Beyond Protest

Why Noncooperation Is How We Win

For nearly a decade, public resistance to MAGA authoritarianism has operated in one primary mode: protest. Marches, rallies, demonstrations, outrage, mobilization. And make no mistake, this matters. Protest is essential. It builds our base, demonstrates courage to those feeling isolated and afraid, and shows authoritarians they don’t have our consent.

But protest is defense. It’s us reacting to their moves, playing on terrain they’ve chosen, proving we’re paying attention to their provocations. And, while necessary, defense alone doesn’t win.

Noncooperation is how we go on offense. And it’s time we learned how to play to win.

This Week’s Actions Are Opening Moves

This week, the nearly 900 walkouts that happened in response to the Women’s March’s call wasn’t just another protest. Neither will the calls from organizers in Minneapolis for no work, no school, and no shopping this Friday. These are opening moves in a sustained campaign of strategic noncooperation, a shift from defense to offense that successful resistance movements require.

When you walk out of work, school, or your daily routine, you’re not simply expressing opposition. You’re practicing the withdrawal of cooperation that makes authoritarian rule impossible. You’re joining what needs to become an ecosystem of resistance: distributed, locally rooted, integrated into our survival strategies, and aimed directly at the pillars that hold up authoritarian power. This is what the research on successful civil resistance shows us works -- what we need is not one massive march that disperses, but sustained participation that becomes woven into our daily lives.

What Authoritarians Actually Need

Here’s what decades of civil resistance research shows: Authoritarians cannot rule without our cooperation.

They need workers to show up and produce, bureaucrats to process their orders, police to enforce their laws, businesses to comply with their demands, and citizens to treat them as legitimate.

When that cooperation is withdrawn - systematically, strategically, at scale - authoritarian power doesn’t just weaken. It collapses.

This isn’t just theory. When Serbia’s Otpor movement coordinated refusal against Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, election workers refused to falsify results, police refused to disperse protesters, and key business leaders withdrew support. The regime that had ruled for over a decade through violence and manipulation fell in days once critical mass was reached.

When Danish bureaucrats systematically sabotaged Nazi deportation orders through “administrative errors” during occupation, nearly all Danish Jews survived because bureaucrats refused to cooperate efficiently.

When Sudanese professionals - doctors, teachers, lawyers - refused to cooperate with al-Bashir’s 30-year dictatorship in 2019, the regime fell within months.

The pattern is consistent: Coordinated refusal works shockingly fast when it targets what authoritarians actually need to function.

Making Authoritarianism Expensive

The authoritarian coalition attempting takeover believes authoritarianism will be profitable, both economically and politically. They think they can steal our freedom cheaply.

They’re wrong. Through strategic noncooperation, we make that theft ruinously expensive.

When Target faced a boycott over anti-DEI policies, Rev. Jamal Bryant led a campaign that cost the company billions. That’s economic refusal with teeth.

When resistant, pro-democracy states refuse federal cooperation on immigration enforcement, they force the federal government to either expend massive resources doing it themselves or fail. That’s institutional refusal - making authoritarianism operationally costly.

When workers strike, consumers boycott, bureaucrats slow-walk implementation, and professionals refuse to provide services, the machine simply stops working. Not because we’ve convinced them we’re right, but because we’ve made their agenda too expensive to execute.

This is offense. This is how you win.

Both/And, Not Either/Or

We need protest AND noncooperation. They serve different strategic purposes.

Protest builds the movement. It creates visibility, demonstrates strength, recruits new members, and proves to those watching that they’re not alone. When people march, it shows authoritarians they lack consent and shows potential resisters they have company.

Noncooperation exercises power. It doesn’t just show we disagree, it makes implementation impossible. It shifts from demonstrating opposition to demonstrating we can make them fail.

Think of it this way: Protest says “we don’t accept this.” Noncooperation says “and you can’t do it without us.”

What This Looks Like in Practice

Coordinated refusal operates at multiple levels simultaneously:

Economic: Workers striking in key sectors. Consumers boycotting collaborating companies. Businesses refusing government contracts that enable authoritarianism.

Bureaucratic: Civil servants slow-walking implementation. Administrators “losing” paperwork. Inspectors finding technical problems that delay enforcement. Mass resignations that hollow out agencies.

Social: Making collaboration personally costly. The “Dinner Table Test”—can you go to Thanksgiving when your family knows you’re processing deportation orders? Can you show your face at your kid’s soccer game when other parents know you’re enabling family separations?

Institutional: States refusing federal cooperation. Attorneys General refusing to enforce unconstitutional orders. Interstate compacts that bypass federal control.

The key is coordination—not isolated individual acts, but organized campaigns with clear objectives, coordinated timing, strategic targeting, and sustained pressure.

Why They Fear This Most

Want proof that refusal works? Look at what authoritarians attack first.

They don’t ban protests initially. They ban strikes. They don’t outlaw opposition parties initially. They crush independent unions. They don’t shut down all media initially. They take over institutions that could organize mass refusal.

They know coordinated noncooperation is the real threat. That’s why Trump’s team is purging federal bureaucracies, threatening state AGs, and attacking universities and nonprofits. Because they know that if enough people in key positions simply refuse to cooperate, their agenda fails.

What We Build While We Resist

Coordinated refusal isn’t just about denying them cooperation. It’s about building parallel power, including mutual aid networks, alternative dispute resolution, community defense, and parallel information systems. This is the infrastructure that provides what they won’t, helps to sustain us, and builds infrastructure and relationships that will outlast this moment.

Every successful refusal proves they need us more than we need them, that they cannot govern without consent, that we have power they cannot take. This is pedagogy through action. People learn their own power by exercising it.

So this week’s walkouts and this weekend’s no work, no school, no shopping days can be the beginning of our victory when they build the infrastructure for ongoing noncooperation: when walkouts lead to strikes, and demonstrations lead to sustained refusal that endures long enough to make authoritarianism ungovernable. This week’s actions matter because they train us in collective action, build the networks we’ll rely on for months ahead, and send an unmistakable signal: we will not cooperate with authoritarianism, and we’re building the capacity to sustain that refusal.

The Choice

We can keep protesting alone, hoping institutions will save us, exhausting ourselves playing defense on terrain they’ve chosen.

Or we can combine protest with coordinated refusal. Build movement through demonstration while exercising power through noncooperation. Show them that yes, stealing our freedom is possible, but it will be ruinously, prohibitively, unsustainably expensive.

This isn’t a new strategy. This is how people have defeated authoritarianism throughout history.

The question is whether we’ll build the infrastructure, maintain the discipline, and coordinate at the scale necessary to make it work here, now.

What time is it? Time to play offense.

Time to refuse.