Category Archives: nonviolence

youth activism now

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I am grateful to have frequent opportunities to talk with grassroots democracy groups about tactics and methods. My current standard talk is here (but I like to offer it as a discussion rather than a lecture).

The groups that have invited me this year tend to be quite grey–well populated by retirees. I actually believe that it is important for large, nonviolent democracy movements to draw heavy participation from people who are relatively safe from state violence, including older and wealthier white people. But I encounter some anxiety about how to engage younger people.

I suspect that part of the issue is simply age-segregation: younger activists have separate groups. But there also may be some discouragement and confusion among American youth at this moment.

CIRCLE surveyed a representative national sample of youth shortly after the 2024 election and found relatively high levels of engagement. For example, 18% of young adults said they had recently participated in a protest, up from 15% in 2022. Another 29% said they would protest if they had the opportunity. (This was before Trump had been sworn in.) An outright majority had signed a petition.

For the population as a whole, the rate of participation in protests has risen rapidly during 2025, surpassing the increase in 2017. I am not sure whether youth are keeping pace with that growth.

See also: the state of nonviolent grassroots resistance; tools people need to preserve and strengthen democracy etc.

tips for democracy activists in 2025

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This is a 22-minute video of me offering suggestions and diagnostic questions for activists in nonviolent, pro-democracy movements in the USA right now, and for those want to get involved.

I have been offering these ideas in interactive webinars and in-person meetings. In those settings, I don’t lecture; we discuss. For this publicly accessible video, I have extracted some of my own thoughts and questions.

the nonviolent response

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It’s not yet clear whether the US has entered an authoritarian period or a right-wing period (or both), because the political struggle is still underway and by no means resolved.

But it is pretty clear that we have entered a period of instability or unrest, which is quite common in global perspective but especially dangerous in a superpower. As I wrote on this blog in 2023, “We will know that we are in that situation if the daily news often includes reports of violent clashes, dubious arrests and prosecutions, threats, firings or resignations connected to politics, and occasional assassinations and politically-motivated mass murders.”

All those boxes are checked in 2025.

I also wrote: “I believe we need broad-based nonviolent social movements to get us through any unrest and ideally to bring us to a better place. Such movements will generate protest actions, some of which will involve reported violence–if only as a result of hostile responses by other groups or police. Thus we should be striving for a high ratio of nonviolence to violence.”

I wrote that it was “time to plan, educate, organize, and train” for nonviolent mobilization in the context of unrest and state violence. I tried to do some of that work– for example, at the 2024 Frontiers of Democracy conference. I do not think I succeeded or was part of larger efforts that were successful. I wish we had prepared better.

It’s not too late. As many people as possible must participate in broad-based, visible, nonviolent political resistance. Please feel welcome to join me at a Crossroads and Connections Webinar on Thursday September 18, 2025 from 6:30 – 8:00 PM Eastern to discuss tactics and strategies. I am happy to do other events like that if I can be helpful.

The graphs show incidence of political violence in the USA recently, per The ACLED Explorer. See also: nonviolence in a time of political unrest; a checklist for democracy activists;  the current state of resistance, and what to do about it; tools people need to preserve and strengthen democracy; learning from the Great Salt March: on civil disobedience and breaking through to mass opinion; countering selective harassment in the Trump Administration; building power for resisting authoritarianism etc.

a checklist for democracy activists

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Many Americans are working to defend democracy, but we need even more. People with diverse agendas and various diagnoses of our current problems must take action right now. There are several legitimate theories of our crisis. We need people to address whatever aspects resonate most with them, coming from their diverse backgrounds and viewpoints.

I think these (below) are our most important tasks. And I believe that if many people do them, our disagreements about diagnoses and strategies will not matter very much, because a stronger civil society will preserve democracy:

One-to-one interviews: Fanning out in a community and asking people what they care about, looking for individuals who have various kinds of leadership potential and networks, and bringing them together in meetings. Use a guide like this one.
Local news: Collecting information that would otherwise go unreported because of the collapse of local journalism, and sharing it. Local news is highly relevant to national events, because everything from budget cuts to ICE raids plays out in locations.
Caring for affected people: Raising money, serving food, driving people where they need to go, taking care of their children and pets, helping them find work.
Advocacy in local institutions: We need concerned citizens to meet with their school superintendent to ask how undocumented children are being protected, their local college president to ask about free speech, and their local TV station to ask about biased news coverage. Some of this advocacy can be friendly and low-key. Sometimes, local leaders just need our quiet support. But some issues may have to escalate to public conflict.
Registering and turning out voters: It is fine to do this in a partisan way: party activism is an important aspect of democracy. It is also possible to register and motivate voters in a genuinely nonpartisan way to expand the electorate and protect everyone’s right to vote as they wish.
Recruiting and supporting candidates: This is important at all levels, from school boards to 2028 presidential candidates.
Nonviolent resistance: Civil disobedience is a spectrum, from easy and safe actions to very courageous ones. The method of banging on pots in big cities has spread globally in the last decade and has now reached Washington, DC. It is an example of a relatively safe action. Standing in the way of armed government agents is much more dangerous. Effective nonviolent movements offer and celebrate a wide range of actions.

I did not list protests on this table. They can be valuable, but I want to suggest that they are more means than ends. For example, a march can be a powerful way of publicizing that there is a resistance and collecting the contact-information of people who might do the other tasks. I often think that the most important people at a rally are not the speakers on the podium but the folks at the back of the crowd with clipboards.

These are not tasks for individuals to do alone. None of us can accomplish much by ourselves; we can’t even think wisely unless we discuss what to do with others. Therefore, the tasks listed above require organizations, and there is an equally important agenda for building and sustaining groups:

Recruitment: Individuals must be invited into organizations and made to feel welcome, notwithstanding their previous experience and views, and encouraged to commit to the group. (This is where protests belong on the checklist.)
Logistics: A group can’t get anything done unless someone finds a space, buys the pizzas, arranges childcare, and does all the other scutwork. Some of this requires skill and experience; all of it requires effort. By the way, the people who contribute in this way must be recognized and thanked.
Decision-making: Groups must make decisions efficiently, yet without ignoring dissenters who have genuine disagreements. Effective groups treat meeting time as a scarce resource and use it economically. They know what they are doing at any given moment during a meeting. (Are we venting? Brainstorming? Advising someone? Choosing between two courses of action?) I recommend distinguishing between contested values and merely practical questions and reserving discussion time for the value-conflicts that need resolution. I would delegate practical issues to volunteers to decide. It is also crucial to record all decisions so that it’s clear what the group has committed to do.
Leadership-development: Groups need leaders. Even the most non-hierarchical groups actually have leaders, although those people may not have titles or official powers. Leaders should be recognized and thanked. They should have opportunities to grow. They should also be held accountable and, if necessary, removed.
Raising and holding money: The typical anti-Trump resistance group raises money, but not for itself. Members pass the hat (metaphorically), and their funds go to political candidates or name-brand national nonprofits. This is unsustainable. In the first month of the first Trump Administration, 350,000 people donated to the ACLU, disproportionately funding one organization that had one strategy. Then the money tapered off. Groups need their own bank accounts and budgets, reserving some funds for their own continuous fundraising.
Hiring: We need more people whose jobs involve organizing for democracy, and we need pathways for those who want to do this work. Organizers can be young, part-time, and (frankly) underpaid, but they need salaries.
Scaling up: Once there are three resistance groups in a given county, there should be an umbrella group for the county. This should not just be forum where like-minded people share news; it should make decisions. That implies a leadership structure at the county level–and then upward from there.
Coalition work: There should be many flavors of organizations, and they should coordinate. I completely respect the big emerging networks, such as Indivisible and #50501, but they need company, and not everyone will want to join any given network. Groups have various identities and agendas. To work in coalition is not only to express mutual support or to agree on general principles. (In fact, it’s fine if different groups disagree on principles.) A coalition can coordinate concrete actions at key moments. That requires empowering selected representatives from the various member organizations to meet and make decisions.

See also: “democracy’s crisis: a system map (a longer and revised version of which is forthcoming in Studies in Law, Politics, and Society); the current state of resistance, and what to do about it; tools people need to preserve and strengthen democracy; and a flowchart for collective decision-making in democratic small groups.

learning from the Great Salt March: on civil disobedience and breaking through to mass opinion

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Erica Chenoweth, Soha Hammam, Jeremy Pressman, and Christopher Wiley Shay estimate that the No Kings protests this June were among the largest in American history, and the number of protests is growing faster than in 2017 (see the graph above).

Protesting has several purposes, including advertising a movement and recruiting people to take other actions. But protests can also influence people to change their views or behavior. For example, they can convert people who disagree or motivate people who are passive (Bayard Rustin 1965).

Inevitably, the vast majority of any protest’s audience does not observe it directly. People see it through media of various kinds. That was even true during the French Revolution (Jones 2021), and more so in an era of mass communications. It is critical whether and how media organizations (and nowadays, social media users) describe protests (Wasow, 2020).

For those protesting against Trump, two current challenges are: 1) neglect and 2) backlash. Some prominent voices in the media seem not to notice that protests are happening, which may reduce their impact. And many powerful media outlets misrepresent protesters. For example, right-wing media obsessively presented Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests as violent, when data show that they were not, and this contributed to a very tangible backlash. BLM demanded reductions in police budgets, but the presence of BLM protests was associated with increases in police budgets (Ebbinghaus, Bailey & Rubel 2024).

The power of media can be discouraging, especially given the splintered and ideologically polarized media landscape and the prevalence of media outlets that are outright hostile to resistance.

However, protest events can break through if they are skillfully designed (and perhaps a bit lucky).

Consider the apex moment of Gandhi’s career as a protest leader, the Great Salt March of 1930.

Before he launched the March, the Indian independence movement was struggling, and Gandhi was struggling against rivals who included religious sectarians, Marxists, and violent revolutionaries. The media that mattered to him (Indian and foreign) was polarized by ideology, language, and ethnicity and was widely hostile to him.

Gandhi chose to march to the sea to harvest salt because that action would dramatize the evils of imperialism, provoke police action, acknowledge the needs of poor Indians for whom salt was expensive, and turn salt itself into a powerful symbol.

When Gandhi set off on foot with a rather small group, press reports were dismissive and patronizing. The Statesman newspaper of Calcutta called the march “a childishly futile business,” and the Times of India defended the government’s salt monopoly as good for the poor. In the USA, TIME Magazine mocked Gandhi’s “spindly frame” and called his wife Kasturba, “a shriveled, little middle-aged Hindu.” (I quote these and the following snippets from Guha 2018.)

But the scale of the march and the brutality of the police response at the shore broke through. TIME switched to describing Gandhi as a statesman and even as “St. Gandhi,” whose “movement for independence” uses “Christian acts as a weapon against men with Christian beliefs.” Perhaps not all the world’s coverage was favorable, but most of the media switched from viewing Gandhi as a bit of a joke to taking him very seriously indeed. He was back at the head of the Independence movement, which now had momentum.

I am not saying that we need a new Gandhi. Centralized leadership is overrated (even in the Indian independence movement). The way to achieve a breakthrough today is to try many tactics in a decentralized way until one or more of them work. But all of us can learn from the Great Salt March, particularly:

  • Innovation: We always need new forms of civil disobedience. Harvesting salt illegally on a public beach was an innovation in 1930. Protesting at Tesla showrooms was an innovation in 2025. What’s next? (Right now, I am wondering about a march of many religious congregations from the National Cathedral toward Lafayette Square.)
  • Grassroots support: Gandhi would have lost humiliatingly except that thousands of people joined him on his march. The cost of salt resonated with poor Indians (as did his leadership, of course). The question is not which issue is most important, but what gets many people involved.
  • A focus on the audience. It is always hard for social movements to think rigorously about how outsiders will receive their messages, because they disagree with the outsiders! Activists are not obliged to change their goals to cater to public opinion, but they must consider perceptions. What will “Normies” think about our protest? That may sometimes be an annoying question, yet victory depends on answering it well.

See also: the state of nonviolent grassroots resistance; features of effective boycotts; how to engage our universities in this crisis etc. Sources: Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement” Commentary (February, 1965); Colin Jones, The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021); Omar Wasow, “Agenda seeding: How 1960s black protests moved elites, public opinion and voting,” American Political Science Review 114.3 (2020): 638-659; Mathis Ebbinghaus, Nathan Bailey & Jacob Rubel, “The Effect of the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests on Police Budgets: How ‘Defund the Police’ Sparked Political Backlash, “ Social Problems, 2024, spae004, https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spae004; Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The years that changed the world, 1914-1948 (Vintage, 2018).