IN SERBIA, IT took social forces pushing from outside the country’s oppressive power structure to generate change. The relevance of Otpor’s example was quickly recognized by activists struggling against repressive regimes in other nations. But in democratic countries with representative institutions, the conventional wisdom is that the process of altering the status quo looks very different. It means working through officials in high office. It requires prolonged and often painstaking back-room negotiations between various interest groups. And when reforms are achieved, they are never so stark or dramatic as a dictator’s fall.
Or are they?
As it turns out, this accepted vision of how political change occurs has serious flaws. At best, it presents an incomplete picture of how progress in our society is won. At worst, it is a wrong-headed story that stubbornly conceals the way in which many of the most significant gains of the past century have been secured, from women’s suffrage, to labor laws, to civil rights. It misses how people with few material resources and little access to conventional powerbrokers have sometimes been able to bring about transformations that mainstream politicians consider to be absurd and impractical—right up until the moment when these changes become common sense.
In recent memory, there are few better examples of such a transformation than the victory around same-sex marriage. Not long ago, most supporters regarded the idea that gay and lesbian couples would be able to legally exchange vows throughout the United States as a far-off fantasy. Same-sex marriage was not merely an unpopular cause in America; it was a politically fatal one, a third-rail issue that could end the career of any politician foolish enough to touch it.
It can be difficult to remember how hostile the terrain was for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) advocates in even recent decades. As of 1990, three-quarters of Americans saw gay sex as immoral. Less than a third condoned same-sex marriage—something no country in the world then permitted. Remaining in the closet was by far the safest course for public officials who wanted to keep their jobs, and politicians were much more eager to cozy up with religious conservatives than to risk any associations with the “homosexual lobby.” In 1996, the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman and denied federal benefits to same-sex couples, passed by an overwhelming 85–14 margin in the US Senate. Figures such as Democratic senator and future vice president Joe Biden voted for it. Democratic president Bill Clinton signed the act, affirming, “I have long opposed governmental recognition of same-gender marriages.”1
When the Vermont Supreme Court ruled to allow civil unions in that state in 1999, Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer called the decision “in some ways worse than terrorism.” The state’s voters quickly reversed the court’s decision, and the judges’ perceived overreach sparked a nationwide backlash. As recently as 2004, conservative strategist Karl Rove, seeing a potent wedge issue, pushed to have “marriage protection” amendments placed on the ballot in thirteen states. All of these passed, in what one newspaper called a “resounding, coast-to-coast rejection of gay marriage.” The goal of marriage equality seemed doomed.2
Today, these look like scenes from an alternate universe. On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that made same-sex marriage legal in all fifty states. Yet even before the decision, a dramatic reversal had already taken place. Some three dozen states allowed same-sex marriages by then, and many of them had enacted it through popular vote or laws passed by elected legislatures rather than through judicial decisions. An ever-growing majority of the public expressed its support for marriage equality in national polls. Surveying the transformed landscape, Republican senator Orrin Hatch, a staunch advocate of “traditional marriage,” had conceded in 2014 that “anybody who does not believe that gay marriage is going to be the law of the land . . . isn’t living in the real world.”3
What is striking about this is not just the seeming suddenness of the reversal. It is that the rapidly expanding victory around same-sex marriage defied many common ideas about how change is supposed to happen. This was not a win that came in measured doses but rather a situation in which the floodgates of progress were opened after years of half-steps and seemingly devastating reversals. The change was not enacted thanks to a Senate majority leader twisting arms or a charismatic president pounding his bully pulpit. Instead, it came about through the efforts of a broad-based movement, pushing for increased acceptance of LGBT rights within a wide range of constituencies. Put together, they won the hearts and minds of a critical mass of people, and thus turned the impossible into the inevitable. When the issue tipped and same-sex marriage was demonstrated to be a cause with the majority on its side, change came in a startlingly abrupt fashion.
This is perhaps the most important point: rather than being based on calculating realism—a shrewd assessment of what was attainable in the current political climate—the drive for marriage equality drew on a transformational vision. It was grounded in the idea that if social movements could win the battle over public opinion, the courts and the legislators would ultimately fall in line.
The ousting of Milosevic in Serbia and the triumph of same-sex marriage in the United States might, at first, appear to have little in common. But for the tradition of civil resistance, both are examples of a similar process. At the core of this tradition is a counterintuitive theory of change, an understanding of how power is distributed and how it can be exercised that cuts against mainstream assumptions. When people wake up to the true power they possess, this theory argues, they can often defy the expectations of political experts. And sometimes they can even surprise themselves.
In the 1970s, as Gene Sharp wrote his landmark works, he was convinced that nonviolent action could be more than a moral crusade. Indeed, he believed that it could be an exceptionally effective form of political struggle, even against cruel and repressive regimes. But in advancing this position, he did not want to be perceived as a starry-eyed dreamer. Therefore, he presented a detailed explanation of how this form of action works.
When Sharp was still a graduate student at Oxford, it dawned on him that most people held flawed conceptions about the nature of political power. As he later described it, he saw that conventional wisdom regards power as “monolithic and relatively permanent.” What he meant was that, according to the standard view, power rests in a small number of hands—specifically, the hands of those at the top: tyrants, presidents, and CEOs. These people seem to hold all the cards. They have authority, influence, and resources. And when push comes to shove, they also have the ability to command heavily armed security forces. This last point is critical: the conventional view holds that power, in the end, “comes from the barrel of a gun.” Sharp contended that people living under dictatorships, implicitly schooled in this monolithic understanding of power, tend to feel helpless. They are led to believe that there is little anyone can do to challenge the existing regime—unless they somehow have the ear of the tyrant or have amassed a substantial arsenal.4
Sharp, however, devoted himself to challenging the thinking behind such despondency. Citing political theorists ranging from the famous (Machiavelli) to the obscure (sixteenth-century French philosopher Étienne de La Boétie), he proposed in his groundbreaking 1973 book, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, that the monolithic understanding of power is misleading and that there exists an alternative way of seeing things that is far more useful for grassroots forces seeking change.
Promoting what he has come to call the “social view of power,” Sharp argued that people have much more power than they typically realize. “Obedience is at the heart of political power,” he wrote. “Rulers or other command systems, despite appearances, [are] dependent on the population’s goodwill, decisions, and support.” Sharp’s idea was straightforward: if people refuse to cooperate with a regime—if civil servants stop carrying out the functions of the state, if merchants suspend economic activity, if soldiers stop obeying orders—even an entrenched dictator will find himself handicapped. And if popular disobedience is sufficiently widespread and prolonged, no regime can survive.5
Experience has shown that this message can be a powerful one for dissidents working on the ground. In the case of Serbia, many had taken it to heart. “Even a dictator can’t collect taxes on his own,” one Otpor activist told author Matthew Collin, giving voice to the social view of power. “He can’t deliver the mail, he can’t even milk a cow: someone has to obey his orders or the whole thing shuts down. The task is to convince them to disobey. When they change sides, the government starts to fall.”6
Sharp’s core proposition has given rise to a rich field of study into the dynamics of popular uprising, and it is clear that the more fluid social view of power can be vital in understanding how popular movements function. Yet, in the years after Sharp first elaborated his theory, a variety of academic critics objected that his approach was overly individualistic and voluntarist. Sharp’s discussion of power was too focused on personal consent, they argued, and not enough on how power is embedded in collective systems and institutions.7
A concept known as the “pillars of support” made an important contribution to addressing these concerns, and it helped to clarify how the social theory of power could be applied in the real world. The idea was developed by civil resistance trainers, including influential Quaker activist George Lakey, and it was incorporated into the literature of the field in Robert Helvey’s 2004 book, On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict. With the pillars of support, Helvey explains, power still resides in the general population’s willingness to accept the legitimacy of a regime and to comply with its mandates. However, this power finds expression in institutions both inside and outside the government.8
The military, the media, the business community, the churches, labor groups, the civil service, the educational establishment, and the courts, among others, are pillars that lend structural stability to a political system. These are all bodies that, in one way or another, provide a regime with the backing it needs to survive.
The pillars concept offers a catchy visual metaphor for the social theory of power. Imagine the various institutions of society as columns holding up the roof of a Roman temple. Social movements are pulling at the various columns. If they remove one or two of the pillars of support, the building would be weakened, but it might still stand. However, if people pull out enough of the pillars, the temple is sure to topple, and the movements will triumph.
If we imagine a hated dictator sitting on top of the temple, confidently surveying his dominion, the image of the building’s sudden collapse—and the tyrant’s resultant tumble—becomes all the more satisfying. In a democratic society, the result of the pillars falling might not be a change of regime, and yet the results can be just as profound: the removal of social supports for the status quo can mean the end of a system such as Jim Crow segregation, for example.
Beyond providing an entertaining exercise in visualization, the idea of the pillars of support is helpful in several ways. As a refinement of Sharp’s theory of power, it highlights the fact that people do not merely interact with a regime as individuals. Instead, their decisions about when and how they might cooperate are channeled through their various social and professional roles. The pillars allow for better strategic thinking on the part of those trying to force change. Activists can more clearly predict what it will take for a regime to fall. They can scheme about how they might undermine one or more of the various sources of social support for the system—removing the backing of the clergy, for example, or prodding the press to adopt a more critical posture—and thus place the rulers on an ever-wobblier foundation.
When several Otpor leaders attended a seminar in civil resistance, well after their campaign had begun, the idea of the pillars of support hit home. They found it to be a useful framework to describe a variety of the things they were already doing—and a challenge to be more strategic in reaching out to groups they might not ordinarily target. As their struggle progressed, the Serbians’ efforts to undermine Milosevic provided a vivid illustration of what it looks like when the pillars fall in practice.
Independent media was a first important social institution in Serbia to side with the resistance. Broadcast stations such as Radio B92 both spread information and lent Otpor countercultural cachet. In the print media, when the regime tried to punish outlets such as the weekly Vreme and the daily paper Dnevni Telegraf for positive coverage of Otpor, it had the effect of alienating even mainstream journalists, who grew increasingly critical of Milosevic’s attempts to muzzle their profession.9
Entertainment and popular music made up another pillar that fell early. In 1999, the entire cast of a play called Powder Keg raised their fists in unison on stage following a performance at the National Theater, and they received a standing ovation. Likewise, rock musicians, whose music was already seen as an affront to the more traditional folk tunes favored by the mafia and nationalist conservatives, were consistent friends to activists.10
The country’s intellectuals and university professors were a third pillar to fall. These individuals threw their support behind resistance efforts in increasing numbers after Milosevic passed a University Law in 1998 curtailing the relative autonomy that the country’s institutions of higher learning had previously enjoyed.11
Eroding other bases of support for the regime took serious work. For more than a year, Otpor organizers strived to win the loyalties of the army and the police. Gaining converts from the army, made up largely of draftees, was the easier of the two challenges: many disillusioned young veterans from Milosevic’s wars joined the movement’s ranks, and Otpor made sure they were frequently in the spotlight, giving them prominent platforms to denounce the president at rallies and marches.
Winning over the police would be trickier. These officers were professionals, and insubordination could cost them their jobs. But because Otpor’s protests produced a constant trickle of arrests, activists in a given locality were soon on a first-name basis with members of the area police force. “Police got to know the enemy and found out that the enemy was a bunch of kids that wanted a peaceful change of a non-democratic regime,” Marovic recalls. As the resistance started visibly gaining momentum, it became evident that taking orders from commanders close to Milosevic might not be the safest career move for individual officers. Otpor activist Stanko Lazendic reported to author Tina Rosenberg that, as the October 2000 presidential election neared, one policeman asked him, “Will we be able to keep our jobs after you take over Serbia?”12
This was a valuable sign that the country had been appropriately readied for a final confrontation. Although chipping away these many pillars was a gradual process, the fall of the temple was quick. When Milosevic refused to accept the results of the election, institutions began to withdraw their support at a furious pace, with union members going on strike and religious leaders calling for the president to step down.13
With all of the pillars that had once held them up suddenly weakened beyond repair, the powerbrokers of the old order were forced to come to terms with a new reality. Amid mass demonstrations, members of the army and the police widely refused orders to move against protesters. As Serbian political analyst Ivan Vejvoda writes, “Rumor spread that several army generals’ sons and daughters were among the protesters and that they would thus refrain from any major violence. The regime was disintegrating from the inside.”14
Otpor activists had possessed confidence that mass noncompliance could work, but it took faith to believe that the end was near for the regime. “Being in jail or being in the streets, we didn’t realize that,” Marovic says. Only after the government monolith snapped could social movements see the extent to which it had been undermined by defections.15
Milosevic fell when the institutions of Serbian society refused to hold him up any longer. But how can the pillars lend understanding to how the debate over same-sex marriage has unfolded?
In an undemocratic regime, a monolithic perspective sees all power as flowing through the dictator. In a democratic nation, monolithic thinking likewise trains citizens to focus on the top. The vast majority of people are taught early on to hold this view. Most history books chart the rise and fall of business tycoons and ambitious politicians. The message is further reinforced when the bulk of our political reporters spend their time writing about the activities of these same actors. Legislative victories are credited to the policymakers who sign the final bills into law rather than to any movements that might have made passage of the bills possible in the first place. The public absorbs this bias, conflating the process of democratic reform with the decisions of charismatic leaders who manipulate the course of the nation’s affairs.
In the monolithic model, if people without privileged political access want to affect the behavior of government in a democracy, the best they can do is try to elect a candidate more sympathetic to their views, with hopes that this person, once in office, will deliver on the issues they care about. Needless to say, this process often ends in disappointment for voters: countless promising new candidates have been quick to distance themselves from grassroots supporters and perpetuate the status quo after they finally breach the corridors of power. Other avenues for gaining influence, such as hiring a lobbyist or filing a lawsuit, depend on the expertise of insiders working the system, and few people can afford to pay the hefty bills that accrue as a result.
A social view of power opens up alternative possibilities for influencing political and economic affairs. Because noncooperation can command the attention of otherwise unresponsive politicians and business leaders, many tactics from the civil resistance canon are relevant across different political contexts. The boycott is a clear example of one that can be used in democracies and autocracies alike. When the United Farm Workers rallied Americans to stop buying table grapes in the 1960s and 1970s, they showed how consumers could exercise power by withdrawing economic participation. The tactic was just as effective in targeting powerful businesses in the United States as it was when applied to a country such as apartheid South Africa.
Both structure-based organizing and momentum-driven campaigns (which seek to deliberately harness the power of mass protest) are based on generating people power outside the formal structures of democratic politics. To that extent, both believe that grassroots sway can be used to challenge monolithic elites. And yet these two organizing traditions use social power in very different ways.
The structure-based approach is fundamentally transactional. It employs social power to extract narrow concessions from opponents. If a group of workers threatens to walk off the job, or members of a tenants’ association start collectively withholding their rent, they can gain power at the bargaining table. Moreover, if they build up organizational strength, they can use their institutional muscle to leverage further gains. A structure-based organization might target and shake one of the pillars of support in order to demonstrate its strength and gain credibility in negotiations. But it is rarely trying to topple the structure as a whole. The types of victories secured through this approach tend be messy, pragmatic compromises that reflect the consensus about what is politically “realistic” at a given time.
Yet, in its most robust form, a social understanding of power encourages advocates to think bigger. It allows them to break with a solely transactional view of politics and instead incorporate a transformational perspective on how to generate social change. A transformational approach does not center on using institutional power to leverage what incremental gains might be possible on an issue at a given moment. Instead, this approach attempts to alter the climate of public debate to make much more far-reaching changes possible.
Instead of targeting specific powerbrokers who might be able to grant concessions to social movements, activists pursuing a transformational route seek to influence the public at large. They do so in the belief that, ultimately, the level of popular backing for an issue—both the amount of latent sympathy present and the amount that is translated in active, vocal public support—is what makes powerbrokers act, sometimes in ways these elites would otherwise prefer not to. Author and attorney Michael Signer notes that “it’s hard to thank any single individual for altering history; more often, the ship of state alters course only because tides are vastly shifting underneath.” A campaign that is thinking in transformational terms attempts to move these deeper waters. Although it may not abandon transactional considerations entirely, it judges itself by standards that go beyond just its ability to exact favorable compromises in the short term.16
The campaign in Birmingham exemplified the approach. There, like in other selected Southern cities, civil rights demonstrators made specific demands on local storeowners and politicians. And yet, the biggest impact of these campaigns was not in eking out small, transactional gains on the local level. Instead, it was in altering public perception on a much wider scale. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1967, “Sound effort in a single city such as Birmingham or Selma produced situations that symbolized the evil everywhere and inflamed public opinion against it.” The result of the shift in public opinion was a far more sweeping change: “Where the spotlight illuminated the evil,” King argued, “a legislative remedy was soon obtained that applied everywhere.”17
Compared with the disobedient campaigns of the civil rights movement, the push for same-sex marriage only sparingly used confrontational protest. Therefore, it does not illuminate many of the facets of how civil resistance works in a democratic context. However, what it does do is provide a powerful example of what happens when a transformational drive turns a politically toxic issue into a mainstream crusade.
To see how change manifests once public opinion has shifted and the pillars give way in the United States, look no further than the spectacle of judges and politicians suddenly embracing a cause that was long considered marginal and doomed.
Given that the monolithic view of power is so dominant in our society, it is not surprising that some have tried to place victories around marriage equality within that framework. Such a view sees same-sex marriage as a legal triumph, won through clever action in the courts. The monolithic perspective sees the Supreme Court as the decisive body determining the fate of the issue, and analysts operating from this mind-set have cast the high-power attorneys who have argued before the court—figures such as David Boies and Theodore Olsen—as the key protagonists in their narrative of change.
One book in this mold, Forcing the Spring by Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter Jo Becker, opens with the line “This is how a revolution begins.” Becker is referring to the 2008 decision of a top-level strategist to launch a legal challenge to California’s ban on same-sex marriage, a case that would ultimately reach the Supreme Court in 2013 and set an important precedent.
But that is not how the revolution began. Although Becker’s book is an excellent illustration of how a monolithic view of power accounts for the rise of same-sex marriage in the United States, it is seriously flawed. Former New York Times columnist Frank Rich tweeted, “For a journalist to claim that marriage equality revolution began in 2008 is as absurd as saying civil rights struggle began with Obama.” Likewise, Andrew Sullivan, a prominent conservative libertarian who has long been involved in promoting gay marriage—having written the first national magazine cover story making the case for it in 1989—points to the decades of grassroots work that predated the narrow, transactional effort of the Boies’s and Olsen’s litigation.18
Focusing on a single lawsuit, advanced by powerful insiders, is a wholly inadequate way to explain how same-sex marriage went from being a quixotic cause to a political winner. Sullivan noted that between 1996 and 2007, before the case profiled by Becker even started, public support for same-sex marriage in Gallup polls rose from 27 percent to 46 percent—an enormous shift, and a decisive one in understanding how the issue was finally won. To start an examination of the issue with one of the Supreme Court challenges that happened after this is to observe only the endgame of social change. And it is to miss a far more transformational story.19
The Supreme Court’s 2013 decisions on same-sex marriage—which struck down both California’s ban and the federal Defense of Marriage Act—were critical milestones, paving the way for the final 2015 ruling. But they were preceded by a long series of state-level legislative and legal fights. These included early legal wins in Hawaii (in 1993) and Vermont (in 1999) as well as the establishment of marriage equality in Massachusetts starting in 2003. They also included acts of civil disobedience such as San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s 2004 decision to marry same-sex couples in defiance of California state law. And they encompassed critical later developments such as the spread of same-sex marriage to New Hampshire, Connecticut, Iowa, and Washington, DC, by 2010.
Viewed incrementally, many of these early efforts were failures: the initial progress in Hawaii and Vermont, for example, was reversed (at least temporarily) by state legislation, and the wins that did hold prompted backlash in other places. Yet their symbolic value was immense. Although early legal challenges and legislative drives did not amount to much in terms of transactional gains, the impact of such initial advocacy could be charted through steady movement in the polls.
“Of course we would lose cases, just as all civil rights movements have, at the start and even in the middle,” Andrew Sullivan explains. “But the cases, as in all civil rights movements, could be leveraged into a broader and broader public discussion, which could move the polls, which would increase the chances of winning future cases. And that’s the pattern we saw.”20
The court challenges that did prevail were largely won once a majority of the public had already shifted in favor of gay marriage. Early lawsuits, therefore, were noteworthy less for what they accomplished with judges and more for providing opportunities to rally supporters, educate the public, and make their case in the media. “In the real world, before the courts will act, there is almost always some shift in social legitimacy,” writes Linda Hirshman, author of a history of the struggle for LGBT rights in the United States. “Civil rights litigation often speeds up the process of social legitimation, because it forces people to take sides in public, but it is almost never the first step.”21
Even listing the long series of state-by-state battles that preceded any Supreme Court decision does not convey the breadth and variety of the activism that propelled the issue forward. Prior to any favorable legal rulings, a concerted drive to secure rights, recognition, and respect for LGBT people was well under way. Marriage equality was just one demand of a wider movement—and a sometimes-controversial demand at that. (Many LGBT activists viewed marriage as too limited and advocated a more radical agenda of queer liberation, producing a long history of internal debate on this issue.) And yet, the cumulative efforts of this movement created the changes in public attitudes that allowed the issue to ultimately gain approval in the nation’s courts and statehouses.
Advocates for same-sex marriage did not rely mainly on civil disobedience and mass protest to generate momentum (although there were notable exceptions, such as Gavin Newsom’s actions, marches on Washington in 2000 and 2009, large-scale demonstrations in California around the controversial Proposition 8, and a variety of incidents in which members of the clergy broke official prohibitions to perform same-sex weddings). Nevertheless, activists worked to turn the power of a wide range of social institutions against the conservative status quo. Here, the pillars provide a useful metaphor for showing how different constituencies contributed to the eventual triumph of marriage equality.
In the pillar of entertainment, actors who had remained closeted for fear that their sexuality would cost them roles began coming out in greater numbers than ever before. Perhaps most prominent was Ellen DeGeneres, who appeared on the cover of Time in 1997. Popular TV shows and movies began featuring openly queer characters, and by presenting these characters in a sympathetic light they normalized LGBT relationships for millions of Americans. These cultural shifts often went hand in hand with movement activity: speaking before hundreds of thousands of LGBT advocates at the Millennium March in Washington on April 30, 2000, DeGeneres pushed other celebrities to publicly come out. “It is the most important thing you will do to save lives,” she said.22
Within major religious institutions, there were heated conflicts about whether these organizations would uphold the status quo. With LGBT ministers and church members forcing the issue, mainline Protestant denominations saw battles over whether they would welcome queer parishioners, whether openly gay and lesbian clergy members would be allowed to lead congregations, and whether these leaders would consecrate same-sex unions. Similar debates took place within Conservative and Reform Judaism. Although religious bodies have been seen as leading bulwarks against change (and, indeed, the Mormons, the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Jewish movement, and Christian evangelicals remain some of the most steadfast opponents of marriage equality), this pillar weakened as the number of welcoming congregations gradually expanded.
Progressive lawyers pushed the American Bar Association to pass resolutions in the 1990s supporting adoption by same-sex couples and opposing discrimination in child custody hearings. They succeeded, and a strong consensus in favor of LGBT rights took hold within the legal community—along with a decided skepticism of legal arguments justifying discrimination. This tendency was pronounced enough that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia complained in 2003 that the “law-professional culture has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda.”23
Experts on parenting and childhood development formed another important pillar that fell early. Conservatives in Congress had long insisted that government has a legitimate interest in preserving heterosexual marriage, because same-sex parents would allegedly endanger the well-being of any children they raised. Yet, the longer conservatives held to this position, the harder they found it to produce credible scholars who would back them on it.24
Movements in other countries transformed the international landscape, and this further wore away at conservatives’ foundation of support. A landmark court decision in 1999 allowed for civil unions in Canada, and full marriage equality laws passed there in 2005. Belgium and the Netherlands had already acted in favor of same-sex couples by then—as had Spain, a Catholic stronghold. South Africa soon followed.
Finally, youth were a decisive pillar that began to move early in support of gay marriage. Whereas being openly gay in high school had once been almost unthinkable in many parts of the country, LGBT student groups grew in record numbers in the 1990s, creating supportive communities for young people who, in previous generations, would never have come out. The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) hired its first full-time staff person in 1995 and held its first national convention in 1997, bringing together such student groups into an expanding activist network. The number of people who reported knowing someone gay rose from 25 percent in 1985 to 74 percent in 2000, with young people being far more likely to fall within the new majority than their parents. And because knowing someone who is gay is a strong predictor of support for marriage equality, young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine were almost twice as likely as people aged sixty-five and older to express approval for change.25
For Evan Wolfson, founder of the organization Freedom to Marry and one of the movement’s key leaders, such shifts in public attitude were essential. As a lawyer in his thirties, Wolfson worked on the legal case in Hawaii that resulted in landmark legal rulings in 1993 and 1996 in favor of gay marriage in that state. However, after Hawaii’s voters approved an amendment to the state constitution in 1998 that reversed these gains, Wolfson was convinced that victory would not be won through legal action alone. What was needed, he argued, was “a true campaign that combined political work and public education.”
When he founded Freedom to Marry in 2001, Wolfson described his objectives in transformational terms: “I’m not in this just to change the law,” he said. “It’s about changing society.” He further argued that pushing only for more easily obtainable gains, such as domestic partnerships, was a mistake. “What I [advocate],” Wolfson said, “is that we go into the room asking for what we deserve, telling our powerful stories, and engaging the reachable allies. We may leave the room not getting everything we want, but don’t go in bargaining against yourself.”26
In 2005, when Wolfson and a group of other prominent LGBT organizers met in Jersey City to map out a path to securing same-sex marriage across the country, they believed that the Supreme Court would have the final say in creating a nationwide standard of acceptance. Yet they pushed forward a varied range of fights at the state level to establish a record of public support for the issue. They determined, in the words of historian Josh Zeitz, that to make progress in federal courts they “would need to tip the scales in their favor by committing to a decades-long campaign to win the hearts and minds of ordinary voters.”27
When state-by-state wins did materialize, many were the result of intensive grassroots mobilization. After a favorable 2003 legal ruling in Massachusetts, writes Zeitz, there was “a protracted struggle of almost four years to stave off initiatives aimed at reversing the judicial decision through constitutional amendment.” Advocates for gay marriage, led by MassEquality, the state’s largest LGBT rights organization, “built grassroots coalitions of clergy, local business leaders, and small-town notables,” Zeitz explains. Moreover, “The movement painstakingly compiled a database of all same-sex couples who had married” since the 2003 ruling, training them as lobbyists and ambassadors. In a similar effort in Maine, canvassers led by young gay activists knocked on two hundred thousand doors, sharing their personal stories and generating conversations with members of their communities. Together with countless others, they were fast creating the environment in which same-sex marriage would prevail nationally.28
In transactional politics, progress comes through the steady accumulation of small victories. Transformational change, in contrast, often occurs in more dramatically punctuated cycles. Because momentum-driven efforts are focused on changing broad public opinion rather than securing a series of incremental gains, their progress is mainly measurable though polls rather than through a scorecard of more tangible wins. For those not paying attention to the overall climate of debate, the results of movement work can be hard to see until a campaign finally reaches a tipping point. Even if advocates pull out a few pillars, the status quo structure can remain standing. But once the public has moved, and an adequate number of props have been fatally weakened, an edifice that looked inert and immovable can suddenly collapse into rubble.
In the context of a dictatorship, the end can be surprisingly rapid. In this respect, the Serbian experience was no fluke. Instead, the conclusion of that revolution followed patterns that commonly appear at the end of civil resistance campaigns. The sight of police and soldiers disobeying orders, a type of refusal known as a “security defection,” is often the last stage of the process. For any dictator, such disobedience is a very bad thing. From the Philippines to Eastern Europe to Tunisia, these defections have been sure signs that the roof is coming down on a regime.
Yet by the time this pillar gives way, other indications that a momentous shift is occurring are usually plentiful. From Milosevic’s downfall in Serbia to the revolutions of the Arab Spring and beyond, the signs have been much the same: professors and intellectuals are in open revolt, journalists are disseminating news through underground channels to bypass censors, workers are on strike, judges are asserting that a ruler’s abuses of power violate the law, political parties are demanding greater representation in official bodies, religious leaders are preaching about the moral justification for resistance, musicians are singing protest songs at rallies, and youth groups are taking to the streets. The “fear barrier” has been broken, as the Egyptian activists who led the revolt in early 2011 put it. Where gains might have been painstakingly gradual before, defections within different constituencies now follow each other quickly. Rebellion becomes contagious.
With same sex-marriage, the public was treated to a stark portrait of what this same process can look like in the United States.
In 2011, for the first time, polls showed public support for same-sex marriage to be over 50 percent. Starting then, we witnessed something not altogether dissimilar to the last days of a dictatorship. As Gallup reported in 2014, “For proponents of marriage equality, years of playing offense have finally paid off as this movement has reached a tipping point in recent years—both legally and in the court of public opinion.” As the temple began to quiver, pillars started falling like dominos, toppling in areas including local government, business, religious organizations, the military, professional sports, and even conservative political groups.29
New York, Maine, Maryland, Washington. One after another, between 2010 and 2014, more than a dozen states joined the litany of jurisdictions allowing same-sex marriage. Increasingly, the wins came via legislation and public votes, not merely decisions by judges.
By the time the Supreme Court cases were being debated in 2013, it was hardly a fair fight. As The Nation’s Richard Kim wrote, not only did the government opt against defending the Defense of Marriage Act but also “it filed an amicus brief arguing that it violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause, essentially leaving the defense of the bill to House Republicans and a sad-sack list of professional homophobes like the Westboro Baptist Church, Concerned Women for America, and the Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays.” Signers of briefs promoting marriage equality went far beyond LGBT advocacy groups; they included professional athletes, libertarian think tanks, and corporations such as Google, Nike, and Verizon.30
In the military, the policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which generated intense debate and backlash in the 1990s, was finally rescinded in September 2011, giving way to widespread sentiment in favor of “open service” by gay and lesbian troops. In a once-unthinkable turn, military chaplains began performing same-sex marriages.
In July 2013, Exodus International, the leading ministry that had claimed to “cure” homosexuality, shut its doors after thirty-seven years, sending shockwaves through conservative Christian circles. Exodus’s director issued an apology to the LGBT community, stating, “We’ve been imprisoned in a worldview that’s neither honoring toward our fellow human beings, nor biblical.”31
The Presbyterian Church voted in 2014 to allow its ministers to officiate same-sex weddings in states where it is legal. Meanwhile, the Methodists reinstated a minister who had been defrocked for presiding over his gay son’s 2007 wedding. As law professor Michael Klarman notes, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary acknowledged as early as March 2011 “it is clear that something like same-sex marriage . . . is going to become normalized, legalized, and recognized in the culture” and that “it’s time for Christians to start thinking about how we’re going to deal with that.”32
Once-traditionalist politicians suddenly began getting in touch with their more tolerant selves. As of 2005, only two US senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, were openly supportive of same-sex marriage. But, after the majority opinion tipped, the public was introduced to the viral phenomenon of politicians “evolving” in their views.33
On May 6, 2012, Vice President Joe Biden sat for a high-profile interview on Meet the Press, in which he stated that he had changed his position. President Obama completed his evolution shortly thereafter. An electoral fear barrier had broken, and a flood began. In just one week in April 2013, six US senators declared their support for marriage equality. Environmentalist writer Bill McKibben noted with some bemusement that, around the same time, “Bill Clinton, the greatest weathervane who ever lived, finally decided that the Defense of Marriage Act he had signed into law, boasted about in ads on Christian radio, and urged candidate John Kerry to defend as constitutional in 2004, was, you know, wrong. He, too, had ‘evolved,’ once the polls made it clear that such an evolution was a safe bet.” A week later Hillary Clinton joined him in explicitly announcing her support for same-sex marriage, despite having declared in 2004, “I believe marriage is not just a bond but a sacred bond between a man and a woman.”34
The wave of state-level “marriage protection” amendments that passed in 2004 turned out to be the last gasp of an opposition that had been polarized but was in decline. By 2014, even prominent conservatives had flipped. They included former vice president Dick Cheney, Ohio senator Rob Portman, and former representative Robert Barr, who sponsored the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996.
Same-sex marriage moved to the bottom of the list of major concerns expressed by Republican voters, and even those politicians who had not changed their position preferred to keep quiet about their views. Conservative strategist Steve Schmidt, an advisor to John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, argued, “I believe Republicans should re-examine the extent to which we are being defined by positions on issues that . . . put us at odds with what I expect will become over time, if not a consensus view, then the view of a substantial majority of voters.”35
The metaphor of falling pillars shows how, even prior to the 2015 Supreme Court ruling, the gains in the fight for marriage equality had been overdetermined. These advances were triggered in multiple, reinforcing ways. To focus solely on the transactional details of the individual court cases, ballot initiatives, and legislative maneuvers that came at the conclusion of the struggle is to miss a key point: these fights took place in a landscape that had already been transformed. As Richard Kim wrote in 2013, “Gay marriage isn’t winning the day because of some singularly persuasive legal argument; it’s winning because the battleground has shifted from the court of law to the court of public opinion.”36
Or, as Wolfson put it, “We had persuaded the country, and the courts followed.”37
In the court of public opinion, everyone has a say in rendering the final verdict. But there is still a special role for the advocates who make the case before their peers. Both in Serbia and in the United States, a mobilized base was needed to undertake the work of shifting popular opinion. And this reflects a last important point about the theory of change: making the pillars fall is not just about getting a majority of people to passively endorse your cause. It is also essential to create a strong, energized core of participants who are willing to go out of their way to help advance the movement. The type of enthusiasm and dedication possessed by these proponents can be called “active public support.”
The data on the difference that active participation makes in determining the success of a nonviolent movement is striking. And this data is available largely thanks to a scholar who never imagined herself becoming an expert in civil resistance.
As an undergraduate at the University of Dayton in the late 1990s, Erica Chenoweth took classes in military science and participated in training activities sponsored by her school’s ROTC program; her goal was to become a US Army officer. In the end, Chenoweth decided not to join the military. “I liked the rappelling, the uniforms, map reading, and shooting at the range,” she explains. “But I wasn’t stoked about getting up in the wee hours of the morning to run until I vomited. I quit, and chose the far less strenuous career of professor.”38
Chenoweth began a doctoral program at the University of Colorado Boulder, spending her first years as a graduate student writing about political violence. In 2006, she received an invitation from a colleague to attend a workshop sponsored by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). The weeklong seminar was intended to introduce social scientists to the field of civil resistance, with the hopes that the participating academics would use the material in their classrooms. “Skeptical but curious—and more than a little enticed by the free food and books,” Chenoweth wrote later, “I applied to the workshop.”39
Chenoweth had not previously heard of theorists such as Gene Sharp, and she walked away from the workshop unconvinced. “My view of all this stuff was that it was well intentioned, but dangerously naive,” she says. Chenoweth found the case studies that had been presented on Otpor, the Indian Independence movement, and other nonviolent struggles to be interesting. However, her background in empirical research left her wary. She believed that the presenters were drawing unduly broad claims from evidence that was merely anecdotal. She was also uncertain about whether the victories claimed by social movements could actually be attributed to people power rather than historical and geopolitical conditions. Throughout the workshop, she needled the presenters with critical questions. “By the end of the week, as you can imagine, I wasn’t too popular,” she says.40
At the conclusion of the seminar, Chenoweth spoke with Maria Stephan, who at that time was serving as the ICNC’s academic outreach coordinator. To Chenoweth’s surprise, Stephan agreed that too little research had been done to quantitatively reinforce arguments about the effectiveness of civil resistance. After much discussion, the two decided to team up in an effort to correct this. ICNC offered to support a data-driven analysis that would compare the outcomes of struggles that used nonviolent tactics to those of armed uprisings against undemocratic regimes. Chenoweth’s participation was secured with the promise that the ICNC would publish the results regardless of what they revealed—even if this meant showing that the unarmed movements were much less effective than true believers in strategic nonviolent action had imagined.
Together, Chenoweth and Stephan began developing what would eventually become the most extensive empirical database ever created on civil resistance. They pored over stacks of encyclopedias, news articles, and historical reports to find their data points. “Whether it was nonviolent or violent,” Chenoweth explains, “we would only code a case as ‘successful’ if it achieved the full removal of the incumbent leader, de jure and de facto secession, or the expulsion of a foreign military.” To be considered effective, a campaign also had to achieve this objective “within a year of its peak.”41
After two years of research, Chenoweth crunched the numbers. She was surprised by what she saw. Examining the first data set of 323 campaigns, she found that nonviolent movements worldwide were twice as likely to succeed as violent ones. As they added more cases, the new data reaffirmed this finding. Further, Chenoweth and Stephan observed that, over the previous fifty years, nonviolent campaigns had grown both more numerous and more successful, even under brutal authoritarian regimes. Violent insurgencies, meanwhile, had grown “increasingly rare and unsuccessful.”42
In 2008, Chenoweth and Stephan published these results in an issue of the academic journal International Security, and they later expanded their work into a 2011 book, Why Civil Resistance Works. Their findings quickly made waves. Within the data-focused quarters of political science and strategic studies, which had previously paid nonviolent conflict little heed, civil resistance began gaining new respectability. Why Civil Resistance Works earned the 2012 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award from the American Political Science Association—the same award that, in 1958, went to Henry Kissinger, someone hardly known for his advocacy of nonviolence. In 2013, Foreign Policy named Chenoweth one of the year’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers” for, as the magazine put it, “Proving Gandhi Right.”43
One particularly intriguing finding from Chenoweth’s work concerns the level of participation needed to sustain a winning social movement. In their book, Stephan and Chenoweth found a direct correlation between the success of a campaign and the popular involvement it managed to invite. Among the movements they studied, the victorious ones uniformly fostered broad-based public sympathy. And yet, Chenoweth found that the number of supporters who were actively engaged in successful movements could be quite small. She observed a trend that she would later dub the “3.5 percent rule.”44
As Chenoweth explains, “Researchers used to say that no government could survive if five percent of its population mobilized against it.” But she saw that the threshold was not even that high. Reviewing the data, Chenoweth found that, in fact, “no campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population—and lots of them succeeded with far less than that.”45
This is not an insignificant number: in the United States, 3.5 percent of the population would mean gaining the active support of some 11 million individuals. But that is still a much smaller slice of the population than the approximately 160 million people that would constitute the majority. For a movement, building this minority into a committed base is just as important as swaying the public at large.
Participation entails something considerably more than latent sympathy. The 3.5 percent needed to be people who were moved to actually take a stand. In compiling their data, Chenoweth and Stephan defined participation as the “active and observable engagement of individuals in collective action.” Spurring people to this level of engagement is not easy. Nevertheless, the authors found that it could be more obtainable for unarmed social movements than for groups pursuing military strategies. “Civil resistance allows people of all different levels of physical ability to participate—including the elderly, people with disabilities, women, children, and virtually anyone else who wants to,” Chenoweth explains.46
Whether or not one regards the 3.5 percent rule as a hard-and-fast threshold for creating change, the measure points to an important idea: although the ultimate goal of transformational movements is to win over the support of the majority of a society, an effort’s grassroots strength is measured by the number of people who take ownership over the cause.
Active public support, examined more closely, consists of several components. The first is showing up. A movement’s active supporters are the people who take to the streets for marches, attend teach-ins, and staff phone banks. Without them, a movement’s rallies would be empty. Second, in societies that hold elections, active public supporters vote with the movement. They put the cause at the top of their list of priorities when going to the polls. For these people, a candidate’s position on the issue in question—whether it be climate change, abortion rights, gay marriage, or immigration policy—can be enough to swing their vote one way or the other. In other words, in their electoral calculus, the movement’s issue outweighs the personalities of the individual political contenders.
A third trait of active public supporters is that they persuade others. Whether they express their opinions on social media or argue with their relatives over Thanksgiving dinner, they attempt to influence the views of those around them.
Finally, active supporters are the type of people who are moved to act independently to advance an issue within their social and professional spheres of influence. This might mean lawyers taking on pro bono work for a cause they believe in, musicians writing songs that celebrate protesters in the streets, teachers bringing lessons on the cause into the classroom, ministers making it the topic of their Sunday sermons, professional athletes or celebrities being spotted in T-shirts that express their beliefs, or store owners putting signs of support in their windows.
Through this last type of advocacy, active supporters help move the pillars to which they are most closely tied. At the start, when an issue is still unpopular, their vocal stances will often earn them scorn from those who judge their passion to be impractical and their techniques to be misguided. The naysayers, however, overlook an important point: without impracticality, underdogs would never win.
Mainstream politicians recognize the benefits of having the backing of the majority, of course. But they go about gaining it in a very different way. The fact that transformative mobilizations cultivate active public support is what distinguishes them from “triangulation” and other insider approaches that try to cobble together a majority by appealing to the political “center.”
Triangulation was a strategy most famously pursued by President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s, under the counsel of then–White House advisor and later Fox News commentator Dick Morris. The strategy was deeply immersed in the logic of two-party politics. In Morris’s words, the idea was to “take the best from each party’s agenda and come to a solution somewhere above the positions of each party . . . that became a triangle, which was triangulation.” By veering to the right on issues such as welfare reform, trade, and military spending, Clinton attempted to woo a majority by presenting himself as pragmatic and above the ideological fray. The Associated Press has described the practice as one of “mak[ing] policy decisions by splitting the difference on opposing views,” with the belief that this will create positions that, by virtue of their moderation, are broadly popular with the American public.47
Needless to say, the past century’s major gains around women’s suffrage, economic justice, and civil rights did not emerge from a strategy of triangulation.
Outsider campaigns that attempt to topple the pillars of support and win over majority public opinion through the efforts of a galvanized base take an opposite approach. Writing about climate strategy, environmental journalist David Roberts cites a simple maxim: “If you want to move the center, you have to pull from one end.” Advocates in this mode stake out highly principled positions that at first seem unrealistic, and then they work to rally the public behind their viewpoint. Momentum-driven organizing does not limit itself to the political confines dictated by transactional negotiations at any given moment. Instead, it seeks to create possibilities that those maneuvering within the constraints of the system are unable to imagine. It aims to change the terms of debate, creating a new baseline for what is considered politically feasible and expedient.48
Pulling from one end is what transformed Milosevic from an entrenched powerbroker into a disgraced and ousted autocrat, and it is what turned gay marriage from an unpopular fringe issue into a civil rights crusade whose time had come. In the case of Serbia in the late 1990s, it was not hard for Otpor and other resistance groups to get a majority of the population to agree that Milosevic should go. A huge portion of the public already detested the regime. With the economy in shambles and the country reeling from a series of disastrous wars, public opinion had already been won. The problem was that people expressed their dissenting views only in whispers, behind closed doors. Although many Serbians wanted change, few believed that it was actually achievable. It took Otpor’s active supporters to demonstrate the viability of resistance.
In the case of same-sex marriage, the work of dedicated activists was likewise essential. It was helpful to have families in Middle America approvingly watch Ellen or Will & Grace in the 1990s. But the vast majority of these people were not going to force the issue in their workplaces or make it their top electoral concern. The few who actually pushed at the pillars—petitioning their churches to accept their same-sex weddings, calling for their employers to extend health benefits to same-sex partners, attending rallies, filing lawsuits, defending same-sex couples at their schools’ proms, knocking on doors, and demonstrating the electoral muscle of LGBT voters at the polls—were the movement’s active supporters.
The process of promoting change by swaying public opinion is a more circuitous approach than making a narrow demand and targeting it at a specific powerbroker. “In classical politics, you’re interested in the direct route to victory,” says Marovic. “But in building a movement, you’re interested in the more fundamental change that happens through the activation of citizens. It’s indirect. And a lot of the things that are going to come from this, you’re not going to see in advance.” Piven and Cloward likewise argued, “The impact of mass defiance . . . is not so much directly but indirectly felt.” Movements at their most transformative produce tectonic shifts that make the ground tremble. Although the impact is undeniable, predicting exactly which buildings or bridges will buckle as a result can be difficult. Because of this, the activists who generate the tremors often do not receive the credit they deserve for the final changes in policy that come about.49
Moreover, part of the process of transformational change is that once an issue has won, its righteousness becomes common sense. After this happens, people will commonly deny that the change was ever a big deal to begin with. They will contend that the shift was an inevitable by-product of historical forces, that it would have happened even without a struggle, and that the lessons that one can draw from it are therefore limited. In the case of same-sex marriage, it is not unusual to hear the view that the victory was an easy one because it merely involved a change in cultural attitudes and did not impose significant economic costs on corporations or economic elites. For this reason, the argument goes, the example is not relevant to movements working to address issues such as climate change.
Certainly, it is true that environmentalists squaring off against the world’s fossil fuel magnates face formidable opponents and that tackling global warming is a very difficult fight. But this is hardly the end of the story. Conventional wisdom held that the British would never leave India because of the profits generated by colonialism. The Crown was the most powerful force in the world, and it would never be moved, many believed. But the balance of the economic equation shifted, in part due to geopolitical changes and in part due to transformative movements themselves. In retrospect, some historians now argue that it was forever preordained that the Raj was unsustainable and would be evicted. In the future, the severe storms, floods, and ecological dislocations resulting from global warming are set to cause untold billions of dollars in damages. For this reason, there are economic forces lined up on each side of the climate dispute; as the impacts grow ever more extreme and costly, the economic calculus of complying with movement demands continually changes.
If there is a common trait in the most prominent movements of the past century—whether they involved efforts to end child labor, redefine the role of women in political life, or bring down an apartheid regime—it is that they took up causes that established powerbrokers regarded as sure losers and won them by creating possibilities that had not previously existed. As the pillars give way, barriers long seen as too daunting to be overcome suddenly appear surmountable.
With same-sex marriage, a transformative approach triumphed. By the time the Supreme Court ruled, the decision represented the codification of a victory that, in an important sense, had already been won. The change was achieved through a mass withdrawal of cooperation from a past order based on prejudice. It could be felt well before it was written into law and well before it was acknowledged by those elected leaders now struggling to show that they have “evolved.” Indeed, like the Serbian regime loyalists caught off guard by an uprising that flooded Belgrade, America’s top politicians—the people typically seen as holding power in our society—were among the last to know.
When it comes to the workings of civil resistance, a faith in the monolithic power of those at the top is not the only thing that mainstream operatives get wrong. Just as they regularly fail to appreciate when the pillars holding up the status quo have grown dangerously weak, they often overlook the types of challenges most likely to begin wearing away at these fortifications. Certainly, that was the case with the British Empire’s rulers in India. Try as they might, they could not see why Mohandas Gandhi would choose to stake his political career on the most absurd and tangential of issues. Namely: salt.