Opposition Is Not Enough
Why our authoritarian crisis requires the vision of a movement that votes
3.5% is a data point that has become popular among people who want to build a movement to defeat authoritarianism and reconstruct democracy in the United States. It comes from great research by Erica Chenowith at Harvard University on nonviolent movements for social change - work we cited in our 2024 book, White Poverty.
After studying people’s movements across the globe in different cultural contexts and at different moments in history, Chenoweth has concluded that a social movement that wins the active support of around 3.5% of a society’s population wins its demands. The prospect of organizing a hundred million voters into a moral fusion movement in the United States is daunting, but it turns out that the movement itself doesn’t need to be anywhere near that size. Because movements move people far beyond their immediate reach. By accelerating the active engagement of a relatively small portion of the population, a moral fusion movement can change the political possibilities for everyone.
It’s true. We always have more power than we realize.
But it’s also true that we all like to use numbers to reinforce what we already believe. Every number tells a story, but it never tells the whole story.
Take, for example, the authoritarian Nazi regime that controlled Germany from 1933-1945, a story we’ve spent considerable time reflecting on here this summer. The numbers are sobering. From the very beginning of Hitler’s regime, the Nazis set up concentration camps in Germany. While the first official one was at Dachau, empty basements and warehouses were re-purposed as concentration camps from early in 1933. These were not death camps for Jews. Those emerged later, and primarily on the Eastern Front after Germany invaded Poland. Concentration camps were the “re-education” centers the Nazis used to punish their opposition and instill fear in the German people. They were populated by trade unionists and Communists, Social Democrats who had held political office and clergy who objected to Nazi extremism. Most Germans interned in concentration camps were not killed, but the Nazis held hundreds of thousands of Germans in these camps.
Eric Boem, a German-Jewish man who fled Germany and served in the US Army, added up the numbers after World War II to try to understand the resistance. “Over a period of 12 years, almost 3,000,000 Germans were in and out of concentration camps and penitentiaries for political reasons,” he noted. In 1930’s Germany, that was almost 5% of the population - and that’s just the people who were arrested and detained. While those who opposed the regime were not nearly as active or vocal as many Germans wanted to claim after war, we know from the research of the German Resistance Memorial Center that many underground networks and individual acts of resistance were never detected by the Gestapo. If there were three times as many Germans who actively opposed the regime as were arrested for doing so, that would mean more Germans resisted the Nazi Party than ever joined it. (At its peak, the party had 8.5 million members.)
Still, the Nazis held power and terrorized the world, murdering more than 11 million people and waging a war that killed tens of millions more.
More.
https://ourmoralmoment.substack.com/p/opposition-is-not-enough?
