Critical Mass

Imagine a cartoon: Unarmed protesters surround a palace. Inside, the royal mathematician frantically scribbles numbers. Nearby, an unhappy king slumps in his throne. His bags are packed. He says, “Let me know when it hits 3.5.”

As you may have heard, every unarmed resistance campaign in recent memory that mobilized at least 3.5 percent of the population for an action against rulers they considered illegitimate forced the desired regime change. This so-called “3.5 percent rule” is merely an academic curiosity. It explains nothing about what came before the “peak event” of participation, nothing about how that event contributed to regime change, nothing about what followed.

The tiny number—Just 3.5 percent!—may give resistance organizers hope. Less helpful, it may cause them to focus on crowd size rather than fundamental movement-building. Recently, when I invited a local 50501/Indivisible coordinator to attend my  nonviolence workshop, she replied, “We just do big events.”

Internet communication makes it relatively easy for rally organizers, like her, to generate satisfying turnout. But casual participation, however impressive at the outset, is unlikely to persist in the face of suffering and disappointment. Movement commitment is more likely to come through person-to-person engagement. Here’s a more useful “rule” to ponder: Organize collective work and shared risk-taking—you can’t achieve much without it.

Here’s another: The more a ruling group must rely on threat power, rather than voluntary cooperation, the more fragile their regime. Removal of an unpopular dictatorship is, in theory, relatively simple. Inspire a critical mass to withdraw their obedience; persuade the armed enforcers not to inflict harm; when the institutionalized fear is gone, the dictator flees. History suggests this may be easiest in a small country with a narrow economy and just one or two major cities.

But what if you’re challenging the policies of a corrupt, sociopathic, authoritarian head of state who, thanks to a sophisticated propaganda system, most voters accept as democratically elected and lawfully governing, and who has the political approval of a substantial minority? And what if this is in an enormous country with numerous major cities, a highly diverse population, and a complex and de-centralized economy? In other words, how does an antifascism movement halt and reverse the expansion of Trumpism?

Perhaps the U.S. antiwar movement of 1965-75 offers some clues. After all, it caused two elected presidents to give up the presidency.

Pressure

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson significantly expanded the U.S. war against Vietnamese independence. The antiwar response was broad (peace groups, college students, Black liberation organizations, political radicals, women’s groups, war veterans, clergy) and multifaceted (teach-ins, picketing, canvassing, marches, rallies, fasts, draft-card burning, lobbying Congress, hounding top officials, etc.). For many participants, the primary concerns were the military draft and U.S. combat deaths.

In 1967, the Spring Mobilization saw 400,000 protesters marching in New York City—at the time, the largest political demonstration in U.S. history—and 100,000 in San Francisco. Yet Johnson kept increasing U.S. troop levels in Vietnam.

In October, the umbrella National Mobilization Committee, shifting to nonviolent intervention, sponsored “Stop the Draft Week.” At the University of Wisconsin, the Oakland (CA) Induction Center, and the Pentagon, unarmed occupiers encountered police brutality. Public approval of Johnson as commander-in-chief reportedly dropped to 28 percent, as domestic turmoil, more than overseas slaughter, troubled the average citizen.

By making Johnson’s war policy controversial and, therefore, newsworthy (compared to, say, U.S. war policy in Afghanistan, 2001-21), the antiwar movement generated pressure. In this context, pressure means political conditions that cause ruling elites to believe they must choose between two or more undesirable options, i.e., a dilemma. To maintain false claims of “progress” in Vietnam (a political necessity for his reelection campaign), Johnson believed he had to send even more troops. But troop increases, he understood, would bring increased antiwar activism, which would further erode his public approval numbers (a campaign disaster).

By early 1968, Johnson and “Defense” Secretary Robert McNamara were politically stalemated and emotionally exhausted. “Losing Vietnam,” they now understood, was inevitable: The mighty U.S. military state, stymied by domestic disapproval and Vietnamese violent resistance, couldn’t permanently maintain the southern half of Vietnam as a client state.

After secretly recommending a slaughter slowdown, McNamara left office on February 29. Similarly, his replacement opposed troop increases because the war was “hopeless” and “domestic unrest” was “rampant.” On March 31, Johnson announced he would begin war “de-escalation” and wouldn’t seek reelection; the antiwar movement had, in effect, chased him into early retirement.

When the next president—Richard Nixon, inaugurated in 1969—didn’t halt the slaughter, the antiwar movement went mainstream. The New Mobilization Committee appealed to labor unions, high school students, military members, and religious groups. The moderate Vietnam Moratorium Committee tried to reach middle-class voters in every congressional district.

In mid-October, the Moratorium to End the War drew large turnout in major cities, including 250,000 for a candlelight march in Washington D.C. and 100,000 for a polite rally in Boston. In response, Nixon canceled Duck Hook, an unannounced military operation which would have escalated the destruction of North Vietnam, possibly with nuclear weapons. In mid-November, a Mobilization drew over 500,000 protesters to Washington, while 250,000 marched in San Francisco.

Statistically, October-November 1969 may have been the peak of civilian participation in the antiwar movement. Moratorium and Mobilization participants nationwide engaged in diverse local actions, from prayer services to high school walkouts, which cultivated more antiwar sentiment. (If two million people took part, that’s 1 percent of the population.) According to some observers, half the population now rejected U.S. war-making in Vietnam.

Under antiwar pressure, Nixon reluctantly began withdrawing U.S. ground troops. To delay “losing” South Vietnam, he employed “secret” bombing campaigns—secret from the U.S. public—and strengthened the surrogate South Vietnam military. Without fail, Congress approved his war funding requests.

Antiwar actions continued, highlighted by campus uprisings in May 1970 (which likely shortened a U.S. invasion of Cambodia), massive marches in Washington and San Francisco in April 1971, the May Day occupation of Washington in 1971, and growing resistance from active-duty soldiers (which unsettled high-ranking officers). The movement triggered Nixon’s personal and ideological paranoia—he imagined an international communist conspiracy—but the constant threat of popular uprising kept him reducing troop levels.

The resultant decline in U.S. draftees and U.S. casualties contributed to a decline in antiwar participation. In 1972, with ground troop withdrawal almost complete, Nixon easily won reelection over antiwar candidate George McGovern. At that point, it appeared U.S. officials could perpetuate airborne slaughter, despite body count now in the millions, so long as U.S. boys weren’t dying. Nixon’s public approval rating in January 1973, shortly after his brutal “Christmas bombings” of North Vietnam, was reportedly 68 percent.

Critical Networks

Now for a closer look:

Sometime around 1946, in California’s Bay Area, a bookstore clerk allowed a penniless young man to take a book on Gandhi. Anyone who wanted such a book, the clerk told him, could be trusted to come back and pay for it. Thus began Ira Sandperl’s career as a scholar of nonviolence. With folksinger Joan Baez, his most enthusiastic devotee, Sandperl participated in many civil rights and antiwar actions, advised Martin Luther King, and, in 1965, founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence.

In March 1967, Sandperl protégé David Harris initiated an anti-draft network. In October, Harris helped organize Stop the Draft Week actions in Oakland, which left him, Baez, Sandperl, Roy Kepler (a Second World War conscientious objector), and two hundred other participants briefly imprisoned.

Among them was Randy Kehler, a Stanford graduate student who had been attending a workshop led by Sandperl, Baez, and Kepler. Incarceration was Kehler’s first experience with “a community of people that were committed to something larger than themselves.” He quit school and accepted Kepler’s invitation to work for the War Resisters League, a branch of War Resisters International (WRI).

Meanwhile, on the East Coast, Harvard graduate student Janaki Natarajan joined the antiwar movement. Natarajan was well-versed in Gandhian philosophy, having participated in the Sarvodaya Movement in her native India. In 1968, at a conference co-sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), she charmed a military state insider named Daniel Ellsberg (Marine Corps, RAND Corp., State and “Defense” departments) and inspired him to read about nonviolence.

 In 1969, Natarajan invited Ellsberg to a WRI conference. One of the speakers was Kehler, who explained that he would soon be joining friends in prison for draft resistance and said “there was something really beautiful about it.”  

Ellsberg had volunteered for combat in Vietnam as a counter-revolution analyst and had worked on a secret study, commissioned by McNamara, called U.S. Decision-Making in Vietnam, 1945-68 (aka “the Pentagon Papers”). He had grown skeptical of the war, knew of the secret nuclear contingency plan, and was dismayed to learn that Nixon secretly intended to maintain a residual force of 50,000 U.S. soldiers in South Vietnam. 

But encountering Kehler’s moral courage and clarity was, for Ellsberg, like “an ax had split my head, and my heart broke open.” The former Marine sobbed for an hour, then pondered what he could do to end the war, now that he, too, was prepared to go to prison. An active loyalist had defected to the active opposition: Ellsberg resolved to leak the Pentagon Papers to reveal how presidents had repeatedly misled the public. 

“No Kehler, no Pentagon Papers,” Ellsberg later acknowledged, and we should add Natarajan, AFSC, and WRI. Indeed, the list of indispensable influences behind Ellsberg’s conversion includes Sandperl, Baez, Kepler, Harris, and all the other anti-draft campaigners who inspired Kehler.

Safe to say, none of them anticipated the remarkable repercussions. In June 1971, when newspapers, in collaboration with Ellsberg, began publishing Pentagon Papers excerpts, Nixon overreacted. Goaded by “National Security” Advisor Henry Kissinger, he arranged a counter-intelligence team to discredit Ellsberg (who “knew too much”) and blackmail him into silence. These so-called “Plumbers” attempted a physical assault on Ellsberg and burglarized his psychiatrist’s office.

When the Plumbers, in 1972, were caught wiretapping a Democratic Party office, Nixon tried to cover up this smaller crime (which he hadn’t ordered) because he didn’t want his criminal conspiring against Ellsberg exposed. Nixon’s obstruction of justice became, in 1973, the centerpiece of the Watergate scandal, with Ellsberg’s espionage trial producing key revelations.

The scandal deflated Nixon’s public support numbers, allowing otherwise deferential legislators to oppose him. Lobbied by peace groups, Congress—at long last—voted to defund Nixon’s bombing campaigns and the South Vietnam military. In August 1974, facing ouster by Congress over Watergate, Nixon resigned the presidency. When Kissinger and President Gerald Ford, in early 1975, requested new funding for South Vietnam, Congress said no. In short, war resisters had driven Nixon into greater domestic criminality, which, when exposed, undermined his ability to continue a war made unpopular by the antiwar movement.

Hope

U.S. political elites will publicly deny an anti-violence movement’s influence over policy decisions. Organizers have to take it on faith that their efforts, one way or another, are grinding away at the ruling regime, stressing fault lines, troubling consciences, inflaming personality disorders, bringing out the best in some insiders, the worst in others. Political lobbying and public outreach—face-to-face—are essential, as are nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience. It may take years (and perhaps some luck), but the combination of critical mass, critical networks, and moral integrity will produce unexpected yet desirable results. Keep the pressure on: you never know what will pop out.

Timothy Braatz teaches nonviolence and is writing a book on antiwar efforts in U.S. history.

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