1 day ago
4
In the wake of two horrifying killings of legal observers in Minnesota, on top of the abduction of countless immigrant community members, the country has reached a turning point. Backlash against ICE’s lawlessness and aggression has reverberated so loudly that even Trump has heard it. But the effects on ordinary Americans contemplating what they would do if they lived in Minneapolis or St Paul is perhaps even more profound.
The extraordinary level of grassroots solidarity and creative resistance in anti-ICE protests in Minnesota has given people a new appreciation for the power that mass non-cooperation can have in resisting the Trump administration’s drive toward authoritarianism. And it has created an awareness of why such action is clearly needed.
Early in Trump’s second term, an array of mainstream critics expressed skepticism about the value of continued protests in the streets. They invested their faith in institutions such as Congress and the courts. But as these institutions – along with law firms, universities and the business community – have each caved in to the administration’s demands and proven themselves unwilling to catalyze an ardent defense of democracy, it has been left to the people themselves to do this essential work.
The Twin Cities were not the first to stand up. We have seen robust resistance in Chicago, Los Angeles, Charlotte, Washington DC, and other metropolitan areas previously targeted by ICE or occupied by federal troops. In the past year, there have been huge No Kings marches and coordinated consumer actions such as Tesla Takedown. But Minnesota has raised the stakes and expanded public awareness of what a community-wide refusal to submit can look like.
As more people consider joining in such acts of refusal, it is important to recognize that they can build on a rich history of past action. While popular revolt is often treated as wholly spontaneous and emotional, there is a whole body of study exploring how mass protest can be deployed in a deliberate and strategic manner – a field with rich insights that new participants can draw from today.
A decade ago, we wrote a book called This Is An Uprising, about the evolution of the theory and practice of nonviolent direct action over the past 100 years. More recently, in preparing a new and expanded 10th anniversary edition, we reflected on how the field known as “civil resistance” has changed since the Barack Obama era. This meant examining how the craft of mass mobilization has become ever more important in the face of growing tyranny, in the US and beyond.
Today, we need democratic uprisings that are bold enough to confront the scale of the crisis we now face and strategic enough to outmaneuver the systems that created it. For this reason, looking at lessons from the field of civil resistance is vital.
We cannot wait for elites
There has long been a debate about whether tactics of civil resistance are more relevant in democratic contexts or authoritarian ones and critics have cast doubt in both directions. When the study of strategic nonviolent action was still in its infancy, it was commonly believed that campaigns of disruptive protest could only prevail under governments that at least nominally tolerated freedom of expression and assembly – be it the British in Gandhi’s India or the John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson administrations for the US civil rights movement. Without such basic guarantees, many feared, demonstrations could simply be crushed. But in subsequent decades, the assumption was reversed. As campaigns of unarmed uprising showed often-surprising success under autocracies, cynics expressed new doubts: the strategies used to unseat dictators, they argued, had little salience in democracies, where people could already express their will at the polls.
We have always rejected this false binary. Civil resistance can be vital in both contexts – though strategies and tactics must adapt to local conditions. In a country like the US, even under administrations that call themselves progressive, as Obama’s did, movement pressure plays a critical role. When leaders elected on platforms of hope fail to deliver, whether because of political cowardice or because entrenched corporate power blocks change, popular mobilization is often the only force capable of compelling action, extracting responses that no amount of insider lobbying can compel.
Under a regime like Trump’s – particularly now, in his second term – the need for organized popular defiance is even more profound. Today, it appears as if the very foundations of American democracy are fracturing. Trump has launched a startling attack on public services, on the very concept of the social safety net, on free speech and the rule of law, on workers’ rights, on immigrants and on other vulnerable communities. If this is to be stopped – and if the wider system of oligarchic rule that is destroying our planet is to be replaced with true democracy – people must rediscover their own power.
Mainstream political thinking in the US sees power as “monolithic,” resting in the hands of senators, generals, billionaires, presidents and CEOs. From that vantage point, the options for opposing a rogue administration seem desperately thin: wait for elections, file a lawsuit, hope for some unforeseen maneuver by elites. This worldview breeds despair. One prominent Democratic party consultant even advised that the best course for progressives is simply to “roll over and play dead”.
The lack of imagination is staggering – and pervasive. In a 7 March 2025, op-ed for the New York Times, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California’s Berkeley School of Law, argued that if Trump chooses to wantonly defy court orders, there will be little further recourse to stop him from continuing to break laws, as the constitution does not give judges adequate enforcement power. His conclusion? “Perhaps public opinion will turn against the president” and convince him to retreat. “Or perhaps,” Chemerinsky bleakly suggested, “after 238 years, we will see the end of government under the rule of law.”
On social media, Corey Robin, the political theorist, rightly blasted this defeatism, labeling it a stunning mix of “irresponsibility and learned helplessness”. He observed that, around the globe, people with far fewer rights and far fewer resources have found more forceful ways to confront authoritarianism, deploying mass strikes, boycotts, occupations, bureaucratic intransigence, artistic resistance and myriad other forms of social solidarity and collective noncompliance. Yet among establishment elites today, he wrote, “no one dares even to talk about picking up the customary political tools that democrats across the centuries and continents have traditionally wielded against runaway rulers”.
The field of civil resistance provides an antidote to the fatal shortage of vision that pervades our political class, detailing a vast repertoire of steps that can be taken outside of lobbying and litigation. By studying these methods, we can learn key lessons: public sentiment rarely moves on its own; it responds to collective articulation and organized action. Democracies under assault cannot rely on existing checks and balances alone, they must be fortified by activated citizens. To simply declare a constitutional crisis and plead powerlessness is to accept pre-emptive ruin. The real question is how to respond when the safeguards we were told would protect us fail.
Grassroots agitation nourishes democracy
Those immersed in social movements look at the process of change in a different way than political insiders do. Instead of subscribing to the monolithic view of power, they hold a social view of power, which understands that those in positions of authority are dependent upon the cooperation and support of the governed.
Frances Fox Piven, the great scholar of disruptive action, reminds us that the capacity of people to withdraw their cooperation from the system remains an essential mechanism for securing progress. In a 2022 interview with Democracy Now, Piven argued that landmark movements of the past, from abolitionism to labor to civil rights, succeeded by impeding business as usual: “I think that movements, protest movements, defiant movements, movements that break the rules, are the main lever, the main weapon, that ordinary people have in realizing their aspirations and protecting their democratic rights,” she stated.
In a separate interview we conducted with Piven, she identified the root of our present crisis in a lack of agitation from outside established political structures: “I think that a lot of the tragedy of American democracy is the result of quiescence,” she said. “Agitation and rising up from people at the bottom are good for democracy. They nourish democracy.”
As the tremendously creative organizers in Minnesota have shown us of late, these campaigns from below can be far more varied than the organizing of big marches. In the 1970s, scholar Gene Sharp famously compiled a list of “198 methods of nonviolent action”, emphasizing the many different tactics available to social movements. Yet as comprehensive as Sharp aimed to be, his list could never exhaust the full range of options. New technologies and the inventiveness of on-the-ground organizers have since added many more examples of unarmed interventions. In 2021, Michael Beer, an activist and movement trainer, produced a revised database that almost doubles the contents of Sharp’s famous catalog, including a full 346 tactics.
Now, as then, the list of methods is best seen as an invitation to creativity, reminding organizers they have many tools in their collective toolbox – each with distinctive properties and powers. The potential of civil resistance is not just in holding large demonstrations. It is in drawing from a vast array of strikes, boycotts, noncooperation tactics and artistic protest. And it is in coming up with innovative forms of creative resistance that may never have been seen before.
The potentials of building momentum through these practices are exciting to envision. And our collective future may depend on their realization.
What’s giving us hope now
A main error that mainstream detractors make when misjudging the impact of mass mobilizations is assuming that protest tactics are somehow exclusive with other methods for winning progress. Whirlwind moments of grassroots action should instead be seen as opportunities both to alter broader political conditions and draw in new recruits for the ongoing struggle in many arenas. What gives us hope is seeing the type of intensive organizing in Minnesota not only inspire a huge wave of participation beyond the state’s borders – with hundreds of people packing neighborhood trainings in communities across the country on monitoring and resisting ICE –but also go hand in hand with shifts in public opinion that are already becoming evident at the polls, where Trump-aligned candidates are rapidly losing ground. Most recently, we saw this when a far-right Republican was defeated by a Democratic union leader in a Texas state senate district that Trump won by 17 points in 2024. In dark times, these mutually reinforcing gains are encouraging signs, and we will need many more of them.
-
Mark and Paul Engler are co-directors of the Whirlwind Institute, a social change strategy center. A new and expanded 10th anniversary edition of their book This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century has just been released.
