What isn’t next: against the “3.5% principle”

“No Kings” was huge in New York, even bigger than “Hands Off” was, and the national turnout was likewise gigantic, not only in the flashpoint cities like LA and NYC but all over the map. In NYC I didn’t hear any speakers. Nationally, there was no single leading organization, though Indivisible is among the prime movers, with the ACLU and labor unions—including mine—getting on the bandwagon and swelling the numbers. What does this rallying crowd want?

It seems clear enough that many people are against Trump. For the liberal politics nerds who seem to be steering the ship, “No Kings” is meant to counter Trumpist flag-waving with civic nationalism and pride in America as the land of democracy. “You have been crushing tyrants since 1776,” Jamie Raskin told the Philadelphia crowd. He also said: “I think of myself as the congressman from Indivisible.” That was quite telling. One way to understand these protests would be as a pre-2026 election rally. Indivisible is all about Democrats: electing them, calling their offices, and learning “best practices” for being a loyal blue constituent who regularly phones their representatives to let them know their policy preferences. “No Kings” just means that we ought to vote Trump out as soon as he gives us a chance.

But plenty of people—perhaps including Jamie Raskin—understand “No Kings” in another sense: it conveys a dire warning against authoritarianism or incipient fascism. Surely these warnings imply we have something else to do than patiently wait to cast a midterm vote for whoever wins our local Democratic primary in 2026. But what? A sign of the thinking here appeared on the “What’s next?” page that went up on nokings.org after Saturday’s marches:

As ICE raids escalate and Trump doubles down on authoritarian tactics—including politicizing the military—we’re meeting the moment with action. The road ahead isn’t just about one protest or one day. It’s about building a movement powerful enough to win against authoritarian forces dead set on destroying our democracy.

We’re inspired by the 3.5% principle: it only takes 3.5% of the population engaging in sustained, strategic protest against authoritarianism to achieve significant political change. Everything we do from here on out is grounded in three core commitments: staying in the fight, taking concrete action today, and investing in the long-term.

Where does this “3.5% principle” come from? It sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. A little searching of the Jacobin archives reminded me that it was a shibboleth of Extinction Rebellion, which takes direct action in order to mobilize ever larger fractions of the population to stop the climate crisis. XR was self-consciously designed around the principles of social movements research and in particular theories of “strategic nonviolence” originating with the Cold War international-relations school of Thomas Schelling and Gene Sharp. That’s an interesting, and somewhat unexpected, affiliation for Indivisibles and No-Kings protestors, whose phone banks and Saturday marches are very far from the more spectacular, disruptive, and largely fruitless tactics of XR.

The sources of the “3.5% principle”

That particular 3.5% number is of more recent though related vintage: the work of Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Maria J. Stephan, a former US State Department strategic planner.¹ Chenoweth’s breezy 2013 TEDx talk summarizes their argument: in a dataset of several hundred twentieth-century “resistance campaigns,” non-violent campaigns with popular participation over 3.5% have all “succeeded.”² In the original 2008 International Security journal article based on their dataset, which cites Sharp a dozen times, the claim was broader: non-violent campaigns have been more successful than violent ones, and the reasons are that such campaigns have tactical advantages.

I’ll return to the interesting theoretical and technical details below, but let’s pause to reflect on the appearance of “3.5%” on June 15 after a nationwide protest of (let’s say) one to two million people. “Protest against authoritarianism,” the No Kings organizers now say, in itself, “achieves significant political change.” That is, they wish people to keep protesting, but they do not wish to say what kind of change would come about. In fact “3.5%” acts like a magic spell: gather enough people to the streets, and “authoritarianism” will go away. Clap your hands if you believe! The resistance experts say so!

But what do they say? Stephan and Chenoweth’s dataset is designed to compare non-violent “campaigns” for democracy with violent nationalist or separatist movements: examples of the former would be the East Timorese resistance to Indonesian military rule, the Burmese democracy movement under Aung San Suu Kyi, and the “Color Revolutions” against post-communist authoritarians in Eastern Europe; of the latter, the Naxalite rebellion and the Nicaraguan Contras. Their case for the success of non-violence focuses on the record of post-Communist liberalization movements.

The technical details of the analysis are unimpressive. They use a multinomial logistic regression of a trichotomous outcome variable—“success,” “limited success,” and “failure”—on a bunch of political and demographic predictors, and then proceed to interpret significant coefficients. There is no sophisticated causal inference here, and I am not sure the regression does more than dress up the basic frequencies of success for non-violent and violent movements.³ The original article does not articulate the magical 3.5% popular participation—this finding came after the original publication. Here too the evidence is not particularly impressive.⁴ Here are the highest-participation-rate “campaigns” in the NAVCO 1.2 dataset:

Most of the high-participation campaigns here took place in small countries. Does the Slovenian independence movement or the Estonian Singing Revolution have immediate lessons for today’s anti-Trumpists? It could be, but I doubt that those lessons are as simple as “drive up turnout and the bad men go away.” The Arab Spring is also prominent on the list, but again just how to think about those “successes” is far from simple.⁵ Looking for big, industrialized countries, the high participation campaigns are the movements against the Argentinian junta, the “Anti-Morsi protests” in Egypt, the Iranian Revolution, and the movement to overthrow the Marcos dictatorship in the Phillippines. It’s not a very promising list from an American perspective. Morsi was deposed by a military junta, and the Iranian revolution created the Islamic Republic. Argentina and the Philippines might be more appealing, but as a roadmap for an American resistance, they give one pause. Offhand, both histories include pre-existing armed resistance, general strikes, large-scale murderous political repression, economic crisis, and a pivotal moment when the Reagan administration withdrew support.

Well, Ronald Reagan is certainly not riding to the rescue of American progressives this time. However, Stephan and Chenoweth also posit a less magical mechanism posited for the “success” of large non-violent resistance campaigns:

We argue that nonviolent resistance may have a strategic advantage over violent resistance for two reasons. First, repressing nonviolent campaigns may backfire. In backfire, an unjust act—often violent repression—recoils against its originators, often resulting in the breakdown of obedience among regime supporters, mobilization of the population against the regime, and international condemnation of the regime. (11)

It turns out their regression analysis doesn’t support this claim even on its own terms (21), but their ideological hearts are clearly in this idea, exemplified by their case studies of success. I suppose no organizer would say this part out loud: only the bravest and most principled people would risk death on the theory that a massacre of non-violent protestors is the best way to topple an authoritarian regime. In any case, putting it that way shows how little the present-day American case fits into the dataset that undergirds the 3.5% factoid. Stephan and Chenoweth say that campaigns succeed more when the military and the police “defect” from the regime rather than massacre non-violent protestors.⁶ I suppose it’s possible, and I also suppose, with dread, that Americans are closer to finding out than we have been in some while.

But I don’t imagine most people involved in “No Kings” are thinking clearly about such possibilities. Instead, the magical thinking around 3.5% is matched by the emptiness of the implied political vision. What does it mean to say “No Kings” after all? We are not ruled by a monarch: there is no King George to declare independence from. What actual demands does the movement have? Would a lack of kings assure us that the deportations will stop? That Social Security and Medicaid will be protected? That federal vaccine approvals will resume? That NSF and NIH funding will be revived?

The headline “3.5%” cases are true regime changes. The equivalent in the US would be a rewriting of the Constitution, but the liberal masterminds of “No Kings,” and the usual suspects in the Democratic party elite, are instead constitutional conservatives, committed to keeping our political system just exactly as it is regardless of the abundant evidence of that system’s inability to restrain Trumpism. I suspect the idea is that expressive protests are just like bringing down a dictator. They are just like the mass movements which prevailed over violent repression in the former Second and Third Worlds, even if the successor regimes by and large focused on conforming to the Washington Consensus (as it then was), bringing neoliberalism to every corner of the globe. But that doesn’t matter, because big enough protests are what ensures change.

As the economist Marcie Smith puts it in a critique of the influence of Gene Sharp, the non-violence expert whose work underlies Chenoweth and Stephan’s:

One of the things I began to see… was a kind of instrumentalization of protests. By which I mean, elevating protest as an end in itself as opposed to recognizing it as a means to specific political outcomes. This idea that if we do protest, good things will happen. If we perform righteousness, power will notice and we will get the justice and freedom that we demand, whatever that means. Protest gets elevated way above other skills, like organizing, political education, intellectual labor, debate, the skills of alliance building, i.e. diplomacy, etc.⁷

Smith was speaking in particular about the climate movement. To see the same antipolitics looming over the protest movement today is foreboding indeed. No participation-percentage target or “civil resistance checklist” will lead us out of this morass.

There is an alternative

Actually, “No Kings” wasn’t the only thing I went to on Saturday. Before the marchers arrived, there was an an energetic “No Cuomo” rally in support of the mayoral campaigns of Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander. Listening to Mamdani (someone recorded his speech), I knew what the point was:

We don’t care if you’re an immigrant New Yorker, if you’re an undocumented New Yorker, if you’re a queer New Yorker. You are a New Yorker. And if you are a New Yorker you deserve the same protections, the same respect, the same representation.

Mamdani stands for something in particular: for refusing to cooperate with ICE, for investing in public services. At that rally, when we said “No Kings,” we were talking about a real choice: between a corrupt plutocrat whose only sincere belief appears to be in the droit de seigneur and a leftist who believes in fighting off attacks on human rights and making the city more affordable for the people who work there. The national movement lacks this sense of a clear alternative, and, as long as its de facto leaders think by the lights of “3.5%,” it cannot possibly develop one.

Addendum, June 20, 2025. Ben Burgis, whose commentary on the protests I, as usual, find compelling, notes that Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin specifically suggested opposing “kings” as an alternative to the Bernie Sanders/AOC “no oligarchy” platform, allegedly because only “coastal” people know what the word means. Wikipedia tells me that Slotkin was a CIA analyst and holds a master’s in international affairs—just the sort of credentials that teach you how to reach the ordinary person in the street.