OBSERVATIONS BY A FED 

Renard de Creux

The author is a 15-year veteran of the U.S. intelligence community with experience in political forecasting and civil conflict analysis.

As I write this, the UK government is in the midst of an aggressive crackdown on right-wing dissent, after days of civil unrest following the murder of three young British girls by the son of Rwandan migrants. Although the killer was born in the UK, the Southport stabbings triggered the release of years of pent-up frustration over migrant crime. As towns across the UK burned, some declared the start of a new civil war. For better or worse, that was never in the cards, if for no other reason than it is hard to have a civil war when one side is armed with guns, planes, and tanks, and the other is armed with bricks and bottles. That said, the riots constituted large-scale, right-wing political violence, which is a rarity in the West, despite the establishment’s efforts to gaslight us into believing otherwise.

In contrast to the UK, where unarmed citizens risked their freedom, and perhaps even their very lives, to violently protest perceived injustice, in the United States, where a large percentage of civilians own, or at least have access to, military-grade small arms, we have seen very little mass action on the part of the right of any sort–violent or otherwise. Even the January 6th protest, which devolved into a riot at the Capitol Building, did not feature armed resistance. It was also a highly localized event, both in time and location. This stands in contrast to the UK riots, which occurred over the course of a week and all across Britain. As an analyst who studies civil conflict for a living, I’m curious as to why this is the case.

How is it that the political right in America—despite being well-armed and very angry—is offering only meek complaints despite suffering an endless stream of abuses? Whether we’re talking about the COVID lockdowns, the Floyd riots, migrant crime, lawfare, cancel culture, or the murder/attempted murder of right-wing activists and politicians, the right has timidly endured years of provocations. So, what gives? Is the American right, for all its fetishizing of Revolutionary era principles and motifs, all talk? Or, are we one Southport-style event away from an explosion of mass action and violence?

What follows is my best effort to break down the complex questions of political violence and mass action. There are two puzzles for me: 1) Why has a well-armed and angry political faction been unwilling to engage in any sort of organized forceful resistance? 2) Assuming the intense polarization of American politics does spark extra-democratic measures from the right (e.g., mass protests and/or targeted violence), how likely are such efforts to succeed in affecting real change?

Spoiler alert! The apparent passivity of the right isn’t because the movement is filled with cowards. To be sure, both left and right have keyboard warriors who are happy to post memes, but are reluctant to engage in any real world adventures, perhaps because a long time ago they took an arrow in the knee. Rather, it is a combination of collective action problems, residual faith in democracy, and a general lack of desperation, that have led right-wing actors–from the elites to the rank-and-file–to avoid actions that would place themselves in legal or financial jeopardy.

As for the prospects for successful extra-democratic forms of resistance, there are no easy answers. On the one hand, history and recent scholarship both point to the power of nonviolent mass movements in achieving lasting political change. However, such movements are only successful when the protest movement reflects a broad societal consensus. In heavily polarized societies, protest movements gain traction only if they win over sympathetic elites who have the power to impose their preferences on the rest of the society–e.g. the Civil Rights Movement. In the absence of social consensus or elite buy-in, activism may necessarily take a more violent turn.

Collective Action and Collective Inaction

On the potential for civil conflict in America, there is a collective action problem at the very heart of the political violence question. Whether we’re talking about street-level skirmishes (rioting, brawling, etc.), or the sort of sustained, organized violence associated with urban terrorism and insurgency, there is always a vanguard element prepared to set caution aside in the interest of furthering the cause. The weaker the state; the more permissive the environment; the easier it is to initiate action. This is in part why civil wars and insurgencies are most common among poor states that are unable to effectively enforce their writ over their entire territory. For these reasons, low per-capita Gross National Income and the presence of inaccessible terrain correlate strongly to the presence of an insurgency.

Unlike the Afghanistans and Burmas of the international system, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and other Western powers, have full control over virtually every inch of their territory. While a resourceful person might be able to hide out in the Rockies or the Appalachian Mountains for a while, there is no zone, even in the continent-sized United States, where the government is unable to project its authority. Contrast the strength and reach of developed countries, which are eager and able to track you down to the ends of the Earth for killing a bear out of season in some isolated wilderness, with the reality of lightly or ungoverned spaces in much of the developing world. It is the expectation of swift state action and severe punishment that serves to deter would-be resistors to government abuse.

Of course, we don’t live in societies governed by non-ideological rulers who use the power of the state solely for easily understood, rational ends, such as sustaining elite control and preserving order. If we were, we would see harsh crackdowns on all forms of political violence. Rather, what we see is the selective application of state power to serve ideological goals.

If you deface a statue and assault an unarmed park ranger in the name of an approved cause, such as “Freeing Gaza,” you’re largely safe from the application of state power. But if you leave tire marks on a pride flag painted on a street, you’ll be vigorously prosecuted. Indeed, not unlike Red Guard violence in Mao’s China, you can attack low-level agents of the state all you want, provided the cause is regime approved. You can disrupt the operation of government and even occupy the office of the Speaker of the House. You might get arrested, but you probably won’t be punished. And if, by some miracle you are punished, it will probably be applied as gently as possible. This is what people mean when they talk about “anarchotyranny”—i.e., the shirking of the state’s traditional responsibility of maintaining order in favor of selective oppression. Whether something is a “crime” depends on the political affiliation and ideological motive of the actor. Praying in an abortion clinic will get you jail time, while assaulting a cop in the name of “racial justice,” might get you a night in jail and a demand that you write an apology letter.

In the end, you have a political system that seems designed to stoke grievances among the out-of-power minority. Of course, grievances are only a small part of the political violence equation. Uyghurs and Tibetans have grievances too, but they have almost no ability to operationalize them because the boot of the Chinese state is so thoroughly on their necks as to make organized resistance impossible. To be sure, political violence has occurred in Tibet and Xinjiang in the past, but it surfaces as a sort of desperate madness, rather than as organized resistance to state power. This is instructive in helping us understand the prospects for a more assertive pushback from the right in Western countries and why such pushback has yet to manifest in a sustained fashion.

Resistance to Chinese rule in Tibet shows us that even a disarmed population living under a totalitarian regime can be pushed to the point of violent resistance, despite no possibility of achieving systemic change and a high probability that such resistance will only serve to intensify state oppression. The 2008 riots in Lhasa—the last major incident of anti-regime violence—only led Beijing to tighten its grip on Tibet, further reducing the space needed for effective, organized resistance in the future. Protests in Tibet now manifest as pointless individual acts of literal self-immolation.

Would-be American resistors are in a far better position to defy regime power than the oppressed populations of Tibet and Xinjiang, but they remain reluctant to move beyond the stage of angry Twitter tirades. Why? The answer is that they did in 2016 with the founding of the Proud Boys, but quickly found out that without top-cover from dissident elites they were an easy target for the security apparatus. This is the difference between the left and the right in the United States, and likely in many other Western countries across time—the right, with its love of process and order, is often reluctant to play the sort of rough political games the left has excelled at for two centuries.

There may also be a class element in play here. The left has the benefit of drawing on a relatively large population of marginalized losers who are more than happy to give their sad lives meaning larping as the anti-fascists of the 1930s. Just search Google for “antifa mugshots” and you’ll get a good look at the sort of elite human capital serving as the footsoldiers of the left. Of course, this is nothing new, as most political movements rely on such people as shock troops. Anna Geifman noted in her book on Bolshevik terrorism that the ranks of Russian revolutionaries were filled with common criminals whose appetite for cruelty was insatiable. The same pattern has been borne out in other conflicts as well, from Algeria to Bosnia. As Geifman noted “there is a strong connection between the political and criminal psychologies.”

For the right, however, street thuggery is something considered both distasteful and dangerous. When, as a reaction to antifa violence, right-wing groups like the Proud Boys began to emerge, Republican politicians and “respectable” right-wing commentators were falling all over themselves to condemn them. In other words, the very people who might be in a position to provide top cover to grass-roots-level resistors instead sided with the left to condemn them. Essentially the same story played out after the January 6th “insurrection.” Combine this with the reality that people on the right tend to be wealthier than those on the left–i.e., they have jobs, homes, and other things that can be jeopardized through heterodox political action–and you have powerful incentives for right-wingers to keep their heads down. Grass roots street-level resistors are thus political orphans, who as Eugyppius noted in his excellent analysis of the UK migrant riots, risk having the full power of the state deployed against them.

The urge to avoid a tit-for-tat dynamic has been strong within the right, particularly among its elites, despite the reality that such a dynamic can, perhaps paradoxically, have a stabilizing effect on potentially volatile situations. The classic study in this area is Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation. Axelrod explored how mutually beneficial cooperation can emerge organically, even in deeply antagonistic circumstances, through a simple tit-for-tat dynamic–i.e., rewarding cooperation with cooperation and punishing betrayals. That such cooperation could emerge in the trenches of WWI, but not between the right and left is its own separate puzzle.

To be sure, some Republican leaders have begun to speak in terms of holding the left accountable by adopting some of the left’s tactics, including using lawfare to attack prominent Democrats. So far, however, very little has been done. This probably reflects the reality that not all GOP figures are under equal threat. Democratic lawfare has so far been largely confined to the targeting of Trump and his inner circle. Speaker Mike Johnson, for example, isn’t in danger, because at the end of the day, the Johnsons and McCarthys of the GOP aren’t a real threat to the establishment. They are the establishment, in so far as they play a useful role in American political theater–-that of the fake opposition. Just as Hulk Hogan needed the Iron Sheik, the Democrats need pliable GOP politicians to serve as the heel in the phony struggle for power.

Most senior Republicans are either happy to play along and be the beautiful losers the left needs them to be; others may have a sincere desire to defeat the left, but are too clueless to offer meaningful resistance. Only Trump and those close to him imperil the continued dominance of the left. Remove Trump from the equation, and the rest of the GOP is likely to fall back into the role of fake opposition. It is for this reason that the left’s attacks have been so focused on Trump and those who provide him with essential aid (e.g., those who dare to defend him in court). It is for this same reason so few on the right are willing to take meaningful action to punish the left for their extra-democratic moves. These are not the kind of people who see rocking the boat as being in their interest.

Better to Vote-Vote Than to War-War

Apart from the collective action problems that impede more aggressive forms of right-wing pushback, there is also the allure of procedural politics. As Adam Prezworski has noted, a key function of elections is that they allow societies to process conflicts without resorting to fighting. As a system, democracy helps reduce the stakes associated with political contests. The cost of violence is generally high in that it jeopardizes human lives and property, while also risking long-term marginalization or even total annihilation of a faction. In exchange for their willingness to concede a political defeat today, elections afford actors the opportunity to win victories at the ballot box tomorrow.

The conflict moderating effects of democracy are particularly powerful when a system features institutions that dampen the effects of elections. These include courts that have the ability to challenge the authority of the executive or the constitutionality of legislation; bicameral legislatures that create tensions within the legislative process; and independent central banks that control monetary policy. The collective effect is to reduce the stakes associated with elections by keeping the Overton window fairly small. In this way, elections never become a totally majoritarian “winner take all” event.

Cheating is to be expected (e.g., using the power of the state to amplify the party message through media or manipulating electoral rules), but it can never rise to a level that totally invalidates the process. Again, the calculation for actors is whether it is more cost efficient to fight or to campaign. So long as the possibility of victory through elections is real, the costs of fighting are probably too high to warrant abandoning the system, even when the incumbent party is engaging in some amount of subterfuge. The greatest risk to the system is that incumbents will fail to exercise restraint in using the power of the government to promote the future success of their faction–i.e., they cheat beyond a level tolerable to the out-of-power minority. If this occurs, the costs of participation in elections suddenly increase for the opposition, making fighting a more attractive option.

Another factor is the nature of the stakes involved. If the Overton window shifts to allow for the implementation of existentially threatening policies, then again, the stakes shift away from participation in elections and toward violent resolution. For fans of Carl Schmitt, this logic should be familiar. The small-time policy problems of tax rates and defense budgets are not truly “political” in the Schmittian sense, because they do not threaten the way of life of any particular actor. When elections become about deep-seated cultural issues, such as problems relating to faith and identity, then the stakes are suddenly raised. Elections then begin to take on a winner-take-all feel.

Scholars on both the left and the right worry about our fraying democracy. For the right, national elections have taken on an existential feel since at least 2016. Michael Anton’s now famous essay from that year, “The Flight 93 Election,” captured a sentiment that has not only persisted, but deepened. Every election is now a Flight 93 election for much of the right, and even much of the left.

A March 2024 poll found that only 29% of Republicans believe that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 presidential election. Only 24% or Republican respondents believed their vote in this year’s election would be accurately counted. The same poll showed fairly low confidence among independents in election integrity as well, with only 62% believing that Biden won fairly in 2020 and 39% feeling confident that their vote would be recorded correctly in the 2024 election.

And yet, Republicans are still campaigning and fundraising. So while there are concerns over fairness, as a party they remain committed to the process. To be sure, “Republican” does not exactly equal “right” in America, but it is the principal political vehicle for achieving right-wing goals. That small donors (those giving less than $200) account for about half of Donald Trump’s funding suggests many rank-and-file Republicans still believe that democracy can work. Trump’s rallies consistently sell out and there is both a strong “get out the vote” and “protect the vote” emphasis in Republican strategy. So while Republicans lack faith that the process is fair, they seem to calculate that they can still produce a margin of victory capable of exceeding the margin of likely fraud.

A continued faith in the possibility of electoral victory reduces the risk of right-wing violence because it means that the politically active elements of the right continue to see the costs of fighting as being higher than the costs of electoral participation. This could change, however, if Trump loses the election in November under circumstances that heighten suspicion that the system is “rigged” against Republicans.

Additionally, if the Democrats advance initiatives such as “Supreme Court reform,” they will be weakening the sort of policy moderating institutions that have helped to lower electoral stakes. Such moves are dangerous in that they risk altering the fight vs. campaign calculus for the opposition. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, political parties in Spain recognized the risks associated with high-stakes elections and chose to implement the informal practice of “el Turno Pacifico” (the Peaceful Turn), in which the incumbent would periodically, voluntarily hand power over to the opposition. One party represented the right, the other the left. And while they disagreed by degrees over policy, they operated within a fairly well-defined set of consensus views that kept the policy window narrow. The effect was decades of political stability. The system, which has the feel of pre-2016 U.S. politics, had the effect of marginalizing more radical elements.

It was after the breakdown of el Turno Pacifico and the emergence of high stakes, winner-take-all politics that we got the Spanish Civil War. Historian Alvarez Tardio noted the following in an article examining the role of political violence in shaping the 1936 election in Spain:

Prior to 1923… Spain experienced violence which ebbed and flowed with the opening and closing of elections… Yet from 1931 to 1936, the situation changed. During this period, political conflict reached particularly high levels not only at election time, but also both prior to and after voting had taken place. Furthermore, violence did not remain circumscribed to the campaign itself, suggesting it was a symptom of underlying institutional problems: the fact that the defeated found it difficult to accept election results; the fear that victors would use electoral success as a pretext to abuse their power once in office; conflicts over the legitimacy of the system itself; and the consequent disloyalty or semi-disloyalty to the same on the part of certain political actors.

Interestingly, however, through much of the 1930s, the political right in Spain remained invested in electoral politics despite the growth in left-wing violence. After the moderate right won a key electoral victory in 1933, the left responded with the infamous Asturias revolt in 1934, which led to 1,400 deaths and that included around 50 murders by left-wing revolutionaries. As historian Stanley Payne has noted, rather than condemning the left’s revolutionary violence, Spain’s press justified the Asturias rebellion as an “act of defending democracy against fascism.”

Sound familiar?

Even the Falangists, Spain’s version of Italy’s fascists, seemed less than enthusiastic about violence, despite their over-the-top rhetoric. After a series of unanswered murders of Falangists, some on the right claimed the movement “smacked more of ‘Franciscanism’ than of ‘Fascism’.” It was only after nine Falangists had been killed that the movement retaliated. Against a background of growing violence and tension, the 1936 election saw the Catholic-dominated right face off against a coalition of leftist groups. Fraud was widespread, as was voter intimidation. Acts of violence were perpetrated by both sides, although it seems the left was somewhat more violent.

The result was a “victory” for the Popular Front, which promptly began a reign of terror. In referring to the fateful decision of the right to launch a counterrevolution, Stanley Payne noted that “no people in modern times has endured such prolonged abuse without a vigorous response, however, desperate.” It was the abduction and murder of a leading opposition leader in July of 1936 that served as the spark for civil war.

The parallels between Spain in the 1930s and the situation in America are, at times, uncanny, something others have noted. But what most strikes me about the Spanish case, is its ability to show us how the institutions of a supposedly liberal-democratic society, once abused and weaponized, can be sapped of their power to manage conflicts within a system. To be certain, there are limits to what the Spain of 90 years ago can tell us about contemporary American politics. For one, Spain in 1936 was far poorer than the United States or any country in Western Europe today. Adam Przeworski has noted in his work that no country with a per capita gross domestic product (GDP) above that of Argentina in 1975 has ever experienced a regression from democracy. The explanation is that wealth moderates political stakes, which is almost certainly still true today. That said, the political problems surfacing in America as a consequence of establishment-populist tensions today are causing some, including Przeworksi himself, to question their assumptions. In a critique of James Burnham’s classic, The Managerial Revolution, George Orwell accused Burnham of the “mental disease” of “predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening.” Those who continue to see the inevitable continuation of American democracy may be victims of that same disease.

While democratic backsliding of the sort seen in much of the developing world has never occurred among the modern, wealthy liberal democracies, there are powerful indications that at least some of these systems are in crisis or on the verge of it. For example, Britain experienced the lowest voter turnout since universal suffrage in the July parliamentary election. This makes sense given that time and time again UK voters have signaled their desire to slow or end Third World migration to Britain, only to have UK elites ignore their demands. This phenomenon is well understood in America, where congressional voting behaviors bear little resemblance to what constituents actually want. Leaders can carry on like this for a while–even a long while–provided people’s basic needs and wants are being met. When, however, you preside over reductions in living standards that create real pain for people who have the perspective to know that their lives are actually getting worse and that their children’s futures will not be better than their own, your position at the top of the power hierarchy becomes more precarious.

Elites and the Masses

There are some important background questions influencing my analysis: What roles do elites actually play in driving political change? Is elite direction essential to the success of anti-regime resistance efforts? Can movements spawn their own counter-elites? What about the regimes themselves? To what extent does regime vitality matter?

To be certain, it is possible for anti-regime movements to generate their own counter-elites. Lech Walesa was an anonymous shipyard worker when he first became involved in labor activism. A gifted leader, he helped build the Solidarity trade union into an organization with 10 million members that would eventually overwhelm Poland’s communist party. There are plenty of other examples of men outside the ruling elite who were able to build a successful revolutionary movement. Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Sun Yat Sen, Benito Mussolini, and Ho Chi Minh, are just some of the better known leaders who rose from humble beginnings to become successful counter-elite leaders.

And what of pure “people power”? Can the masses themselves overwhelm and overthrow a despotic regime? Some elite theorists are quick to dismiss the power of popular mobilization without the guiding hand of a strong counter-elite. The record here is mixed. Protests, riots, work stoppages, and many other forms of civil disobedience can achieve success, but only when a large, energetic protest movement confronts an already weakened ruling elite that has lost the confidence of its security forces.

In Stephen Kotkin’s pathbreaking analysis of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, he noted that it was not the power of civil society that made revolution possible, it was the fragility of the communist regimes themselves. With the notable exception of Poland, the countries of Eastern Europe had almost no institutions outside the ruling party-state apparatus. But despite this lack of civil institutions, when mass protests occurred, they were largely successful in collapsing the brittle communist regimes.

In the case of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, what began as a student demonstration on 17 November 1989, swelled to a 500,000 strong anti-communist protest that prompted senior party leaders to resign. On 28 November 1989, the communist party announced it would surrender power. The regime folded up in less than two weeks without the 200,000 man Czechoslovak People’s Army even firing a shot. Most of the Eastern European regimes followed a similar path. Only in Romania did the security forces attack protesters on the orders of the regime.

But even in Romania, the security forces eventually abandoned the regime, leading to a violent overthrow and the execution of the country’s communist dictator and his wife. As D.E.H. Russell noted in her landmark study of revolutions in 15 countries, the disposition of the military is a key factor in shaping the success or failure of an uprising. Russell quotes Lenin who, when writing about the success of the 1917 revolution, noted that “no revolution of the masses can triumph without the help of a portion of the armed forces that sustained the old regime.” History has largely validated Lenin’s analysis, although it is also important to note that sometimes the revolution can succeed when the military simply declares its neutrality–leaving the rest of the regime to fend for itself.

In 1989, the Army of the Romanian People’s Republic was willing to fight for its regime, but only for a few days. Romania’s party army eventually turned its back on the country’s dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. The other communist regimes of Europe didn’t even bother trying to use force, although some considered it. That same year, in China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) combined brutality with resolve to crush massive student-led protests in Tiananmen square. To be sure there was some reluctance on the part of some Chinese Communist Leaders and some insubordination, but there was enough vitality left in the regime and enough loyalty in the PLA for the CCP to avoid the fate of other communist regimes in 1989.

As in 1989, 2011’s Arab Spring showed how leaderless, mass protests can bring down brittle governments, like the ones in Egypt and Tunisia, while also highlighting the resilience of other autocratic regimes, such as those in Syria and Bahrain. Critically, both of the latter were able to maintain the loyalty of the security forces, while the former were not.

If we needed another example of the central role of the security forces in determining the outcome of mass protests we received one with the recent toppling of the relatively successful and, until recently, relatively popular, Bangladeshi Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina. As in the other cases of successful protests outlined above, the protests were large–probably involving millions of people–and sustained. Critically, the regime, after weeks of attempting to crack down and disperse the protesters, eventually lost the confidence of the country’s army, which declined to enforce a curfew order that would have resulted in more violence. Hasina fled Bangladesh the day after learning the army had abandoned her.

The issue of security force loyalty, while important, remains a theoretical one in the American context. What is clear is that the vast American law enforcement apparatus remains firmly under the control of the country’s political elites. The willingness of federal law enforcement officials to relentlessly pursue January 6th protesters and anti-abortion activists supports this view. Where the U.S. military stands is a different question. The U.S. armed forces have a circumscribed mission at home, being an outward looking organization oriented toward external threats. When it comes to resolving domestic crises, including civil unrest, the national guard is probably a more relevant actor. So while it is useful for those of us who study civil conflict to ask how the U.S. military would respond to a domestic crisis relating to political unrest, it is probably more productive to ask how organizations like Alabama National Guard would respond. 

I’m not convinced the answers to such questions are knowable today. Given that senior military officers and Defense bureaucrats frequently worked to undermine President Trump, it seems likely such people would be inclined to side with the ruling managerial elite in any future domestic dustup. This makes sense since they are themselves of that group. This is another point where a class-based analysis can be helpful. If the officer corps of the pre-managerial revolution era were fundamentally bourgeois in character, the officers of today, having been indoctrinated by “the Cathedral” and absorbed into a technocratic milieu, are eager to play the role of upper-middle class striver. These folks seem likely to do whatever is asked of them by the political establishment.

Outside the managerial class are the enlisted personnel, as well as some lower and mid-rank officers who–for one reason or another–are wired in a way that makes them inherently anti-establishment. That there were active duty and reserve military personnel at the Capitol on January 6th 2021–including mid-level officers–says something interesting about where the rank-and-file might stand in some future national political crisis. What seems likely given that American military institutions at the working level are made up of people whose political views skew right would be heavily conflicted should they be asked to crack down on right-wing actors. That said, there are other dynamics in play. Breaking ranks is potentially very costly for individuals and consequently comes with its own set of collective actions problems. You can layer on to this the complexities associated with the federal system–e.g., the National Guard in a particular state answers to the governor of that state, but is funded by the Defense Department and can be federalized. The result is a complex civil-military relations problem that would require a far more detailed analysis to resolve.

Another key issue affecting the prospects for protest success is the size and the overall social appeal of a protest movement. Although a third of Britons supported the peaceful protests that followed the Southport stabbings, only 5% supported the riots and of that 5%, only 2% strongly supported the violence. 85% opposed the riots and of the number 75% strongly opposed it. This is not a firm foundation for mass action and no foundation at all for large-scale political violence. Indeed, some research points to a population participation rate of 3.5% as necessary to ensure meaningful political change through nonviolent protests. Such high rates of participation encourage elite defections (including splits between the military and civilian leaderships), particularly if the regime opts to crack down on peaceful demonstrators.

I have not been able to find good public opinion polling on the recent Bangladesh protests or even solid participation numbers, but just based on photos of the turnout and the small size of counter protests, it would seem the level of support and energy behind the Bangladesh protests was far greater than in the UK, where in left-wing counter protesters sometimes far outnumbered right-wing demonstrators. UK authorities, in a manner eerily similar to the US government’s response to the January 6th protests, initiated a massive crackdown, not just on people who actually participated in violence, but people who simply watched the violence or who posted things on social media the government disapproved of. In other words, the political right in the UK may be worse off following the riots. Certainly there is a real human cost being paid by those who chose to lash out against the UK’s left-oriented managerial state and its new client base, migrants.

The lessons here for the right both in America and, more broadly, in the rest of the Western world, is that mass action can work, but only when the protests involve a notable percentage of the population pushing back against an already battered and self-doubting regime. In Bangladesh, it is unclear how many people participated in the nationwide protests, although the numbers were surely high (probably in the low millions). In contrast, recent anti-migrant protests in the UK were far smaller and did not enjoy the broad base of support young Bangladeshi protesters appear to have had.

Timing is Everything

The timing of mass political action and the forms it takes greatly influences its prospects for success. Lenin regarded a “revolutionary situation” (i.e., a political or economic crisis) as a necessary precondition for success. Acting boldly outside the context of a crisis is the province of the foolish and the desperate. Most European revolutions of the 20th Century (successful and unsuccessful) involved just such situations–Spain being an exception. So who decides the timing of revolutionary action? In some cases, no one does. Some events, such as the recent protests in Bangladesh, seem to have lacked the guiding hand of a Lenin-like figure, carefully assessing the situation and deciding when to strike.

This implies that the conditions themselves can bring forth politically powerful mass action without the benefit of counter-elite direction. In some cases these succeed, as occurred recently in Bangladesh. In others they fail, as was the case in Tiananmen.

Why mass protests emerge when they do, particularly when there is no well-organized opposition in place to shape them, has been the subject of many studies and much speculation over the last two centuries. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his classic work “The Old Regime and the Revolution,” noted that revolutions often occur in the wake of well-intentioned government reforms. Scholars inspired by de Tocqueville’s work have noted that improvements in the conditions of a people create expectations of future rewards. Setbacks along the path of reform then contribute to a revolutionary “mood” that can manifest as protest and violence.

The collapse of the Soviet Union is a good example of this principle in operation. Life in the late USSR was objectively better than at any time in the country’s past. Political repression, while still a reality, had greatly softened since the brutal years of Stalinist totalitarianism. Flush with oil money from the sky-high crude prices of the 1970s, consumer products began to flow into the USSR. By 1986, 93% of Soviets were regular TV viewers. In addition to TVs and radios, by the 1970s Soviet citizens could increasingly buy washing machines, refrigerators and other life-improving appliances. The appearance of these items whetted the Soviet consumer’s appetite for still more. Unfortunately for Soviet leaders, crashing oil prices in the 1980s reduced the state’s ability to meet the rising expectations of Soviet citizens even as ill-timed political reforms allowing for freer expression created a negative feedback loop that destroyed Party legitimacy. The resulting political crisis led to a poorly planned coup by hardliners that sealed the fate of the Union and one-party rule. Again, de Tocqueville’s analysis seems spot on:

The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform… The very redress of grievances throws new light on those which are left untouched, and adds fresh poignancy to their smart: if the pain be less, the patient’s sensibility is greater.

There are many other examples in history of similar patterns playing out. For example, the Tiananmen Square protests arose after the repression of the Maoist era had given way to the economic opening of the late 1970s and a period of relative political liberalization. Even the recent example of Bangladesh fits the pattern. That country had experienced rapid GDP growth during Sheikh Hasina’s tenure as prime minister. The 2020 pandemic derailed Bangladesh’s economy and may have contributed to a general sense of discontent over public sector employment quotas–the issue that drove the initial student protests.

There is some of this at work in the United States. After decades of rising living standards and life expectancy, Americans are increasingly pessimistic about their future. Unprecedented numbers of Americans see the future as a bleak place where their children’s lives will be worse than their own. This sense of betrayal and frustration is very likely a key feature in the populist revolt against established political parties and a key reason why figures like Donald Trump have attracted such a strong following.

Defeat in war can also serve as a revolutionary condition to be exploited by a vanguard or unguided popular uprising. The German Revolution of 1918; the 1905 Russian Revolution; and France in 1870 immediately come to mind as examples of how a military defeat can roil a country’s domestic politics. The psychological impact of a costly defeat on a regime can lead to just the sort of crisis of confidence discussed earlier and leave a regime’s leadership vulnerable to internal critics.

Following Russia’s humiliating defeat in 1905, the Czar initiated reforms that did little to appease moderates who favored liberalization, while at the same time emboldening radical opponents. As Sean McMeekin has noted, the end result was the Revolution of 1905, which very nearly succeeded. Were it not for the brilliance of a uniquely talented Russian statesman, Sergei Witte, the Czar might have lost his throne 12 years before the catastrophe of 1917.

It is easy to see how such situations might emerge in the American context. A war with China over Taiwan that goes poorly for the United States is one obvious example. A major economic crisis is another possibility, one that seems increasingly likely as America’s leaders take on ever more debt. It is possible, and perhaps even likely, that those two scenarios would converge, as they did for Germany in 1918. A crisis not only distracts the regime, critically, it can sap a ruling elite of the confidence they need to lead–a weakened ruling elite being a key condition for successful popular action.

The Many Flavors of Resistance

In addition to timing, there is the question of how mass action manifests–as peaceful demonstrations or as violent resistance–and which manifestation is most likely to bear fruit. Over the last 15 years, scholarship has called into question the long-standing assumption that violence is the path to meaningful political change. A 2008 study drawing on a dataset of 234 cases of mass resistance found that nonviolent campaigns succeeded 53% of the time; over twice as often as violent campaigns, which succeeded only 26% of the time. The larger the non-violent campaign, the more successful it was likely to be. When participation rates from the population reached the 3.5% rate, all of the nonviolent campaigns were successful.

There are many reasons why non-violent campaigns might be more successful.The authors of the 2008 study asserted that nonviolent protest movements are better able to attract a broad base of support. Nonviolent movements are better able to incorporate women, the elderly, and people who may be unwilling to participate in violence for philosophical or other personal reasons. Violent movements tend to recruit from a much smaller base of support and to receive less international sympathy. Regimes in general feel little compunction about responding to violence with violence–often an overwhelming, disproportionate amount of force is used against violent resistors and can be further used by the regime to justify the application of persistent oppression, of the sort that might make future resistance more difficult.

The earlier cited example of China’s crackdown following the 2008 riots in Lhasa is a good example of how a regime can overreact to violent resistance. Since 2008, China has doubled down on efforts to control Tibet, including strengthening programs such as the forced relocation of rural Tibetans to urban centers to facilitate tracking and monitoring; and the mass removal of Tibetan children from their homes for placement in Chinese boarding schools to allow for cultural and ideological indoctrination to advance the sinicization of Tibet.

Violent resistance to Indian rule in Kashmir did nothing to weaken New Delhi’s grip on the disputed region. In February of 2019, a suicide bomber killed 40 Indian paramilitary police in Kashmir’s Pulwama District. The attack was the deadliest attack on India’s security forces in Kashmir since 1989. It did not produce the results the attacker was probably hoping for. Far from shaking India’s commitment to controlling Kashmir, the attack led New Delhi to strip the territory of its autonomous status, restrict internet access, bolster its security force presence, and strengthen border security with Pakistan.

Whereas violent resistance can provoke a strong state response that leaves resistors worse off, state efforts to use force to suppress nonviolent mass movements can often backfire. The recent Bangladesh case is instructive here. The aggressive state response to the initial student protests increased public sympathy and led to a swelling of the protesters ranks. What began as a relatively small protest focused on an economic grievance, became a much broader movement with sweeping demands.

I should note here that when I write “nonviolent” I do not mean a bunch of people show up at a rally, walk around with signs, hear some speeches, and go home a few hours later–ȧ la a Tea Party protest in 2009. No one in power cares when their opponents stand around and politely mill about before driving 12 hours back to their home in flyover country. Protests need to be sustained and disruptive. Does this mean protesters should spray paint fine works of art or glue their hands to a highway? That part isn’t clear.

There is no firm consensus among social scientists as to when and why socially disruptive tactics work. In a survey of 120 experts in sociology, political science, and related fields, 69% of respondents judged that socially disruptive protests were at least somewhat effective if there was already a high degree of both public awareness of the issue and at least tepid support for public action. 31% believed such protests either have no effect or are actually counterproductive.

There are at least three variables in play: the attitude of the audience toward the issue; the type of tactic employed; and the size of the protests.

The jury is out on whether guerrilla protest tactics such as those employed by small groups of radicals are effective. Extinction Rebellion, which came to fame after employing such tactics, announced it was adopting a new strategy in early 2023 that would instead focus on political and financial centers of power. The reason cited was that they judged they had achieved what they could using socially disruptive tactics–i.e., raising awareness–but that the tactics themselves did not result in policy changes. Whether this is true, or if the change was because they saw their previous tactics as counterproductive is unclear.

Climate change enjoys high levels of public awareness, but it is also a hot button political issue. Support or opposition for action on climate change then is often woven into a person’s broader philosophical and social worldview. A 2020 study supports this view, noting that attitudes toward protests reflected the political orientation of the audience. Democrats generally support action on climate change. Republicans are more skeptical. Democrats will thus tend to view protests more positively than Republicans. This isn’t terribly surprising and mostly just confirms normal intuition. The notable finding is that it suggests protests themselves have a very limited effect on people’s attitudes. Something that is already popular will probably not become substantially more so. Something that is viewed unfavorably, will not suddenly be viewed as favorable. In other words, protests probably have relatively little power to change minds, but they can serve to build political momentum for the protesters. The squeaky wheel does tend to get the oil, after all.

Now if the security forces overreact and shoot some protesters… that can change minds by encouraging public sympathy for the protesters. Similarly, the initiation of violence by the protesters (e.g. riots and looting) can have a profoundly negative effect. Researchers found that after a protest against government economic austerity measures in Barcelona, Spain that morphed into a riot, support for the group that initiated the violence fell by 12%.

The lesson here is that non-violent action is generally more effective than violence, but that it has only a limited power to shift people’s perceptions, at least in the short-run. This brings me to the issue of protest size. We noted earlier that the larger the protest, the more effective it is in bringing about change. This is true for many reasons, but notably it creates dilemmas for elites. Large protests that do nothing to disrupt public life are probably not very effective. It is only when large protests become truly disruptive–challenging the regime’s ability to function and maintain control in urban areas that the necessary dilemmas emerge to create incentives for elites to defect to the protest movement; stick their head in the sand and essentially declare neutrality; or double down on loyalty to the broader regime.

An order to crack down on protests imposes a Rubicon-like choice for security forces. To fire on unarmed civilians can have profound future effects–even personal consequences for those who give the order and those who carry it out. To side with the protesters is also risky, because their movement may fail, leaving the defectors in a bind. Neutrality is probably the safest option, but it tends to be one available only to the higher ranks. The average soldier or junior officer does not have the luxury of being a conscientious objector when the order to shoot or brutalize protesters is issued. Refusing an order under such conditions carries with it a high risk of swift and severe punishment.

There are some important caveats to note, however. While non-violent resistance is often more successful, particularly when there is robust mass action, non-violent strategies are probably less effective in heavily polarized societies or when the group lacks broad-based appeal. As Barbara F. Walter noted in her book How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, Catholics in Northern Ireland attempted to bring about change through peaceful protest actions, including sit-ins and open-air rallies, before ultimately resorting to sustained political violence to achieve their ends. Perhaps, if the Catholics had persisted for a few more decades using non-violent strategies they would have peacefully arrived at something like the Good Friday Agreement. We’ll never know.

Another political movement highlighting the limits of non-violent resistance can be seen in the Catalan separatist coalition. The Catalans had carefully cultivated an “amiable image” for years before frustrations boiled over in 2019 with massive riots in Barcelona. Although Catalan independence was popular inside Catalonia, it enjoyed little support among Spanish elites and the broader Spanish public. Consequently, Spanish elites saw little benefit in granting independence to one of Spain’s most economically productive regions.

Another case is that of the Falun Gong movement in China. In 1999, 10,000 Falun Gong members showed up outside the Chinese leadership compound, Zhongnanhai, to demand the CCP grant legal status to their group. Falun Gong was studiously apolitical and the protesters themselves were by all accounts orderly and non-confrontational. And yet the protest so unnerved Chinese leaders that they responded by outlawing the group and launching a massive crackdown that continues even today. Falun Gong lacked the sort of broad-based, diehard support needed to challenge China’s regime.

These cases highlight the limits of nonviolent resistance. Movements with genuinely broad societal appeal have a strong chance of success. Those with only regional appeal, or that stand in opposition to another powerful faction (e.g., Irish Protestants in the case of Catholic resistance in Northern Ireland) are very likely to fail.

Right-wing resistors in the United States, should they try to follow the path of socially disruptive mass protests, are likely to face an uphill battle. For one thing, many would-be right-wing protesters probably need to be at work on Monday. The 2022 Freedom Convoy protests in Canada are a good example of a relatively robust right-wing protest movement that ultimately disintegrated when the government began to turn the screws a bit on the protesters–cutting them off from fuel, financial services, and threatening criminal prosecutions. The state didn’t need to shoot protesters or torture anyone. It simply applied some legal and economic pressure to break the movement. I expect there would be a similar dynamic in the United States the moment real costs are imposed–or even just threatened.

What Does All This Mean?

Candidly, I’m not sure. On the one hand, the incentives for mass action and even violence are probably growing. On the other hand, the fundamental barriers to collective action remain in place–e.g., lack of elite top cover and continued faith in procedural democracy. What will ultimately allow the right to break through the collective action problem is something that is difficult to quantify–i.e., desperation. Right now, things aren’t so bad in America. To be sure, there are those who think otherwise, but objectively speaking things are still pretty good. No one is starving to death and the soft authoritarianism the left has embraced, while uncomfortable, has not become so burdensome that people are prepared to risk their lives and property to see their cause advanced. As desperation increases, which I predict it will, we may see the calculation change. A similar dynamic played out in Spain in the 1930s, with the right slowly responding to ever more aggressive left-wing provocations until the system finally reached a breaking point in 1936.

As we approach our breaking point, we are likely to see a broad spectrum of actions–some violent, many non-violent. Of those, I suspect none are likely to be effective in producing meaningful change, although they are likely to heighten the number of contradictions in the American system as we continue building toward what I expect will be a traumatic resolution at some point in the next decade.

I fully expect for us to see examples of spontaneous mass action in the coming months and years. As noted, such events can produce results when there is a broad societal consensus in support of the protesters, but in a highly polarized polity like 2024 America, not only is such mobilization unlikely, it would probably also be both short-lived and ineffective. That does not mean, however, that the path of nonviolence is an unproductive one. I write this, not just because I have no desire to see widespread violence in my country, whether it is of the Spanish Civil War variety, or the more subdued, but still nasty Italian “Years of Lead” type, but because there are real alternatives.

One possible path to effective extra-democratic activism is “pre-political” work, as outlined by N.S. Lyons in his April 2024 remarks in Brussels on the future of the right. Lyons aptly notes that effective political movements often begin with pre-political efforts, such as building volunteer organizations that serve the community. He cites the example of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)–a Hindu nationalist volunteer organization that, through its community outreach and charity activities laid the foundations for the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The BJP is almost certainly the most successful right-wing party in history and its rise to national dominance is made even more remarkable by the fact that it had to overcome a left-wing socialist party that dominated Indian politics for decades. As Lyons notes, this didn’t happen overnight. It involved decades of investment in building grass-roots support and in contesting cultural and educational spaces. The RSS-BJP rise did include unfortunate episodes of violence, particularly of the communal variety, but overall it occurred within the legal and democratic processes of the Indian system. There was no civil war; there was no insurgency; there was no campaign of terrorism. There was, instead, persistent, rather tedious, political and cultural work. When violence did occur, it took the form of riots and brawls. Given India’s long history of communal violence, this aspect of the RSS-BJP ascension was probably unavoidable, even if it is lamentable. If the American right is to restore its own political relevance, while also reducing the risk of widespread civil conflict, it would do well to learn from the RSS-BJP experience