Protests are supposed to feel decisive — a heady moment when the people rise up and power has no choice but to listen. But what if the actual effects of those protests are not seen until later, sometimes much later? 

What if the real work happens in the invisible spaces after everyone goes home — in decisions made by politicians weeks later, in shifts so gradual nobody connects them back to the march?

David Meyer has spent his career studying that gap between the street and the outcome. 

A professor at UC Irvine and author of How Social Movements (Sometimes) Matter, Meyer isn’t interested in the romance of resistance; he’s examining its machinery. And what he’s found might surprise cynics (including your host): Protests work, but not the way we think they do, and almost never on the timeline we expect.

Meyer explains why the 1960s anti-war movement didn’t end Vietnam. But it reshaped American foreign policy for 30 years. The 2017 Women’s March on Washington didn’t impactTrump’s first term. But it built political oppositional infrastructure still operating today. 

Meyer argues we’re in unprecedented territory — protests caught between democratic reform and revolutionary overthrow, facing an elected leader who commands 40 percent approval from Americans while threatening the democratic institutions themselves.

So do this weekend’s “No Kings” marches matter? Meyer says yes — but the protesters are starting something, not finishing it. 

Join us as we explore why change often operates in shadows, why cracks in coalitions matter more than crowd size, and why protest’s most important effects are the ones nobody sees coming.

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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

[00:00:00] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. There’s almost something religious about the moment before a march begins, that collective breath, that sense of purpose, the belief that if enough people show up, if enough voices join together, the world will notice, that it has to bend, that it will have to change. This weekend, thousands will gather under banners reading, No Kings, certain that their presence is an answer, that democracy can be saved one march at a time. But what if we’re asking the wrong question? What if the real story isn’t whether people show up, but what happens when they go home? And what if there’s something even more fundamental we’re missing? Something about what these protests can even accomplish, trapped as they are in a kind of political no-man’s land. David Meyer has spent a career watching Americans take to the streets against wars, for civil rights, demanding change, resisting power. He’s a professor at UC Irvine, but more importantly, he’s the person who wrote a book called How Social Movements Sometimes Matter. That word sometimes is the whole ballgame, because Meyer isn’t interested in the romance of resistance. He’s interested in the machinery of change, and what he’s found is uncomfortable. Most protests accomplish almost nothing, or rather they accomplish things, but not the things protesters think they’re accomplishing, and not on the time frame that anyone expects. Meyer co-wrote The Resistance, studying what happened after Trump’s first election triggered the largest protest in American history, and his conclusion is bracing. Trump isn’t some aberration that passionate opposition can simply overwhelm. He’s the end product of 50 years of disciplined, strategic movement building on the right, which means that the resistance isn’t fighting a man, it’s fighting a movement that’s been winning for half a century. But here’s what makes this movement so strange, so unprecedented. These protests exist in a space not easily mapped. They’re not the protests of the 1960s. Those had leaders, had clear policy demands, were trying to change what a democracy did, and they’re not the revolutions that topple dictators. Those are trying to overthrow autocrats, to change who holds power entirely. What we’re seeing now is caught somewhere in between, and maybe that’s why it feels so uncertain, so hard to sustain. Because what do these protests actually want? Trump was elected, he commands on a good day, still 35-40% of the country’s support. He works through democratic institutions, even as he strains them. You can’t treat him like a dictator, there’s no government to topple, no palace to storm. But you also can’t treat him like just another president you disagree with. Traditional opposition through institutions feels too slow, too weak, for what feels like an existential threat. So the resistance exists in this uncomfortable middle space. No charismatic leadership to follow, no clear demands beyond stop this, no theory of whether they’re trying to change the government or change what it does. Movements that don’t know whether they’re working within the system or trying to overthrow it, end up doing neither. So this weekend as people gather to say no kings, what are you building? Not what are you against, but what are you for? Not how do you feel, but what’s your plan? Because being anti-Trump isn’t a strategy. Having your body in the street isn’t a theory of change. And feeling good about showing up isn’t the same as witting. And if we’re serious about defending democracy against a threat that’s both democratic and authoritarian, both elected and dangerous, we might want to listen about the difference between protests that matter and protests that just makes us feel good. It is my pleasure to welcome Professor David Meyer here to the program. David, thanks so much for joining us.

[00:04:05] David Meyer: Hi, Jeff. You did a lot of work on that introduction. I think you’re a little more cynical than I am.

[00:04:12] Jeff Schechtman: Really? Sure. Probably true. But there is this tendency, and that’s a good place to start, because there is this tendency to romanticize protests, to romanticize these demonstrations into thinking that somehow they’re going to make a difference. Talk about that first.

[00:04:30] David Meyer: Protest makes a difference often, but it doesn’t deliver automatically without all kinds of other cooperation from other tactics and branches of government and institutional politics. Protest works, but not by itself. And it takes a very, very, very long time. And as you know, mainstream media and most school teachers like to tell shorter stories. It’s hard to tell long stories and keep people engaged. So there’s a great story that you can tell about the March on Washington in 1963, and 250,000 people show up. And six months later, Congress passes the Civil Rights Act. Wow, that’s a great story. But the March on Washington was first proposed in 1941, 22 years before the big demonstration took place. And the big demonstration in Washington, D.C., where Martin Luther King gave that great speech followed years and years of community campaigns, fundraising, organization building, lobbying, electoral participation, and many, many, many other tactics. So protest doesn’t work by itself, and it doesn’t come out of nowhere. That’s the starting point. And if we want to switch forward to No Kings, No Kings builds on top of some organizations that have been active for a very long time. It’s not just 5501 that is turning out people. Indivisible, which started eight years earlier when Trump was first elected, is mobilized intensively with strong community connections, and lots of other organizations concerned with particular aspects of the Trump administration are also turning out people. So there’s an infrastructure that’s invisible when you just look at the dramatic event.

[00:06:38] Jeff Schechtman: What about the idea, though, that there doesn’t seem to be, at least on the surface, a specific set of goals for these protests, and that it also seems to be lacking charismatic leadership, which I would argue is essential to these kind of situations?

[00:06:56] David Meyer: Let’s talk about those things separately. First of all, when you talk about specific demands, it is very hard for a decentralized campaign like the No Kings campaign to come up with a clear message that all 2,000 sites are going to articulate. But I’m pretty sure they’re going to be recurrent themes in all of the campaigns, and they’re relatively moderate. They respect the Constitution. They don’t cut taxes for the rich. But any campaign that turns out lots of people has people coming to the campaign, coming to the streets, with a set of different expectations and different demands. So if we go back to use the template of the March on Washington in 1963, there were a lot of demands that get filtered out of history. So they were looking for a guaranteed job for every American. Organized labor was a big participant. That’s invisible in the history. In terms of the charismatic leadership, there are local leaders who are great speakers. There are well-institutionalized politicians who are using a platform like a seat in Congress to articulate views. And I think it’s always a mistake to overstate the importance of the dramatic leader. I mean, certainly someone like Martin Luther King was a great speaker and an extraordinarily brave man. But the civil rights movement and what it accomplished was built on the efforts of thousands of other people who may have been less charismatic. They were certainly less visible. They were doing the day-to-day work of building a community and articulating demands. The last thing about specific demands, sometimes the most powerful thing a movement can do is say no. And you listed the anti-war movement. The anti-war movement was opposed to the war. And it took a long time for the war to end. That didn’t mean the anti-war movement didn’t matter. It ended the draft, which was not the central articulated demand. And most of the activists in the street were not talking about a radical remaking of US foreign policy. So people come with different expectations. And those demands are processed and compromised and re-articulated by institutional politics. That means that whatever you go out there to protest for or against, it’s not going to be a yes, no, I got it, I didn’t get it. You’re going to get something or some political process that’s part of the story. But it’s not like, oh, we’re going to go out in the streets and, you know, on Monday, Trump won’t be president anymore. I think things are more complicated than that.

[00:10:26] Jeff Schechtman: They are more complicated. And also, when we compare them to protest movements, let’s just say in the 60s, we’re also dealing with a very different media landscape and social and cultural environment. We’re dealing with shorter attention spans. We’re dealing with information sources that people have that are not as unified as they were 50 years ago. We’re dealing with so many things that are inherent in the way information moves today that arguably that creates a whole different framework for something like, for a protest movement like this.

[00:11:01] David Meyer: I think that’s exactly right. I think the political landscape is dramatically different. I think the tactics of organizing are dramatically different. So, I mean, I keep coming back to the 1963 demonstration, but as a good example, it took eight months to build up to bring 250,000 people to the National Mall for a big protest. Now, getting out the message doesn’t require telephone trees. It doesn’t require leafleting on the streets. You can get out the message on social media very, very quickly and turn out large numbers much more quickly. Next point of it, you talked about the media landscape. I think that’s very, very important. Back in the old days, there was widespread trust in what we now call the legacy media. That’s those big national newspapers and broadcast news on television. It’s not like they were always right or you always agreed with the picture they took, but they operated with journalistic conventions where they tried to get an accurate story out and they tried to correct mistakes. And because most people were watching and reading the same things, the images they chose and the stories they told tended to predominate and spread. Now even the biggest television networks get much lower ratings than they ever got before. The New York Times has fewer readers and there are fewer local papers. When I ask my undergraduate students where they get the news, they say, the internet. And I say, where on the internet? And they say, everywhere. Well, it’s a fragmented, segmented media landscape where it’s very easy to only get stories that you agree with. That’s a problem. And that is a challenge for activists in framing No Kings or any other large organizing effort.

[00:13:18] Jeff Schechtman: Doesn’t that work both ways? And that’s an inherent part of the problem, that people also show up at these events and come to these protests all for arguably different reasons because they get their news from so many different sources, whether it’s hundreds of YouTube channels or TikTok channels or whatever it might be. Everybody shows up with a different purpose and a different mindset. And then to your point, the way it’s covered is equally diffused. So doesn’t that take the energy out of it in so many respects?

[00:13:49] David Meyer: It means that you have to do more than just protest, but it doesn’t mean that protest doesn’t matter. And when we talk about people coming with different objectives to a campaign, that happens all the time. That used to happen all the time. Local groups who support large demonstrations go in with ideas about remaking foreign policy or just stopping one war or stopping the draft or, I mean, and on and on. The idea that people are in a demonstration with different objectives and different theories of change, I think that’s endemic to protest politics. I think the idea that everyone who was on the mall in Washington, D.C. thought the Civil Rights Act was the be-and-end-all to what they were asking for is fanciful. In terms of the interpretation of war, I think you’re right. That’s a big challenge for us as American citizens to understand what’s really going on and for members of the media to portray as accurate a story as they can. And that’s hard now.

[00:15:04] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about this hybrid idea that on the one hand, the goal is an electoral goal, a democratic goal in terms of what I think most people going to these marches would like to see, some kind of preservation of democracy and some kind of resolution of all of this through democracy. And yet there is also this sense of wanting to have no kings, to overthrow some kind of monarch. And these two things are not necessarily in sync with each other.

[00:15:34] David Meyer: I think saying that you want a president bound by the Constitution and by laws, no kings is a very American slogan. It’s the kind of thing people might have said during the American Revolution, no kings, no absolute power. Checks and balances, although they probably wouldn’t have used that term, but a separation of powers and diffusion of power to localities. I think saying stop to the persistent overreach of the Trump administration is a really good start to lots of other conversations. And the things that are most salient, that is most meaningful, important, urgent to people who are showing up at those demonstrations are for sure all over the place. There are people who don’t want federal workers fired. There are people who don’t want to abandon standards on climate change. There are people who don’t want to cede public health to Bobby Kennedy Jr. and forego vaccinations. And in the university where I live, people are concerned with funding for financial aid and funding for scientific research. So there’s a whole batch of grievances that fit under the broad umbrella of restoring institutional balances in American politics. And the responses are likely to be partial and fragmented as well, but again, that doesn’t mean they don’t matter. So as you know, the very conservative Republican governor of Oklahoma, Kevin Stitt, just made an announcement that it was inappropriate and dangerous for the president to federalize the National Guard and send them to states where the governors don’t want them. That’s a little bit of Republican opposition, a crack in a coalition. If the big demonstration on No King’s Day is successful, we should watch for more cracks. That doesn’t mean the whole edifice falls at once, but it does mean that you can observe a weakening. A couple of days ago, the president of MIT wrote a spectacular statement explaining that MIT was not going to accept a compact with the Trump administration in which they promised if MIT did what they wanted on admissions and curriculum, the university would have expedited access to federal funds. The president of MIT said, we’ve always thought that federal funds for research should be dispensed according to merit, not political connections. She rejected the offer. After today, across my computer, I learned that Brown University rejected the officer, and a coalition of Iowa universities have rejected the compact. Okay. Piece by piece, resistance builds and cracks the infrastructure of what it’s challenging. In real life, we wish this happened faster. We wish we could always see the effect of what we’re doing, but the process of social change is long and difficult. Because you can’t see everything moving doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Because you can’t notice your child growing on a day-to-day basis, and you have to take measurements over a longer period of time, it doesn’t mean he’s not getting nutrition, doesn’t mean he’s not growing. So the demonstrations on Saturday are intended to feed the resistance and chasten their opponents. And I expect that’s quite likely to happen.

[00:20:06] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about past protests against Trump 1, and some of the lesser protests against Trump 2, how they have played out, and what, in your view, they might have accomplished.

[00:20:18] David Meyer: Well, the Women’s March was probably the largest demonstration ever in American history. There were close to a million people in Washington, D.C., another 750,000 in Los Angeles. And what they did in Trump 1 was set off a parade of protests that took place every week in Washington, D.C. Big national demonstrations for science, against restrictions on abortion, for equal rights, for education. And the wins they scored were mostly defensive wins, stopping the initiatives of the Trump administration. And they encouraged institutional challenge from ambitious politicians. So the attorney general of Washington state saw the protests at the airports during Trump 1 and made a decision to challenge the so-called Muslim ban. What he discovered was that his own electoral incentives were lined up with his political beliefs. That’s a good position to be in. And he’s now the governor of Washington state. Now, I would like to tell you that they completely chastened the Trump administration, and it became a normal presidency. That didn’t quite happen. But Trump was stymied and stalled by institutional players because he couldn’t appoint the same set of officials that he has gone with in this administration. This time, there have been many more people involved in the opposition, but not so many big protests. Protests this time have been organized in a decentralized fashion. A lot of stuff is happening at the localities. You probably remember the protests at Tesla dealerships. There are protests at universities. There are protests outside courthouses and against ICE, immigration control. And thus far, they’ve made it a little more visible what ICE is doing on immigration, what the government is doing on other programs, and a little more difficult for the administration. But the challenges absolutely lie ahead. I don’t expect anything to end on Saturday afternoon, except the one-day demonstration.

[00:23:19] Jeff Schechtman: One of the things you talk about is the timing of these things, the political opportunity that’s inherent in them. How does this line up in that scale as you see it?

[00:23:29] David Meyer: Well, right now, protests in American politics is almost always tied to what’s going on electorally. And right now, across the United States, there are disputes about redistricting in the middle of a census period, in the middle of the 10-year block where we don’t normally redistrict. And believe me, state legislatures who have to vote on those new districts are paying attention to what the opposition is and how it affects their political prospects in the future. In California, as you know, we’re going to vote on a proposal to gerrymander severely, to pick up five congressional seats that Texas is giving to Republicans. And Governor Gary Mnuchin wants to give a countervailing five seats to Democrats. Both of these efforts, well, I mean, the Texas effort is certainly inimical to good democracy and good governance. But the California approach is, well, if you’re going to do it, we’re not going to bring a lawsuit to a gunfight. We’re going to try to correspond and use the resources at our disposal. Believe me, people in state legislatures across the United States are paying attention to these disputes right now. And the size and scope of these demonstrations on the 18th are going to affect how they deal with those pressures. Texas legislature passed them already. In California, it’s going to the citizens through a ballot. But in lots of other states where it’s only one congressional district at stake, Nebraska, Kansas, Indiana, state legislatures are very conscious of what their constituents think and what’s important to them. That’s one part of the electoral structure. Next, we are in the middle, it’s almost easy to forget that we’re in the middle of a government shutdown as we speak. The Democrats are trying to hold the Trump administration hostage in looking to restore subsidies for health insurance. Now, is that going to happen? I don’t know the answer to that. I do know that those Democrats are going to be paying attention to the turnout and the politics of these demonstrations in deciding whether to hold fast or whether to cave. And correspondingly, Republican legislators are also watching these demonstrations. They’re going to look to see if it’s people in their districts who are showing up. And that’s going to affect whether they decide to what kinds of compromises and deals they agree to accept. Okay, so there’s a policy dilemma on the horizon because of the government shutdown. There is a there are elections on the horizon associated with gerrymandering. And then always in the first year of a presidential administration, everybody, politicians and pundits is paying attention to these off your elections. That is the governorships in New Jersey and Virginia and New Jersey. And believe me, people will be making large claims about how those turn out and how it vindicates whatever they’ve been doing.

[00:27:18] Jeff Schechtman: Doesn’t all of this imply, not to put too cynical a point on it, but it implies business as usual, politics as usual. And it seems that it’s so much of what has happened, awful as it is, is really antithetical to business as usual, that politics has changed as a result of the corruption and the way in which this administration has operated and continues to operate.

[00:27:45] David Meyer: I wish I could tell you that corruption is something new in American politics. It’s not. I wish I could tell you that the extraordinary moves the Trump administration has made to seize power and expand its power is something that has provoked a new kind of politics. But a new kind of politics doesn’t come out of nowhere and it doesn’t come out instantly. It’s the result of a long haul, slow boring of boards. Max Weber, the famous German sociologist, said you have to pound and pound and pound away. And regular politics, which includes elections and fundraising and canvassing, all that stuff is going on at the same time. And when more people get involved with greater passions, there’s a possibility of constructing something new.

[00:28:44] Jeff Schechtman: Somebody mentioned to me earlier today, talking about this, that there is this possibility, this fear of violence that hangs over this weekend. Talk about that.

[00:28:54] David Meyer: The prime organizations that are underneath the No King’s Rally are determinately, vociferously committed to nonviolent action. And they’re offering training sessions in all of their written materials. They’re emphasizing we are nonviolent. Right. And they believe, and there’s good reason to believe this, that any instances of violence will be used to tar and discredit them. So the organizations are trying to impose a kind of discipline. The last time I looked, there were more than 2,000 events scheduled for the 18th. Some of them will be very responsive to national organizers who are articulating this appeal. Others are likely to be less disciplined. And how do you get to go to a demonstration? Well, you walk or take the bus or drive your car to where the demonstration is going to be. It’s not like there’s a bouncer at the entrance to a demonstration who would stand in front of a bar and keep troublemakers out. In political demonstrations, there’s nobody working the doors. Anybody who goes there who shows up can participate. The notion that some people may attend these demonstrations somewhere and do something provocative or stupid, I think that’s quite possible. And if that happens, there is going to be a battle over defining whatever that act is as lone wolf or the inevitable product of a protest. You can bet if one person is cursing and holding a racist sign, that’s going to be up on all the conservative media networks. So it’s a challenge for mainstream media to cover these demonstrations proportionately. And if there are crazy, stupid, provocative people who do things that are disruptive, to put those efforts in perspective.

[00:31:21] Jeff Schechtman: There’s no way of knowing what’s coming from the other side. We still have agents and troops on the ground in places like Los Angeles and Portland and Chicago.

[00:31:32] David Meyer: Are you bothered by this? Yes. Right. And why are we bothered? One reason is protest, whether you agree with it or not, is constitutionally protected. It’s in the First Amendment. That’s to peaceably assemble and present grievances and petition the government. Second reason is some police are very well-trained and very experienced. If ICE agents are showing up who have been recently hired, if National Guard who have been trained in combat are showing up in American cities, the possibility that someone who is not particularly well-trained, not necessarily very familiar with protocols and their people around them gets scared or overreacts, people could get hurt. In fact, people have already gotten hurt by ICE agents and guardsmen. So that’s a scary moment. And the idea that it’s worth protesting against in a disciplined fashion, well, that kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?

[00:32:47] Jeff Schechtman: I guess ultimately, we’ll see how the narrative of this plays out. And that’s a big part of it in this age of social media and instant communication and all the things that we talked about earlier.

[00:32:59] David Meyer: Yeah. I would urge you and your listeners to listen to the people who show up at these protests and take them seriously. And I would say the same thing regardless of their cause. Protest is a piece of politics in America. And to treat it as something other than that is a mistake.

[00:33:25] Jeff Schechtman: Professor David Meyer, I thank you so much for spending time with us today here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.

[00:33:30] David Meyer: Thank you, Jeff. It was a pleasure.

[00:33:32] Jeff Schechtman: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Sheckman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.