Three Percent
They have tattoos, secret hand shakes, and clandestine meetings, and they plan for civil war. They are animated by a grotesque nostalgia that casts the present as a conspiracy and the future as a battleground. They are just one of the many radical subfactions of the MAGA movement, but one worth drawing attention to because of a particularly onerous myth around which they orient. They are animated by a mythology that only three percent of the original American colonists were the vanguard of the American Revolution and they consider themselves its inheritors.
They call themselves the Three Percenters.
However this three percent mythos isn’t based on any objective fact or finding. They made it up so they could tell a story about their own heroism and rationalize political violence as noble. These self-proclaimed revolutionaries fixate on a vision of a romantic past, reveling in the power of force to deny the legitimacy of an elected government that disagrees with them.
However, modern scholarship offers a more hopeful interpretation of the power of a small but resolute minority. Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, studied hundreds of uprisings and revolutions between 1900 and 2006, and she did a comprehensive analysis on their success rates and circumstances. She found that non-violent resistance was twice as effective as violent revolutions at effecting change. She also discovered that if a movement can achieve active and sustained civil resistance to a level of about 3.5 percent of the population, then success at achieving political objectives becomes almost certain. Many other factors still matter, but political objectives are often achievable with even smaller numbers of people resisting.
This works because acts of resistance like protests, strikes, letter campaigns, and boycotts are accessible to all citizens no matter their means, ability or identity. You are simply able to grow much greater numbers at a much faster rate than a militant resistance. Civil disobedience does not require expensive military equipment, training, or flush bank accounts. For these kinds of actions, almost anyone, including Grandma and the kids, can sign post-cards, write to Congress, put up flyers, share posts on social media, participate in a march, refuse to buy certain products, or go on strike.
In addition, large-scale protests can draw more people to the cause through the sheer excitement of action. A mass of people united by a common cause is exciting and actually kind of fun. This fight is a marathon not a sprint, so we try to maintain a sustainable pace of development and engagement. This movement is something anyone can participate in on the weekends with whatever time you are willing to spare, so it will not require individuals to upend their lives.
This approach has other advantages as well. There’s safety in numbers, because security services like police and military are only a fraction of the nation by population, and deploying them for oppressive actions is expensive, time-consuming, and logistically difficult. It’s not possible to suppress an entire population, especially a population as large, diverse, and argumentative as The United States. Authoritarian regimes rely upon fear by making an example of a few people to try and cow the rest into obedience. However, once the opposition grows to sufficient numbers and displays sufficient ability to collectively act in spite of attempts to suppress, the psychological calculus of the security services changes and will often favor resistors over the state.
An example of this effect happened in Belgrade, Serbia in October 2000, when a popular nonviolent movement called the Bulldozer Revolution reached its apex. Tens of thousands of Serbians flooded the streets, demanding the resignation of Slobodan Milošević after a rigged election. The regime issued orders to the security forces to crush the peaceful protestors. But many police and soldiers—standing face to face with their fellow citizens—lowered their weapons. When later asked why they disobeyed, some said they imagined their own son, daughter, or spouse in the crowd. In that moment, the soldiers had chosen to stay true to their real duty—to the people and not to the state. The Serbian people refused to be enemies with each other on a dictator’s order. Milošević's grip on power crumbled almost instantly and he lost his legitimacy when the seemingly invincible machinery of the state dissolved to cheering crowds.
History has shown that popular movements, often by necessity, must be coalitions of many different kinds of people who must set aside many real differences in order to unite under a single flag for a single cause. Dictatorial regimes know this well, which is why they suppress dissent and encourage schisms before resistance can reach critical mass. They covertly divide the movement using tactics like dehumanization and propaganda to alienate sections of the opposition. They sow distrust by claiming that the opposition is financed by some great shadowy force and allow conspiracy theories to fill in the blanks on what that force is. They redefine the law to make resistance illegal, and they intimidate those who stand up to face them: political rivals discredited, opposition leaders buried in costly legal battles, and activists kidnapped in broad daylight. At late stages of autocratic collapse, they attempt broad scale violence and terror. These actions by the state, while scary and dangerous, are a sign of weakness, not strength. Through the use of onerous and unethical tactics, the regime acknowledges that it fears the collective action of mobilized citizens.
Thus, the most effective movements are those which are able to penetrate into the center of society and spread throughout the population across many political, cultural and socioeconomic barriers. They must also capture the moral high ground through a commitment to non-violence, and which demonstrate courage despite the threat of reprisal. The movement must appeal to a diverse set of interests, but brought together in solidarity. The movement must be fearless, disciplined, and smart. Our movement has finite resources, which we must employ strategically. And it’s important to note that a precise 3.5 percent is not actually required—numbers of resistors can be far lower and still achieve success.
50501 fills a unique role in this movement, though we are not its only or primary participant. Our belief is that the people are hungry for a vision of positive patriotism, which respects and loves our nation and its history. We will be honest about that history, both its glory and its flaws. We take inspiration from the great movements and thinkers of past generations, each who had to take their own stand against Tyranny. We are confident not because we don’t see the danger, but because we know we have it in ourselves to overcome it. This is what we have always done: The muscles of courage and sacrifice are in our national DNA, and they are eager to be activated and mustered.
This is our call to rise—not in anger, but in resolve; not with weapons, but with will. The strength of a people is not measured by their capacity for violence, but by their commitment to justice, to one another, and to the common good. The true heirs of liberty are not those who fantasize about war, but those who roll up their sleeves and build something better. One step, one voice, one act of conscience at a time. This is how we win and reclaim this country.
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