A note of caution about the 3.5% rule that has received a lot of focus in recent years:
People will, of course, find reasons to explain away why one or the other of the protest movements don’t count – but what’s important is that both show there is nothing magical about a 3.5% threshold, even in exactly the context to which it was originally applied.
The animating theory of modern protest, then, has been extended well out of the context of its original research, and doesn’t hold up even in its original context when we look at the biggest non-violent protest movements of the last decade. And yet this goes entirely unexamined.
The two examples they point to share an obvious commonality that doesn’t apply to the climate movement. Both protest movements were brutally suppressed by a much larger and more powerful external force. If the protests has been across all of China or Russia I am sure the outcome would have been different. But 3.5% of Hong Kong or Belarus are both small compared to China and Russia.
A caution, having just learned of this 3.5% observation.
In the past, things like this have been reversed to justify anger against the masses. I.e. If the movement is not a current success, it therefore has less support than 3.5%. Therefore, we can do something bad to everyone that is not us.
