Americans are relearning an old truth in real time. Crowds can be enormous, morally right and still politically ineffective if they cannot translate outrage into leverage.
That is not cynicism. It is political science.
In the United States especially, protest without an end game is not merely incomplete, it is self-defeating. The Civil Rights Movement succeeded because it knew what victory looked like—desegregation orders and voting-rights protections backed by federal law. The movement against the Vietnam War forced change not because millions marched, but because it made the war politically and institutionally impossible to sustain. In this country, protest must point somewhere concrete, or it is eventually absorbed by the system it seeks to challenge.
The modern research most often cited is the work of political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, who analyzed hundreds of resistance campaigns across the 20th century. Their finding was blunt: nonviolent movements succeed far more often than violent ones, not because they are gentler, but because they attract broader participation and trigger defections among political and institutional elites.
From that research emerged what has become known as the “3.5 percent rule,” the observation that no government has historically survived when roughly 3.5 percent of the population engages in sustained, visible, nonviolent resistance. Chenoweth herself has cautioned that this is not a magic number, merely a way of illustrating how small a committed minority can be when participation becomes organized and persistent.
Still, the implication is sobering. In the United States, 3.5 percent is not a slogan. It is roughly twelve million people acting repeatedly, in public, over time.
History shows what happens when that scale is reached and sustained.
In the Philippines in 1986, the People Power movement filled the streets day after day until the Marcos regime could no longer command loyalty. In East Germany in 1989, mass demonstrations eroded obedience so thoroughly that the Berlin Wall fell almost as a bureaucratic afterthought. In Poland, Solidarity built an alternative civic authority around labor unions, churches and disciplined organizing that the state could neither suppress nor ignore.
These were not emotional eruptions. They were legitimacy crises made operational.
Which is why the American question is never simply, “How many people showed up?”
It is, “Did they show up with demands that force institutions to act?”
We see the stakes of that question again today. From the “No Kings” protests to demonstrations following the killing of Renee Nicole Good, shot by an ICE officer in Minnesota, Americans are once more gathering to say what should not need saying: that unchecked state power, especially lethal power, is incompatible with a free society.
The grief is real. The anger is justified. But clarity is still missing.
“No kings” is a powerful moral frame. It echoes the Constitution. It appeals to the American instinct against personal rule and unaccountable authority. It is a legitimate expression of constitutional loyalty, not radicalism.
But it is a diagnosis, not a prescription.
It names the danger. History shows how nations actually defeat it.
Successful democratic movements do not survive on symbolism. They survive on specificity.
The Civil Rights Movement did not demand abstract dignity. It demanded desegregation and voting rights. Solidarity did not protest authoritarianism in theory. It demanded legal recognition of independent unions. Filipinos did not rally against corruption in general. They demanded Marcos resign and new elections be held.
They told the public what victory looked like.
They told courts what to order.
They told legislatures what to pass.
They told officials exactly where to stand.
Absent that, public anger becomes noise—loud, righteous and ultimately easy to wait out.
And here the recent past offers a warning that should not be ignored.
The most important lesson of the Black Lives Matter era is not that mass protest failed. It is that power never watches passively. While millions marched after George Floyd’s murder, conservative political operatives constructed a counteroffensive, weaponizing “critical race theory,” “DEI,” and “wokeness” to recast demands for accountability as cultural extremism. The goal was not to answer the grievance, but to fracture the coalition behind it and exhaust public sympathy.
Movements must understand this plainly: if you do not bring a plan, your opponents already have one.
The uncomfortable truth is that political systems do not yield to emotion. They yield to cost.
They change when refusing to act becomes more dangerous than acting.
That is why the question facing today’s protests is not whether they are morally justified. They are. It is whether they are structurally dangerous to the status quo.
And that requires concrete demands aimed at specific institutions: independent prosecutors, federal investigations, consent decrees, statutory reforms, transparency laws. Things that can be written into court orders, budget lines and legislation. Things that force attorneys general, judges, governors and members of Congress to decide—publicly—whether they will defend the system or shield its failures.
Some will object that none of this is realistic under the current Trump administration.
History suggests the opposite.
Movements rarely succeed because presidents allow them to. They succeed when resistance fractures the coalition that makes presidents governable: courts, states, corporations, markets, military leadership, civil servants and allied governments. Executive hostility does not make reform impossible. It merely changes where pressure must be applied.
Authoritarian drift thrives on routine obedience. It collapses when obedience becomes unreliable.
That process is slow. Bureaucratic. Legally tedious. Emotionally exhausting. And almost always less dramatic than people hope.
But it is how change actually happens in mature political systems.
America does not yet face a revolution. It faces a choice.
It can remain a country that vents its conscience in the streets and then returns, quietly, to the habits that produced the injustice in the first place.
Or it can become, again, a country that knows how to finish what its conscience begins.
That knowledge is not theoretical. It is inherited.
It built the Civil Rights Movement from court orders and church basements.
It ended a war through organized refusal and legislative pressure.
It has broken entrenched systems before—not with chaos, but with clarity.
“No kings” is a warning. It is also an invitation.
An invitation to turn moral refusal into democratic force. To turn crowds into coalitions. To turn grief into law. To turn protest into power.
The machinery of authority depends on routine obedience.
History shows that when citizens withdraw it—patiently, lawfully and together—even the most entrenched systems bend.
That is not romance.
That is the unfinished work of a free people.
