Welcome to the first set of answers to the first-ever Message Box Mailbag.
The response blew me away — more than 100 questions and comments came in, and some really interesting conversations broke out among members of the Message Box community.
This is exactly what I was hoping for when I started thinking about doing a mailbag.
As a reminder, these will come every Saturday as a special feature for paid subscribers.
Post your questions for next week’s mailbag in the comments section of this post.
Tim Bak:
It seems that mass peaceful community action — the 3.5% thing — will be the only effective response against the Trump authoritarian government. It also seems there is a reluctance to roll this out. What do you think about a general strike with optional peaceful protest (to avoid the incitement of violence by Trump we are already seeing) as the means to capture the attention of both the rest of the public as well as lawmakers who could do — and in response would do — something to stop Trump?
Answer:
Tim’s question is one of several about whether mass mobilization is the best (and maybe only) way to defeat Trump’s aggressive effort to consolidate power and turn America into an authoritarian state.
The 3.5% rule he references comes from political scientist Erica Chenoweth, who studied more than 300 movements for social change and found that every nonviolent movement that engaged at least 3.5% of a country’s population succeeded in achieving its goals.
I highly recommend Erica’s interview on Pod Save America from earlier this year.
Mass mobilization in the form of large, nonviolent, consistent protests and/or a general strike is absolutely the right answer — but it’s not a button you can simply press. You have to build public will and create the proper political context. If Democrats called for a general strike tomorrow, it would barely make a ripple.
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