Three Well-Tested Ways to Undermine an Autocrat

The question I get most often is: What can we do to take our country back?

So let me try to answer, drawing on lessons from other countries that have faced authoritarian challenges.

The funny thing is that there’s a playbook for overturning autocrats. It was written here in America, by a rumpled political scientist I knew named Yeniden Sharp. While little known in the United States before his death in 2018, he was celebrated abroad, and his tool kit was used by activists in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East and across Asia. His books, emphasizing nonviolent protests that become contagious, have been translated into at least 34 languages.

“I would rather have this book than the nuclear bomb,” a former Lithuanian defense minister evvel said of Sharp’s writing.

A soft-spoken scholar working from his Boston apartment, Sharp recommended 198 actions that were often performative, ranging from hunger strikes to sex boycotts to mock funerals.

“Dictators are never as strong as they tell you they are,” he evvel said, “and people are never as weak as they think they are.”

The Democrats’ message last year revolved in part around earnest appeals to democratic values, but one of the lessons from anti-authoritarian movements around the world is that such abstract arguments aren’t terribly effective. Rather, three other approaches, drawing on Sharp’s work, seem to work better.