On October 5, 1988, Chileans did something most of the world thought was impossible. They voted a dictator out of power. Not through a coup. Not through armed revolution. Through a plebiscite in which 55.99 percent of the population said “No” to General Augusto Pinochet’s bid to extend his fifteen-year military dictatorship for another eight years.
This was not luck, and it was not inevitable. It was the product of three years of meticulous organizing, an unprecedented coalition of eighteen political parties that genuinely despised each other, a massive voter registration drive under conditions of terror, and - here is the part that matters most - a campaign built on joy rather than fear.
As we prepare for the 2026 midterms, facing accelerating threats to democratic governance in the United States, the Chilean model is not just instructive. It is essential. And Chile is not alone. From Serbia to Estonia, from Hong Kong to the American South, the history of successful resistance is, at its core, a history of cultural production, of music, art, humor, performance, and collective celebration deployed not as decoration on a political campaign but as the campaign itself.
Chile, 1988: The Anatomy of Joy as Strategy
First, understand what Chile was facing. Pinochet had ruled with an iron fist since the CIA-backed coup that overthrew the democratically elected Salvador Allende in 1973. Over the course of his rule, more than 3,000 people were killed or “disappeared.” Twenty-eight thousand were tortured. Two hundred thousand were forced into exile. The regime exercised complete control of the media, the military, the police, and the machinery of government.
In 1980, Pinochet pushed through a fraudulent constitution that included a provision for a 1988 plebiscite—a straight yes-or-no vote on whether he’d continue in power. He controlled everything. He had destroyed all voter registration records. He required expensive new registration that most people were too terrified to pursue. The media was his. The military was his. He expected to win.
The opposition faced every structural disadvantage imaginable. It was fragmented across eighteen political parties spanning from Christian Democrats to Communists who had spent years fighting each other. The population was traumatized - people had learned over fifteen years that political participation could get you killed, disappeared, or tortured. And the proposition they were trying to sell - “No” - was inherently negative, a pure negation with no personality, no program, no future.
Three things made the campaign work.
The Coalition
Eighteen parties formed the Concertacion and united behind a single campaign. This was what I call the springs-to-river model in its purest form: distinct streams that disagreed on virtually everything agreed on one thing, the dictatorship had to end. They didn’t resolve their ideological differences. They didn’t try to. They built a channel wide enough for all of them to flow through toward a single shared objective.
Conservative parties remained formally outside the coalition but many of their voters supported the No. The Catholic Church, led by the Cardinal, provided moral authority and physical infrastructure including churches as meeting spaces in a country where meeting spaces had been systematically closed. Labor unions, particularly the Confederation of Copper Workers, provided organizational muscle. Student organizations provided energy and bodies.
Meanwhile, the Crusade for Citizen Participation ran a voter registration drive of staggering scope, enrolling over seven million voters under dictatorship conditions. This was the “Demand” phase of the framework; creating the conditions for a legitimate vote before a single ballot was cast.
The Message: Joy Is Coming
Under international pressure, Pinochet granted both sides fifteen minutes of uninterrupted television time nightly for twenty-seven nights in September and October 1988. The opposition’s internal debate about how to use this airtime is the most instructive part of the entire story.
The traditional faction wanted to do what felt morally right and emotionally authentic: show footage of torture, list the regime’s crimes, feature testimony from families of the disappeared. Make the moral case against dictatorship through unflinching documentation of its horrors.
The advertising team, led by Eugenio García at the Porta agency, argued that this approach would be strategically catastrophic. Their reasoning was grounded in something that research on political mobilization has since confirmed: fear-based messaging suppresses participation among undecided and infrequent voters. Reminding people of trauma they were trying to survive would make them want to withdraw further, not engage. And it would play directly into Pinochet’s framing of “stability versus chaos” by making the No vote feel like a return to the darkness rather than an escape from it.
García’s team made a decision that was genuinely radical at the time: they would build the entire campaign around the proposition that saying “No” was the pathway to joy.
Chile, la alegría ya viene. Chile, joy is coming.
Alegría doesn’t just mean “happiness” in Spanish. It carries a connotation of collective, carnival-style celebration - the joy of community, of dancing together, of belonging to something larger than yourself. It was forward-looking (joy is coming, not here yet). It promised something without specifying policies. It was emotionally unifying as everyone wants joy. And it contrasted starkly with the grim authoritarianism of Pinochet’s Chile.
The rainbow logo symbolized both the plural coalition (each party had its own color) and the promise of a better future. It was bright, beautiful, professionally designed, and easy to reproduce on flags, T-shirts, banners, and posters. The nightly broadcasts featured celebrities alongside everyday people of all ages - families, workers, students, the elderly. There was dancing, music, and celebration with mimes and performers, and international solidarity messages. And the catchiest jingle in Chilean history, one so catchy that even staffers on the “Yes” campaign were caught humming it during their own brainstorming sessions.
They made supporting “No” look fun, desirable, and, critically, normal. Not radical, not dangerous, but normal. The thing happy, reasonable people do.
What they did not do is equally important. They did not attack Pinochet personally. Instead, they made it about the system, not the man. They did not promise specific policy outcomes. They did not relitigate the past in detail. They did not match the regime’s negativity. They did not use fear as their primary motivator.
The government’s own Interior Minister later admitted: “In a few days nobody could ignore the evident technical superiority of the No campaign: superior in argumentation, superior in filming, superior in music.”
The Mobilization
On September 22, the campaign launched the Marcha de la Alegría - the March of Joy - a ten-day rolling celebration that moved through Chile from its northernmost to its southernmost cities, culminating in Santiago. This created visible, joyous, participatory momentum heading into the vote.
Combined with a massive parallel vote count operation - the opposition knew Pinochet would try to steal it and built the infrastructure to prove the real results - the campaign produced a decisive 55.99 percent No vote. Pinochet was forced out. Democratic elections followed in 1990.
The Pattern: Chile Is Not Alone
The strategic logic of Chile’s No campaign, of fighting fear with joy, using cultural production as the primary instrument of political mobilization, and making participation feel desirable rather than obligatory, appears in every successful cultural resistance campaign of the past half century. The cases differ in their specifics but converge on the same insight: arts and culture don’t illustrate a political argument. They create an emotional reality in which political action becomes possible.
Otpor, Serbia (1998–2000): The Comedy of Resistance
When students in Belgrade decided to challenge Slobodan Milosevic, they understood that direct confrontation with a regime that had survived a decade of wars, sanctions, and international condemnation would fail. So they chose a different weapon: absurdist humor.
Otpor, or “Resistance,” deployed street theater as a form of political warfare. In the most famous action, activists painted Milošević’s face on a barrel and placed it in a busy square where passersby could hit it with a stick for the price of one dinar. When police arrived, they faced an impossible dilemma: arrest people for hitting a barrel, or tolerate public mockery of the president. They confiscated the barrel. Footage of uniformed officers solemnly carrying a barrel with the president’s face through the streets created more mockery than the original action.
On Milosevic’s birthday, Otpor organized mock celebrations, bringing cake, and singing birthday songs with exaggerated cheer. Police could not figure out how to respond to people singing birthday songs. “Smiling Resistance” had activists simply walking around in branded T-shirts, greeting strangers and smiling. The clenched fist logo - simple, black and white, cheap to stencil or print - appeared on every wall and lamppost in the country.
Otpor grew from eleven founders to tens of thousands of members and contributed directly to Milosevic’s electoral defeat in 2000. The strategic lesson: humor reduces fear, lowers the barrier to participation, and forces authoritarian regimes into lose-lose situations. You can’t shoot people for laughing at you, but you also can’t afford to be laughed at.
The Singing Revolution, Baltic States (1987–1991): Freedom in the Key of F
In the late 1980s, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania found their way to independence from the Soviet Union through an instrument that seems, on its face, absurdly insufficient: folk songs.
The traditional song festivals that had been part of Baltic cultural life for over a century became the vehicle for independence movements. In Estonia, 300,000 people - a full quarter of the country’s population - gathered at the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds to sing national songs that had been forbidden under Soviet rule. Night after night, people gathered to sing. The events were cultural, not political - or rather, they were so deeply cultural that their political content was undeniable but impossible to prosecute.
Mass singing accomplished several strategic objectives simultaneously. It was a cultural act that was harder to repress than a political act. The Soviets could not justify sending tanks in to disperse a song festival. It created emotional bonds among hundreds of thousands of strangers who discovered, through the act of singing together, that they were a community with a shared identity and shared aspirations. It asserted national identity against imperial erasure. And it made participation joyful rather than grim. People came back night after night because singing together felt good, not because they were grinding through a duty.
The Singing Revolution is the clearest demonstration of a principle that Chile also proved: when you make resistance feel like celebration, you don’t have to recruit participants. They recruit themselves.
Hong Kong’s “Glory to Hong Kong” (2019): The Crowdsourced Anthem
During the 2019 pro-democracy protests, a musician using the pseudonym “Thomas” composed an orchestral protest anthem. The lyrics were crowdsourced and refined collectively by the movement. The song was released online for free, with Cantonese and English versions, YouTube tutorials, and downloadable sheet music for every instrument.
“Glory to Hong Kong” was sung by thousands at protests, performed in flash mobs in shopping malls, played on pianos in train stations, and adapted for settings from solo guitar to full orchestra. When the government eventually banned it, the ban made it more symbolically potent. It was the most effective advertisement any song can receive.
The anthem gave the movement an emotional anchor that persisted beyond any single protest. It made demonstrations feel like cultural events, not just political actions. And it provided a way for people who could not attend protests because of work, disability, family obligations, or fear to participate by learning, performing, and sharing the song in their own contexts.
The U.S. Civil Rights Movement: The Original Playbook
The most relevant domestic precedent is also the most familiar, though we often underestimate just how strategically deliberate its cultural dimensions were.
Freedom songs were not morale-boosters. They were tactical instruments. “We Shall Overcome,” “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” “This Little Light of Mine” - these songs created courage in the specific moment of confrontation. When you are sitting at a lunch counter and a mob is pouring ketchup on your head, or when you are marching across a bridge and the state troopers are forming a line, singing together is how you maintain nonviolent discipline. It regulates the group’s emotional state. It communicates to observers what kind of people you are. It builds solidarity among strangers who have just met but are now, in this moment, a community.
The visual aesthetics were equally deliberate. The dignity of Sunday dress at protests was a strategic choice, not a coincidence. It created a visual contrast between disciplined, well-dressed nonviolent protesters and the violent, snarling segregationist response. The choreography of marches, the composition of photographs, the selection of which confrontations to seek and which to avoid were all decisions about cultural production in service of political goals.
This is the American tradition we inherit. Cultural resistance is not an import. It is homegrown, and it is tested.
Rock Against Racism, Britain (1977–1981): Making Resistance Cool
In the late 1970s, the National Front was making significant inroads among white British youth, weaponizing punk and skinhead culture for fascist recruitment. Rock Against Racism responded not with counter-arguments but with counter-culture: massive concerts and carnivals that made anti-racism the socially desirable position.
The Carnival Against the Nazis in Victoria Park in 1978 drew 100,000 people and is widely credited with blunting the National Front’s electoral rise. The movement didn’t try to refute fascist ideology point by point. It made fascism uncool. It offered young people a more attractive identity, one that was multiracial, musically vibrant, and joyful, and let the contrast speak for itself.
The lesson for our moment: you do not defeat authoritarian cultural appeal by out-arguing it. You defeat it by out-performing it. You build a cultural environment in which democracy is the exciting, creative, community-building proposition while authoritarianism is the ugly, repressive, joyless one.
The Throughline
Across all of these cases - separated by decades, continents, languages, and political systems - the strategic logic is identical:
Arts and culture were not deployed to illustrate a political argument. They were deployed to create an emotional reality that made political participation feel desirable, joyous, and socially rewarding.
Chile’s No campaign didn’t use music to make people think about dictatorship. It used music to make people feel what freedom would be like, and then offered voting as the pathway to get there. Otpor didn’t use humor to explain why Milošević was bad. It used humor to make resistance feel fun, low-risk, and attractive to people who would never attend a conventional political rally. Estonia’s singing didn’t make an argument for independence. It made 300,000 people experience independence - the feeling of being a free people, singing their own songs, in their own language, together.
The No campaign solved the fundamental problem of resistance under authoritarian conditions: people are afraid, demoralized, and fragmented. Fear-based messaging - however factually accurate - makes all three worse. It paralyzes the afraid, deepens the demoralization, and gives the fragmented no reason to come together. Joy does the opposite. It mobilizes the afraid by promising something worth taking risks for. It reverses demoralization by making people feel powerful and connected. And it unifies the fragmented by offering a big tent built around a simple emotional proposition that doesn’t require ideological agreement.
What This Means for 2026
We face the 2026 midterms under conditions that democracy scholars describe as competitive authoritarianism. Under competitive authoritarianism elections continue, but the state apparatus is being weaponized against opposition. Federal agencies are being dismantled. Funding is being used as political punishment. Universities are being captured. Courts are being packed. Dissent is being criminalized. The playing field is not level.
The standard progressive response is to amplify the alarm. Document the threats. Sound the emergency. Explain how bad things are and how much worse they’ll get. This approach is factually correct and strategically counterproductive. Research on political mobilization shows that fear-based messaging suppresses turnout among precisely the populations most needed - young people, infrequent voters, economically stressed communities. The 2024 election made this painfully clear: youth turnout dropped from over 50 percent to 42 percent, and 59 percent of non-voters said no organization or campaign had even contacted them.
Chile teaches us a different approach. Pair urgency with agency. Make people feel that the situation is serious and that their participation can change it, and that participation will be a joyful, community-building, identity-affirming experience. Frame the midterms not as a grim duty to prevent disaster but as a plebiscite on freedom - a collective act of defiance and celebration. Build a cultural infrastructure from songs, art, performance, and community gatherings that makes voting feel like joining a party rather than performing a chore.
Alegría ya viene. Joy is coming. That’s not naivety. It’s a strategy. And it has a track record of defeating dictators.
Glad to read this. Have you seen Pablo Larrain's fabulous film about this very topic?
Go frogs!!!