Protest vs. Resistance 101

First posted on Substack at https://tadstoermer.substack.com

With less than four months before the midterms, a question keeps coming up in the resistance spaces I occupy, usually in two parts: What is the difference between protest and resistance? Isn’t activating 3.5 percent of the population enough? 

Let’s start with the basics. Protest and resistance are not synonyms.

Protest seeks to express opposition, to articulate grievance. It is communication before it is anything else. It demonstrates dissent. It mobilizes supporters. Done well, it raises the costs an abusive authority pays to act. And sometimes it forces concessions. Read Gloria Browne-Marshall’s A Protest History of the United States, which is as comprehensive and insightful a review of American protest as you’re going to get.

Resistance is something else. Resistance seeks to change power itself. Not just who holds it, but how it is organized, and — crucially — what it can do to people. 

And it is strategic. In resistance dynamics, protest performs a function. It voices its grievance to an abusive authority, but its greater value lies in what it builds: communities of trust with the kind of solidarity that structure and organization can stand on, communities that draw resources — energy, time, money — that can be strategically deployed. Sarah Stein Lubrano is all over this in Don’t Talk About Politics and on social media. 

So resistance asks questions that protest never has to. If the problem is power, then what is the structure of power that has to be dismantled? What rupture — in politics, law, society — will it take? What replaces that structure? And how do you hold the authority to enforce the replacement once the rupture comes?

All of that changes how you judge success.

Protest, outside of resistance, succeeds if it changes opinions, gains attention, or pressures decision-makers. Resistance succeeds only if it changes the structure of power. Which means the question that matters most is not whether a movement was peaceful or disruptive, large or small. It is whether what the movement changed was political and immediate, or structural and lasting (which is not to say permanent). 

That is the axis of protest vs. resistance, one that we almost never talk about.

It is not the axis that the 3.5 percent claim measures. I keep encountering it. I even saw it in People for the American Way’s The Art of Saving Democracy: An Action Kit for Making Change, stated pretty baldly as a truism: “no authoritarian regime has survived when only 3.5 percent of the population stood up against it in a sustained resistance.” That is on the same page as the remarkable claim that “Nonviolent resistance is the most effective form of protest,” both points begging the question about the difference between protest and resistance.

The claim comes out of the Chenoweth study and is trumpeted almost everywhere: interviews, podcasts, Harvard’s own webpages. Nonviolent protest movements — recast as a new category called “civil resistance” — that activate 3.5 percent of the population at a single peak event have never failed. A small minority can change the world. Sustain participation at that level and you will win. A historical correlation, orphaned from the mechanics of resistance, has been converted into a predictor of success.

Why doesn’t it work? Because even granting the study its success rate, we have to ask what success means there. The Chenoweth study measures whether campaigns achieved essentially political objectives: removing a government, ending an occupation, winning a concession. Resistance asks something different: did the campaign transform the structure that made the abuse possible, or just replace the people administering it? 

Those are different dependent variables. One measures regime change in the moment. The other measures structural change that lasts. Most of the protest literature assumes they are closely related, if not identical. Resistance history shows they aren’t.

Removing rulers can be an extraordinary achievement, especially when they don’t want to go. But what power did the movement hold the next day? What kept the people it drove out from reorganizing and returning, or from never really leaving at all? What made victory mean improvement for many people rather than new jobs for a few?

Mobilization isn’t necessarily power. Rupture isn’t victory. Victory isn’t improvement.

And, for what it’s worth, Chenoweth’s own updated data now include campaigns that crossed 3.5 percent and still failed. And it shows the overall success rate of nonviolent protest campaigns dropped under 34 percent after 2010. Even the claim, with all its limitations, no longer describes our world. But that part never makes it into the memes.

That reveals a deeper problem that explains its power and persistence: the storytelling around it. The 3.5 percent framework records mobilization at a single point against a regime or a policy or an occupation and then asks whether the campaign got what it wanted in the moment. There the story ends. It says nothing about what happens next. That’s how most resistance narratives work, ending exactly where the framework ends, at the point of initial change. Resistance history, rather than protest story, shows that the decisive struggle actually begins there.

And our own resistance history illustrates it. More than once.

The patriot resistance of the 1760s and 1770s shows the limits. Its leaders organized against the abusive authority of the British Parliament to protect rights as they understood them, escalating from protest to organized opposition to direct action. But they carried no broader vision of what power should look like after rupture, because that kind of structural change, abolishing the British government over them, wasn’t really what they wanted. They wanted it altered, substantially, but not abolished. So when the rupture came anyway, the enslaver republicans hijacked their resistance for their own end, a transfer of power to themselves. Even the rights the patriots had organized to protect became a casualty, one they had to fight to recover through the Bill of Rights.

The antislavery resistance of the 1830s through the 1860s learned the harder lesson. In America, electing federal candidates who opposed slavery was nearly impossible. Electing a president who merely opposed slavery’s expansion — equivalent, in kind, to supporting ICE while opposing its next budget increase — was enough, with John Brown’s help, to alarm enslavers into secession. In that environment, political change was never going to be sufficient to achieve the structural change that ending the enslavers’ regime would require. And Congress said so immediately, passing the first 13th amendment — the Corwin amendment to the Constitution that barred Congress from interfering with slavery in the states — with Lincoln’s blessing.

So when the rupture that Harpers Ferry sparked finally came, and the war functionally suspended whole swaths of the constitutional order (habeas corpus, representation, allowed expansion of executive and military authority), the antislavery resistance refused to settle for a proclamation that disrupted slavery in rebel territory, or even for ripping it out of the Constitution through the 13th Amendment. Had the objective simply been ending legal slavery, as the patriots’ had been to end British abuses, the movement could have declared victory in 1865 and gone home. Many did just that. William Lloyd Garrison, among the staunchest of abolitionists, closed his antislavery newspaper and tried to dissolve America’s largest antislavery society. Mission accomplished. 

But the radical core of the antislavery resistance, the Radical Republicans inside and outside of Congress, understood that abolition alone left the enslavers’ political economy and — this is critical — their moral economy very much intact. They saw the full scope of the problem: not just the political and economic juggernaut of human exploitation but everything that exploitation required and cost, and how far it had metastasized through American governance. Reconstruction, not reconciliation, was required, not as an add-on to abolition, but as the endgame of the resistance to slavery. Their program meant reorganizing the federal judiciary, building economic and social support through the Freedmen’s Bureau, securing citizenship and the vote, funding public education, attempting property redistribution, legislating civil rights, and refounding the country’s entire reason for being in the 14th Amendment. 

That is how you fix a structural problem through resistance and try to keep it from coming back.

For all its success, it still wasn’t enough, because while they could abolish slavery, they could not abolish the enslaver. Not his worldview, not his twisted values, not his culture. That would require sustained enforcement, which lasted only until it conflicted with the political interests of Republican leaders once the radicals faded. The Lost Cause — and no one covers it better than Karen Cox — is what the enslavers built with the reprieve. Freedom was reduced to words on a piece of paper while coercive labor, racial terror, disfranchisement, dispossession, and unequal law returned to govern people’s lives.

That is why resistance carries a much tougher definition of success than protest does. Resistance succeeds not when abusive authority is defeated but when the conditions that allow abusive authority to exist have changed. That requires vision before victory. Not a perfect blueprint, but a shared understanding of the underlying problem, of the institutions and not just the people that must change, of the interests that will fight that change wherever and in whomever they live, and of the power it will take to enforce the new order the rupture makes possible.

The Civil War was a political rupture. Reconstruction was structural transformation. How and why it was defeated is why the struggle continues.

Apply that history now. An election can be a successful protest against an incumbent, even a political party. It is not, on its own, resistance. If the institutions, incentives, and distributions of power that enabled the abusive authority in the first place remain intact, nothing has really changed. If all you hold after election night are pledges of eventual change rather than accountable plans for immediate alteration, you don’t have change at all. What you usually have is worse: the old order returning stronger, because opposition relaxes while everything that enabled the abuse stays exactly where it was.

I’m not arguing protest is ineffective. I’m arguing that protest and resistance operate on different planes, and that confusing them leads scholars and activists alike to mistake moments of rupture for moments of transformation. 

Think about January 6, 2021. Millions of Americans declared victory when Biden won, as if removing Donald Trump were the change itself. Then an insurrectionist mob showed exactly how intact the conditions that produced him remained, and even that warning moved no one to address them. The victors exhaled and leaned into norms. Biden turned the matter over to prosecutors and committees, which lapsed into the usual American posture of focusing on bad actors as exceptions to a healthy system rather than as symptoms of a disease. The problem came back stronger, and with more devastating effect.

Or watch the recent youth-led movements abroad. India’s recent “cockroach” protests: get on the streets, agitate, push the government ahead of important state elections, collect a pledge and a political casualty, go home. That is a real political victory. Whether Modi’s promises alter the examination system — or simply release the pressure until the government can return to business as usual — is the test. Sri Lanka in 2022, Bangladesh in 2024, Nepal in 2025: presidents and prime ministers forced out, governments brought down. Lasting change? The record is mixed at best, and still unfolding. Movements can be devastating at mobilizing against a regime when they unite around what they oppose, and that gets you political change: remove one set of people, maybe install another that agrees with you. Structural change demands more, a vision, actual policy, constitutional arrangements, political creativity, and coalitions built to make the change mean something and then make it last.

And what about Hungary? Magyar won in April, took office in May, and by July the supermajority that came with him had amended the constitution, removed Orbán's handpicked president, and begun drafting a new constitution to dismantle Orbán’s abusive system. That is what a resistance win could look like (accompanied, crucially, by a supermajority of the sort our Radical Republicans manufactured and expertly wielded). Whether it becomes a resistance victory, though, depends on what Magyar builds, what survives the next transfer of power, and whether Orbán’s organized network can return. 

Hungary is also the danger of parachuting other people’s resistance into ours. Americans misunderstand resistance because our political culture insulates our constitutional order and makes structural change extraordinarily difficult. Start with the Constitution itself, where substantive amendment has come through rupture, disruption, national crisis. And often with a body count. 

Even the structural change available outside the Constitution is rare. Our political culture is fundamentally conservative, loaded with biases against change that are nearly impossible to overcome, so powerful is our civic faith that the existing institutions are, against all the evidence, fundamentally good. On the rare occasions Americans have forced structural realignment (the Revolution, Reconstruction, the New Deal, the civil rights era), it has not come through ordinary electoral politics.

Think I'm kidding about our civic faith? Look at the members of Congress right now, and the candidates running against them, all campaigning on change with themselves as its agents. Most won’t pledge to change the president by the one means Congress holds, impeachment, whatever the odds against its success. They can't even manage a simple statement of position on removing a man they are happy to call a tyrant, out of fear of risking notional political capital. They won’t pledge to abolish ICE, either, despite the rising body count. So if Democrats win on November 3, what actually changes on November 4, or January 3, or at all? Again and again, members of Congress and candidates campaign on change while refusing to commit to the change they will actually make. Their theory of change ends at their own election: change someone else for them.

It turns out that political change in the United States is relatively common. Swap out Congress, sure. Fix the problem? Rarely. And if Americans let protest become the definition of resistance, we will keep measuring success by the wrong things. That mistake will derail us, or at least keep us distracted when distractions cost the most.

Because in the end, protest asks: how do we remove them?

Resistance asks: what exists after they’re gone?

Our resistance history suggests the second question is the far harder one, and the one we spend the least time answering.