Consider This from NPR - Americans are protesting the Trump administration. Do they work?

Episode Date: April 24, 2025

When you think of a successful protest movement, most Americans probably think of the American Civil Rights movement, and the March on Washington in 1963.Martin Luther King, Jr. standing behind a podium on the steps of the Lincoln memorial delivered his most famous speech and a line that would come to define the goals of the Civil Rights Movement. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act just nine months after the March. A year after that Johnson signed the National Voting Rights Act of 1965.The quest for equality continues. In the decades since that bright summer day in August 1963, many other Americans have tried to use the model of protest to achieve their political goals. But do protests work?For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

When you think of a successful protest movement, most Americans probably think of the American Civil Rights Movement and the March on Washington in 1963. John McDonough It was such a joyous day. There was such a broad array of support from whites, Jews, Christians, labor. For those of us who were born in segregation, as I was, to come and see born in segregation as I was, to come and see this array of powerful white Americans coming in on our side was thrilling, uplifting, and we went away, many of us, I among them, euphoric. That's activist Roger Wilkins recalling the historic day. In 2008, Wilkins and Martin Luther King Jr. biographer Taylor Branch spoke to NPR for

the 45th anniversary of that march and Dr. King's famous speech. The day was a powerful and star-studded event, attracting the likes of singer Harry Belafonte, union leader A. Philip Randolph, and of course, Martin Luther King Jr. But at the time, Branch says, Washington was bracing itself for immense violence as protesters filled the city. They expected riot and mayhem to a degree that is almost impossible to apprehend today unless you go back and read the records. Liquor sales were canceled in the District of Columbia for the first time since the end of Prohibition in 1933. Plasma was stockpiled.

Elective surgery was canceled. But of course, that didn't happen. And the March on Washington is remembered as the model of peaceful and effective protest, despite the passion that it brought the hundreds of thousands to Washington that day. You can hear that passion in the voice of John Lewis, then the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Those who are said to be patient and wait, we must say that we cannot be patient. We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now. And of course, at 5 o'clock that day. I have the pleasure to present to you Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr., standing behind a podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial,

delivered his most famous speech, and a line that would come to define the goals of the civil rights movement. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act just nine months after the march.

A year after that, Johnson signed the National Voting Rights Act of 1965. Consider this. The quest for equality still continues. In the decades since that bright summer day in August 1963, many other Americans have tried to use the model of protest to achieve their political goals. But do protests work? From NPR, I'm Juana Sommers. This message comes from NPR sponsor Air Canada. Ready for your next adventure?

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The first hundred days of Donald Trump's second presidential term have been characterized by layoffs of federal workers, questionable deportations of protesters, and his unusual relationship with Elon Musk. And through all of that, there have been protests in different parts of the country. Donald Trump says not to go! That sound from one of the 1,300 hands-off rallies that took place on April 5th, but are those protests changing any minds or changing any policies? Those are questions I put to Harvard Kennedy School of Government political scientist

Erica Chenoweth. What is it that makes a protest effective? So the literature really suggests that there are four key things that help social movements in general succeed. So one of the things is size. So a very large protest is much more likely to get noticed, to demonstrate people power, to have a large symbolic impact, and potentially to begin to shift people's understandings about the stakes of an event

or a set of claims that are emerging from it. A very diverse crowd also suggests that whatever the protesters are saying is something that's widely shared. Protests that are disciplined, that is to say that they stick to their own message and their own plan tactically, are more likely to elicit sympathy or sympathetic views.

And the movements that are the most effective are those that begin to shift the loyalties of people than different pillars of support. As I think about some of the biggest protests that I've seen at least in my lifetime, they've come from the political left. I'm thinking about things like the Black Lives Matter movement, Me Too, the war in Gaza. I wonder, has that been the case historically? You know, a prominent paper actually looks at the impacts of the Tea Party protests of April 15th of 2009 on the 2010 midterm elections.

So what they did find is that having a Tea Party protest in one's district and having it be a particularly large protest was strongly correlated basically to whether Tea Party candidates both won the primaries and then won those elections. And so we see that whether it's on the right or left, there's a pretty consistent story in the role of protests and shifting electoral behavior, even if those impacts on elections are modest in terms of the percentage of the vote that might be shifted. And then just about three weeks ago, a paper came out basically arguing that the same story

did hold with regard to the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer of 2020 impacting vote share in the 2020 presidential election. You know, we've largely been backward looking and discussing what makes protests effective or successful, but I am curious because we're in a very different political moment here in the United States where rules and norms are changing and in many cases being ignored. Do you think that the lessons that we've been talking about today apply to the current political moment? I think they do.

I don't have any reason to believe that the general principles of what has made democracy movements successful in the past would not apply here. There are a couple of caveats to that. The first is that the United States is a massive country. The other caveat though is that during the period that most of the research has been done about what makes movements succeed, that period was the period of, basically US global hegemony. So the sort of post-World War II period is when we saw mass non-violent civil resistance movements

become an important engine driving democratic transitions and the global spread of democracy over the next number of years and decades. But if the United States is not any more in a position where it is even just representing that itself is committed to democracy at home and abroad, then we are in somewhat unchartered territory. I have a question for you about what pushes people to actually take to the streets.

You earlier mentioned the example of South Korea where of course there was this dramatic event, this declaration of martial law that happened and that triggered massive protests. I wonder, is it more difficult for protests to gain stream of say for instance, rights or the rule of law are infringed on bit by bit rather than with a big catalyzing moment like that one that we've been talking about?

I do think that a bright line like that, a catalyzing moment, can really snap people into action. And there's a sense that once you sort of break through whatever was holding the person back from participating, once they break through that barrier, whether it's fear or just apathy or demoralization, that there's actually like no going back. There's no way to predict what types of triggers will lead people to that outcome, but certainly a coup attempt would be one of them or some kind of sudden and shocking usurpation of power.

And then there are other, there are sort of two others that people have found in the literature that, that tend to be common triggers. One is a stolen election or some, an election that obviously is rife with such significant problems that basically nobody believes really the outcome. And then incidences of police brutality or brutality by state authorities which can often trigger demands for accountability and then if those demands are suppressed that can then trigger a much broader set of demands by a much broader set of people for justice. We've been speaking with Erica Chenoweth, author and civil resistance researcher. Thank you.

Thank you. This episode was produced by Megan Lim. It was edited by Courtney Dornig. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Sommers.