Protests Won’t Be Enough to Stop a Coup

Aim for the Center

In that sense, nonviolence undergirds the second rule of a winning protest strategy: It must pull in the mainstream. A robust movement will be “diverse and multigenerational,” Erica Chenoweth told me, with children and grandparents, civil servants and judges as well as radicals. She cited the 2000 Serbian uprising against the murderous dictator Slobodan Milošević, which triumphed by mobilizing people from nearly every age group, economic sector, and geographic region of the country.

A prodemocracy movement’s most important constituencies are the institutions that keep society running: banks, businesses, the military, schools, the media, government bureaucracies, police, the judiciary. Lakey calls these “the pillars of power.” An authoritarian head of state must command their loyalty, or at least their subservience. Should financiers, college presidents, distinguished members of opposition parties, and middle-school students start defecting to the other side, the political, physical, and even psychological costs of putting down an insurrection will become prohibitive. The Serbian uprising came to an end when police and army commanders refused to order the police guarding the parliament building in Belgrade to fire on the crush of protesters gathered before it, because, according to a reporter cited in a documentary about the rebellion, “they knew their own kids were in that crowd.” The takeover of the building was the coup de grâce in the dictator’s downfall.

Hit Them Where It Hurts

As essential as the first two laws of grassroots regime change may be, the third one makes it stick: Whatever the movement looks like, it will have to cause economic pain. If worst comes to worst, victory will hinge on consumer boycotts and strikes, Hardy Merriman, the co-author of one of the growing movement’s key handbooks, “Hold the Line: A Guide to Defending Democracy,” told me. I was skeptical. Boycotts take months to have an impact, and coups happen fast. Plus, America isn’t France. We don’t do general strikes. Moreover, 21st-century American unions are not the force that 20th-century American unions were; overall membership is less than a third of what it was at its peak in the 1950s, and some union members voted for Trump. But strikes don’t have to be general, Merriman explained. Strikes can be rolling, moving from place to place, industry to industry. And if workers, unionized or not, can’t afford to go on strike, they can engage in a slowdown. Civil servants could slow-walk orders they disagree with (even more than Trump says they now do) by insisting, say, that they require legal review.

Read: The election that could break America

In any case, I was dead wrong about American unions. One after another, local chapters have been declaring themselves ready to strike. On October 8, the Rochester, New York, branch of the AFL-CIO—the nation’s biggest federation of unions—passed a resolution calling on its national leaders and “all other labor organizations in the United States of America” to prepare for a general strike, in the event of “any effort to subvert, distort, misrepresent or disregard” the outcome of the election. Labor councils associated with the AFL-CIO in Seattle and Western Massachusetts have done the same.