to fizzle or never reach critical mass
Here are two things to
read if you want more info:
No Shortcuts by Jane McAlevey
The 2021 Political Typology by Pew. In the absence of a full blown power analysis, that report should be a wake up on the challenges of expanding beyond the 6% of the population who ID as progressive