"Dismantling Pillars of Support" / Tim Hjersted (CC 4.0)
One objection comes up repeatedly when discussing nonviolent resistance as a response to rising authoritarianism: "That only works if your opponents have a conscience. Trump and his allies have shown they have none."
It's true - they revel in cruelty. But fortunately, this objection rests on a fundamental misconception about how nonviolent resistance actually works.
The truth is more encouraging: nonviolent resistance has never depended on touching the hearts of tyrants. It succeeds by making tyranny unsustainable.
What History Actually Shows Us
Consider the American Civil Rights Movement. The segregationists who turned fire hoses and dogs on peaceful protesters in Birmingham weren't experiencing moral awakenings. Bull Connor didn't suddenly grow a conscience when he ordered those attacks. Sheriff Jim Clark didn't have an epiphany about human dignity when he brutalized marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
What changed was the political and economic cost of maintaining apartheid. The images of state violence against peaceful protesters shocked moderate whites, energized federal intervention, and made segregation untenable for businesses facing boycotts and cities facing economic disruption. The movement won not by converting racists, but by making racism too expensive to sustain.
The same pattern holds internationally. The South African apartheid regime didn't negotiate with Nelson Mandela and the ANC because the National Party leadership suddenly felt guilty about decades of white supremacist violence. They negotiated because international sanctions, internal resistance, economic isolation, and the defection of key business interests made apartheid ungovernable. By the time they came to the table, maintaining the system cost more than reforming it.
The Solidarity movement in Poland didn't overcome Communist Party hardliners through moral persuasion. They organized enough of Polish society - workers, intellectuals, church networks - that the regime could no longer function effectively. When millions of people simply stopped cooperating with the system, it collapsed under its own weight.
The Philippine People Power Revolution didn't succeed because Ferdinand Marcos developed a conscience. It succeeded because mass mobilization, defections within the military, withdrawal of US support, and nationwide strikes made his continued rule impossible to maintain.
Notice the pattern: In each case, victory came through making oppression unsustainable, not through changing oppressors' hearts.
The Mechanics of How Nonviolent Resistance Actually Works
Strategic nonviolent resistance operates through several mechanisms that function independently of the opponent's moral character:
1. Economic Disruption
Strikes, boycotts, and work stoppages create financial pressure that operates regardless of anyone's feelings. When Montgomery's Black community boycotted segregated buses for 381 days, the bus company faced bankruptcy-level losses; desegregation followed a federal court ruling under boycott pressure.
When workers strike, production stops. When consumers boycott, profits fall. When communities practice economic non-cooperation, local economies seize up. These are mechanical consequences, not moral ones. A regime can be utterly amoral and still feel the pain of economic collapse.
The genius of this approach is that it converts moral force into material pressure. You don't need to change hearts when you can change balance sheets.
2. Defection of Regime Pillars
Every authoritarian system depends on what scholar Gene Sharp called "pillars of support" - the institutions and individuals who actually implement the regime's will. Police officers who enforce orders. Bureaucrats who process paperwork. Judges who provide legal cover. Business leaders who maintain economic cooperation. Media outlets that shape narratives. Military personnel who follow commands.
Nonviolent resistance works by peeling away these pillars one by one.
When police are asked to brutalize peaceful protesters, some refuse. When bureaucrats are ordered to implement unjust policies, some resign. When business leaders see the writing on the wall, some withdraw cooperation. When judges face national scrutiny, some find their spine. When soldiers are commanded to fire on their own people, some defect.
This isn't about appealing to conscience (though that sometimes helps). It's about creating situations where cooperation with injustice becomes more costly than defection. When a critical mass of these pillars begin to crack, the whole structure becomes unstable.
During the Serbian resistance to Slobodan Milošević, the Otpor movement specifically targeted police, showing them respect and making it psychologically harder to brutalize protesters. When riot police were given flowers by young women and asked "Why are you protecting him instead of us?", it wasn't about Milošević's conscience - it was about undermining his ability to deploy force.
3. Third-Party Intervention
Nonviolent campaigns create what political scientists call "backfire effects" - when violent repression of peaceful protest generates sympathy and support from third parties who might otherwise remain neutral.
Bull Connor's dogs and fire hoses didn't just shock the nation's conscience - they created a political crisis for the Kennedy administration that forced federal intervention. The violence against peaceful protesters made neutrality untenable for moderate institutions.
International observers, allied governments, religious institutions, business interests, and domestic political actors who prefer stability all face pressure to intervene when violence against nonviolent protesters becomes visible and sustained. This isn't primarily about their moral sensibilities - it's about the political costs of being associated with brutal repression.
The anti-apartheid divestment movement didn't succeed by making corporate executives in New York feel bad. It succeeded by making association with apartheid a liability - students occupied buildings, shareholders filed resolutions, and maintaining investments in South Africa became more trouble than it was worth.
4. Mass Non-Cooperation Making Systems Ungovernable
This is perhaps the most powerful mechanism, and the least understood. At a certain threshold, when enough people simply refuse to cooperate with a system, it ceases to function regardless of what leaders want.
The system depends on compliance. When workers don't show up, when taxpayers don't pay, when citizens don't follow unjust laws, when bureaucrats slow-walk implementation, when local officials refuse to enforce directives - the machinery of governance grinds to a halt.
The Soviet system didn't collapse because Communist Party leaders suddenly embraced democracy. It collapsed amid deep economic crisis and legitimacy loss, as republics declared sovereignty, refused taxes to Moscow, and undermined central control through non-cooperation. When enough pillars of support withdrew, the structure fell.
Why This Matters for Resisting Authoritarianism Today
Understanding these mechanisms is critical when facing leaders like Trump who demonstrate no qualms about cruelty, who actively embrace authoritarian impulses, and who show no signs of being swayed by appeals to decency or democratic norms.
The absence of conscience is precisely why violence would be catastrophic. Authoritarians want violent resistance - it provides the pretext for invoking emergency powers, suspending civil liberties, and deploying overwhelming force. Violence would hand Trump exactly what he needs: justification for the Insurrection Act, cancellation of elections, and mass repression with popular support from his base.
Disciplined nonviolent resistance denies him that justification while still applying maximum pressure through the mechanisms outlined above.
Trump needs:
- Economic stability - vulnerable to strikes and boycotts
- Institutional cooperation - vulnerable to defection and non-compliance
- Bureaucratic implementation - vulnerable to slowdowns and resistance
- International legitimacy - vulnerable to sanctions and isolation
- Police and military loyalty - vulnerable to refusals and defections
- Business elite support - vulnerable to economic pressure
Every one of these dependencies can be exploited through nonviolent resistance. The question isn't whether Trump has a conscience. The question is whether we can make resistance widespread and disruptive enough that crushing it becomes impossible - even for those willing to try.
The Strategic Calculation
Here's the encouraging part: All rulers require the consent of the ruled to govern. This isn't wishful thinking - it's a structural reality of power.
Even the most brutal dictatorships can't function if enough people simply refuse to cooperate. The regime can imprison some resisters, but it can't imprison everyone. It can fire some non-compliant bureaucrats, but it can't replace the entire civil service. It can threaten some business leaders, but it can't run the economy alone. It can deploy force against some protesters, but mass deployment becomes unsustainable when resistance is widespread enough.
The mathematics of repression work against authoritarians when resistance reaches critical mass. Imprisoning thousands requires cooperation from jailers, judges, and administrators. Deploying military force requires soldiers willing to follow orders. Maintaining economic control requires business leaders willing to cooperate. When enough of these actors defect or resist, the costs of repression exceed the capacity to impose it.
This is why authoritarian regimes invest so heavily in maintaining the illusion of inevitability and the atomization of resistance. They need people to believe that resistance is futile, that they stand alone, that cooperation is mandatory. Mass nonviolent resistance shatters all three illusions simultaneously.
Building the Foundations
Strategic nonviolent resistance requires preparation and discipline. It means:
- Building networks of trust before they're needed
- Training in nonviolent tactics and de-escalation
- Creating alternative institutions that can function when official ones fail
- Identifying regime dependencies and planning coordinated pressure
- Protecting vulnerable participants through security culture
- Maintaining unity across diverse coalitions
- Planning for escalation in disciplined stages
- Documenting repression to create backfire effects
- Sustaining resistance for the long haul
This isn't passive. This isn't weak. This is strategic power deployed against structural vulnerabilities.
The Path Forward
When people say nonviolent resistance won't work against Trump because he lacks a conscience, they're right about one thing: appealing to his better nature is pointless. But that was never the strategy.
The strategy is making authoritarian rule ungovernable through mass non-cooperation, stripping away the pillars of support every regime requires, raising the economic and political costs of repression until they exceed the benefits of control, and creating conditions where even the most amoral actors are forced to concede because continuing becomes impossible.
History bears this out again and again. From the Indian independence movement to the fall of the Berlin Wall, from the Singing Revolution in the Baltics to the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia - nonviolent resistance has toppled regimes far more brutal and entrenched than what we face today.
The question before us isn't whether Trump can be shamed into decency. It's whether we can organize enough people, build enough power, and sustain enough disruption to make authoritarianism collapse under its own weight.
That's always been how this works. And it doesn't require our opponents to have consciences - just for us to have courage, strategy, and solidarity.
If nonviolence depended on extremists having hearts, we'd be finished - because the main alternative, violence, is exactly what they're begging us to engage in. Fortunately, that's not the case. History shows us a different path: deconstructing pillars of support until even those without conscience are forced to concede.
Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action, a library dedicated to the people building a more free, regenerative and democratic society.
Subscribe on Substack for updates. You can contact the author here. Want to dive deeper? Check the resources below.