How Resistance Succeeds

The number of protests has been skyrocketing nationally. Does it matter?

I described the massive turnouts at Town Halls in Indianapolis last week to my youngest son; he responded “for all the good it will do,” dismissing the effectiveness of such events. But there is scholarship showing that non-violent protests by a sufficient percentage of the population have succeeded in overcoming autocracies elsewhere.

And what is a “sufficient percentage”? Three and a half percent of the population!

If turnout at the past week’s nationwide town halls is any indication, reaching three-and-a-half percent should be very do-able. According to Google, there were 340 million Americans as of 2024. Three and a half percent would mean that we need to turn out 11 million 900 thousand nonviolent protestors.

The pre-eminent researcher in the field of protest efficacy is Erica Chenoweth of Harvard, who co-authored the book, “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict.” In the linked interview, she explained why civil resistance campaigns that are non-violent attract many more people than violent insurrections like the horrifying one we saw on January 6th (as she notes, it’s in part it’s because there’s a much lower barrier to participation compared with picking up a weapon). It isn’t sheer numbers, of course–she explains the other factors that were necessary to successful resistances in the countries she’s studied.

There are four of them:

The first is a large and diverse participation that’s sustained.

The second thing is that [the movement] needs to elicit loyalty shifts among security forces in particular, but also other elites. Security forces are important because they ultimately are the agents of repression, and their actions largely decide how violent the confrontation with — and reaction to — the nonviolent campaign is going to be in the end. But there are other security elites, economic and business elites, state media. There are lots of different pillars that support the status quo, and if they can be disrupted or coerced into noncooperation, then that’s a decisive factor.

The third thing is that the campaigns need to be able to have more than just protests; there needs to be a lot of variation in the methods they use.

The fourth thing is that when campaigns are repressed — which is basically inevitable for those calling for major changes — they don’t either descend into chaos or opt for using violence themselves. If campaigns allow their repression to throw the movement into total disarray or they use it as a pretext to militarize their campaign, then they’re essentially co-signing what the regime wants — for the resisters to play on its own playing field. And they’re probably going to get totally crushed.

As she notes–and as the emerging American resistance has found– protesting can take many forms other than street demonstrations.

People have done things like bang pots and pans or go on electricity strikes or something otherwise disruptive that imposes costs on the regime even while people aren’t outside. Staying inside for an extended period equates to a general strike. Even limited strikes are very effective. There were limited and general strikes in Tunisia and Egypt during their uprisings and they were critical.

Chenoweth cautions that preparation for most of these methods is essential, noting that successful strikes or other methods of economic noncooperation have often been preceded by months of stockpiling food, coming up with strike funds, or finding other ways to engage  community mutual aid while the strike is underway. Here in the U.S., organizations like Indivisible have demonstrated that capacity for planning and organization, and together with other grassroots organization, they’ve proven their ability to turn out large numbers of citizens.

What is so encouraging about Chenoweth’s findings is that “large numbers” does not equate to “large percentages.” As she says,

a surprisingly small proportion of the population guarantees a successful campaign: just 3.5 percent. That sounds like a really small number, but in absolute terms it’s really an impressive number of people. In the U.S., it would be around 11.5 million people today. Could you imagine if 11.5 million people — that’s about three times the size of the 2017 Women’s March — were doing something like mass noncooperation in a sustained way for nine to 18 months? Things would be totally different in this country.

April 5th should provide us with an initial indication of whether engaging that percentage will be possible. On April 5th, Indivisible and several allied organizations are mounting a nation-wide Day of Action, telling this lawless administration “Hands off our healthcare, our social security, our democracy!” Here in Indianapolis, it will take place at the Statehouse, from noon to 4:00.

I plan to be there, and hope to see many of my local readers.

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What The Fire Hose Obscures…

Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of what has aptly been called the “firehose” of unconstitutional, illegal and profoundly stupid actions being taken by Trump and DOGE is the public’s corresponding inability to understand it all–to keep track of the assaults on the multiple responsibilities of government, and to recognize the immensity of the harms being done.

It’s all too easy to focus on the pettiness and bigotries–the erasures of the contributions of Blacks and women from official websites, the withdrawal of Secret Service protections from those on Trump’s extensive “enemies” list, the threats to law firms that represent people on that list…etc. etc. But while we are appalled by the lack of backbone being demonstrated by many of those targets (and all of the Republicans in Congress), we are missing less reported actions that are wreaking incalculable harms.

Last Sunday, the New York Times reported on one of those actions.

In a climate-controlled bunker in an unremarkable building in rural Aberdeen, Idaho, there are shelves upon shelves of meticulously labeled boxes of seed. This vault is home to many of the United States’ more than 62,000 genetically unique lines of wheat, collected over the past 127 years from around the world.

Though dormant, these seeds are alive. But unless they are continually cared for and periodically replanted, the lines will die, along with the millenniums of evolutionary history that they embody.

Since its establishment in 1898, the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Plant Germplasm System and the scientists who support it have systematically gathered and maintained the agricultural plant species that undergird our food system in vast collections such as the one in Aberdeen. The collections represent a towering achievement of foresight that food security depends on the availability of diverse plant genetic resources.

In mid-February, Trump administration officials at what has been labeled the Department of Government Efficiency fired some of the highly trained people who do this work. A court order has reinstated them, but it’s unclear when they will be allowed to resume their work. In the meantime, uncertainty around additional staffing and budget cuts, as well as the future of the collections themselves, reigns.

As the article notes, America’s food system relies on our ability to respond to the next plant disease or other emergent threat, and this little-known agency is essential to our preparedness. Across 22 stations maintained nationwide, 300 scientists maintain more than 600,000 genetic lines of more than 200 crop species.

The collections of some crops, like wheat, are in the form of seeds. But others, like apples (2,664 lines), must be maintained as living plants in the open field. The scientists who care for them must follow strict requirements for sustaining genetic purity so they can provide healthy viable seeds or plants to the tens of thousands of researchers and others who request them each year.

The article compares this activity to a survivalist cache. It represents a safeguard against all future challenges to growing the food we need. (You’d think a man with 13 children might care about the future of those children, if not the rest of the human race, but apparently not.)

Moving fast and breaking things may work in some sectors. But the disruptions underway threaten irreversible losses of crop genetic diversity. Such losses directly undermine the United States’ ability to ensure continued food security and dietary diversity amid challenges to our agricultural systems.

The word “irreversible” is chilling–and therein lies the challenge we face.

It isn’t just the fact that Americans have installed a collection of clowns and buffoons–in both the Oval Office and Congress– who lack any ability to govern, or even understand the purpose of government.  It isn’t their ham-handed efforts to erase evidence of diversity–much of which will be countered by  Internet sources. It isn’t even the mean-spiritedness of their attacks on disfavored “Others” (as one participant at a Town Hall put it, “what kind of people are only happy when they are hurting someone else?”). It’s the immense and irreversible damage that is being done, and the fact that the assaults are so widespread that we can’t keep track of them.

We can recover from the economic damage being done, although not without considerable pain as prices increase, tourism vanishes, and working Americans have fewer jobs and less disposable income. We will mourn the unnecessary deaths from vaccine misinformation, termination of medical research and drastic cuts to Medicaid, but the nation will survive those losses.

It’s the irreversible damage being done–to our international alliances, to food safety, to America’s promise of liberty and civi equality, and to who knows what else–that will forever mark this horrible juncture in our national story.

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Red State Blues

I don’t know indiana State Representative Chis Campbell, and I had to look up her district (26) but everyone in Indiana ought to understand the contents of her recent newsletter, detailing the losses that Indiana will sustain as a result of the carnage being wreaked by the Trump/Musk administration.

Deep-Red Indiana, where citizens love to hate the federal government, is the state third-most reliant on federal funding. We are behind only Louisiana and Mississippi (a statistic that gives credence to the frequent accusation that Indiana’s terrible legislature wants to turn Indiana into the Mississippi of the north).

According to Representative Campbell, nearly 44% of Indiana’s budget comes from federal agencies and grants.

So what are a few of the biggest impacts Trump’s plans will have on Hoosiers? Rep. Campbell lists them.

First, there’s the projected impact of Trump’s insane tariffs. The Conversation calculates that Indiana will be the third most impacted by those tariffs, losing $4.82 billion (a 1.12% decrease in our GDP), primarily in the auto, manufacturing, and agriculture industries. “The auto industry, one of Indiana’s biggest economic sectors, is expected to lose $28.2 billion because of these tariffs.”  It is projected that a Hoosier family of four will spend an extra $2,836 each year, “equivalent to half a year’s worth of utility payments.”

If Trump is successful in ridding us of the much-maligned Department of Education, Indiana will lose $1.8 billion we now get for K-12 and higher education.

The Division of Family Resources (DFR), which primarily funds schools with a high number of low-income students or students in need of special education, receives a little under $2 billion from the federal government. Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) receives approximately $670,000 in Title III funding. These dollars help students who are learning English as a second language, and they benefit approximately 6,400 students in the IPS system. Additionally, students with disabilities rely on the DOE to enforce the right to an individualized education plan.

Then there’s Medicaid.

Congressional Republicans have proposed $880 billion in federal cuts, which would be impossible to achieve without cutting Medicaid or Medicare. Since roughly 70% of Indiana’s funding for Medicaid comes from the national government, Indiana could be in a serious bind. It’s estimated that close to 484,000 Hoosiers would lose their health care coverage if these federal cuts are passed and Indiana fails to cover the costs.

As Representative Campbell notes, the assault on healthcare isn’t confined to Medicaid. Cuts to the NIH–the National Institutes of Health–will dramatically affect Indiana University and Purdue University, both of which rely heavily on federal funding to conduct on-campus medical research.

Cuts to HUD will worsen Indiana’s challenging housing market. We are already one of the most difficult states in which to rent  (Fort Wayne is ranked the third least renter-friendly city in the U.S.). And since HUD enforces fair housing laws, Trump’s cuts to the agency will join his other efforts to revive Jim Crow.

If Trump was capable of rational decision-making, he would re-think his wildly unconstitutional Executive Orders and his support for Musk’s equally unconstitutional chain-saw “efficiencies,” because the data shows that the mayhem is hitting Red states like Indiana far harder than it is affecting Blue states.

It is unlikely that Trump understands that differential impact, or recognizes the European Union’s very deliberate effort to target its responses to his tariffs to the states inhabited by his supporters.  As the linked article from Fortune reports:

The EU measures will cover goods from the United States worth some 26 billion euros ($28 billion), and not just steel and aluminum products, but also textiles, home appliances and agricultural goods. Motorcycles, bourbon, peanut butter and jeans will be hit, as they were during President Donald Trump’s first term.

The EU duties aim for pressure points in the U.S. while minimizing additional damage to Europe. The tariffs — taxes on imports — primarily target Republican-held states, hitting soybeans in House speaker Mike Johnson’s Louisiana, but also beef and poultry in Kansas and Nebraska. Produce in Alabama, Georgia and Virginia is also on the list.

Unfortunately those of us in Red states who aren’t members of the MAGA cult will suffer along with everyone else. And of course, residents of Blue states won’t escape the effects of the combined madness (Trump, Musk) and cowardice (Republicans in Congress).

As the consequences become increasingly impossible to ignore, the resistance will grow. It is already gathering speed: over 11,000 people turned out to hear Bernie Sanders and AOC in bright-Red Greeley, Colorado, and an amazing 34,000 turned out in Denver.

Even in Red Indiana, Town Halls are packed with Americans who aren’t going down without a fight. And as the cuts to Social Security staffs make access difficult-to-impossible, those crowds are exploding.

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The Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight

When I read the astonishing news, the first thing that came to mind was a 1971 film titled “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.” There’s a reason I frequently refer to Trump’s idiot appointees as clowns or Keystone Cops. 

But of course, it isn’t funny.

By now, you’ve undoubtedly read the media reports about a security breach so ludicrous that it could be the subject of a comic film: intelligence officers used a commercial messaging app (Signal) to discuss and coordinate a military strike against Houthi rebels. In the process, they accidentally included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg in those discussions. (Initially, Goldberg– understandably– thought the messages were part of a hoax. Only after the strike occurred as discussed did he realize the texts he’d received were genuine.)

Robert Hubbell (and many others) noted that the recklessness wasn’t simply stupid; it was criminal. As Hubbell pointed out, a government employee of lower rank who committed the same offense would be behind bars “awaiting trial without the benefit of bail. See, e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 793(f) (“Whoever . . . .through gross negligence permits [national defense information] to be . . . delivered to anyone in violation of his trust” shall be fined or imprisoned for up to ten years.”

Huffpost quoted Mayor Pete’s reaction, including the expletive:

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is calling out President Donald Trump and his cabinet after an “epic fuckup” accidentally gave a journalist access to a group chat detailing a planned airstrike in Yemen.
“It is getting clearer by the day that the people in charge of the American government cannot keep the American people safe,” Buttigieg said in a video posted on social media.

In the New York Times, David French addressed the breach, saying that Hegseth should resign, having “blown his credibility as a military leader.”

I’m a former Army JAG officer (an Army lawyer). I’ve helped investigate numerous allegations of classified information spillages, and I’ve never even heard of anything this egregious — a secretary of defense intentionally using a civilian messaging app to share sensitive war plans without even apparently noticing a journalist was in the chat.

There is not an officer alive whose career would survive a security breach like that. It would normally result in instant consequences (relief from command, for example) followed by a comprehensive investigation and, potentially, criminal charges.

Federal law makes it a crime when a person — through gross negligence — removes information “relating to the national defense” from “its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted or destroyed.”

As French and several others have commented, the incident is an example of public officials using a commercial messaging app so that they could avoid accountability by circumventing the “security infrastructure that protects defense secrets and preserves the official records of communications and decision-making by senior government officers.”

The very use of the app broke several laws. French quotes one: Department of Defense Policy Regarding Use of Unclassified Mobile Applications. Paragraph 10 in Attachment Two of that document states:

Unmanaged ‘messaging apps,’ including any app with a chat feature, regardless of the primary function, are NOT authorized to access, transmit, process non-public DoD information. This includes but is not limited . . . iMessage, WhatsApps, [and] Signal.

The use of a commercial messaging app (presumably on personal cell phones!) endangered US national security. That, in itself, was an appalling and entirely illegal lapse. But as French goes on to argue, the reckless disclosure to Jeffrey Goldberg elevates the offense to a level requiring impeachment and removal from office.

And then, of course, there’s our Madman-in-Chief’s response to this gobsmacking breach of security:

One additional unsettling aspect of the affair is that Trump claimed to know nothing about the inadvertent disclosure to Jeffrey Goldberg—even after a representative of the National Security Advisor admitted that the texts received by Goldberg were authentic. Trump is either clueless, lying, or both. There is no combination of those possibilities that reflects favorably on Trump.

The cabinet officials recruited by Trump and obediently confirmed by Senate Republicans are an embarrassing collection of know-nothings, incompetents and conspiracy theorists, leavened with a sprinkling of Russian assets. (Designations that are not mutually exclusive…)

If we needed any additional proof that the administration’s anti-DEI, anti-“elitist,” anti-woke, anti-education assaults are efforts to ensure continuation of the historic dominance of mediocre (and worse) White men over more competent women and minorities–efforts to turn back the clock to a time before individual merit mattered more than a preferred gender or skin color– the pathetic performance of these individuals should be dispositive.

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Why Research Matters

When I joined the faculty of Indiana University after decidedly non-academic stints as a lawyer, real estate developer and  ACLU executive director, non-university friends would often question the institutional obligation to devote considerable time and effort to research. They questioned the reason so many institutions of higher education pursue a “publish or perish” criterion for  tenure (and a number didn’t understand why we had tenure, either).

I’ll leave my fairly robust defense of tenure for another time, but in the face of Trump’s unprecedented assault on universities, the New York Times recently ran an editorial explaining the critical importance of scholarly research.

The editorial began by explaining that what we are seeing is typical of authoritarianism:

When a political leader wants to move a democracy toward a more authoritarian form of government, he often sets out to undermine independent sources of information and accountability. The leader tries to delegitimize judges, sideline autonomous government agencies and muzzle the media.

One of those “independent sources of information” is, rather obviously, scholarship. As the editorial points out, academic researchers pursue the truth–empirical facts– and that can present a threat to those in authority. Putin and Erdogan have closed universities, Modi’s government has arrested dissident scholars, and Orban has appointed loyal foundations to run universities.

Mr. Trump’s multifaceted campaign against higher education is core to this effort to weaken institutions that do not parrot his version of reality. Above all, he is enacting or considering major cuts to universities’ resources. The Trump administration has announced sharp reductions in the federal payments that cover the overhead costs of scientific research, such as laboratory rent, electricity and hazardous waste disposal. (A federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order against those cuts.) Vice President JD Vance and other Republicans have urged a steep increase of a university endowment tax that Mr. Trump signed during his first term. Together, these two policies could reduce the annual budgets at some research universities by more than 10 percent.

There is public dissatisfaction with the very real problems of America’s universities, and the editorial goes into considerable detail about the current deficiencies and problems of those institutions. But as it also notes, just as with Trump’s approach to trade, government waste, and immigration, the administration’s “solutions” won’t ameliorate or address the real problems. It will make things much worse.

The American higher education system, for all its flaws, is the envy of the world, and it now faces a financial squeeze that threatens its many strengths — strengths that benefit all Americans.

Chief among them is its global leadership in medical care and scientific research. American professors still dominate the Nobel Prizes. When wealthy and powerful people in other countries face a medical crisis, they often use their connections to get an appointment at an American academic hospital. For that matter, some of the same Republicans targeting universities with budget cuts seek out its top medical specialists when they or their relatives are ill.

American leadership in medical and scientific research depends on federal money. Private companies, even large ones, typically do not conduct much of the basic research that leads to breakthroughs because it is too uncertain; even successful experiments may not lead to profitable products for decades. Mr. Trump’s planned funding cuts are large enough to force universities to do less of this research. The list of potential forgone progress is long, including against cancer, heart disease, viruses, obesity, dementia and drug overdoses. And there will be costs beyond the medical sector. There is a reason that Silicon Valley sprang up next to a research university.

The Times is right to say that we need to speak–loudly and publicly– about why universities matter, to point to the many ways in which higher education and research promote public health, economic growth and national security. It’s also important to recognize that universities are the largest employers in some regions. And for many Americans, universities have been “an unmatched, if imperfect, engine of upward mobility that can alter the trajectory of entire families.”

Thus far, too many academic officials have been timid and quiet in the face of this assault. That needs to change.

College presidents do not need to become pundits. But they do need to defend the core mission of their institutions when it is under attack. University leaders would help themselves, and the country, by emerging from their defensive crouches and making a forthright case for inquiry, research, science and knowledge.

This administration is waging war on science and knowledge. It’s a war we cannot let them win.

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