The No Kings Protests were remarkably successful (far more successful than the relatively much smaller Tea Party protests of 2009-10). The next question though is: So what? A bunch of middle aged and retired Old White People showed up to rallies.
The team at TPM draws attention to a loose "3.5% Rule." This was postulated by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan by looking at protest movements from 1900-2006.
The first rule was that non-violent protests were more successful than violent protests. When protests use violence they unleash the far greater violent capacity of the state. This is why Trump kept harping about the No Kings movement being full of Antifa or terrorists or whatever. It's also why it's so important that it was, in fact, a bunch of Old White People.
Once a nonviolent protest movement was able to mobilize 3.5% of the population, it almost always leads to a collapse in the regime. A lot of these recently have been the so-called Color Revolutions that swept through former Soviet Republics and several Middle Eastern countries. There are 340 million Americans. Let's say that the larger estimates of the rallies was right at 8 million. That's about 2.3% of the population. To get to the magic number, you'd need about 12 million protestors.
The economy is soft as hell, but has not yet collapsed. If that in fact happens, Trump's unpopularity will explode, especially since he's currently building himself a ballroom, bailing out Argentina and extorting his own Justice Department for more money.
Could America be headed to its own color revolution?
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