Christian Paz

Was there anything that distinguished the protests this weekend from the kind of mass protests that we saw during the first Trump administration?

Theda Skocpol

My research colleagues and I looked at both the wave of Tea Party protests that spread in 2009, starting with Tax Day, which was the biggest [single-day protest] in the sense of size and numbers of places across the country. And we also looked, four years later, at the Resistance to Trump, which got going a little faster and where the peak-moment of both size and spread was the post-inaugural Women’s Marches in January 2017. And in that respect, the No Kings protests that we’ve seen so far are similar to both the Tea Party and Resistance movements, in that these were all nationwide demonstrations that were synchronized and happening everywhere. They come, obviously, from different partisan directions — 2009 compared to 2017 and now — but what they share is that they were all very widespread and very large.

Christian Paz

I’ve seen criticism of the No Kings protests that suggest the sprawling and decentralized nature of the whole thing, as well as its laser-focus on opposition to Trump — rather than a more positive vision — is a problem. What do you make of that argument?

Theda Skocpol

It’s interesting that civic resurgence in our time has taken the form of these big waves from both sides of the spectrum — with the Tea Party protests as the first big wave and then the anti-Trump resistance four years later as the second. In both cases, these [protests] were not really policy-focused. They were really expressions of alarm about the direction of the country. The sense that these were authentic expressions from people who were alarmed about where the country was headed was what gave them their force.

Now, I will say that there’s a difference that I’m concerned about this time: The research that my colleagues and I did on the 2009 and 2017 protests found that they gave way to organizing. There were 2,000 to 3,000 local groups that were formed in both cases all over the country, and in almost every congressional district in every state, that carried on meeting face-to-face and helped the protests transform those connections into policy and political effects. In both cases, there were people who came forward and ran for office and created congressional waves, first for the Republicans (in 2010) and then for the Democrats (in 2018).

Christian Paz

What do you make of the idea — which is credited to professor Erica Chenoweth, even though, to be fair, her argument is much more complicated than this — that in order for there to be tangible political consequences, these protests need to get at least 3.5 percent of the population involved?

Theda Skocpol

A lot of the media that I saw after the protests was saying things like, Well, we got to get to 3.5 percent of the population in the next big no King’s Day. And I really think that's a misdirection. I understand the research that says that getting to that threshold is correlated with overthrowing weak autocratic monarchies and arresting parliamentary democratic backsliding, but that’s not the point in the United States. The point is whether we’re going to see — as we saw from the right and left in the earlier big waves — a follow-through in political and electoral organizing. 

To judge these protests as a success, they have got to feed into electoral results and to prod America’s elite institutions to stop caving in to the administration’s corrupt demands. And that’s a bigger lift than anything that we’ve seen before. In the end, it doesn't matter if 3.5 percent of people turn out one time or another. What matters is political power. People on the right know that.

Christian Paz

What do you think about the ongoing debates about how much, if at all, the Democrats need to “moderate”?