Is the No Kings movement a color revolution?

After the No Kings protest on Saturday, I was curious about how MAGA pundits would respond, so I watched a few clips from their shows/podcasts. For the most part, they went from claiming that those involved would be America-haters, terrorists, antifa, and Marxists beforehand, to claiming it was all just old people afterwards. 

On Youtube, it was a post by Glenn Beck that caught my eye because it was titled, "Glenn Beck Exposes No Kings Plot: This IS a Color Revolution!" In case you're not familiar with the term "color revolution," here's how Wikipedia defines it:

The color revolutions were a series of often non-violent protests and accompanying (attempted or successful) changes of government and society that took place in post-Soviet states (particularly Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan) and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the early 21st century.The aim of the color revolutions was to establish Western-style democracies.

I'll grant that Beck isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. Perhaps he thinks that comparing the No Kings protests to non-violent attempts to establish democracies in post-Soviet states is fear-inducing. But if that's his idea of a critique...I'll take it!  

So I watched the video. Beck begins by calling everyone who attended the protests an "idiot." But after about 9 minutes of that, things get pretty interesting. At that point, he starts talking about the intellectuals and organizers behind the protests and encourages his listeners to read two books. The first is "Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, " by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan.

For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results.

Over the last few months I've heard about the "3.5% rule," but didn't know where it came from. Thanks to Glenn Beck, I now know that it came from Chenoweth and Stephan.

Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change.

Whether or not you agree with the "3.5% rule," the fact that "nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns," is the money quote.

The second book Beck mentions is "From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Guide to Nonviolent Resistance," by Gene Sharp.

From Dictatorship to Democracy was a pamphlet, printed and distributed by Dr Gene Sharp and based on his study, over a period of forty years, on non-violent methods of demonstration. Now in its fourth edition, it was originally handed out by the Albert Einstein Institution, and although never actively promoted, to date it has been translated into thirty-one languages. This astonishing book travelled as a photocopied pamphlet from Burma to Indonesia, Serbia and most recently Egypt, Tunisia and Syria, with dissent in China also reported. Surreptitiously handed out amongst youth uprisings the world over - how the 'how-to' guide came about and its role in the recent Arab uprisings is an extraordinary tale.

 If you're interested, check out Sharp's "198 Methods of Nonviolent Action."

Silly me. I had studied the nonviolence methods of Ghandi and MLK when I was in college in the 1970's. But I thought all of that wisdom had been lost in the succeeding decades. Here it is alive and well in a whole different form among the intellectuals and organizers behind the No Kings movement. That brings me so much hope and joy!

At this point, I haven't seen a lot of other MAGA pundits comparing No Kings to the color revolutions.  But someone who did make the connection is Kirill Dmitriev, Putin's Envoy on Foreign Investment and Economic Cooperation. In response to a tweet from Mike Flynn about the No Kings protests, he wrote: "Same playbook and same people who do 'color revolutions.' Sad that very few people understand the deep level of coordination and experience involved." It's not hard to understand why Putin would fear color revolutions. As a matter of fact, that fear could be what drove him to invade Ukraine.

The Kremlin’s fear of a fresh popular revolution threatening its position in power isn’t far-fetched; history favors nonviolent movements, which boast a 53% success rate compared with the 26% success rate for violent campaigns. In Russia’s neighborhood, civil resistance has proved itself to be a particularly potent strategy – between 1900 and 2019, 58% of the region’s major nonviolent movements succeeded in achieving their goals.

While Russia’s “special military operation” launched on Feb. 24 to “denazify” Ukraine came as a shock to many, Putin’s fear of popular revolutions means he has been plotting to regain control in Ukraine ever since a popular revolution in February 2014 deposed Kremlin-backed president Viktor Yanukovych.

If the worst thing that Beck or any other MAGA pundits can say about No Kings is that we are emulating nonviolent color revolutions to defend democracy - a prospect that terrifies Putin - it is just the kind of affirmation I've been looking for to indicate that we're on the right track.