What You Can Do About It

Yes, it’s that bad.

The New York Times surveyed 35 leading constitutional scholars in April 2025. 34 of them concluded the president is acting unconstitutionally. The sole dissenter was a proponent of expansive executive power. The administration has defied roughly one-third of 160+ court orders. Noah Feldman at Harvard: “Since 1865, no president has refused to follow a direct order from a federal court.”

The V-Dem Institute warned the US will be downgraded from democracy in its next assessment — the “fastest evolving episode of autocratization the USA has been through in modern history.” The Century Foundation scored us 57 out of 100 — a 28% drop in one year.

Now here is what the research says actually works. Not platitudes. Not hope. Evidence.

The Math

Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan studied 323 mass mobilizations from 1900 to 2006. Nonviolent campaigns succeeded 53% of the time. Violent ones succeeded 26%. No campaign that mobilized 3.5% of the population in sustained nonviolent resistance has failed. Chenoweth calls this a “rule of thumb” — not an iron law — but the pattern held across every case in the dataset.

In the United States, 3.5% is roughly 11.5 million people. The October 2025 No Kings day drew an estimated 5–6.5 million participants across 2,700+ events — approaching the threshold. Chenoweth’s own Nonviolent Action Lab at Harvard has termed the widening movement an “American Spring,” noting it has more geographic diversity and staying power than the 2017 resistance. No Kings III has registered 2,800+ events for March 28.

A 2012 study in Nature found that a single social message about friends’ voting behavior generated approximately 340,000 additional votes in one election. A 2011 study in PNAS found that framing voting as identity — “be a voter” instead of “go vote” — increased turnout by up to 11 percentage points. Your action propagates through your social network up to three degrees of separation. Your friend’s friend’s friend is affected by what you do this week.

The math is the strategy.

What Actually Worked

Poland, 2023

Turnout: 74.4%. The highest in a contested Polish election since the fall of communism. Young voter turnout surged from 46% to 69%. The ruling party had captured the Constitutional Tribunal, politicized courts, and taken control of public media over eight years. Then the government’s own court issued an abortion ruling so extreme it triggered mass protests that permanently cost them a quarter of their support — especially among women. The EU withheld billions in recovery funds over rule-of-law concerns, creating tangible economic cost. Three opposition parties coordinated. They won.

Recovery is partial. Captured institutions remain contested. But they won.

South Korea, 1987 and 2024

The June Democratic Struggle lasted 20 days. A broad coalition — students, workers, clergy, opposition politicians — forced the military regime to concede direct presidential elections. Within a year, 4,000 new unions were established. Thirty-seven years of democratic practice later, when President Yoon declared martial law in December 2024, citizens mobilized within hours. Institutions held because decades of democratic practice had made them load-bearing.

Hungary, April 12, 2026

Peter Magyar was a Fidesz insider. He defected in early 2024 and built the Tisza Party from nothing. In the 2024 European Parliament elections, Tisza won nearly 30% — Fidesz’s worst result in 20 years. As of late February 2026, Tisza leads by double digits in most polls and up to 20 points among decided voters. Hungary votes April 12. If Magyar wins, it will be the first reversal of consolidated competitive authoritarianism through elections in the EU.

The lesson: an insider who defects with credibility among the ruling party’s own base can accomplish what opposition coalitions could not.

Serbia, 2000

Otpor organized in 100+ towns. 70,000 joined. They branded resistance as identity, weaponized humor, and pressured fractious opposition parties toward a unified candidate. Election day: 80% turnout. Among 18-to-29-year-olds: 86%. Milosevic fell.

Minneapolis, January 2026

4,000+ federal agents deployed. Two citizens killed — Renee Good on January 7, Alex Pretti on January 24. The city responded with the first general strike in 80 years. 700+ businesses shut down. 50,000+ marched at negative 20 degrees. 30,000 constitutional observers trained across 77 counties. 60 CEOs from 3M, Target, Mayo Clinic, and UnitedHealth signed an open letter demanding deescalation. The strike spread to 300+ cities.

The result: ICE drew down from 4,000 agents to 500 by late February. A federal judge found “compelling and troubling” evidence of racial profiling. Hennepin County is investigating 17 criminal incidents by federal agents. ICE national approval dropped to 40% (Marquette, February 2026). 65% said ICE “went too far” (NPR/PBS/Marist). 50% now support abolishing ICE entirely — a record high. The city estimated $203 million in economic damage in a single month. The cost was real. The cost of doing nothing was higher.

No single leader. No single strategy. Dozens of imperfect ones running at the same time: Signal-based neighborhood dispatch tracking ICE convoys, door-to-door mutual aid, daily surveillance of ICE field offices, clergy civil disobedience at deportation terminals, church sanctuaries, know-your-rights sessions in multiple languages. Christopher Armitage calls this “the mosaic.” Every tile is incomplete. Together, the picture is clear.

Moderate Strategies Win

Laura Gamboa at Cambridge University compared Venezuela and Colombia. In Venezuela, the opposition oscillated between election boycotts and street protests. This gave Chávez exactly the justification he needed to crack down and consolidate power. In Colombia, the opposition stayed constitutional — used courts, used Congress, refused to give Uribe a pretext. They defeated his third-term bid.

The lesson: don’t hand them the excuse.

The Seditionist’s Dilemma explains why moral appeals to the other side don’t work: internal enforcement makes defection more dangerous than loyalty. Republican officials stay silent not because they agree but because the cost of speaking up is higher than the cost of complicity. What shifts this is external pressure — from voters, from donors, from state-level prosecution — that raises the cost of complicity above the cost of defection.

The State-Level Lever

The federal government is captured. But the United States is not one government. It is hundreds of independent governments, and fifty of them are dual sovereigns with their own constitutions, their own courts, and their own criminal codes.

Prosecution

State attorneys general have concurrent jurisdiction to investigate crimes committed by federal agents on state soil. California AG Rob Bonta issued a law enforcement bulletin in January 2026 asserting this authority. Minnesota AG Keith Ellison won a restraining order preserving evidence in the killings of two Minneapolis residents by federal agents. 18 state AGs filed a joint brief in Perdomo v. Noem challenging unconstitutional ICE stops.

Presidential pardons cannot reach state convictions. That is the dual sovereignty doctrine, affirmed by the Supreme Court in Gamble v. United States (2019). The pardon power stops at the state line.

Honesty requires noting: no state has ever successfully prosecuted a federal official to conviction for official-capacity conduct. Every historical attempt has been blocked via federal removal or Supremacy Clause immunity. The closest was Ruby Ridge — the Ninth Circuit allowed Idaho’s prosecution of an FBI sniper to proceed, 6–5, before the new county prosecutor dropped the case. This pathway is legally grounded but untested. What is proven is that the threat of prosecution changes behavior even when the prosecution doesn’t materialize.

Non-Cooperation

The anti-commandeering doctrine (Murphy v. NCAA, 2018) means states cannot be forced to enforce federal mandates. This is not theoretical. 24 states have legalized cannabis against federal law. The mechanism is already in use.

Economic Pressure

Democratic-controlled jurisdictions have $176–240 billion in pension fund exposure to 26 corporations providing surveillance, detention, and enforcement technology. Divestment works: eight banks eliminated 87.4% of private prison companies’ credit lines in one year after targeted campaigns. The Supreme Court’s market participant doctrine (460 U.S. 204) protects state investment decisions from federal preemption.

What You Can Do This Week

1. March 28: No Kings III. 2,800+ events registered. Minneapolis is the flagship. Previous No Kings days drew 5–7 million people. Find your location and sign up at nokings.org.
2. May 1: May Day Strong. “No Work, No School, No Shopping.” The coalition includes the Chicago Teachers Union, NEA, National Nurses United, Sunrise Movement, and Indivisible. The Minneapolis Workers Assembly voted unanimously for workplace strikes, school walkouts, and consumer boycotts. 3,600 Minnesota professors are in. This is the bridge from protest to economic disruption — the tactic Chenoweth says movements need most. maydaystrong.org
3. Call your state legislators. Not Congress — your state house and state senate. State-level resistance is the proven mechanism. Find your representatives at openstates.org.
4. Contact your state attorney general. Request investigation of federal officials exceeding authorized duties under state law. Name the specific conduct. Be specific.
5. Register voters. Poland won with turnout. Young voter turnout surged 22 points. The math applies here. Every voter you register is a vote the system has to overcome.
6. Join mutual aid. Minneapolis proved that neighborhood-level organizing creates political facts on the ground. KC Tenants ran a 248-day rent strike that ended with union recognition. Find or build mutual aid near you.
7. Recruit three people. Bond et al. (Nature, 2012): your action propagates three degrees out through your social network. If every reader recruits three people who recruit three people, the numbers are exponential. This is not a metaphor. It is what the data shows.
8. Document everything. Photograph. Record. File public records requests. Build the evidentiary record that future prosecutors and journalists will need. The tools already exist.

What Not to Do

Chenoweth’s recent work (Journal of Democracy, 2020) shows that since 2010, nonviolent campaign success has dropped below 34%. Violent campaigns dropped to 8%. Why: over-reliance on mass demonstrations while neglecting strikes and economic disruption. Digital organizing that creates less durable organizations. And the share of movements with violent flanks has climbed from 30% to over half — which gives the state exactly the justification it needs to crack down.

• Don’t give them what they want. Violence is a gift to the regime. Every broken window is a news cycle they control.
• Don’t boycott elections. Venezuela’s opposition boycotted and handed Chávez legitimacy. Turnout is the mechanism.
• Don’t fracture the coalition. Poland won with three parties. Purity tests lose.
• Don’t confuse social media with organizing. Posting is not recruiting. Recruiting is a conversation, in person, with someone who wasn’t going to act.
• Don’t wait for the military. Croissant, Kuehn, and Eschenauer (Journal of Democracy, 2018) studied 40 cases: militaries with histories of human rights abuses side with the regime. The US military has 70 years of complicity. Nobody is coming to save us.
• Don’t wait. The IRI Evidence Briefer (2024) and every case study confirms: early intervention is exponentially more effective than late intervention. Project 2025 is 53% complete. The window is now.

This is not hope. Hope is passive.

This is evidence. Every country that reversed democratic backsliding did it with turnout, coalition, and sustained pressure. Poland did it. Serbia did it. South Korea did it twice. Minneapolis did it in January. Hungary may do it on April 12.

The research is unambiguous across 35 countries over 30 years. The question is not whether it can work. The question is whether enough of us show up.

For the full investigation of the system we’re up against — the ontology architecture, the surveillance infrastructure, the nine domains — read The Endgame and The Lookup Table. For why competitive authoritarianism is structurally reversible, read Here’s Why It Works.

Sources

1. Chenoweth, E. & Stephan, M.J. Why Civil Resistance Works. Columbia UP, 2011.
2. Chenoweth, E. “The Future of Nonviolent Resistance.” Journal of Democracy 31(3), 2020.
3. Bond, R.M. et al. “A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization.” Nature 489 (2012): 295-298.
4. Bryan, C.J. et al. “Motivating Voter Turnout by Invoking the Self.” PNAS 108(31) (2011): 12653-56.
5. Christakis, N.A. & Fowler, J.H. Connected. Little, Brown, 2009.
6. Gamboa, L. Resisting Backsliding. Cambridge UP, 2022.
7. Croissant, A. et al. “Mass Protests and the Military.” Journal of Democracy 29(3) (2018): 141-155.
8. Riedl, R.B. et al. “Pathways of Democratic Backsliding.” The ANNALS 712(1) (2024): 8-31.
9. V-Dem Institute. Democracy Report 2025. University of Gothenburg, March 2025.
10. Century Foundation. “Democracy Meter.” January 15, 2026.
11. Liptak, A. & Wegman, J. “A Road Map of Trump’s Lawless Presidency.” New York Times, April 28, 2025.
12. Marquette Law School. National Survey, February 4, 2026.
13. NPR/PBS News/Marist. “The Actions of ICE.” February 5, 2026.
14. Polish National Electoral Commission, October 2023.
15. Centre for European Reform. “Can Hungary’s Opposition Win?”
16. Bunce, V.J. & Wolchik, S.L. Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Postcommunist Countries. Cambridge UP, 2011.
17. Center for Progressive Reform. “One Year of Project 2025.” February 11, 2026.
18. IRI. Political Parties and Opposition to Democratic Erosion. 2024.
19. Armitage, C. “The Blueprint That Broke a Federal Occupation.” cmarmitage.substack.com, 2026.
20. Gamble v. United States, 587 U.S. 678 (2019).
21. Murphy v. NCAA, 584 U.S. 453 (2018).

Related Reading

• The Endgame: Competitive Authoritarianism in America
• The Lookup Table: How the Federal Government Is Building a Profile of Every American
• Here’s Why It Works: The Structural Weakness of Competitive Authoritarianism
• The Psychology of Authoritarian Control: From Cults to Cognitive Warfare
• The Tools Already Exist to Make Power Visible