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What if MAGA rule so dismantles the institutions of representative democracy that normal institutional processes are insufficient to overcome tyranny? Around the world, general strikes, “people power” uprisings, and other forms of “social strikes” have overthrown violent, armed dictatorships. What conditions might put social strikes on the agenda in the United States?

 

 

An authoritarian takeover is under way in the US, complete with the arrest of opposition political leaders, unrestrained executive usurpation, and lawless physical violence and kidnapping by masked, unidentified, armed federal agents. As detailed in a previous commentary, forms of mass nonviolent “people power” uprising have forestalled or reversed such takeovers in many other countries, ranging from the Philippines, to Serbia, to South Korea. Yet the United States has little tradition of using such means – which I refer to collectively as “social strikes” – to oppose tyranny. Could social strikes nonetheless play a significant role in countering Trump’s developing autocracy?

Conditions for social strikes

What conditions put social strikes on the agenda?

• Growing disaffection of the population leading to a “great repudiation” by a large majority. As a study a century ago noted, “strike conditions are conditions of mind.” Social strikes are unlikely to happen before a large proportion of the population are enraged at the MAGA tyranny, dubious that more moderate forms of action will suffice, and willing to take personal and institutional risks to oppose it.
• Growing self-organization and capacity to act by the movement-based opposition and forces of social self-defense more broadly. This involves cooperation among national organizations and networks. Even more important is local organization, formal or informal, that is able to act and coordinate with others. Such networks need to be able to persist despite pervasive repression.
• Actions by the movement-based opposition that win wide popular support and participation. “Exemplary actions” that visibly oppose the harm the regime is doing and show that people can stand up and resist it can help lay the groundwork for mass participation in social strikes.
• Internal conflicts within the regime. As Abraham Lincoln (and the Bible) observed, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” A divided regime is less able to engage in a strategy of either consistent repression or of manipulative concessions.
• Undermined pillars of support. Every regime depends on the support of its supporters, whether that takes the form of campaign contributors, propagandists, or soldiers, police, or other agents of repression.
• Disaffection in the instruments of repression. Turning points in civil resistance in the Philippines, Serbia, and many other cases came when police and soldiers opposed a coup or refused to fire on protestors.
• Lack of concessions or reforms from the regime. It is a truism that the powerful defeat challenges to their power by a combination of repression and concession. A ruling force may appear strong because it never backs down, but in the long-term such pig-headedness is likely to force more and more of society into opposition.
• Ineffectiveness of other forms of opposition. Many people, quite reasonably, will prefer conventional forms of institutional resistance to ameliorate their conditions rather than undertake risky ventures like social strikes. The failure of less drastic forms of resistance often lays the groundwork for social strikes.

Clearly, such conditions for social strikes do not currently exist in the US. However, there are harbingers that may point toward the emergence of such conditions. For example, millions of people have participated in a series of days of action opposing MAGA autocracy and its gestapo tactics, its destruction of food, housing, and healthcare for millions of Americans, and its destruction of our climate and environment. Polls demonstrate that a majority of the public has increasingly opposed such Trump initiatives.

 

 

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been riven by firings, resignations, and other signs of internal conflict; the MAGA movement was sharply divided by the US bombing of Iran and the concealment of documents about Jeffrey Epstein. While many universities, law firms, and other institutions have caved in to Trump’s demands, others are moving to public opposition. Some key elements of support for the Trump regime have gone into opposition. Disaffection was widely reported among the National Guards and Marines sent to repress the people of Los Angeles and Washington, DC. Despite the growth of public opposition, the Trump/MAGA modus operandi seems to have little or no role for concessions to placate opponents or win back disillusioned neutrals and supporters. Although all of these factors might provide favorable conditions for a reinvigorated opposition in the political arena, the leadership of the Democratic Party has so far failed to provide such an opposition.

Social strikes could either be the result of actions by the regime and its supporters or of initiatives by the opposition that stimulate mass popular action. Mark and Paul Engler write in their book This Is an Uprising (New York: Nation Books, 2016) that “a strategy of nonviolent escalation can sometimes set off historic upheavals of their own.” They offer numerous examples, including Gandhi’s “salt marches” that mobilized India against British imperialism; Rosa Parks’ refusal to go to the back of the bus in segregated Montgomery in 1955, which triggered the Montgomery bus boycott and helped start the entire civil rights revolution; and the protest suicide of a Tunisian fruit seller that set off the ouster of the Tunisian dictatorship and the start of the “Arab Spring.”

In two of the four case studies in a previous commentary, “Social Strike for Social Self-Defense,” social strikes in the Philippines in 1986 and Serbia in 2000 were a response to efforts to perpetuate authoritarian rule by stealing elections. The 2024 social strike in South Korea was in response to an attempted presidential coup. Puerto Rico’s 2019 social strike was a response to the disclosure of outrageous behavior by top officials that violated a wide range of shared norms. Social strikes can also be triggered by outrageous violence on the part of the regime.

All of these cases illustrate Gandhi’s maxim that even the most powerful cannot rule without the cooperation and/or acquiescence of the ruled. In all these cases, popular mobilization and the threat of general social disruption were so great that the autocrat’s supporters abandoned or turned against him and forced him to resign.

The timelines for such scenarios are largely unpredictable. The popular mobilizations in the Philippines and Serbia built for many months. Those in South Korea and Puerto Rico responded to sudden events and were victorious within weeks.

Such events are full of unknown unknowns. While preparing for what can be anticipated is valuable, it is no substitute for constantly keeping watch and experimentally “testing the waters” to see what is actually happening in people’s hearts and minds.

Today’s expressions of popular disaffection do not guarantee that social strikes will become possible, that they will occur, or that they will succeed. But they do provide good reason to consider them as a possible strategic horizon for the growing movement for social self-defense.