Several years ago, I read a paper by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page about who gets what in American politics. I revisited that paper yesterday. It’s an interesting read. Here’s the source: Gilens, Martin, and Benjamin I. Page. “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” Perspectives on Politics 12, (3): 564–581. It’s a social science treatment, so it may take a moment to get acclimated to it, but its conclusions are clear enough. Perhaps it tells you something you already knew. But science papers sometimes come in handy when people demand sources for your claims.
Here’s what they did: The study evaluated several theories about the dynamics of political influence in the United States, analyzing more than 1700 policy decisions from 1981 to 2002 to test competing theories of how American democracy functions. “Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented.”
Here’s the gist: The authors found that the preferences of average citizens have little or no independent impact on US government policy. However, economic elites and organized interest groups exert substantial and statistically significant influence. In other words, policies favored by the wealthy are far more likely to be enacted than those supported primarily by ordinary Americans, even when the latter represent a majority view. The authors concluded that the US operates more on “Biased Pluralism” or “Economic-Elite Domination.” Economic-elite domination is the corporate state and technocratic control I keep telling readers about.
With Trump, the country is breaking out of this pattern of economic-elite domination. To be sure, Trump is a capitalist, but he is highly critical of the corporatist arrangements that are wrecking the nation. Ordinary Americans are finally getting the things they want—crime control and public safety, immigration restrictions and mass deportations, restructuring of the world economy to put America first (tariffs and all the rest of it), tax cuts, combating the woke progressive project to change culture and education, etc.
This is what the “No Kings” protests are about: a corporate-funded color revolution to return to the status quo Gilens and Page identify (“No Kings” Redux—There They Go Again). Corporate elites loathe populism, and so they are spending millions to create the illusion that the people are opposed to Donald Trump. It’s having some effect, but not nearly the effect the corporate-state media is telling you it’s having.
The “No Kings” project rests on the concept of an “authoritarian breakthrough” (sometimes called “autocratic breakthrough”), which originates with Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way in their 2010 book Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War, where the term denotes the process by which a competitive authoritarian regime transitions into a fully authoritarian one. In contrast to earlier notions of democratic breakdown or autocratic consolidation, Levitsky and Way use the term to describe a specific trajectory in which limited pluralism and formal democratic institutions are effectively eliminated, consolidating power entirely in the hands of incumbents. Before their work, the phrase had appeared only sporadically and without theoretical precision; it was Levitsky and Way who systematically incorporated it into a comparative framework for understanding regime evolution after the Cold War. Their formulation situates “authoritarian breakthrough” as one of several possible outcomes for “hybrid regimes,” alongside democratization, regime collapse, and continued competitive authoritarian stability.
Media talking heads are telling us that the antidote to autocratic breakthrough lies in the 3.5 percent theory of political change. This is the work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan on nonviolent movements, presented in their 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. The authors studied hundreds of campaigns for regime change over a century and found that, if 3.5 percent of a population actively participates in sustained, peaceful protest, major political change almost always succeeds. Sounds promising to those swept up in the mass hysteria surrounding Trump’s Presidency. They argue that nonviolent movements work well because they allow broad participation, disrupt economic and social systems, and weaken loyalty among elites and security forces.
We see this presently not only in the “No Kings” project, but in the Democratic shutdown, and calls for corporate elites and the military to turn on Trump. This nonviolence route must be pursued, according to Chenoweth and Stepham, because violence limits participation and strengthens government crackdowns. Hear that, Antifa and other assorted resisters? Chenoweth and Stepham are telling you to knock it off. You’re only making it worse.
While the emotionally dysregulated among Hoffer’s true believers are fighting law enforcement in the streets, the organizers of “No Kings”—Open Society Foundations (George Soros), the Tides Foundation, and the United Community Fund and the Justice and Education Fund (Neville Roy Singham)—are beavering away trying to get to the 3.5 percent mark. To reach 3.5 percent, the organizers will need around 11-12 million people marching in the streets of America. The organizers are already planning a third “No Kings” installment, October 18th’s protests having fallen far short of the goal, even by the mark of organizers’ absurd claim of 7 million (Cutting Through the Hype: How Did “No Kings 2.0” Do Saturday?). By exaggerating the numbers of the October event, the idea is to create the illusion of momentum in building the non-violent resistance movement against Trump. If the exaggeration becomes a belief, they hope to exaggerate the next one by even greater numbers. Unfortunately, Chenoweth and Stepham stress, illusory numbers won’t cut it. They need a hard 11-12 million. And that ain’t happening.
freedom and reason 