Talking With Erica Chenoweth

Civil resistance: Does it work, and when?

MAGA may say that No Kings Day 2 was a “hate America” event, but in reality it was not just peaceful; it was joyous. Participants in the huge march I joined in New York, and by all accounts at other demonstrations across the country, were vastly encouraged to see so many others standing up to the Trump regime.

But what, if anything, do such events accomplish? I talked with Erica Chenoweth, author of Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know and multiple studies across a wide range of nations. She knows better than anyone else the truth about civil resistance — when it works, when it doesn’t, why it works when it does. Transcript follows:

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TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Erica Chenoweth

(recorded 10/22/25)

Paul Krugman: Hi everyone. Paul Krugman again. This week I’m going to be speaking with Erica Chenoweth, who is the person on civil resistance and academic research thereon. This is recorded a few days after No Kings Day two in the US. So we’re having a lot of civil resistance, at least trying to, here in this country.

Erica is suffering a fate which I have managed to avoid my entire adult life, which is as an academic dean. She’s speaking now, however, in her capacity as a researcher into the phenomenon of civil resistance. Good afternoon Erica.

Erica Chenoweth: Good afternoon. Thank you for having me on, Paul.

Krugman: So, obviously: events. I don’t know if you witnessed or saw any of the Boston No Kings day—which was huge according to the estimates—I saw the one in Manhattan. These were massive, massive protests, utterly peaceful. But there’s always a question: does this matter? So we have a lot of people out there waving signs, some of them funny, some people were in costumes. You’ve written a lot, particularly one very widely cited book, saying that it really does. So why don’t you tell us about why civil resistance matters?

Chenoweth: I would say there are two ways to answer your question. One is, do protests matter? Which is one way to ask it. Then the other question is, does civil resistance matter? Those are slightly two different questions. On the protest side, just immediately speaking, there are a lot of papers about this. There are papers in my discipline (political science and sociology and econ) even about trying to understand the impacts of even a single day of protest and widespread participation, and a single day of protest on things like shifts in public opinion, changes in policy, shifts in election turnout for particular parties, the tendency for people to run for office, all kinds of reforms.

I think the general answer is that, on a number of dimensions, even a single day of protests with very widespread participation can often lead to shifts and those different outcomes, even if there’s sometimes modest shifts in places like the United States where a modest shift in voter turnout can actually be quite decisive because of the nature of our voting rules. “First past the post,” that means elections can be completely changed by small margins. So it’s easy to overstate the impact that a single day of protest can have. But it’s also easy to underestimate it, given where the scholarship is on this topic.

Now, civil resistance is a broader phenomenon than just protest. Civil resistance is when people engage in sustained levels of mobilization, organization and political conflict without using violence. So it includes protests, but it also includes other methods of non-cooperation, of community organizing, of base building, of sometimes bargaining and negotiation. Lots of different methods to try to shift the balance of power in their favor. Civil resistance can be used where elections don’t happen at all and it can be used where elections do happen. It’s sort of a broad range technique of struggle that is meant to dislocate whatever the sort of opponent is of the movement from their pillars of support by changing what their interests are and the future of the country.

The degree to which civil resistance works depends on a variety of things. How does the movement build a capacity for broadening its base over time? How it builds a capacity for engaging in a wide variety of methods like non-cooperation, strikes, boycotts and the like. Also whether it is able to withstand the almost inevitable violent attacks against it, by maintaining discipline and resilience and making that violence backfire. Those are the key characteristics of movements that succeeded, at least in the 20th century, to do things like initiate democratic breakthroughs in Poland and in the Philippines and later on in Serbia, Brazil, and Argentina. People are familiar with the Arab awakenings of the early 2010s, etc. So those cases are what we would call civil resistance cases, more so than protest by itself.

Krugman: Okay. There are two questions that occurred to me. The first is the effect on the participants themselves, and it’s the mood, if I can say that Saturday was kind of a joyous occasion. It looked to me like people seemed very happy in the process of doing it. I think I know why, but what would your take be on why that was such an uplifting moment for so many people?

Chenoweth: I think part of it was uplifting because there is power in numbers and power in understanding that one is not alone, and feeling both deeply concerned about and willing to do something about a state of affairs that people find intolerable. Doug McAdam, who is a sociologist, wrote an important book about the impacts of participation in the civil rights movement on people who participated and also why they participated. He coined this term called “cognitive liberation” and the idea of cognitive liberation is simply when a few things happen at the same time; the first is that there’s a collective understanding that the situation can be changed. There’s a collective understanding that it’s intolerable and there’s a collective understanding that each individual must do something about it, but also can do something about it. Then there’s an understanding that now that we all know this information, there’s no going back to the previous status quo where it felt like the situation was permanent, only going to get worse, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

He describes this process that happens socially and collectively, where there’s an awakening to the fact that there’s nothing permanent about any of our political realities and that they can be changed. Then for many people, they come to the feeling they must participate in changing the political scene and that they feel like they see others now who agree with them. That’s a deeply affirming experience and the feelings that come up for people are feelings of joy and feelings of hope. Those are very important collective emotions for people to experience, when the emotions that are being projected on them are feelings of, “your voice doesn’t matter” and “there’s nothing you can do about this situation,” as almost total power and control being wrested from the citizenry.

Krugman: The impression I had was just that it was really important. Certainly the current administration wants a narrative which says that it’s not. The voters spoke in 2024 and even after the fact, the president said that it was a joke, it was a small event. But if you were there, you saw that it wasn’t a small thing.

Chenoweth: There are also studies that show that civil resistance campaigns that involve festive events and party-like atmosphere do draw more people. So as they’re more attractive, they draw more participants because it lowers barriers of fear, but it also makes it an incentive to participate in an otherwise dangerous situation in some cases. This is a paper by John Gledhill, Christopher Shay, and Allard Duursma that came out a couple years ago.

Krugman: Yeah I actually did meet people saying, “are you sure you want to go to this thing, because it might be dangerous?” Ex ante, maybe that was reasonable, although in reality there were zero arrests in New York, probably in Boston as well.

But the other question is about impact on the regime, whatever you want to call it. We’re somewhere in between where normal democratic elections are going to take place and this might move the votes a few points and color revolution against an autocrat. You’ve argued that you can get significant defections from the existing power and how does that work?

Chenoweth: This comes from observations made by people from Hannah Arendt, to Jean Sharpe, to Mahatma Gandhi, to George Lakey. About the fact that every tyrant, no matter how tyrannical they are or where they are in the process of consolidating their power, they rely on a huge number of people to pull it off. So the people that have to go along with it in order for it to be pulled off often include people who are powerful, influential people in the society, in the business sector, or even small business chambers of commerce, and formations. Labor can be a really important pillar of the faith community, educational institutions, important multi-sectoral domains of power, like law, then professional associations and things like that. Basically, within civil society, there’s this huge range of formations, sectors and institutions that are either going to help the consolidation happen by going along with it or they’re just not going to cooperate. In other cases, where there have been acute backsliding episodes even recently in places like South Korea, the behavior of those pillars and the way they interacted with the elites surrounding the aspiring autocrat are what proved to be the most decisive and, to put it concretely, like in South Korea just a few months ago when the president declared martial law in the middle of the night and tried to have an auto coup, the kind of federated trade unions across the country quickly called for people to go to the parliament and protest immediately. And they did, and then in the middle of the night, they said by declaring martial law, this president has declared the end of his presidency. He’s no longer fit to serve. By the morning, they were able to announce credibly that they could initiate a general strike in the country. That was enough to make the generals and those around the president say, “this is not going to work,” and he called off martial law. That could have been the end of this story, and he could still be there trying to seize power. But as a matter of fact, that wasn’t where the movement stopped. They said, “we meant it when we said you’re no longer fit to serve. You can’t continue being the president. We’re going to impeach you.” They used a variety of methods to make sure that even politicians in his own party showed up and formed a quorum for the impeachment proceedings. They impeached him, and he’s no longer in office.

So, that was just a powerful display of very quick mobilization, activating the broader civil society networks and pillars that then elicited change in behavior, in the interest calculation of people who were going to go along with that and then realize we’re not going to go along with it, right? “There’s no way this is going to work,” “We don’t want to be part of it,” etc. Now in a setting like ours, there has already been some defections of prominent people resigning, for example, or refusing to resign and being forced to be fired from their positions as inspectors general or other things.

But also last week, a lot of noise around people in different institutions throughout our society basically saying, “no.” Yesterday the archbishop of Chicago released a statement basically saying, “absolutely not, the current administration’s policy toward immigrants in the city is intolerable and we’re not going to go along with it.” Then at the Chamber of Commerce last week, a low key story, the Chamber of Commerce sued the Trump administration over its H-1b policy, on the basis of it being unconstitutional, not just on the basis of it being harmful for their industries, but saying, “he doesn’t have the right to do this,” Congress is the one who actually needs to make this change if they want to impose $100,000 fee on H-1bs, etc.

There are many others, the airports that refuse to run Kristi Noem’s TSA commercial. These are all examples of what I think civil resistance scholars mean when they talk about defections, or at least non-cooperation by people in key pillars of support. They don’t have to switch sides, but not going along with it is what prevents the consolidation from taking place.

Krugman: As we speak, one university after another is refusing to sign on to Trump’s compact. You have to wonder if there has to be some mutual reinforcement among these things. I wonder how much the No Kings Day demonstrations may have, in some cases tipped the balance at the universities, and then the more people refuse, the more others will too.

By the way, the Chamber of Commerce, given my line of work, that’s a bit of a shock because, you would expect that for them, deregulation and low taxes is everything, it’s serving their commercial interests because they want to be able to hire cheap foreign workers. But nonetheless, that was a little bit of a surprising show of courage there. What about now? One of the things that my overly cautious friends were worried about was actually the police, and I actually have a bit of observation, which I was surprised at how calm and friendly looking the police officers along the route were. Actually I don’t know if you addressed this, the sort of normal-ness of the crowds seemed to me to be an important factor?

Chenoweth: The theory is that the more representative the crowd is of the general population, the more likely it is to have non-escalatory impacts with police or with bystanders or anything else. Part of that is just because it’s very clear to all who are observing it, that these are folks from every walk of life, regardless of what the GOP wants to say about these people, they’re plainly peaceful protesters, some of them engaging for the first time in a political protest in their life and look like they made their first protest sign to come out and say “No Kings,” or something like that and are not threatening. There’s nothing in here that’s threatening people and property around the protest, even if they are actually threatening power. That’s the needle that civil resistance campaigns thread, which is to say they’re able to convey a political threat without threatening people and property around them, in terms of their destructive potential. I think this is actually what differentiates in so many ways, just in a very narrow strategic or tactical sense, from more violent protests, which is that people don’t get the message because they can’t pay attention to anything else, but the concern about the destructiveness of the protest.

This is why I think a lot of the messaging that went into Saturday on the No King’s organizational infrastructure side was very clear that this was a peaceful protest. There were even directions for people participating in the protest for that required them to show up not bringing weapons of any kind, not engaging in any kind of aggressive behavior toward anybody else around at the protest and also ignoring provocateurs; de-escalation trainings were offered in advance by many, many people.

So it’s not just that these massive demonstrations take place in a vacuum. There was a lot of preparation that went into creating what I and many others in my field called “nonviolent discipline,” which is, nobody actually really did know what was going to happen, especially in the places where the National Guard is actively deployed. ICE is engaged in active operations. Journalists and clergy are getting shot with pepper balls and all kinds of things nobody really knew. That just means that it takes a lot of preparation to make sure that a community can turn out in huge numbers with confidence that they’re not going to be the ones escalating the situation.

Krugman: Given the heated rhetoric, “this is the terrorist wing of the Democratic Party and its Hamas supporters,” and they’re all these grandmothers and parents pushing prams—it didn’t look like that. Although, I have to say, I was wondering a little bit whether there would be counter demonstrators. I don’t know, I’m not quite sure how that was managed, but there was no sense of confrontation at all.

Chenoweth: Yeah. In some places around the country it was different from that. Even in the earlier iterations of No Kings, for example, in Gillette Wyoming in June, there were counter protests against about 175 No Kings protesters facing off against (I’m not sure if they were armed) counter protesters who were saying “Heil Hitler” and “Trump is king” and that kind of thing. So they turned out on October 18th, knowing that that happened the last time they came out again. The risks that are absorbed by people in different communities around the country are really different, depending on where they are. Gillette is in Campbell County, Wyoming, which is maybe the county that voted the highest proportion for Trump in 2024, over 86-88%. So this is in deep red Trump country. They turned out again and again so that’s what we call a costly signal, which is to say the commitment and resolve and discipline demonstrated by that protest, might have different effects than even a larger protest in a more friendly-to-protesters area in the country.

I think it’s really important not to underestimate, again, why a single day of protest can be so powerful, given that in some parts of the country, people are demonstrating very obvious levels of personal courage to engage in it.

Krugman: Now, one of the sets of institutions that you worry about, certainly I worry about, is the news media. Local sources had it page one everywhere, but national media was very uneven. My former employer put the biggest demonstrations since Earth Day in 1970 on page A23. So they seemed to want to downplay it.

So if mammoth protests happen and they don’t get reported, do they make a sound?

Chenoweth: Clearly no, if they don’t get the attention that is due, then that is going to moderate their effects for sure. On the other hand, there’s a very active debate about the salience of, say, New York Times coverage or Washington Post coverage, or Wall Street Journal coverage compared to what people see on TikTok, which is where double digit percentages of the population now claim to get their news.

I think that that just speaks to two things. The first is that people are seeing viral videos, they’re seeing representations that the media is not paying attention to. But the other thing is that they’re seeing it in a much more algorithmically controlled way, as opposed to in a gentle way, where people who are making daily editorial decisions about the most important things that have happened in the country today are not weighing in. So there are trade-offs about that. Then there’s also the issue of the segmentation of knowledge, which is to say that some people are simply getting different kinds of information than other people in our society because of the way that the information is segmented through these platforms. So I think it just speaks to how totally complicated and intimidating the information environment is for people all over the world, frankly, who are trying to organize and strategize ways of bringing attention to their demands.

In Gandhi’s day, he very self-consciously used the arrival of mass media to the advantage of the Indian independence movement. His entire strategy hinged on the fact that if colonial British troops were assaulting peaceful demonstrators, that that would offend the British public and that that would be covered, and that the coverage of it would be viewed as intolerable by the British public because of what they had been told about, people living in India versus what they would see about it themselves. He felt like the truth was the thing that would break through. In fact, his autobiography was called My Experiments with Truth.

Krugman: Oh, I didn’t know that.

Chenoweth: So we’re in a much more challenging and intimidating terrain when it comes both to the ecosystem in which information is circulating and people’s unwillingness to settle on a particular truth as a social construct, shall we say.

Krugman: Some of these successful civil resistance movements have taken place under quasi-authoritarian or violent authoritarian regimes and ones that presumably control the media as well. What’s a good example of a successful regime overthrow? Which one would you cite and how did that work?

Chenoweth: You can think about the East European revolutions as a really typical example of where that played out. You had the pro-Soviet propaganda dominating the information ecosystem plus the surveillance aspect and everything else going on. Those are prototypical cases where there’s a single party line and not much else going on for a sustained period.

Now, there is certainly underground news, and there was underground literature and underground intellectual organizing and things like that throughout this. But when it was able to come through to the surface and catch on, that’s when you would often see these cascading effects because it’s suddenly that something breaks through in a way that produces common knowledge about the fact that this is not an invincible autocrat, they’re weak actually. They’re fragile. We all agree. If I can look out my window at 300,000 people in the square, if you’ve got nothing and then the next day, something is really different in the society and it generates a sense of collective awareness that, “oh this is over?” So that’s why you have people like Timur Kuran talking about these information cascades and how it can go from “nobody’s saying anything” to all of a sudden, not only are 500,000 people demonstrating in a square, but within days the regime has fallen. Which is how it happened in East Germany and a bunch of these other contexts.

One thing to note is that, in those days, the arrival of any kind of subversive media was like the backbone of some of these movements. So the solidarity movement is named after their newspaper “Solidarity” which arrived before the name of the group. They started publishing this newspaper that had an alternative viewpoint than the communist Polish government.

Krugman: For listeners, this is Poland in the 1980s. So this is way back.

Chenoweth: Way back. And it was banned because of that. So as soon as they banned it, because the movement had anticipated it and had the capacity to print itself and kept printing it within a very short period of time, there were like millions of people who wanted this newspaper, right? So that is an amazing process.

What’s different about our time is it feels hard to hang your hat on what would be the contemporary version of that. Where you could get some kind of irresistible alternative perspective that breaks through an otherwise trashed information ecosystem and helps to build a new consensus around a new movement that then ultimately is in a position to challenge an autocratic regime and negotiate a democratic transition peacefully. So that’s really another part of our challenging terrain that a lot of movements are grappling with and trying to strategize around.

Krugman: The news coverage has not been completely suppressed, obviously. We’re still getting upset at even the fairly modest attempts to do it. So it’s not as if it’s going to come as a revelation to learn that actually a lot of people don’t like the current administration. So that in some ways means that this moment of truth is a lot harder to happen.

Chenoweth: I think that’s for two reasons. One is because of the question about how you can build a moment of truth through some kind of media or some kind of narrative, but the other issue is the polarized nature of our current situation, which is to say if people have been living under a closed, autocratic regime for decades where previous attempts at protest even around student issues or labor issues were violently suppressed, and there’s been really no scope for dissent or an alternative viewpoint. When one emerges nevertheless, that is interesting to me.. Where we are now is in a situation where more countries around the world are in this hybrid regime category than we’ve had in decades. What that means is that the publics are also more polarized, they can both claim to have elected their representatives. These people didn’t come to power in a coup or because some kind of foreign backed occupation of the country that then could consolidate, or something like that. These are elected officials who represent a non-trivial proportion of the population. There’s a legitimacy claim there. Then there’s also a legitimacy claim to the view that elected officials should not corrupt the institutions to give themselves more power, and yet the institutions themselves seem incapable of managing that crisis.

So the situation the United States is in right now is more like many different backsliding-democracies have experienced over the past 25 or 30 years than it is what people were facing 50 or 60 years ago. It’s also more like what was happening around the world in the sort of 20s and 30s era. Where the primary way that authoritarian parties were coming to power was through elections. They were elected communists or elected fascists. Then once they were in power, they were breaking the democracy. That is a very challenging political moment to address, because in those cases, power is ascendant. Whereas in a long standing autocratic system there’s a sense of decline and that the power is descending and moving to different parts of the society.

Krugman: Anti-authoritarian movements, there’ve been a lot of these elected governments to try to turn themselves into permanent ruling parties. A majority actually have, in the end—lost it, in the last few decades.

Chenoweth: When Maria Stephan and I wrote our book Why Civil Resistance Works, we started collecting data in 2006. So our data ended in 2006. So we initially had our data set running from 1900 to 2006. During that time period, nonviolent resistance campaigns that were mostly pro-democracy campaigns, the majority of them succeeded and they were succeeding in increasing proportion over time.

The most successful decades were the ones that had completed themselves just before we wrote our book. Then in my book, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know, I published an update on the data that I’ve been maintaining and continue to update. In that book, I talk a little bit about the fact that we started to see in the 2010s, decline in the proportion of campaigns that had succeeded compared to the 2000s and the 90s, etc.

Now we’re into a new decade and my next book is basically trying to track where we are there. What I’ll say is that it does look like there seems to be something of a golden era, in which nonviolent campaigns were winning at extraordinarily high rates, like +60% of them that were mobilizing against autocratic regimes, some of them long entrenched autocratic regimes were succeeding and basically since the mid 2000, when we’ve also been tracking a global democratic recession, those campaigns have been less capable of pushing back at that same level.

Now, that doesn’t mean these nonviolent campaigns aren’t working anymore. But it does mean that the kind of autocratic governments that are facing them down are winning more often. So what I’m grappling with right now is the question of whether and how the opponents of these campaigns have basically learned from these earlier periods and have adapted their strategies for how to prevent themselves from needing to resign, for example, in the face of one of these movements and what that then says about how movements need to adapt their own strategies as well.

Krugman: That’s interesting. So there’s kind of an arms race on civil resistance and suppression thereof.

Chenoweth: Yeah. That’s not a bad way to put it, except that the arms are all on one side.

Krugman: Yeah, I was noticing—I was on a bit of a high after Saturday and then I think the morning before we are having this conversation ICE just grabbed a whole bunch of people on Canal Street, and it’s like, you suddenly start to wonder: was anything actually accomplished?

Chenoweth: Well, this is where it’s really important to learn from the history of these movements, which is that it’s usually not about a single day of protest. It’s about building power for the long haul. The average campaign that succeeds takes a few years to do so. I shouldn’t say that this is prescriptive or predictive either, by the way. But, if we just look at the historical record, we know that it takes time for campaigns to build the power that begin to tap into those pillars of support and create loyalty shifts, etc. And that one of the reasons movements win when they win is because they are resilient to the repression that they experience in the meantime.

Every single campaign that Maria Stephan and I initially logged in our book and that I’ve later updated since, every single campaign that was actually threatening power experienced violent repression by the state. So the question isn’t whether peaceful movement succeeds without really upsetting the status quo, they only succeed when they upset in a pretty serious way the status quo and that just means that along the way it is very dangerous, right? It’s just very dangerous and can become more so the closer it is to a crisis. That’s exactly why the preparation around nonviolent discipline is so crucial for so many of these movements to be able to maintain their plan, even as repression escalates.

Krugman: So can I talk about 3.5%, which, of course, everybody grabs on to that number. The famous result, which I think you have some questions about now, is that if 3.5% of the population participates in civil resistance then the regime falls, is that so? What’s the status of that now?

Chenoweth: That number was drawn from that initial sample of data that Maria and I published in our book. The very specific parameters of that are that we looked at maximalist campaigns, so those that were trying to oust incumbent national leaders or achieve territorial independence, that’s the sort of subset of campaign types that this applies to. Our measure of participation was peak participation. Although as I mentioned, in most cases this was sustained over a long period. What there is to know about it is that during that time period, it’s a historical observation that when peak participation reached that threshold we didn’t see failed cases in that data set. Now, whether this has descriptive or prescriptive or predictive power outside that sample is a totally different question. So, among other things, there clearly have been some exceptions to it since then. So the first one that I’ve written about is Bahrain, where in 2011 to 2014, it appears that about 7% of the population mobilized, and that the monarchy is still in place. I think one of the things to know about that case is it’s kind of a unique one. Much like another exception, Brunei, which in the 60s had an armed rebellion of 4000 people, which actually was about 4% of the population. These are small monarchies with huge international allies backing them. In the case of Bahrain, there was so much concern about cracking down from within the state itself against these demonstrators that the Saudi government sent troops instead, precisely to try to avoid defections.

So you can see some adaptations there. But also, it’s an exception to the rule. The other thing to know about it is, in that sample of historical cases, I don’t think there’s any of these campaigns that were sitting around thinking to themselves, “we need to mobilize 3.5% of the population.” They weren’t aiming at it. They just happened to get there, and beyond it in many cases. It was an indicator of other groundwork that had been laid that allowed them able to achieve that large scale threshold while doing lots of other things like building capacity for eliciting these defections and building alternative institutions and negotiating and persuasion work and lots of other things to where that large threshold probably represented huge numbers of supportive people who themselves would never engage in frontline protest for one reason or another. So we can’t observe how much work they’d already done and how many people actually agreed with them when they achieved those thresholds. This is just to say, I would interpret it with caution as a prescriptive device. I think it’s a hopeful number in the sense that people feel that it’s within reach in their societies to mobilize effectively against authoritarianism. But I also think it’s not a magic number. It’s one indicator of many different dynamics that exists in these movements. Just not to overstate the claim, I think it is pretty important.

Krugman: From economics: “empirical regularities work perfectly until people notice them, and then they stop working.”

Chenoweth: Oh, I might have to quote you on that going forward.

Krugman: How much do we look like either a failed or successful resistance? A lot of people are using Hungary as a kind of role model, but actually the evolution of the stuff in the US is looking less and less like Hungary in various ways. So I don’t know what to map what we’re going through on to. What do you think is actually happening here?

Chenoweth: I had a conversation with my colleague Steve Levitsky about this on Monday on a webinar that we did, and I asked him this question, “where would you put us right now?” He said, “there’s no precedent for where we are.” I think I largely agree with him because here’s what we’re dealing with: we are in a global period where we’ve seen around the world a democratic recession year over year for every year in the past 17 or 18 years in a row, there have been fewer democracies and more autocracies and hybrid regimes in the world and last year was a pretty big jump in that because the year 2024 was the year of elections around the world. For the first time in world history, in every election and in every established democracy in the world, the incumbent lost vote share. It’s not always the right that lost vote share, the left. But for the most part, this elevated or empowered far right parties around the world. We’re part of that trend.

But we also in the United States have our own historical experience of racial authoritarianism, in the country that we’ve inherited, but has arguably never actually been implemented and consolidated to this degree from the federal level. It’s always been a regional phenomenon in terms of the way that it was institutionalized under Jim Crow, etc. But the federal government at best was an enabler of it, and at times was an opponent of it and in fact has tried to help to dismantle it in the 60s. We’re now at a place that I think the country arguably has never been before, which is to say that that particular version of the country’s authoritarianism has captured the arms of the federal power, and is seemingly not respecting federalism in the same way that one might have expected. So I agree with you that Hungary is not the best reference point. I also think our own history, unfortunately, doesn’t even provide the best reference point because of the scale, scope, and speed of what’s happening.

This is just to say, I think that where we are in kind of uncharted territory, I also think the fundamentals of what we know about how to arrest backsliding probably remain the same. I also believe that the United States has everything, our population has all of the ingredients to do what many other populations around the world have been doing and what people in our country have done in the past which is to build and strengthen the civil society response to what’s happening, to uphold the institutions that need upholding, and to renew and improve the institutions that need renewal and improvement without bloodshed. I truly believe that we have the capacity to do that. It’s up to us to decide whether we can organize ourselves to deliver on that.

Krugman: That’s quasi upbeat I would say (laughs). I personally fluctuate, I was on a high Saturday and then something else happened, but it is fantastic to study the history and clearly, systematically, I admire the attempts to do more than just description and actually quantify.

Sorry, that’s my nerd side talking.

Chenoweth: Same, I get it.

Krugman: I wish I was, as a historian, studying this from 50 years in the future and not having to live through it. But anyway, it’s very enlightening. At least there’s rays of hope in there.

Chenoweth: There’s always hope. Absolutely.

Here’s something that will make you feel hopeful. We have more information, more history, more knowledge, more perspective, more manuals, more guide books, more research, into how people mobilize effectively against authoritarianism than anyone in human history has ever had.

Krugman: Yeah and we have the history of people successfully doing it. So that matters a lot. You know, one can say this is inevitable.

Chenoweth: That’s right.

Krugman: Okay. Best of luck. May we retain enough academic freedom that studies like yours can be continued. Thank you so much for talking to me.

Chenoweth: Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks, Paul.