The “No Kings” protests in every state may have been the biggest day of demonstrations in American history, a data analyst has suggested.
“Based on hundreds of crowd-sourced records of No Kings Day event turnout, and extrapolating for the cities where we don’t have data yet, it looks like roughly 4-6m people protested Trump across the U.S. yesterday,” independent data journalist G Elliott posted to X Sunday.
For reference, that’d mean Saturday’s demonstrations featured 1-2% of the total population of 340 million taking to the streets in more than 2,000 cities to voice their opposition to the increasingly authoritarian, far-right policies the president has pursued since assuming office for the second time.
Historically, a regime falls when around 3.5 percent of the general population protest. You can do it, US, I believe in you!
This oversells it. 3.5% is the level at which experts say can cause a “Tipping Point” for a trend to take hold, such as a dad like hula-hoops or yo-yos, to revolutions.
It’s not guaranteed, though.
I think the statistic of 3.5 is more of a symptom rather than the cause of a regime’s fall. For 3.5% to protest means that:
Probably other reasons.
Protest by itself achieves exactly jack shit. It’s a tool, effective in conjunction with all the others, but you can’t expect any change if you just put 3.5% of people on the streets. They will fuck around aimlessly, and then go home.
Yes - it’s a signal that a large fraction of the population is mad, it’s not the protest that does it but rather the fact that there’s so many people involved in opposing the regime that it becomes difficult for the regime to act and easier for the population to find like-minded to fight back.
It’s the willingness to act that makes a difference.
it’s at best a warning sign and a way to organise and prepare actual riots
once movement starts hurting the economy, regimes will collapse.
BS stat.
Correct stat, but it’s not like you get to 3.5% and then the regime magically falls. There’s context around that. It requires keeping up the pressure.
We can’t fizzle out the way the George Floyd protests did.
The George Floyd protests didn’t fizzle out, but the Dems took power for 4 years. The protests we see now are built on the George Floyd protests, and include many of the same people.
They may have been a foundation to build on, but they largely failed in their goals. There was a sudden surge in cities proposing budgets that defunded the police. Once the sausage making process was done, those budgets largely reflected the status quo.
The best you can say about its direct practical effect is that Chauvin was convicted. I do think we’re seeing more cases of abusive cops actually being prosecuted for misconduct, or at a minimum, losing their job.
It’s still taking some effort to even get that, though. I just ran across a case in my YouTube feed, where a civil rights lawyer with a channel brought attention to a case. This had happened months ago, but all the sudden, the prosecutor dropped the charges and the cop was fired. If it weren’t for it blowing up on YouTube, that probably wouldn’t have happened. There’s almost certainly thousands of stories like it in process right now that aren’t getting that attention.
Oh, and we got Juneteenth added as a day off. I guess that’s nice. Except some companies have already dropped it from their holiday list (mine did).
I get your point. I see the local news pick up cases for people who are being ripped off, and if it’s a big corporation, they usually get everything they want. But I always wonder about all the other people who didn’t have a newscast advocating for them. The news can’t pick up all of them, especially if they’ve already covered that story, so those people are unlikely to get anything, they’re just screwed.