Just How Powerful Are Protests?

Archon Fung: Hey, you’re listening to Terms of Engagement, episode fifteen already. My name is Archon Fung. I’m a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation here.

Stephen Richer: And I’m Stephen Richer. I’m the former elected Maricopa County recorder. And I am now a senior fellow at the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School. And of course, as always, Archon and I are speaking in our individual capacities, not on behalf of the Ash Center or not on behalf of the Harvard Kennedy School.

And always, of course, we welcome your comments. And so if you have comments on today’s discussion, please feel free to put them in the chat, and I’ll work to integrate them into the conversation.

Archon Fung: Great. And just a little bit of an update from our last couple of episodes, one episode thirteen with Joey Fishkin and episode fourteen with Danielle Allen. We talked about the Compact for Higher Education, which the Trump administration initially offered to nine universities around the country. And as the deadline that the Trump administration. Was it last night? It was last night. And as of last night, seven universities indicated that they would not sign the compact. And those were MIT, Brown, University of Virginia, Dartmouth, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California. And thus far, we haven’t heard from two more universities. which is the University of Texas at Austin and Vanderbilt University.

Although the chancellor of Vanderbilt, according to reporting from the Times, said that they had some reservations about the compact. So on episode thirteen, Stephen, you asked me if several universities signed, would it make collective action more difficult for others? I said, absolutely. But what’s turned out to be is the opposite of that is seven universities have said, no, we’re not going to do it. Which I think it’s the first example of kind of fairly costly institutional collective action to say no to administration demands in higher ed, but maybe also in the broader landscape of foundations, media organizations and law firms that I can think of. So I think this might be significant.

Stephen Richer: I think it’s pretty awkward now if you’re Vanderbilt and you try to say yes. Yeah. And so if Vanderbilt and University of Texas haven’t responded yet, does that mean that all students can turn in assignments later? Now, we should note that the Trump administration has made overtures to additional universities, including Arizona State University, brought them in for conversations with the Department of Education. So it does look like this is expanding significantly. beyond those original nine universities. And of course, as we mentioned last week, it might soon be opened up to all universities. Right.

Archon Fung: It may already be. The reporting on that’s a little unclear, I think.

Stephen Richer: But some universities have been brought in for the conversation.

Archon Fung: Yeah, absolutely. All right. So on to today’s topic, inflatable frogs and the resistance. So today we’ll be talking about the No Kings protest movement. It’s reported that on Saturday, there were over twenty six hundred events all across the United States. And I think, you know, if you’re just looking at crowds at one protest, it’s often a heroic estimation. Trying to estimate thousands is very, very difficult. But people are throwing around numbers like between five and eight million. I think we’ll have somewhat better estimates hopefully in a few weeks. We’ll post in the show notes in the chat some of the crowdsourcing efforts through which people are trying to estimate some of these crowd counts of very dispersed protests. And so to help us understand this weekend’s protests, but also the larger resistance movement and the history of protests in the U.S., we’re joined by the University of Pittsburgh’s Laura Putnam.

Stephen Richer: All right. So it’s my honor to introduce our guest, which is indeed Professor Laura Putnam, who is the UCIS Research Professor of History and Director of the Global Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. She researches social movements and political participation in local, national, and transnational dimensions. In recent years, Professor Putnam has used ethnographic and oral historical methods to explore shifts in grassroots politics in Rust Belt, Pennsylvania, and beyond. In addition to her academic writings, she writes for popular publications such as the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, the New Republic, Vox, and Democracy, a Journal of Ideas. She also leads the Civic Resilience Initiative at Pence Institute for Cyber Law Policy and Security. Welcome, Professor Putnam. Welcome, Lara.

Archon Fung: Great. So I think all three of us went to different No Kings protests around the country.

 Stephen Richer: Yeah, but at the outset, I should say that this is unusual for me, and I’m a little bit of a protest skeptic, but I wanted to go just because it was such a historical event and because I had so many friends involved in it. So I went to the one at Boston Common, which was a beautiful day. It was just delightful to be walking around downtown Boston. And there were thousands and thousands of people out and about. And it had a very festive, fun, lots of people that are doing arts and crafts. I think it was sort of like do your arts and crafts excuse for a lot of adults. You went in.

Archon Fung: I saw the one in Times Square pretty briefly. I didn’t stick around for very long because I was with friends in Times Square.

Stephen Richer: But I think Professor Putnam went to a few in the Pennsylvania area. And so I guess we should probably start with just sort of the notion, like, what do you think the goal was? Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what the organizers’ goals were. So the organizers were a whole bunch of different organizations, right? There is no one organizing entity. It’s not like there’s no kings.inc or something like that.

Archon Fung: I think what the protests do a few of the things that protests do is uh make it uh visible how many people are upset with the current administration.

Stephen Richer: So would you say that’s the unifying principle is just we we were upset and it could be you know we’re upset about because the cuts to the federal government.

Lara, are you back with us? Can you hear us now?

Lara Putnam: I’m back with you, and now I can hear you, so thank you for your time. Even better. Some people would prefer not to hear us. I apologize. Well, great. Well, I read off your introduction, and we were just talking. I went to the No Kings protests in downtown Boston. Archon went in Times Square, and we were saying that we think that you had gone to two different protests in the Pennsylvania area.

Lara Putnam: That’s right. So I started down in Fayette County, which is a county that Donald Trump won with sixty-eight percent of the vote in the city of Uniontown. So this is like an old coal-producing region in southwest Pennsylvania. And then after about an hour there, I drove up to Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in Westmoreland County, which is an area that was actually one of the real starting points of the Tea Party surge back in 2009 in response to Barack Obama’s election. So I wanted to get a sense of what the protests were looking like outside of metropolitan areas.

Stephen Richer: Did they have distinct vibes?

Lara Putnam: Absolutely. It was really striking in both places. I’ve been to protests actually in each of these places as well as elsewhere. These protests were just sort of demographically much strikingly more representative of just the population as a whole of these different places. So both of these are counties that are pretty white counties. There were just there were more men. There were more of a pretty wide range of ages, although mainly white. Probably mainly folks in the sort of, you know, fifty to sixty to seventy range. But there was also a lot of it really strikingly in both of these places, a lot of like people who sort of like they fit that like Reddit guy demographic of just like, you know, regular guys kind of skeptical of the whole political system in their thirties, forties, fifties. So that was really that.

Stephen Richer: So on your non realizing that it’s not scientific, what characterized the Times Square protests?

Archon Fung: I think it was look to me like some of the usual suspects of people who are more politically active on the left. I think. thought there were fewer African-American, Black people and Hispanics than if you just kind of walk down big parts of New York just on a regular day. It felt a little more white to me. But, you know, I didn’t do a survey or anything. I would guess because it’s New York City, the vast, vast majority did not vote for Donald Trump. Yeah.

Stephen Richer: So one of the criticisms that’s been online of the various protests were that, one, I think a lot of the anticipatory criticism was that this is going to be a bunch of radical lefties this is going to be affiliated with antifa and that this is going to be potentially violent or just a bunch of people who are you know kind of kind of weird i don’t know but instead the criticism was that it was old, white, and not terribly cool. Like it was a bunch of people doing line dancing and wearing animal costumes. Is that actually a good thing or is that a bad thing?

Archon Fung: Is that even what you think of who went? What are your impressions from more rural places?

Lara Putnam: Yeah. I mean, again, what was most striking to me was how reflective of the sort of population as a whole of demographically, really in both of these places, in both the sort of more rural aging Fayette County and in Westmoreland, which is more of a blend. And so it definitely was not like, I mean, I have not seen so many American flags in the same place since, you know, the last Fourth of July big bang and parade in each of these places. So it was definitely… definitely embracing the sort of patriotic signs and symbols. It was also really striking to me actually that the folks driving past in cars and pickup trucks were probably like, 20:1 honking in favor of the protesters, and that was different from what I’ve seen before.

Archon Fung: Why do you think that is? And then did you manage to talk to people? Like, were they people who never supported Donald Trump or are now having some second thoughts?

Lara Putnam: So I think it’s unlikely that anyone who was at the protest had voted for Donald Trump in twenty twenty four. You know, the they are the range of folks who are there are, I would say, demographically similar to folks who are increasingly registering independent rather than democratic in those particular counties. Again, you can be demographically representative, but not representative in your personal views, of course. But it was just, they were broad-based in the sort of demographic representation. And definitely, you know, neither… sort of simply aging hippies nor young radicals. It was just like regular folks. That was very much the vibe. Organizers at one point had put out a call to wear yellow, sort of reminiscent of that don’t tread on me flag. And so I started looking at which kinds of yellow T-shirts people happen to have in their closets. And it was like, one was like this very natty shirt from the Pennsylvania Snowmobiler State Association. And one was like the Murraysville High School marching band and One was a Jimmy Buffett t-shirt. It was just like a kind of regular blend of what you’d see at the grocery store in Southwest Pennsylvania.

Stephen Richer: So I didn’t know the yellow component and I didn’t see too much yellow. I will say that it warmed my sort of Americanist heart to see all the constitutional messaging, all the revolutionary rhetoric. I saw a Thomas Paine sign, and I liked that. But to Laura’s point, She doesn’t think it was people who voted for President Trump in twenty twenty four. So if this isn’t about persuading those people or mobilizing people who weren’t part of the Trump coalition in 2024, what’s the purpose? Is it to persuade the people who are sitting on the sidelines or is it just to show other people that there’s solidarity in dissatisfaction? Yeah.

Archon Fung: What do you think the purposes are? Well, first of all, do you have any insight into the organizers’ purposes, whether it’s Indivisible or other kinds of organizations? And then what are other purposes of the protest, whether or not the organizers intended them?

Lara Putnam: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it was a really broad coalition of organizations who were among the organizers. You know, if you go to the No Kings website, all of the sort of standard sort of center left unions, SEIU, certainly all the unions that tend to be more strongly leftist, communication workers, the UE, and Next Gen America and Planned Parenthood and the League of Conservation Voters, but also, you know, some of the, say, Trump resistance 1.0, Indivisible and other groups that popped up and became important coalitions in 2017 onward. And then some new folks like there’s been this sort of very loose coalition called 50501, which has done some organizing of protests since January, mainly organizing on Reddit, tends to bring in younger people, especially in metropolitan areas, may bring in people who are explicitly not affiliated with the Democratic Party. But in the there’s sort of one question, like who’s calling for this and then who’s making it happen locally? Locally, it was often a combination of folks. But with local Democratic organizations like the Democratic Women of Fayette County and the, you know, Democratic Women of Westmoreland and the such and such a district, you know, even sub county local Democratic folks. who were making sure that you got the permit, that you had trained protest marshals. It was very clear that organizers had, even in the small city of Uniontown, on up to Greensburg, were very focused on making sure that there’s gonna be folks in charge who are gonna prevent violence or who are gonna be able to respond to provocations, which there didn’t end up being. As I said, there were-

Stephen Richer: Yeah, I should say it was very successful seemingly in that respect. And Professor Chenoweth here, Erica Chenoweth, has already said that there were very few incidents of reported violence, very few incidents of police engagement. But I wanna draw you in on sort of this purpose thing, because again, I laid out my priors being a bit of a skeptic and Jay Cave in the comments says that the point of a protest is to pressure policy makers and to draw attention to issues. So is there a particular policy that people want changed in this? Or does this have to do with the November election that is right around the corner in Virginia and New York? Or what do you think?

Lara Putnam: So I think you always have multiple different audiences, right? You’ve got the local audience of people who are almost by definition less engaged in politics than you are. So they voted for whoever they voted, but they’re not necessarily following politics closely. They may be hearing through media or social media different thoughts on how the Trump presidency is going. Part of, as you’re organizing a protest, part of your audience is whether through people actually seeing you or word of mouth, conveying your vision of your values and in this case, your opposition to the current steps being taken by the current government. There were lots of, there were a range of signs that were sort of issue specific. You mentioned a lot that had to do with sort of standing up for the constitution. Those are really important values. as we know, I would say from research and recent elections, that’s not necessarily the top of mind values of the swing vote, right? So actually, if you’re out there caring about the rule of law and the Constitution, you’re already kind of unusual statistically in the United States, and swinging you is not going to actually swing an election. So there were a lot of signs, I think, you know, very intentionally that were about things like the protecting Medicaid, about social security, about uh the um ACA benefits uh and subsidies so health care uh about taxes and billionaires um and so there’s you know policy specific signs also a lot of um i would say uh you know anti-ice signs i would say the the images yeah immigration yeah and and the specifics of like um uh raids in America’s cities and sending the National Guard to America’s cities. Immigration encompasses a whole bunch of things, but that piece of how it’s being handled is clearly not popular among protesters. So the people you might be able to persuade to get off the sidelines enough to, let’s say, vote in an upcoming election they might otherwise not have voted in.

Stephen Richer: So there’s that piece of it. So elections do loom as part of this, whether it’s the elections that are coming up in just a few weeks here or whether it’s the elections in twenty twenty six. How much do you think that election like getting people to vote in a certain way was the motivation is the motivation? I think it was somewhat less that. A couple of purposes I think this protest and many others serve. One is to let other people know that you care.

Archon Fung: So some of the research on non-democratic situations show that people underestimate how much other people don’t like the regime because it’s quiet. It’s hard to infer what people are really thinking. And a protest is a manifestation of what people are thinking. To me, I don’t know if any of the organizers thought this, but to me, one of the main values of the protest is of this protest is exercising muscles. So if the 2026 election goes bad in the sense of a January six type of scenario undermining the election, I think popular protest is one of the main things. That might put it back on track. And so this is maybe an on-ramp toward that kind of muscle. Now, Adam Travorsky, the political scientist in his Substack post from yesterday, he went to the one, I think he went to the one in Times Square, and he said he was struck by how little capitally democratic messaging there was. It wasn’t like vote for the opposition to this party. And so I’m wondering, like, I found that a striking observation. I think it’s probably correct because a bunch of the people that you’re drawing in are pretty skeptical of the Capitally Democratic Party. So I wonder, like, Lara, how much electoral politics do you think was in there? I must say in the Boston one, which I didn’t go to, the speakers were Mayor Michelle Wu, Attorney General Andrew Campbell. But honestly, like, I didn’t even know where they were. I didn’t. hear them and it was more just about like seeing people’s signs and like there were different parts and seeing people’s costumes and whatnot but yeah it wasn’t a I mean to what extent is it a capitally democratic kind of activity that happened on Saturday do you think? Yeah but the thing is like strikingly in order to have an electoral impact it doesn’t have to have capital D branding and it may in fact be most impactful because those swing voters are the people who are least like by definition, swing voters are people who are least all in on the Democratic Party branding. So it may well be that mobilizing people and saying, you’re part of this us that doesn’t necessarily have a capital D Democrat by its name, that may be the most impactful. I mean, I would say there’s, you know, from, there’s a lot of evidence that there is an electoral impact to having protests.

Lara Putnam: They do, folks have done studies both in for the Tea Party protests, for the Women’s March and for the Black Lives Matter protests, looking at rainfall, so basically saying, let’s compare places where protests were rained out so they didn’t happen, whether or not people intended to, they couldn’t happen because of rainfall, to places where there wasn’t a rainfall on that day, and so protests could move forward. And all of the statistical analysis of that suggests that actually the fact of having good weather so that you could go out and actually protest does reverberate into increased vote share for the party that sort of aligned with the protesters in the next election. Although it seems to be pretty heterogeneous so that, for instance, for the Black Lives Matter protests, it seems like the biggest impact came in the whitest places. So when you had sort of more like less diverse places where you had a racial justice protest that translated into, and that wasn’t rained out, that translated into more votes for you know, Joe Biden in November, so it’s interesting. So there, there, and the other route through which that happens, we’ve already talked about sort of, um, showing, you know, showing that there’s support for the views that the protesters are standing up for, but also just meeting people at a protest matters, right? So people who go to a protest meet other people, establish connections, the local organizers, not the national coalition build their, their email list, And so sort of formally growing groups that then can pull people in as volunteers on local races and so on in ways that reverberates outward.

Stephen Richer: So one, the unifying principle of all of this, the unifying personality of all this, and obviously the alleged king in the no kings protest is President Donald Trump and objecting to the policies, the personality, whatever it is of President Trump. Now, in response, the White House only said something about like no big deal or it was silly or something like that. But also President Trump posted a video to social media and we were going to we were going to show that if we can. So I don’t know if Colette or Sarah is able to put that up. So now we’re moving from the protest, like how to understand the protest in itself to the protest in the larger American narrative, which this is engaging. Yeah. Given that President Trump responded how he did, he clearly wasn’t, I guess, shaking in his boots. Was this successful? Was this meant to change? Was this meant to cow President Trump? And what do you make of that response?

Lara Putnam: I have no idea. I mean, how would we know if he was shaking in his boots? I’m going to say it’s not clear to me how Trump or Trump’s allies in the government are feeling about this. And it’s not clear to me whether, and this may be the more important question, whether Republican Congress people who are up for election you know, a year and a month from now, having seen there being multiple protests with, you know, hundreds to thousands of people held within their own districts, does this shift their calculation at the margins moving forward. I think that’s the more relevant question. It’s much less about the perceptions of Donald Trump who’s gonna do what he’s gonna do and more about the self-interested perceptions of folks and folks who’ll be on the ballot in the year ahead. And there, the fact that it’s less the number of people who showed up in New York City or even Boston and more just the spread of how many different places. I mean, in Pennsylvania alone, I think there were over eighty different separate communities that held protests. And just the fact of that local protest, and also maybe its coverage in the local media, is more relevant in terms of national politics, because what the Congress chooses to do or not do in terms of Donald Trump is super important. So, you know, if a congressperson knows that there have been five different communities his own district have held, there’ve been enough people who felt strongly enough that they showed up to protest, that may reverberate through that route, which wouldn’t necessarily show up in Donald Trump’s choice of video to post.

Archon Fung: Right. I think I guess to my mind, I mean, one reason why we showed that is I think it’s an effort to shape what a protest is and how to think about it. Right. Because all these protests from Black Lives Matter on, I think, harken back to the dignified protests of the civil rights movement in some way. And then when Speaker Mike Johnson says, well, what’s going to happen on Saturday is the people who hate America and the fascists and the pro Hamas wing of the Democratic Party, which is to say the whole Democratic Party, he’s trying to say, no, it’s not the dignified activity of the civil rights marchers. It’s these anarchists and rabble rousers. And then I think Donald Trump’s video is saying something different still. It’s like, I don’t care who these people are, but they’re not Us. And so, you know, where Marie Antoinette said, let them eat cake. Donald Trump is saying, let them eat something else. Yeah. And so that’s one effort to characterize. But with fifty fifty one and indivisible, what do you think? How do you think they’re trying to characterize what this protest is about? It’s not a march on Washington. It’s everywhere. And it’s a bunch of other things also.

Lara Putnam: No, I mean, just, you know, one more point on, you know, Donald Trump had to go make an AI-generated video of himself with the plane because there wasn’t any useful-to-him footage being generated by the protest, right? Right, yeah. Like, read that. Yeah, there’s no Molotov cocktails. There was no Molotov cocktails.

Stephen Richer: Los Angeles was so easy to show people on top of burned-out Waymos waving a Palestinian flag and just retweet that. That’s a great point.

Archon Fung: That is a great point, yeah.

Lara Putnam: So I think in the first do no harm, it’s incredibly impressive that you managed to get seven million people into the streets to participate in protests and not generate… a single clip that could go viral, much less like a highlight reel that would match the narrative that they had preset in place. They hate America. It’s the violent communists. It’s the Hamas wing of the Democratic Party, et cetera. They had geared up a whole narrative frame and then didn’t have anything to put in it. So then they shifted gears. And you can see the sort of narrative flailing there.

Stephen Richer: So I think by the… rubric of no unforced errors this will go down as one of the largest mobilizations in united states maybe the largest single day maybe the largest single day um no no countervailing narrative that sets up easily then by that rubric it’s a success now one of the things that i was reading about with respect to some of the costumes is that this was supposed to be this was supposed to be fun this was supposed to be inviting did you did you have fun?

Archon Fung: I would have had fun if I had stayed longer. I thought it was pretty joyful, right? I mean, the inflatable animals and. And is that important to, you know, because I never looked at like Selma, Alabama crossing the bridges, like these people obviously weren’t having fun, but they were also being attacked.

Lara Putnam: But I mean, I think that drawing, you know, it is one thing to prepare a protest movement to intentionally use violence protest or nonviolence to attract violence in order to shape the media narrative and impact policymakers elsewhere. And that’s what the sort of heroic phase of the civil rights movement did. But that doesn’t just happen. And for sure, you say sort of no unforced errors. You for sure do not want to be pulling people who have not been through like deep building processes of, you know, solidarity and training and preparation to be sort of cannon fodder into a world in which any slip from the sort of dignified, we are going to put our bodies on the line and be the recipients of violence in order to shift the narrative. it would have been, I think, a huge strategic error to be aiming for that. And no one was aiming for that this time. And, you know, and reasonably so. So in terms of like making it fun, you know, I think the crucial thing is to make it feel like safe and inviting and like a space that you could identify yourself, that people who are less political can identify with and can see themselves stepping forward into, right? So that it doesn’t seem like a space of, where only radicals or where I’m going to end up, you know, on social media next to a sign that says something egregious that I don’t believe in. Or so the fact of bringing the temperature down through funny signs and through costumes, like there were a lot of Portland frogs on display in Westmoreland County. So, you know, that was, that I think is both important for avoiding racism bad outcomes in the present, and also in setting up the possibility of being like, yeah, and sending the message, you know, we could do this again. We didn’t bear risk, or we, you know, this was not costly to the participants in a way that would make folks think that this is, well, they’re never going to do that again.

Stephen Richer: So speaking of which, is there another protest already? Yeah, and more broadly, maybe the last kind of thing we can explore is where do you think this is going? Is there going to be more no kings, or… Will these people all join organizations and deepen their activism or what?

Lara Putnam: For sure, we know from past experiences that folks who do one thing tend to show up at the next thing. And we know from interesting studies done like in twenty eighteen that even if you just compare people who were politically active to people who were politically active and went to rallies. Right. So the people who had participated in rallies were like twice as likely to be planning to volunteer in the term election for a candidate. So, you know, rather than sixteen percent of people who are politically active in whatever way, but not attending versus thirty eight percent, I want to say, among people who had gone to a protest or a rally. So for sure, I think that the like the protest to political volunteer pipeline is like well established as something that we should, I think, expect to see.

Stephen Richer: Okay. Well, speaking of next things, though, because I see we’re out of time. So we do have our next, we have our next thing scheduled, which is next week, a week from now. And we hope that you’ll join us again. And then I just wanted to say, you know, our thirty minutes has come. And I did want to say thank you so much to Laura, to Professor Laura Putnam from University of Pittsburgh. And any closing thoughts?

Archon Fung: Let me add my thanks as well for sharing your wisdom and your direct observation of places that are neither Boston Common nor Times Square is super interesting and important. And to folks out there who are watching or listening, if you have suggestions or themes that you’d like us to explore, please email info at ash.harvard.edu. And huge thanks to Sarah and Colette and Courtney for making the whole program work. And I hope to see you next week. Thanks so much.

Lara Putnam: Thanks for having me here. It’s been fun.

Archon Fung: Great. Thank you very much.