June 2025 – Carwil without Borders

Americans, citizens and immigrants alike, protested on Saturday, June 14, in exceptional numbers as a wave of No Kings protests became the most widespread public repudiation of the second Donald Trump administration. These protests, which were undoubtedly energized by the standoff between Los Angeles-area communities and Federal troops, could mark a turning point from isolated protests to mass resistance.

Protests are called demonstrations for a reason. And these were displays of political strength for a movement that has a lot to prove: that it better represents the country than a president elected with a slim plurality in November 2020, that it is better able to capture public enthusiasm than an incipient fascist movement, and that it is undeterred by the state violence shown through military deployments, arrests of opposition leaders, and near-disappearances of a growing number of immigrants.

So what does success look like for a mass display of public will?

One simple metric is comparative: did a the anti-Trump movement out-organize and out-turnout their opponent. And here, the juxtaposition with Trump’s military parade — a celebration of the US Army’s 250th birthday on Trump’s 79th — will be unforgettable.

But in a larger sense, protesters make a political statement through crowds (and yes, through many other kinds of actions, but June 14 was largely a day for crowds). When they succeed, that message is “indisputable in its overwhelmingness,” as Argentina’s Colectivo Situaciones described the protests that brought down three presidents on December 19 and 20, 2001. Through some alchemy of place, time, presence, voice, and action, crowds constitute themselves into the “The Voice of the People.” And assert that they, and not their government, will decide the future.

I want to use this occasion to share how those of us who study mass protest try to conceptualize just how protests achieve that kind of political impact.

Charles Tilly, who with various colleagues has probably done the most to examine the protest demonstration as political form, has a four-word summary of what protesters are actually demonstrating. And Tilly’s model is interesting in part because it situates demonstrations as just one form of collective political action (or “contentious politics”), alongside riots, strikes, revolutions, and among many other attempts at disruption or representation. Demonstrations are a social transaction where movements accept that a government system will persist, but where governments are moved to recalibrate their actions based on shifts in popular support and public mode. In that frame, Tilly et al. argue that protesters are engaged in displays of WUNC: worth, unity, numbers, and commitment.

Worth: Protesters present themselves as worthy of political participation, rather than exclusion from decisions about their own fate. This might be especially relevant for groups, from working-class laborers in the 19th century to women in the suffrage movements to minorities of various enfranchisement movements, who are formally excluded from participating in official politics. This is self-presentation as an argument that one deserves a place at the table.
Unity: Protesters come together and present a common voice. This may be the most basic element of what a common protest is, and everything from a speaker’s dais to roars of approval to marching side-by-side demonstrates this unity of purpose, both to participants themselves and to their audience.
Numbers: The size of a protest illustrates the larger capacity of a movement to catalyze political action, to show up again, and to influence democratic outcomes. When the 2006 immigrant protests promised, “Hoy marchamos, mañana votamos / Today we march, tomorrow we vote,” they were offering their quantitative weight to political actors that would accept their agenda.
Commitment: To a greater or lesser degree, protests demonstrate the willingness of participants to do hard things, to devote a share of their time to political action, and to make sacrifices for a cause. This is why long marches, gatherings in spite of rain or cold, and endurance of repressive violence—fire hoses, dogs, tear gas, projectile weapons—are so impactful. And why activists can create their own endurance tests—sit-ins, extended vigils, hunger strikes—to show others what they are willing to do.

What‘s great about this framework is that it doesn‘t just make sense of how movements have an impact, but also gives some sense of what goals organizers might have in choosing different protest forms.

But when I tried to understand the movements I have worked with, I came to feel that other dimensions were important as well. As I’ve written: “But what if grassroots movements see themselves not just as claimants before the state, but as a rival power to it? What if they claim a bit of sovereignty for themselves? The mobilized communities described here do use their unity and numbers to illustrate their claim to represent the public as a whole. To create the shared impression that “everyone” is part of a mobilization, however, they also highlight diversity among themselves and carry out geographically expansive protests. And they demonstrate effective practical sovereignty over urban spaces and persistence in the face of state violence.”

These are, I think, four new dimensions. A mobilization that claims sovereignty has worth, unity, numbers, and commitment, but is also diverse, widespread, irrepressible, and in control. What do these four adjectives mean?

Diverse: This includes and goes beyond the intersectional identities notion of diversity. Yes, it’s about including those oppressed, marginalized and excluded. It is those who were scorned claiming political voice. But also yes, it’s about joint action across lines of difference, showing people working together despite privilege and division. It is uniting to fight together. And yes again, it‘s about those sectors of society that have been pitted against each other finding common cause. It’s realized though unexpected juxtapositions: Teamsters and Turtles together at last, the office worker in a suit throwing back a tear-gas canister.
Widespread: Movements demonstrate their political significance by being ubiquitous: We are everywhere. At the height of their water privatization protests, Cochabambans moved to erect road blockades on every street they could find. And in the United States, we’ve seen a move since at least Occupy in 2011 to maximizing the number of protest locations. This was definitely a feature of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, possibly the most widespread protest mobilization in American history. Here in 2025, No Kings seems to have doubled down on this strategy, meaning that many metropolises could boast multiple urban and suburban protests on the same day: as many as fifty separate locations in the San Francisco Bay Area. Much of the celebratory sharing that happened yesterday was geographical, with images from places like Boise, Salt Lake City, or Hattiesburg (Mississippi) treated as mic drop moments.

The last two elements of my list may just be at the horizon for the current protest wave in the USA, but they mark out where things could go as the protester–government standoff evolves.

Irrepressible: When a movement surges back in to the streets after repression, it showcases the limits of state power. This feeling is definitely significant right now, with these protests surging both in places where police and military violence was displayed over the past ten days, and showing up in new places in outraged reaction. Anyone who has been on the streets when police have backed down, or gave up their hold on even a block of the city to allow protesters to surge in, knows the electricity that goes through a crowd that has lost its fear and disempowerment. Finding ways to protest through, or in spite of, physical attempts to prevent you from doing so is a powerful political statement.
In control: Beyond that, lies the experience of protesters actually choosing what happens in the streets. Of public collective decisions on what happens next. This is why certain kinds of rallies and assemblies are uniquely empowering, because people choose on the spot what do, where to go, how to escalate, and whether to persist until their demands are one. The collective experience of direct action is its own unique form of self-empowerment.

The United States is a massive country with many cities, countless communities, and many, many places of gathering. It’s an exceptional challenge to walk forward through the different kinds of collective power sketched out here all at once. When face-to-face in one place we can get a sense of our potential, but we’ll need to find ways of keeping track of that across many settings.

Synthetic journalistic, movement media, and academic accounts can give us perspective, and I hope this outline of elements of power can help orient those accounts. Counting the number of locations, as being done by the Crowd Counting Consortium, is vital information. Yet summaries of crowd size and dispersion are useful, but also not enough. We need to thicken these accountings of where and how many with considerations of which alliances are emerging, which sectors of society are participating, and how daring and how contagious actions are. As well as what is working despite the kinds of force directed against it.

In the past, with thinner forms of communication and a greater reliance on centralized mass media, singular national protest gatherings may have been more important in building this shared sense of working together and achieving power. So did roving concentrated mobilizations, whether that was the trail from Birmingham to Freedom Rides to Selma to Chicago, or from Seattle to DC to Cancun to Miami. Now, in part because the adversary is more directly the national government, an Everything Everywhere strategy seems to be taking shape.

“The Whole World Is Watching.” It’s been decades since American protesters chanted this sentence at American police in an effort to deter violence and brutality. But it has perhaps never been more true than right now. The political drama of the USA in 2025 has the world riveted, and I as I walked through the modern train station in Potsdammer Platz, built where the Berlin Wall once stood, the face offs, a pillar at the bottom of stairway brought the confrontation between Federal troops and Los Angeles protesters to life in the middle of Germans daily commute.

And without a doubt, Los Angeles marks a dramatic new turn in the authoritarian rollout of the second Trump Administration. After months of high-consequence policy changes and comparatively isolated forms of protest, the situation is shifting towards an open confrontation and nationwide resistance. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on everyday Angelenos have prompted a public reaction by a community that doesn’t have the luxury of waiting until November 2026. And the president’s long-advertised desire to confront protesters with the United States military is finally being realized.

Both the roundup of ordinary civilians and the militarization of American cities push beyond existing expectations. They embody the threat of a different country, one where freedom is utterly denied to a millions and dramatically curtailed for the rest of us.

Everything I’ve said so far is, I think, obvious whether one is within range of the tear gas, across town, across the state, or across the ocean. But that’s not why I write this post. Instead I want to share a bit of perspective as someone who spent a decade puzzling through the sometimes deadly and sometimes transformative dance between protest and repression, including how Bolivians flipped the most heavy-handed domestic military deployment into the forced end of a presidency.

First and foremost, state crackdowns like Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and the Marines are exceptionally risky moves for rulers. The repressor imagines that such a show of force will rapidly bring about a scene of submission: arrested or injured opponents, a fearful majority of the population, and a quieter country. But the truth is, there’s no single outcome when an unarmed populace faces down an armed military. And nothing demonstrates a government’s weakness more powerfully than when even its deliberately trained soldiers can not obtain compliance with its orders.

Second, a crackdown in one place can kick up either mass demonstrations of repudiation or many sparks of daring rebellion across the country. Or both, which is what the invasion of Los Angeles has appeared to do this week. Spreading out protests when repression is concentrated is a winning tactical approach.

Sometime in the coming days or weeks, American protesters will make the turn from a solidarity movement with Los Angeles to a national mobilization in defense of freedom and democracy.

Third — and these may be the two ideas I most want to share widely because they is not common sense to many Americans — widespread confrontational protest and massive shows of popular opinion are both essential, and need not be in competition with one another. In Bolivia, in Argentina, in Thailand, in Ukraine, in Egypt, and in Chile, people who succeeded in national political turns did both of these things. As seen this week, acts of confrontational action can deter or delay the mass detention and deportation of our neighbors; they also can hold space in times of protest. On the other hand, acts of mass participation literally demonstrate that the public rejects a government and its policies. They create moments of collective purpose that strengthen their participants and remind allies elsewhere that they are not alone, and that we can win. (See below the line for how I described them working together in Cochabamba, Bolivia.)

This month, and especially this weekend, people primarily oriented around one or the other of these goals will likely be side-by-side in the street. Those who define themselves around what I’ve called “The Tactical Argument of our time” (whether nonviolent action can/is better at/is necessary for/could never/is counterproductive to bringing about revolutionary change), may be primarily worried about whether their preferred tactical approach is being permitted or blocked. My suggestion instead is to consider how much more powerful this movement could be if both flourished. And then to do the work of both helping people stay safe(r) as they speak, act, and resist.

Solidarity from Berlin.

p.s. Here’s how I described these two sides of successful uprisings in my research on Bolivia:

To win, the Coordinadora had to wield mass pressure, establish its legitimacy, gain a seat at the bargaining table, and convince the government to completely reverse the privatization. The moment of mass pressure involved blockades and other disruptive actions to win the annulling of the contract. The moment of legitimacy consisted in convening assemblies, cabildos, and an unofficial referendum or consulta popular to register public opposition to water policies. … While pressure and legitimacy represent two distinct moments of the mobilization, they worked in tandem, like two legs walking: Road blockades organized across the city and the surrounding region built up into an overwhelming civic strike, while marches flowed together into large-scale meetings called cabildos, often held in the central plaza. The civic strike was the cabildo’s operative arm, its means of exerting pressure; and the cabildo was the strike’s brains and voice, the only place from which it could claim sovereignty. Without either, the Coordinadora and the Water War it fought, would have amounted to nothing.