On Saturday I was heartened to be one of millions of Americans who took to the streets in cities and towns across the United States to stand against “the most brazen power grab in modern history”. While no official total tally of “Hands Off!” participants is yet available, the anti-Donald Trump, anti-Elon Musk actions on Saturday were certainly among the largest single-day protests in US history, with rallies in all 50 states.As we seem to be entering a new stage of popular protest movements, it’s worth assessing the strategic value of protest, as well as the limits and potential liabilities. History is full of powerful examples of consequential bottom-up protest movements. The women’s suffrage movement secured voting rights after decades of struggle. The civil rights movement dismantled Jim Crow segregation. The labor movement won the eight-hour workday, the weekend and much more. Protest was an essential tool for each of these movements. It can take many different forms, including mass demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, unruly disruption and civil disobedience.Protest is often negatively framed as naive, utopian or merely self-expressive. But it can be profoundly pragmatic. When part of a larger power-building strategy, protest can play an essential role in forcing issues onto the public agenda, changing popular opinion, delegitimizing powerholders, shifting the balance of forces and even toppling regimes. Protest movements don’t always win, of course, but history is full of stories of “Davids” defeating “Goliaths”.Only weeks into Trump’s second term, as we seek to limit the damage and, ultimately, to defeat authoritarianism and oligarchy, protest is as necessary and important as ever. How can we make our voices as powerful as possible?How Trump frames protestersProtest is also rife with peril. When powerful people and institutions feel threatened, they tend to fight dirty, using every tool at their disposal, including police and legal repression. In addition to facing threats to safety and freedom, social movement participants are characteristically slandered and stereotyped by their opponents, with slanted news coverage often parroting the messages or sharing the assumptions of the ruling class.Before exploring some pitfalls of protest (and how to avoid them), let’s get a few things clear. First, it is brave and worthy to engage in protest for just causes, against powerful actors; not only that, it’s necessary if we want to have a democracy. Second, our opponents have a vested interest in disparaging and caricaturing our protests and they will attempt to slander us no matter what we do (but this doesn’t mean we have no ability to counter their attacks). Third, peril and pitfalls cannot be completely avoided: a protest where everything goes perfectly is rare, and the likelihood of errors and excesses is a poor excuse for inaction.That said, organizers of protests do have a responsibility to do everything in our power to ensure that collective action is as effective as possible. The sociologist Max Weber argued that those who seek to intervene in politics have a responsibility not only for our own intentions, but also for the counter-responses to our actions. In other words, we have a responsibility to think a few chess moves ahead and to craft a strategy that can win.A central constraint today is the dominant narrative about protest itself. In the US, this narrative casts protesters as a special type of person, with some combination of the following features: loud, shrill, naive, counter-cultural, speaking in jargon, Marxist, anti-American, violent and economically and/or educationally privileged (AKA “elitist”). The purpose of this dominant narrative is straightforward: inoculate millions of Americans against protest movements by otherizing “protesters”. In other words, there’s a well-worn caricature of a protester that holds many everyday working people back from aligning with protest movements.Ultimately it’s on us to get more people to see us differently. To be clear, I’m not talking about our hard opponents. The point of protest is never to be palatable to everyone. I’m talking here about the millions of Americans who have a high potential to join, support or at least sympathize with protest movements.Trump didn’t invent this disparaging story, but he grafts these negative tropes about protest and protesters on to his larger pseudo-populist “anti-elite” narrative. I put “anti-elite” in quotes because Trump strategically names cultural elites as culprits, intentionally diverting attention away from the concentrated economic power (eg Wall Street, huge corporations and billionaires like Elon Musk) that is actually to blame for the hardships of tens of millions of working-class Americans. Trump’s favorite “elite” targets include academia, the news media, Hollywood and Democratic politicians. “Woke protesters” take their place alongside the rest of this elite cast in Trump’s play. Opposed to these hoity-toity, overeducated, condescending elites, Trump presents himself as hero and champion of “ordinary Americans”.This framing is effective because it taps into a real and deepening class-based cultural divide in America – between a highly educated professional class occupying roughly the top 10-20% of the spectrum, and the bottom 80% below. In his book Dream Hoarders, Richard Reeves lays out how this upper stratum has pulled away from the majority of Americans – not just economically, but socially and culturally. The complex US tax code, legacy college admissions, and housing, zoning and other policies have benefited the already advantaged. As distinct from the ultra-rich “one per cent”, many in this larger upper strata see themselves as progressive, even as they benefit from invisible moats around their neighborhoods, schools and social networks. This deepening class-based insularity creates the cultural disconnect that Trump exploits. He directs populist anger toward these cultural elites, while diverting attention away from far more powerful and destructive economic culprits, offering working-class Americans cultural revenge rather than policies that could make a real positive difference in their lives.View image in fullscreenTrump’s exploitation of this cultural-economic backdrop – and Democrats’ failure to even comprehend it, let alone come up with a counter-strategy – was central to his electoral victories in both 2016 and 2024. This same backdrop should also be of great concern to protest movements. We who are attempting to organize people into collective action must recognize how easily our movements can be portrayed as extensions of this privileged class and work intentionally to break out of that framing (and, sometimes, that reality).At Trump rallies during his 2016 campaign, I observed how he would deliberately draw attention to protesters, utilizing them as characters in his story, encouraging the crowd to chant and jeer as security removed the disruptive “outside agitators”.So it was striking to watch how dramatically Trump changed his tack when military veterans spoke out at some of these same rallies. He completely ignored them, refusing to acknowledge their presence, strategically avoiding even looking in their direction. These veterans later learned from active-duty friends that Trump had gotten quite upset by their actions, because they didn’t fit into his narrative; military veterans could easily overcome Trump’s “woke protester” framing.Breaking out of Trump’s playbookIn the first several weeks of Trump’s second term, we again see powerful examples of veterans speaking out, for example, publicly confronting their representatives about Doge cuts to the benefits they earned. Grassroots organizations of veterans, like Common Defense, are helping to prepare, support and amplify the efforts of fellow veterans as they use their powerful voices to speak up in this critical moment. Protagonists in the story of America, veterans bring a unique authority and credibility that is very difficult for their powerful opponents to caricature or disparage.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSimilarly, the federal workers who are organizing and showing the real-life impacts of Musk’s reckless cuts are very effective spokespeople right now. From park rangers to USPS employees, these workers are protesting threats to their livelihoods and to the valued public services they provide, speaking up as workers about the devastation wrought by Musk’s “chainsaw” on their lives and the communities they serve. Importantly, they represent a cross-section of America: diverse in race, geography, education and political leanings. They are relaying their experiences and connecting with millions of Americans who see themselves in their stories. Using plainspoken language rather than jargon, they present themselves not as “protesters” but as parents, neighbors and workers who have a stake in their country’s future.The lesson isn’t that you have to be a military veteran or federal worker if you want to effectively protest against Trump and Musk. But if our opponents are determined to otherize us as unrelatable “protesters”, what are the familiar aspects of our identities that we can emphasize instead? The story of a worker who is so fed up that she decides to join with others in collective action is very different from the dominant story about generic protesters.It’s important to also grasp and grapple with other elements of Trump’s attack narrative; his use of “protester” tropes is not the only means he uses to otherize and dehumanize. He also attacks vulnerable people because of their immigration status, their advocacy for Palestine and their gender identity, among other pretenses. Each of these attacks warrants its own strategic counter-response and it’s vitally important that we show solidarity and narrate Trump’s targeting of any of us as an attack on all of us and on our shared values and rights – as has been on display in the popular outpouring of support for the detained Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil.Another important way today’s protests are breaking out of Trump’s playbook is by consistently punching up, especially at Musk as an unelected billionaire who has taken oligarchy in America to new heights. When we name powerful economic culprits, it takes the wind out of Trump’s fake populist sails. Billionaires who rigged our economy and political system make for a more convincing culprit to millions of Americans than vulnerable scapegoats (eg immigrants, trans people, or “woke”). A central reason we got into this mess is that Democrats have been so tepid and inconsistent in picking visible fights with billionaires, Wall Street and corporate power.It’s important that we consistently punch up at billionaires and the politicians doing their bidding and refrain from punching down at people who voted for Trump. To break out of Trump’s story of the “smug and condescending affluent liberal protester”, we should avoid messages that are, indeed, smug and condescending (eg, “In this house, we believe science is real”) or that mock people for their economic struggles (eg, “How are you feeling about voting for cheaper eggs now?”). Such messages are self-indulgent and counterproductive, and we can do so much better.Organizing for powerFinally, if we are to make our protests as effective as possible, we should recognize protest for what it is: a tactic. Protest is not an end in itself. Tactics require larger long-term power-building strategies. Absent strategy, protest can sometimes still hold some short-term strategic value (eg, showing that dissent exists), but if we want to accomplish more than a flash in the pan – if we genuinely intend to shape history, as powerful movements before us have done – then we need to figure out what to do after the protest ends and everyone goes home.The key is organization. Organizations transform episodic moments of outrage into sustained campaigns that can win concrete victories. Without organization, we’re no match for the powerful forces we’re up against. It’s no accident that the five decades when labor unions and other participatory organizations have declined are the same decades when capital consolidated control of our political system and inequality grew worse and worse.To rebuild people power, we need to build organizations with structure, leadership development and capacity for sustained campaigns and struggle. There are all kinds of organizations: labor unions, place-based (local and statewide), issue-based, faith and congregation-based, and more (check out the list of partner organizations that helped plan the 5 April “Hands Off!” protests). If you’re showing up to the protest as a lone individual, let it be your on-ramp to longer-term collective action. Figure out where you fit in, what capacity you can add, what skills you can develop, how much time you can give. Even just a few hours a month, when multiplied by millions, can amount to a formidable force – the kind of people power we need to defeat authoritarianism and oligarchy.Because ultimately we’re not trying to build “protest movements”, we’re trying to build people’s movements; movements that use protest as one tool among many, whose ultimate aim is to win a real voice for working people in determining the policies that impact our lives and communities – and to make an America that works for all of us.
Jonathan Smucker is a political organizer, campaigner and strategist who co-founded Popular Comms Institute, PA Stands Up, Lancaster Stands Up, Common Defense, Beyond the Choir and Mennonite Action. He is the author of Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals. More
