Here’s the thing about authoritarian power that most people get wrong.
We think power looks like this: one strong man at the top, holding everything together by force of will and iron fist. Take out the strongman, and the whole thing collapses.
That’s not how it works. That’s never how it works.
Power is not a pyramid. Power is a table. And the strongman is not holding up the table, the legs are.
The legs are the pillars of support. Gene Sharp, the political scientist who basically wrote the manual on nonviolent resistance, identified them decades ago. The military. The police. The courts. The business community. The media. The civil service. Religious institutions. And, crucially, ordinary people going along with their ordinary lives, paying their taxes, showing up to work, and keeping the machine running.
Here’s what this means strategically: you cannot win by fighting the top of the table. You win by pulling out the legs.
Every authoritarian government in history has fallen the same way. Not because someone punched the dictator, but because the people holding the thing up stopped holding it up.
This is what happened in Poland. The movement leader, Solidarity, didn’t defeat repressive communism by winning a military battle. They pulled the economic leg. Ten million workers - a third of the entire Polish workforce - refused to cooperate. The regime couldn’t function. The leg came out.
This is what happened in Serbia in 2000. Otpor - a student movement - didn’t overthrow Milošević by storming the palace. They ran a pillar-targeting campaign. They went to the police and said: he’s using you. They went to the business community and said: the sanctions are killing you. They went to the military and said: your kids are in this movement. One by one, the legs got wobbly. On the day of the final election, Milošević tried to steal it. The miners went on strike. The truckers blocked the roads. The police stood down. The whole table collapsed in 48 hours.
This is Gene Sharp’s core insight, and Erica Chenoweth’s research confirms it over and over: nonviolent movements win not by overpowering regimes but by out-maneuvering them - making it more costly for the pillars to keep holding the table up than to let it fall.
Now apply this to right now.
The Trump administration is doing something interesting. They’re not just exercising power, they’re consolidating power. And consolidation means something specific: it means permanently securing the pillars. Capture the courts. Purge the civil service of anyone with independent judgment. Intimidate the business community into compliance. Co-opt the military. Defang the press.
They know the table theory. They’re reinforcing the legs.
So the question for us isn’t “how do we fight Trump.” The question is: which legs are still wobbly? And what does it take to pull them?
Some legs are already pretty secure. The courts have been packed. The civil service is being purged. Fox and the right-wing media ecosystem have been loyal for decades.
But some legs are shakier than they look.
The business community is not monolithic. Tariff chaos, market instability, and the destruction of international relationships are genuinely costing them money. That’s a wobbly leg.
The military officer corps has an institutional culture that is not fully compatible with what’s being asked of them right now. Deploying against civilians, against protesters, against their neighbors - that’s a strain on the leg.
Local law enforcement, especially in blue cities and states, has real limits to how far it will go in service of federal overreach. Minneapolis showed us that.
And most importantly: the ordinary cooperation of ordinary people - paying taxes, obeying rules, going along - is the biggest leg of all, and it is made of millions of individual decisions that can change.
Here’s the punchline.
When people ask me what they can do, I tell them: stop thinking about what you’re against and start thinking about which leg you can pull.
Are you a business owner? You have a pillar relationship. Are you in a union? Your union is a pillar. Are you in a religious community? That’s a pillar. Are you a veteran, a doctor, a teacher, a civil servant? Pillar, pillar, pillar, pillar.
The resistance doesn’t win by being angrier or louder than the regime. It wins by being structurally smarter. By identifying the specific relationships, the specific dependencies, the specific costs, and applying targeted, sustained pressure to make the legs give way.
The table looks solid. But tables have fallen before. Ours will too if enough of us stop holding it up, and start pulling it down.
Precisely. Another necessary Nakagawa lesson! The most amazing thing is that nonviolent resistance has always been around and works better than violence. Sharp found examples throughout history, and Chenoweth and Stephans proved it's true (. . . although, as Chenoweth is going to warn in the near future, we must be careful about receiving information online through social media, which has been manipulated to harm resistance efforts).