Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Nationwide “Hands Off!” rallies were held in over 1,200 towns and cities, in every single state of the Union on Saturday, staged by over 150 organizations, including workers’ unions, democracy advocates, veterans and human rights groups, according to David Collins at AP.
Some of the urban demonstrations were significant, with tens of thousands in Boston, thousands in Chicago, thousands in Atlanta, and in an especially humiliating blow to Trump, enormous crowds of protesters surged through the streets of Manhattan, in numbers that so surprised the NYPD that they had only a few dozen policemen available for crowd control. They weren’t needed, since all the crowds were remarkably peaceful despite their anger.
Too much should not be made of these early April demonstrations, which were in many instances small, despite their breadth. Trump and the rich thugs around him could not care less if some Americans come out and stand in the street and chant. If, however, the demonstrations gather strength and grow over time, they pose a threat to his growing autocracy.
Political scientist Erica Chenoweth has shown that 3.5% of the population in a society can create great social change. That’s 11.9 million Americans.
As a historian, I’ve had an interest in social movements and revolutions, albeit in the Middle East rather than in the US. But some sociological principles travel.
In my view, Trump is making the typical mistakes of a failed dictator, though he is committing those errors on a scale and with a breakneck speed that is unusual in other cases.
One mistake that dictators often make is to narrow their base of support by doing large favors for a small number of very wealthy people and adopting punitive policies toward important social groups.
Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, the last shah or king of Iran, for instance, made the “thousand families” the basis of his rule. That’s a pretty narrow power base.
I’d say the Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, overthrown in 2011, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, overthrown in 2011, Moammar Gaddafi in Libya, overthrown in 2011, and Ali Abdallah Saleh in Yemen, overthrown in 2012, all made a similar error of depending an an ever narrower elite, often one they themselves helped create through nepotism and cronyism.
Trump has tied himself to a handful of billionaires and their interests, and has invited some of them into government to take a chain saw to it. It is an extremely narrow base of power if he loses his popularity with white southerners through letting the billionaires cut their social security and other government support.
Worse than a narrow base of support among the ultra-wealthy, many Middle Eastern dictators adopted policies that harmed a wide range of other groups.
The oil price revolution of the 1970s caused high inflation in Iran. The shah, however, blamed it on the shopkeepers gouging customers, and fined thousands of them, upsetting the retail sector.
I interviewed shopkeepers in Tripoli, Libya, after the overthrow of Gaddafi, and many of them told me they were glad he was gone. They said that he set tariffs arbitrarily, changing them abruptly and often. One electronics dealer told me that he never knew if he could make a profit, because he would send buyers to Dubai assuming one tariff rate, but by the time the goods arrived in Tripoli’s port, Gaddafi might have changed the tariff so that it hurt his bottom line.
Putting high tariffs on imports is more or less like fining retailers. Trump is making a typical Middle East dictator move in angering the retail sector, which has plenty of money to dedicate to politics, and plenty of workers who can demonstrate on a Saturday. There are about a million retail businesses in the US employing about 10 million workers. While the retailers may have been part of Trump’s fan base in the past, his tariffs of the past week could well sour them big-time.
It could be a sign of things to come that a prominent Walmart heiress penned a barely veiled attack on Trump. The bulk of Walmart’s goods come from China, and Trump just knee-capped the Walton family, which owns the retail giant.
The Iranian monarch expanded the university system but instituted a deadly censorship system, with secret police carting intellectuals away for having mildly criticized the government. The universities came to be full of people who hated the dictator, as did the K-12 schools, such that teachers mobilized.
This paradoxical expansion of higher education but then cracking down on critical thought was pursued by Mubarak, Ben Ali, Gaddafi and Saleh, as well. University students were at the barricades in the 2011 Arab Spring youth revolutions.
There are about 3.6 million K-12 schoolteachers in the US, and about a million post-secondary teachers. I suspect they are increasingly done out with Trump just as their counterparts were upset with the shah 50 years ago.
There are also 19 million college students in America, whose present and future Trump is jeopardizing dramatically.
“Hands Off!” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / ChatGPT, 2025
The shah also angered many in the white collar middle class with his censorship and cronyism. The white collar middle class was also conspicuous in the 2011 Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia.
Trump’s firing of thousands of federal workers and scientists, his endangering of the universities that educate the children of the middle class, his destruction of the medical research infrastructure that combats disease outbreaks and public health menaces actually goes far beyond anything any Middle East dictator did. The professional classes are not powerless in American society and angering them on such a large scale will have an effect.
Back in the 1970s, the four-fold increase in oil receipts allowed the shah to embark on many building works, such that laborers came from the countryside in large numbers for day work in construction. Inflation, however, often ate at their wages, and slums grew up around the cities with few amenities. These workers were available for anti-regime protests because they were dissatisfied and often part time employees with time on their hands.
Trump’s attack on the social safety net will hit the poor and the workers hard, and produce urban unrest. His tariffs will be inflationary, and will hit workers and the poor the hardest.
Dictators who get overthrown, then, anger the main social groups and classes in society, one after another, while surrounding themselves with filthy rich cronies who cannot in the end protect the autocrats from widespread popular anger.
The United States is a much more organized society than the shah’s Iran or any of the Arab states affected by the Arab Spring. Groups who see their interests injured have many connections, means of self-expression, and ways of organizing. I’d be shocked if Saturday’s rallies petered out. I think, on the contrary, that they may well be the kernel of one of America’s most important mass movements.
My only fear is that people will channel their energies into the 2026 midterms and the Democratic Party and stop there. The Democrats are corrupt and bear some of the blame for the state of the nation. Any popular movement needs to demand change not only in Republican policies but also in Democratic ones.
We don’t need Clintonian Democrats in the place of MAGA. We need an American social democracy.
What would that look like? Listen to Bernie Sanders.
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