How to Stop Fascism

Most people who recognize what is happening in their country right now share one thing in common. They don’t know what to do about it.

They vote. They post. They argue at Thanksgiving. And then they go back to their lives and hope someone else figures it out. This is not cowardice. It is the absence of a plan. And the absence of a plan is one of the most studied problems in the history of political science.

For the better part of a century, researchers across psychology, political science, and conflict studies have been asking the same question: what actually stops authoritarian movements? Not in theory. Not in a seminar. In practice, in the real world, with real dictators and real populations. The answers they found are remarkably consistent, remarkably specific, and remarkably underused.

This piece walks through six researchers whose work, taken together, forms a blueprint for how ordinary people defeat fascism. Not with armies. Not with violence. With behavior.

The Playbook That Toppled Dictatorships

Gene Sharp never held public office, never led a protest, and never ran an organization with more than three employees. For the last fourteen years of his life, he ran the Albert Einstein Institution out of two rooms in a brick townhouse in East Boston, near Logan Airport, where he also grew rare orchids.

He was, by almost every account, the most consequential political scientist of the twentieth century that most people have never heard of.

Sharp was born in 1928, the son of a traveling minister in Ohio. As a young man, he refused the draft during the Korean War and spent nine months in federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. While preparing for his sentence, he wrote a letter to Albert Einstein at Princeton asking if the physicist would contribute an introduction to his book on Gandhi. Einstein, a pacifist, agreed. Sharp later named his institution after him.

Over the next five decades, Sharp produced an enormous body of work on a single subject: the mechanics of political power. His central insight was deceptively simple. All political power, including the power of dictators, depends on the obedience and cooperation of the population. No regime can function when enough of its people withdraw that cooperation. The military can’t deploy if soldiers refuse. The economy can’t run if workers stop. The government can’t govern if citizens stop complying.

In 1973, Sharp published his three-volume masterwork, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, in which he catalogued 198 specific methods of nonviolent resistance. Boycotts. Strikes. Sit-ins. Tax refusal. Slow compliance. Deliberate inefficiency. Each method was documented from real historical examples.

Twenty years later, in 1993, a Burmese exile asked Sharp to write something shorter. Something that ordinary people could read and use in the field. The result was From Dictatorship to Democracy, a 93-page manual that compressed four decades of research into a step-by-step framework for dismantling authoritarian regimes without firing a single shot.

The Burmese military junta sentenced anyone caught with the book to seven years in prison. That did not stop it from spreading. The book was translated into more than 30 languages. It was smuggled into Serbia, where the student resistance movement Otpor used it as a field manual to organize the campaign that brought down Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Oleh Kryenko, one of the leaders of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, said publicly that Sharp’s book was “the bible” of the resistance. In Egypt, copies circulated in Tahrir Square during the 2011 revolution.

Sharp died in January 2018, at ninety years old, in the same East Boston townhouse where he had worked for decades. His obituary in the Washington Post called him a “preacher’s son whose own gospel of nonviolent struggle inspired velvet revolutions that toppled dictators on four continents.” A Scottish journalist who made a documentary about him summed it up differently: “In South America, they’re not tweeting Che Guevara. They’re tweeting Gene Sharp.”

Sharp’s work established the theoretical foundation. The researchers who followed him tested it.

Why We Won’t Say the Word

Robert Altemeyer spent his entire career at the University of Manitoba studying a single question: why do some people follow authoritarian leaders without hesitation, even when doing so conflicts with their own values and interests?

In 1981, he published his first major book, Right-Wing Authoritarianism, in which he introduced the RWA scale, a psychometric instrument that measures three interlocking personality traits. The first is authoritarian submission: a willingness to defer to perceived legitimate authorities and to accept their statements without scrutiny. The second is authoritarian aggression: a readiness to attack, condemn, or punish people who the authorities designate as threats or deviants. The third is conventionalism: a strong attachment to traditional social norms and a hostility toward anyone who violates them.

The word “right-wing” in Altemeyer’s usage does not refer to political conservatism per se. He uses it in the psychological sense of submission to established authority, as opposed to rebellion against it. But his data consistently showed that people who scored high on the RWA scale clustered overwhelmingly on the political right. They attended authoritarian churches. They consumed authoritarian media. They followed authoritarian leaders. And when those leaders told them to attack, they attacked.

Altemeyer spent 40 years tracking this pattern across thousands of subjects, publishing updated findings in 1988 and 1996, and releasing a free online book, The Authoritarians, in 2006. His findings were remarkably stable. The traits that predicted authoritarian followership in the 1980s predicted it in the 1990s and 2000s with virtually no variation.

But the most relevant finding for the current moment is not about the followers. It is about everyone else.

Altemeyer documented that the rise of authoritarianism depends less on the strength of the authoritarian leader or the size of the authoritarian base than on the passivity of the rest of the population. The majority of people in any society are not authoritarian followers. But the majority of people are also reluctant to name what they are seeing until it becomes undeniable. They call fascism “political polarization.” They describe the systematic dismantling of democratic norms as “both sides going too far.” They minimize, euphemize, and wait.

This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a function of how the brain responds to threats that feel too large to confront. The brain’s threat response system is calibrated for manageable problems. When a threat exceeds that threshold, the brain does not escalate its response. It downgrades the threat. It reclassifies it as something smaller and less dangerous. It files fascism under “politics,” because politics is a category the brain knows how to process. Fascism is not.

The implication is straightforward. The single most consequential behavior available to the average citizen in the early stages of an authoritarian movement is the one that feels the most uncomfortable: saying the word. Out loud. Without softening it.

The Conformity Trap

In 1951, Solomon Asch, a Polish-born psychologist working at Swarthmore College, conducted a series of experiments that remain among the most cited in the history of social psychology.

The setup was simple. A participant sat in a room with seven other people, all of whom were actors. The group was shown a card with a line on it and asked to match it to one of three comparison lines. The correct answer was obvious. The lines were not ambiguous. In control trials where participants answered alone, error rates were less than one percent.

But when the seven actors unanimously chose the wrong answer, 75 percent of real participants conformed at least once over the course of the experiment. They said what they could see was wrong because everyone else in the room had said it first.

Asch’s work exposed something that decades of subsequent research have confirmed. Conformity is not primarily a cognitive failure. It is a social survival strategy. The brain’s anterior cingulate cortex, the same region that processes physical pain, activates during social exclusion. At a neurological level, disagreeing with the group produces a response that is functionally identical to being struck. For most of human evolutionary history, expulsion from the group meant death. The brain learned that going along is safer than being right.

This has obvious implications for political movements built on social pressure. When every person in your family, your church, your social media feed, and your television says the same thing, the biological cost of dissent is enormous. You don’t even have to believe it. You just have to keep saying it. That is how conformity sustains itself. Not through belief. Through the fear of what happens when you stop.

But Asch found something else, something that turned the entire dynamic on its head. When even one other person in the room broke from the group and gave the correct answer, conformity dropped from 75 percent to between 5 and 10 percent. One voice. One person willing to say out loud what everyone else could already see. That was enough to collapse the effect for everyone else in the room.

The lesson is not that you need to convince the majority. The lesson is that you need to be the first person willing to say what is true in front of other people. Because the moment you do, you free everyone else who was waiting for permission.

Inoculation Before Infection

In 1961, social psychologist William McGuire at Yale University proposed a theory of persuasion resistance that he modeled explicitly on medicine. Just as a vaccine exposes the immune system to a weakened pathogen so it can mount a defense against the real thing, McGuire argued, exposing people to weakened versions of persuasive arguments would trigger a psychological defense that would make them resistant to the full-strength version later.

McGuire was motivated by the Korean War. American prisoners of war had returned home parroting enemy propaganda, and the public was alarmed. Social scientists were tasked with understanding why people crumbled under persuasive pressure, and McGuire wanted to know whether resistance could be built in advance. His experiments, published between 1961 and 1964, demonstrated that it could. People who were first exposed to weak counterarguments and then shown how to refute them were significantly more resistant to persuasion than people who had simply been told what to believe.

The theory sat largely in academic journals for decades. It was known. It was cited. It was rarely applied at scale.

In 2017, Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge, changed that. Van der Linden had been studying climate change misinformation and was frustrated by the limits of fact-checking. You could debunk a false claim, and people would still repeat it. The misinformation had already settled. So van der Linden asked a different question: what if you could protect people before the misinformation reached them?

His first study, published in Global Challenges in January 2017, tested the approach on climate change attitudes with a nationally representative sample of over 2,000 Americans. He found that exposing people to a general warning about politically motivated misinformation campaigns, followed by a small dose of the actual misinformation along with a refutation, produced durable resistance. The effect held across Republicans, Independents, and Democrats.

Van der Linden then scaled the approach to social media. Working with Jigsaw, a division of Google, his team created 90-second animated videos that taught viewers to recognize specific manipulation techniques: scapegoating, emotional language, false dichotomies, incoherence, and the use of fake experts. In a field study published in Science Advances in 2022, the team ran these videos as YouTube ads, reaching over a million users. Users who watched the videos demonstrated significantly improved ability to identify manipulation in content they encountered afterward. The inoculation effect persisted for at least 18 hours after exposure, and it worked equally well on viewers across the political spectrum.

The mechanism is not about telling people what to believe. It is about teaching them to recognize the structure of manipulation. Once you can see the trick, it stops working. You don’t have to fact-check every claim. You just have to recognize the five or six techniques that show up in virtually all propaganda: fear, blame, false choices, fake consensus, and conspiracy framing. Those techniques are the delivery system. Learn to see the delivery system, and the payload can’t land.

The Bystander Problem

Ervin Staub was six years old in the summer of 1944, living in Budapest with his family, when the Nazis began rounding up Hungarian Jews. His family was marked for deportation to Auschwitz. They survived because of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who used forged protective papers to shelter tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews, and because of ordinary people in their neighborhood who chose to help rather than look away.

About half a million other Hungarian Jews were murdered.

That experience shaped the rest of Staub’s life. He escaped communist Hungary at eighteen, earned a PhD at Stanford, and spent the next five decades studying a single question: what determines whether people intervene to stop harm or stand by and watch?

In 1989, he published The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence, drawing on case studies from the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the Cambodian genocide, and the Argentinian Dirty War to identify common precursors to mass violence. His central finding was counterintuitive. The most important variable was not the behavior of the perpetrators. It was the behavior of the bystanders.

When bystanders remain passive, Staub found, perpetrators interpret that silence as social permission. Each act of violence that goes unchallenged lowers the threshold for the next one. The perpetrators escalate because nobody stops them, and the escalation itself recalibrates the norm. What was unthinkable yesterday becomes tolerable today and routine tomorrow. Staub called this the “continuum of destruction,” and he documented it in every case of mass violence he studied.

The inverse was also true. When bystanders intervened early, even in small ways, the escalation stalled. Active bystanders changed the calculus. They did not have to be powerful. They did not have to organize armed resistance. They just had to make their opposition visible. A person standing beside someone being harassed. A community publicly rejecting a policy of exclusion. A government issuing a diplomatic warning. The form of the intervention mattered less than its timing. Early intervention was exponentially more effective than late intervention, because the norms had not yet shifted.

In the late 1990s, Staub took his research to Rwanda, five years after the genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 Tutsis in 100 days. He designed community workshops aimed at helping Hutus and Tutsis understand how ordinary people could be drawn into extraordinary violence, and how ordinary people could also choose to resist it. Evaluations showed that months after the training, participants were more willing to cooperate across ethnic lines, more open to dialogue, and more skeptical of authority than control groups.

He later developed active bystander training for the California Commission on Police Officer Standards and Training after the Rodney King incident in 1991, a program that was eventually adopted by the New Orleans Police Department in 2014 with measurable reductions in use-of-force incidents.

Staub’s work delivers one clear message: doing nothing is not neutral. Every day of silence raises the cost of speaking up. And the people who ultimately stop political violence are not the ones with the most power. They are the ones who act first.

The Number That Ends Regimes

Erica Chenoweth did not start out as an advocate for nonviolent resistance. In 2006, as a PhD student studying terrorism and insurgency, they attended a workshop at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict and spent most of it arguing that nonviolence was strategically inferior to armed struggle. A colleague, Maria Stephan, challenged them: if you’re so sure, prove it. Look at the data.

Chenoweth took the challenge seriously. Over the next several years, they built the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) dataset, the most comprehensive catalogue of political resistance campaigns ever assembled. It covered every major campaign for regime change or territorial liberation from 1900 to 2006, more than 300 in total. Each campaign was coded for strategy (violent or nonviolent), peak participation, duration, and outcome.

The results, published with Stephan in the 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works, upended Chenoweth’s own assumptions. Nonviolent campaigns succeeded 53 percent of the time. Violent campaigns succeeded 26 percent of the time. Nonviolence was not merely a moral preference. It was twice as effective.

The reason was structural. Nonviolent campaigns attract broader participation because the barriers to entry are lower. You don’t need to be young, male, physically strong, or willing to kill. A 70-year-old grandmother can march. A teenager can refuse to attend school. A worker can stay home. This diversity of participation gives nonviolent movements a strategic advantage that violent insurgencies cannot replicate: they pull people from every sector of society, including the security forces and the regime’s own base of support. When enough of those people defect, the regime cannot hold.

The threshold Chenoweth identified was 3.5 percent. No government in the dataset had survived sustained nonviolent resistance involving at least 3.5 percent of the population at its peak. The number was descriptive, not prescriptive. Chenoweth has been careful to emphasize that. In a 2020 discussion paper, they noted at least one exception: Bahrain’s movement in 2011 to 2014, which exceeded 6 percent participation and still failed, likely because of military intervention by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. And many successful campaigns achieved their goals with less than 3.5 percent, because other factors like organization, timing, and strategic diversity also matter.

But the 3.5 percent figure points to something real. In the United States, 3.5 percent of the population is roughly 12 million people. Over 7 million Americans participated in the No Kings protests in a single day. That is one of the largest demonstrations in American history, and it was still less than two-thirds of the threshold. More importantly, it was a single event. Chenoweth’s research shows that one-day protests, no matter how large, almost never produce systemic change. What produces change is sustained participation over time. Showing up once is a rally. Showing up every week is a movement.

The six researchers covered in this piece came from different disciplines, worked in different countries, studied different populations, and asked different questions. Sharp studied the mechanics of power. Altemeyer studied the psychology of followership. Asch studied conformity. McGuire and van der Linden studied resistance to manipulation. Staub studied the role of bystanders. Chenoweth studied the arithmetic of participation.

They never collaborated. Most of them never met. And yet their findings converge on the same set of conclusions with a consistency that is difficult to dismiss.

Authoritarian movements do not succeed because they are strong. They succeed because the rest of the population is passive, silent, and disorganized for too long. The window for effective resistance is early, not late. The behaviors that matter are specific, measurable, and available to anyone. Name it. Speak first. Inoculate the people around you before the propaganda reaches them. Stand next to someone being targeted. Show up, and keep showing up.

None of this is theoretical. Every one of these findings has been tested in the field, in real countries, against real authoritarian regimes. The data is as close to settled as social science gets. The only variable that remains unsettled is whether enough people will use it.

198 methods of nonviolent action (download it now)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vs_BAGYYumRsQszBjCMX2hncyoTWR2DWPizDESw3BTM/edit?usp=sharing

Sources

Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Porter Sargent, 1973)

Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (Albert Einstein Institution, 1993)

Robert Altemeyer, Right-Wing Authoritarianism (University of Manitoba Press, 1981)

Robert Altemeyer, The Authoritarians (self-published, 2006)

Solomon Asch, “Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments,” in H. Guetzkow (ed.), Groups, Leadership, and Men (Carnegie Press, 1951)

William McGuire and Demetrios Papageorgis, “The Relative Efficacy of Various Types of Prior Belief-Defense in Producing Immunity Against Persuasion,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 62, No. 2 (1961)

Sander van der Linden, Anthony Leiserowitz, Seth Rosenthal, and Edward Maibach, “Inoculating the Public against Misinformation about Climate Change,” Global Challenges, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2017)

Jon Roozenbeek, Sander van der Linden, Beth Goldberg, Steve Rathje, and Stephan Lewandowsky, “Psychological Inoculation Improves Resilience Against Misinformation on Social Media,” Science Advances, Vol. 8, No. 34 (2022)

Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge University Press, 1989)

Ervin Staub, Overcoming Evil: Genocide, Violent Conflict, and Terrorism (Oxford University Press, 2011)

Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011)

Erica Chenoweth, “Questions, Answers, and Some Cautionary Updates Regarding the 3.5% Rule” (Carr Center Discussion Paper, Harvard Kennedy School, 2020)

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