Strategic Resistance: Mass Demonstration

On June 17, 2025, approximately five million people^[1] gathered in streets of big cities and small towns across America, protesting Donald Trump and his autocratic ambitions. “No Kings” was the theme of the day.

I monitored Bluesky that weekend, trying to glean a sense of what was happening on the ground. I saw lots of protest photos posted — including a surprising number of proportionally high turnouts in red-state small towns. People coming back from No Kings tended to report feeling relieved, hopeful, and energized. Okay, I thought, this is good progress.

Then the next day I read an essay — from someone who didn’t participate — that deeply frustrated me, because it indicated a total misunderstanding of the strategy of mass nonviolent demonstrations. This person called the No Kings protests a “failure” because “the tanks still rolled” in Trump’s military birthday parade on the same day.

I don’t know how common that sentiment is, but a few days later I read another critical take. This author was disappointed because there wasn’t more police violence across the country, which the author took as proof that the organizers deliberately kept the protests “toothless”.

The fact that both of these writers are anti-MAGA leftists is what makes their derision and dismissal so frustrating — like watching a teammate kick the ball directly into your own net.

So I want to explain why those “protest is useless” takes are missing the point, and why joining these organized street rallies is an excellent use of your time and energy at this particular moment.

Mass demonstrations are a highly effective mechanism for demonstrating ‘social proof’

Social proof is the influence of the many over the few — for example, when people look to the behavior of others to determine what is socially acceptable.

Social proof doesn’t morally discriminate. Five years ago, millions of people spontaneously demonstrated in support of Black Americans and against police brutality, providing social proof in favor of racial equity. But when Trump got more votes in the 2024 election, white nationalism got a boost from social proof.

Yet his election win obscures the fact that a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s actual policies and actions — and that number is growing all the time.

People who don’t pay particular attention to news or politics were much more likely to support Trump than Harris in 2024. This type of voter gets their news from Facebook and YouTube, where they are exposed mostly to pro-Trump messaging. Without the support of those low-information voters, Trump would not have won.

Now, most people will adjust their behavior in response to social proof, but one specific type of person will also adjust their attitudes and beliefs: people who are uncertain about their own information. If you’re not a person who pays very much attention to news and politics, and you see a large mass of people protesting about something political, you’re likely to consider that they might know something you don’t. (This is why another term for ‘social proof’ is ‘informational influence’.)

Put those two facts together and you get this: the people who put Trump over the top in 2024 are the same type of people who are most likely to have their attitudes and beliefs influenced by mass protests.

The people who put Trump over the top in 2024 are the same type of people who are most likely to have their attitudes and beliefs influenced by mass protests.

Social proof doesn’t only work to shift opinions among people who disagree with you, it also helps to shore up resilience among people who agree with you. This is why people were coming home after No Kings feeling “hopeful” and “energized” — because they’d received social proof that they weren’t alone.

Localized, physical mass demonstrations are effective at providing ‘salience’

Roughly speaking, salience is a determination (often subconscious) of how 1) relevant and 2) memorable an event or piece of information is to the observer or recipient.

One nonpolitical example of salience is the way that people make different decisions when dealing with cash versus debit cards. The two should be functionally identical, and yet people are more willing to spend money when using a debit card than when using cash. Debit cards add an extra layer of abstraction, whereas cash is more physically, transparently salient. You feel the expense more when you’re counting out bills.

Similarly, an online petition might gather millions of signatures, and yet have far less salience than a couple hundred people marching in your neighborhood. For one thing, signing a petition is too quick and easy; showing up in person demonstrates a higher level of commitment, something that people instinctively take into account when judging social proof.

Second, while videos are usually more salient than text — it’s hard to imagine that a description of the assault on George Floyd, however strong the language, would have sparked the same intensity of response — in-person experiences are the most salient of all. They hit both relevance (these are my neighbors, these are people like me, these are people in my physical space) and distinctiveness (this is unusual, this is noteworthy) at high levels.

The greater the salience of an instance of social proof, the greater its effect. Salience is why I was heartened to see so many personal accounts of No Kings protests in small towns and red states: at current levels of polarization, even millions of people protesting in large cities may not move the needle for many rural voters, while comparatively tiny yet local protests have a strong chance.

Realistic, strategic goals for this stage of resistance

“The tanks still rolled” is a specious criticism of mass protest, because there is no form or quantity of opposition that was ever going to convince Trump to cancel his fascist birthday theatrics. We already allowed him to amass too much power for that.

(Nor would cancelling the parade have been a worthy goal in any case; it is but a symbol of Trump’s totalitarian aspirations, and not even nearly the only one. The real harm is happening elsewhere.)

The other critic I read, the one that called No Kings a “toothless march” because it lacked widespread violence and disruption, claimed that “protests are meant to aggravate.” Which misunderstands a lot about civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance.

While I won’t say that aggravation is never the right goal, it’s certainly the wrong one here and now. Because the cold hard reality is that the systemic problems in American politics and society have been building for decades, and they are now far too entrenched to be reversed easily or quickly. Defeating fascism^[2] requires playing a long game, one of years rather than months.

If you step back and look at the power distribution in 2025, it’s heavily skewed in favor of Trump and other plutocrats. Elon Musk, whose wealth is functionally limitless, has repeatedly cowed elected Republicans with the mere threat of funding a challenger’s primary campaign. Trump — having rooted out any commanders who are not groveling loyalists — wholly controls one of the largest, most well-appointed militaries in the world … and has now acquired an extra $75 billion that will likely be used to turn ICE into a loyal fascist domestic militia (“the Proud Boys, at national scale, with badges”).

There are still a few levers of power that can be wielded by ordinary people, but in order to be effective against the utterly massive amount of money and force the other side can bring to bear, we need a lot of people. And so the primary aim of any resistance movement at this stage has to be to engage and organize as many people as possible.

Our one goal right now should be to grow a bigger organized resistance movement.

Violence is counterproductive to that goal. Peaceful protests attract people and allow almost everyone to participate; violent protests repel new people and bleed membership. This is a key reason why nonviolent popular revolutions have twice the success rate of violent ones: they are simply able to grow much larger.

Non-violent disruption and “aggravation” is a tactic that can be wielded successfully, but it’s something you want to deploy strategically, after you’ve reached the levels of movement participation required for success.

Under a democratic regime, the bar is lower: social proof provided by simple mass demonstrations can influence people and institutions whose behaviors are inherently reactive to public opinion: politicians who are concerned about being voted out of a job, corporations who rely on consumer goodwill for their continued profits. We saw this happen in 2020 with Black Lives Matter.

But under an authoritarian regime — which to be clear is not a hypothetical, but the actual state of American government since January 2025 — that kind of populist reactivity is always counterbalanced by substantial fear of the autocrat’s retaliation.

To overcome that fear, to begin to embolden potential defectors and peel off some of Trump’s key support, will require huge numbers of people pushing back, in organized, strategic ways. So our goal — the one goal, to which everything else is secondary if not irrelevant right now — should be to grow a bigger organized resistance movement.

Build, baby, build

To that end, the main thing we should hope to see from protests at this stage is growth and momentum.

And that is going well! The Hands Off protests in April drew between one and 1.5 million participants. Two months later, No Kings pulled at least five million — approximately quadruple, making it the largest single-day protest in American history.

That is not a disappointment, that is an excellent trajectory! If we can merely double participation one more time, we’d be close to the kind of numbers that could reasonably expect to prevail in the long run.

There is, however, some urgency here. In the coming months Trump is all but certain to ramp up violent suppression against nonviolent protestors. While those optics work in favor of the resistance, it does mean that at some point these sorts of public rallies may become too dangerous for most people to continue attending.

If that happens, there are other, physically safer options for effective resistance … but they all require very large numbers of well-organized people. Nonviolent public demonstrations — being the most visible, salient form of social proof — are one of the best tools for growing a movement. We need to use them to their fullest now, while we still can.

What to do now

As I post this, we are just a few days from the next major national protest, scheduled for Thursday, July 17. Find an action near you on this map and, if you possibly can, RSVP and attend. Be part of the social proof — and while you’re there, talk to your fellow protesters, make connections on the ground.

If you can’t participate this time, then watch and plan ahead for the next one. Sign up at one or more of the many cooperating resistance organizations — I like Indivisible — so that you stay notified. Especially, make direct contact with local organizers and groups.

Also starting this week, Indivisible is launching One Million Rising, with a goal of training at least one million people nationwide in anti-authoritarian tools and tactics. Sign up here for the first video call, on Wednesday night, July 16.

Researching, composing, and sourcing informative essays like this one require many, many hours of unpaid work. If you appreciate it and can afford to, please help me continue writing with a paid subscription at the Member or True Fan levels. Or you can leave a one-time, pay-what-you-can tip. Thank you for your support!

Photo credits: 1