Broadsheet

I’ve spoken before with Jonathan Gruber, one of America’s leading health economists; I decided to talk again after reading a remarkable new paper he co-wrote about the effects of immigration on healthcare for native-born seniors — bottom line: the attack on immigrants will send thousands of us to an early grave.

Transcript follows

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TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Jonathan Gruber

(recorded 2/11/26)

Paul Krugman: Hi everyone. This week I’m talking for a second time with Jon Gruber, one of the world’s best healthcare economists. I wanted to talk with him about some of his new work which I think is really important. It’s at the intersection between healthcare and immigration policy. So first off, healthcare. We’ve actually had a major change in health policy, sort of by default, which is the end of enhanced subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. Are you tracking how that’s going and where we are so far?

Jonathan Gruber: Yeah, Paul, let’s cover for a minute what happened. So a key pillar of the Affordable Care Act were tax subsidies to make health insurance affordable on the exchanges. And the way we set it up was that you pay a sliding scale percent of your income. So if you’re very poor, you’re on Medicaid, unless you’re one of those ridiculous states that didn’t expand Medicaid. Then you paid about $20 if you’re near poor, ramping up to at a maximum of about 10% of your income. And that maximum was set at four times the poverty line, which is a little bit more than median income in the US.

Under COVID, President Biden put an expanded version of those subsidies and he made three critical changes. One is the 20 became zero. And it turns out that matters a lot. It turns out zero matters a lot for some people. There’s a surprising amount of evidence that even if someone takes things like life-saving drugs, a $5 copayment really deters people from taking them.

So the zero helped a lot. He lowered the slope so people paying 8% of income were then paying 6. But he also got rid of that cliff at the top. And you might think, for people above the median income, I’m not that sympathetic. But if you’re an older person in a high cost state, health insurance can be very, very expensive. So those were first put in place for two years and extended for three more years. They expired within this past year because they were not extended.

What does that mean? That means that a bunch of very low income people are now going to stop paying zero and pay something. People in the middle will pay some more. And then people at the top of the scale—sort of above middle income but not rich—those people are to suddenly face unaffordable health insurance costs. So it’s very personal to me. I have friends who are 60-year-olds in Massachusetts like me. I have a friend who’s going from paying $8,000 a year to $25,000 a year for health insurance. I don’t know what his income is, but even if your income was $100,000, that’s 25% of your income. That’s a lot of money. That’s unaffordable.

The projections from my research, my independent research, and actually the Congressional Budget Office agreed, were that over time about four million people would lose health insurance from this. I think it’s always good to explain to people what that means. The best estimates suggest, based on the Affordable Care Act, that for every 800 people who lose health insurance, one person dies every year. So 4 million people losing health insurance is 5,000 more deaths a year.

So far, looks like enrollment’s down about a million and a half. So far it’s smaller than expected, but the expectation was a 4 million person drop would arise over time. I think it takes people time to adjust. Part of it is some states have reacted by filling the gap. So Massachusetts has announced that it will continue subsidies at that level paid for solely by the state, $250 million. Several other states have as well. And that may be part of why enrollment has dropped less than we might have expected so far.

Krugman: Yeah, and the fact that states can even get anywhere close to doing that is telling us that there really isn’t that much money involved. That making a health care program that kind of made the United States almost a civilized country for universal health insurance really didn’t cost very much beyond what we were already spending.

Gruber: You know, here’s a way to think about it, Paul. The cost of extending these subsidies for a decade is one-tenth of the increase in the deficit from the Trump tax cuts. $300 million for subsidies, $3.3 trillion for the Trump tax cuts. So what we’re saying is we’ll spend ten times as much to make tax cuts for the rich as we are to make insurance affordable for the middle class.

Krugman: Wow, yeah. I don’t have the ICE budget in my head right away, but it’s clearly gotta be bigger.

Gruber: I believe the ICE budget is up to 80 billion a year. So right there, that was about a 70 billion a year increase. That’s twice what you’d need every year to have these subsidies put in place.

Krugman: I mean, you talk about loss of health insurance and dying, but it’s also true that for a lot of people the financial hardship is just huge. You’re taking people who are sort of better off than the median income, though not rich by any stretch of the imagination, and they’re suddenly faced with intolerable health care bills.

Gruber: You know, there’s a large literature now showing the financial benefits of health insurance, showing that people who are insured go into bankruptcy less, they have less delinquent debt. Here’s the finding that I think is most striking about this, Paul. There was a famous study called the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment run by Amy Finkelstein and Kate Baker. I was affiliated with it, but they really ran it. That study was essentially a random allocation of health insurance through a lottery in Oregon. And there were lots of findings. What was most striking to me immediately was that depression in the [insured] population fell by 30%. That’s not Prozac. That is the loss of stress, of not worrying every day about being bankrupted by your medical bills. And this is the kind of well-being that health insurance gives people. This is why other countries have universal coverage, because it’s an unnecessary stress in people’s lives.

Krugman: Yeah, I have to say just a very, very tiny echo of all that was when I retired from the Times. I had to switch plans from UnitedHealthcare, which I had through the Times to another plan through the City University of New York. And obviously Medicare is involved, too. But somehow or other things got screwed up and they put me on the wrong plan just as I was starting to have some health problems. And the amount of sheer anxiety created by a brief visit to the emergency room, not knowing right at the moment if it will be paid for.

Gruber: First of all, you don’t know what the price is gonna be. So we can talk about problems in the healthcare system, a lack of transparency. You have no idea what you’re in for. My daughter drives an ambulance. There are people who she wants to pick up who say, “Please don’t put me in the ambulance, I can’t afford it. I don’t have health insurance.” These are people making life altering choices for reasons and they’re worried about not having insurance.

You know, I gave a Ted talk on this and the story I started with is the story of two women, both who were diagnosed with breast cancer at age 36, both with small children. One did not have insurance, but she delayed treatment and eventually died. The other is my wife, who because she had good insurance was well treated and is perfectly healthy today. And you know, those stories are replicated all over this country.

Krugman: Okay, just to add one more thing, I assume that you follow Charles Gaba, the amazing sort of autodidact, self-taught health care expert who’s become invaluable since the early days of Obamacare. But he’s been saying that just looking at the number of people with insurance is not enough. We need to look at people downgrading, getting worse policies.

Gruber: You know, this is a harder one, Paul, because defining underinsurance is very difficult. So let me give you two examples. There’s two senses in which people downgrade. One is they move to plans with higher deductibles and higher out-of-pocket cost sharing. Now that depends really on your income. The truth is, people like you and I should have high cost sharing. That’s the honest truth. We can afford it.

The story I like to tell about this is, you know, I hurt my knee playing tennis. It was still hurting a couple weeks later. It was the weekend. My wife said I should go to the emergency room and get it looked at. I went to the emergency room and got an MRI. It cost me 50 bucks. They looked at it. They said, stop being a whiny bitch. Go home. You’re fine. That cost my insurer $1,000. If it had cost me $1,000, I would have waited another week. So cost sharing is mixed. For low income people, it can be a barrier to getting needed care. For high income people, it’s not. So that’s one sense of what you’re upgrading, narrowing.

The other sense of underinsurance is this big issue about narrow networks, about people not having the choice of provider. And on this one, I think actually the evidence, Paul, is pretty clear that narrow networks are not problematic, that people have seen their choice limited, but it hasn’t really negatively affected their health. There are some horror stories, don’t get me wrong, but on average, I think of narrow networks like the way we thought about airline deregulation. You know, no one wants to pay hugely high prices for a very broad network, just like no one wants to pay very high prices to have nice silverware again on airplanes.

And so, I agree we should worry some about it but I think the focus once again should be on an income basis, which is lower income people facing high cost sharing and protecting them from that.

Krugman: I always think of driving down Route 1 in New Jersey, where there are lots of billboards advertising, “Our emergency room is best.” It’s a horrible thing if people are choosing emergency rooms based on who has the best billboard.

So, okay. You have this really interesting and actually quite upsetting paper about immigration and healthcare. It’s really kind of startling.

Gruber: Yeah, so basically, the hypothesis we’re testing is: does changing the number of immigrants change the health outcomes of our nation’s seniors? We focus on the nation’s seniors partly because that’s where the action is in terms of mortality. That’s where the data is. We have excellent data for the Medicare program. And also because they’re not the immigrants. You can’t be on the Medicare program if you’re an immigrant unless you’ve been in this country for a while and worked and things.

So it’s really a separate population. We’re looking at the effects of a flow of immigrants into the care of our nation’s seniors on Medicare. And it turns out that a lot of the care for our nation’s elders is very labor intensive, in particular the care they get for their long-term care needs, both at home and in nursing homes. And it turns out a lot of those workers in those sectors are immigrants. Immigrants are disproportionately represented in the healthcare sector in general and the caring part of the healthcare sector in particular.

However, it’s not obvious that more immigration would improve care. First of all, you have to argue that more people improves care. There’s some evidence on that, but you have to argue that. The second is, look, a lot of care might be about communication. If immigrants cannot communicate well with the elders, if elders are racist, if they’re not able to work with the immigrants, maybe it wouldn’t improve their care. So we want to ask the question, does having more immigration actually improve the care and health outcomes of seniors?

The results are basically that when there’s more immigration, there’s a large rise in the number of caregivers, particularly the number of aids and other people in that part of the healthcare spectrum. Second, it does not lead to reductions in the number of native caregivers. They’re not taking the jobs of native caregivers. Actually, we find there’s a slight increase in the number of native doctors when there’s more immigration. We think because there’s more the doctors can do because they have more people who can work with them. But there’s no evidence they’re reducing the size of the native pool working in that sector. And then we find a significant and quite striking reduction in the odds that elderly people will die when there’s more immigration to their community.

Interpreting these numbers are hard, but let me sort of give you a number. I think it’s a good way to hang on to it. What our results imply is that if there’s a 25% rise in legal immigration in the US—325,000 people—that would lead to 5,000 fewer elder deaths per year. Let’s put it another way. Haitians are disproportionately represented in the healthcare sector. Our estimates imply that if you deport 330,000 Haitians, which is what the revocation of TPS would do, you will cause 9,000 more elder deaths per year. So this is really striking evidence that immigrants are just a vital part of our network that’s caring for our nation’s elders.

Krugman: There’s a couple of points in there. One is, I have to admit I’m a little annoyed at myself. There’s a kind of general proposition that immigrant workers in the United States mostly do not compete head to head with native-born workers because they tend to be in quite different occupations. And I always talk about farm labor and construction and food processing. But healthcare, somehow I never mentioned that. Yet, the share of home health aides that are foreign born is immense.

Gruber: Yeah, they’re really a very important part of our ecosystem of caring throughout the healthcare system, all the way up to doctors. Many of our best doctors are immigrants, but we’re focused more on the unskilled immigration. And it is a huge share. My wife is a nursing home ombudsman. She sort of is a volunteer checking quality at local nursing homes.

The bottom rung is called Certified Nurse assistants, CNAs. They’re virtually all immigrants. These are hard jobs. These are jobs where you’re changing the bedpans of elderly patients, turning them in their bed to make sure they don’t get bed sores, things like that. These are jobs which in Massachusetts pay slightly more than working at Starbucks. And they’re jobs that natives, by and large, don’t want.

Look, one in three home care workers are immigrants. 18% of all healthcare workers are immigrants. They are a huge and vital part of our system. And let’s remember one important fact. I’m sure you’ve talked about this, Paul, in the context of our fiscal situation, about our aging population, creating a dire fiscal situation. Our aging populations create a massive new demand for long-term care. We have a population that’s rapidly aging. We are about 10 to 15 years away from peak long-term care demand in our country as the boomers reach their late 70s, early 80s. We already are vastly understaffed in our long-term care sector. We have a billion people who would be delighted to come to America and work at the wage they’re willing to offer to help take care of our seniors and they’re wonderful, caring people. And yet we’re moving the opposite direction, kicking them out.

Krugman: Yes. This is one of those things, by the way, where the normal distinction between over 65 and under 65 doesn’t fully capture what’s going on. You know, I’m about to turn 73, but there’s a world of difference between 66-year-olds and 80-year-olds. So although the baby boomers are basically all over 65 now, the kind of age-adjusted population of seniors is still going to be cresting much, much higher.

Gruber: Yeah, Paul. I still remember when you were a young 33-year-old pup in 1985 teaching me international trade. Time does fly. And look, it is true. First of all, it’s not just over 65. A lot of the caring is actually for the disabled who are under 65. So it’s not just over 65. We focus on elder care in this paper. But there’s a lot of disabled people who need this care. They’re a very important, significant part of our population. But it’s not just the oldest. The oldest is old.

I actually have a book I wrote with Kathleen McGarry at UCLA, which is comparing long-term care systems around the world. We have descriptions of the long-term care system in 10 different countries. And for each country, we show there’s not just a rapid growth in the over 65 share. Within the over 65, there’s a rapid growth in the over 85 share. And this is the peak care. One in three people will use the nursing home at some point.

More than half the people will need formal long-term care of some kind at some point. This is going to be a huge demand and quite frankly a huge opportunity for our economy to provide in an economy where AI is taking a lot of low-skilled jobs. These are low-skilled jobs AI can’t do. These are low-skilled caring. Maybe someday we can have robots do this, but that’s a long way away. So this is job where a lot of low-skilled workers that might be displaced from other sectors can provide care to the elders who need it.

Krugman: Yeah. It’s interesting. The strategy you use for estimating does rely a lot on the fact that immigrants don’t go to all places equally. So the most acute health care shortage, or lack of health care workers, is probably occurring in places where immigrants don’t go. I was wondering about that a little bit.

Gruber: It’s a great point. Immigration alone is not going to be enough to address the coming crisis of a dramatic increase in long term care needs. We’re also going to have to deal with the low wages we pay. And I have a plan for that I’m happy to discuss with you. We’ve actually put together a pilot program here in Massachusetts to try to deal with that. But it’s hard to imagine given our fiscal situation that we’re going to be able to afford the increase in pay

that will call forth the supply without immigrants as well. So immigrants need to be part of the strategy. If we simply try to raise pay enough to have this done domestically, the pay increase would bankrupt the government. So I think we need a joint strategy. And I would argue there’s three pieces. One piece is immigration, which we’re discussing. Another piece is higher pay. The third piece, and this is what we’re doing in Massachusetts, and it’s really critical, is to recognize the important role of career ladders in this sector.

So in the nursing home, you can be a CNA, that’s the lowest level. The next level up is called the Licensed Practical Nurse, an LPN. They largely exist just in nursing homes. This is below an RN, the nurse you typically deal with, above a CNA. They’re growing in other sectors, but they’re largely focused in nursing homes. A CNA makes 22 bucks an hour. An LPN makes 40 bucks an hour. Okay? So that’s a pretty good living. You only need one year of school if you’re a CNA to become an LPN.

So, we did a survey in Massachusetts of all the CNAs and said, why aren’t you becoming LPNs? And they all said, “we can’t afford the school, we can’t afford the time off.” So we got a $6 million grant from the state to set up a pilot program here in Massachusetts called the Career Ladders Program. You can look it up where we are paying for CNAs to get half a year, 50% time off paid and free tuition to become LPNs. And the money doesn’t come from the government, it’s repaid by their employers because their employers are so desperate for these LPNs. They were willing to make this a revolving fund where they repaid the money in. We need to get creative in thinking about how we can make this a more attractive sector.

Krugman: Okay, so you’re actually out there in the field trying to do stuff, which is really impressive.

Gruber: We have to be.

Krugman: But I have to say, in a way this ties in with the question about upfront costs and co-pays and failure to seek treatment. I think it’s difficult for people like us to whom life has been kind to appreciate how close to the edge lots of people are. That even though, you know, we would look and say the payoff of your income over the next 15 years from taking a year off and going to school would easily self-justify, people can’t do that.

Gruber: They can’t. I mean, they are working three jobs. They have kids to take care of. There’s a great book by Mulleinathan and Shafer about the mental stress that low-income people are under and the fact that it doesn’t get in their bandwidth to make investments. They call it the poverty trap. Basically, when you’re poor, you’re so busy trying to survive, you can’t make the investments that let you move out of poverty.

And this is just not appreciated by those of us who aren’t in poverty, who have had a lot of beneficial aspects of their life, that poor people really need a hand up to just make the investments that will allow them. It’s not that they’re lazy. They just don’t have the time to make those investments. So I’m hoping we can set up programs like this, which will promote that kind of human capital development. And then even if the CNA job is not that highly paid, it’s something new for a couple of years on your way up to a more highly paid position.

Krugman: Okay, so it’s not just more immigration, although God knows that’s where we’re gonna get the people to fill these frontline jobs, but it’s also then improving conditions. And of course, when we talk about immigrants and senior citizens, we talk about the fiscal side and the fact that the federal government is in large part a vehicle for taxing working-age people and supporting older people. Immigrants help with that because they generally come during their working age, but it’s also the supply side. So it’s both. And of course, what we’re doing is moving in the opposite direction.

Gruber: Exactly. At a time when those needs are growing, we are moving in the opposite direction. And we need to figure out a politically acceptable way. I understand immigration is a fraught issue, and clearly we might have gone too far in the Biden years. And so the question is how we get back to a more rational immigration policy that recognizes that we need these bodies. Tara Watson at the Brookings Institution has proposed specific increases in quotas for health care workers. We can think about ways to really use our immigration system more productively.

Krugman: Yeah, it’s interesting. The number that you use in the paper is a 325,000 increase in immigration. But that also turns out to be roughly in the same ballpark as the number of people ICE has arrested in the past year. And of course, Stephen Miller keeps on wanting 3,000 deportations a day, so, more than a million. And by the estimates you had, that would mean something like 15,000 extra deaths per year.

Gruber: You know, these are folks who are contributing. If you look at the data, a very small fraction try to be criminals. The majority of these people are contributing to our society and critically in ways that our natives don’t want to contribute. Not because they’re bad people, just because the wages are bad and they have other things they’d rather do. And healthcare has become a very partisan issue.

Krugman: Yeah.

Gruber: But I feel like long-term care doesn’t have to be. Republicans have moms too. And I feel like we can really think about trying to make this an issue that we can come together on, and think about how we can treat our nation’s seniors with some dignity. I wrote an editorial with Richard Frank of the Brookings Institution pointing out that during COVID, you know, we shut down our economy and spent $3 trillion largely to save the lives of our senior citizens. Yet now that COVID’s over, we go back to putting them in shitty nursing homes and not given the dignity that they deserve. Why can’t we continue to care for our nation’s elderly in the way that they deserve?

Krugman: Yeah, I mean, care can be very expensive, but we’re already spending a lot and...

Gruber: We’re already spending a lot. So the other thing we did, working with Richard Frank of the Brookings Institution, we developed a program for universal home care for the elderly. We’ve designed a program where everyone on Medicare would get government funded care in their home, because people don’t want to go to nursing homes. Let’s be blunt. And we think actually the main mechanism through which our effect is operating in this paper is by keeping people at home and out of institutions, hospitals and nursing homes.

And we have a proposal for a universal home care program that would be funded by the government, but with individual co-payments. So richer people would pay in, poor people would get it for free. And we estimate that you could provide a universal home care program that’s very reasonable for about $40 billion a year, which is really, once again, chump change compared to the maxes we’re talking about.

Krugman: I didn’t realize it was that cheap. And if you’ve had elderly loved ones, it’s so emotionally wrenching to deal with all of that. And the idea that we could sort of make it a fundamental part of our society that we treat older people decently for so little money. I’m actually shocked by that.

Gruber: You know, it’s not just that. Don’t forget, what does it do? It frees up children—largely women, largely daughters—to reenter the labor force and deploy their skills where they’re most valuable. It creates jobs for immigrants and natives, and hopefully ladders to good paying jobs. And it really just reduces the intergenerational stresses that are caused by caring. We have this very strange, unlevel playing field in long-term care in our country, Paul, where when your parents are in a nursing home or assisted living if you’re wealthy, everything’s kind of taken care of. Their food, their medical care, everything. When they’re home, you’ve got to arrange it all. You’ve got to arrange their food, you’ve got to arrange their medical care, you’ve got to arrange their caregivers. And that’s very taxing, it’s very expensive, it’s just tough on relationships. And there’s no reason why we can’t afford this in our society.

Krugman: 95% of Americans can’t afford that now. I’d say that basically textbook royalties were what made my mother-in-law’s final years decent.

But, can you talk about research methodology on this?

Gruber: Well, a shout out to another Nobel Prize winning economist, David Card. David Card is one of the early pioneers in research on immigration. He was more interested in the effects of immigrants on the labor market. And he said, “Let’s say I want to know the effect of immigration to an area on native workers. Well, the problem is why do immigrants come to an area? Maybe they come to an area because opportunity is going up.” So, you might find that more immigrants cause native workers to do better. That’s not because the immigrants came. It’s because immigrants came to places that were going to do better anyway. This is a common confusion of causation and correlation that drives empirical work in economics. So what David Card came up with was a very clever, what we call an instrument in economics, or a very clever natural experiment. He noted, as you said, that immigrants tend to cluster. So when Haitians come to America, they tend to go to certain spots. When Mexicans come, they tend to go to certain spots. My daughter-in-law is Brazilian. Brazilians from Minas Gerais in Brazil tend to come to Framingham, Massachusetts. And he said at the same time, there are large national waves of immigration that are caused for reasons that are independent of the US. There’s an earthquake. There’s a humanitarian crisis. So let’s take Haiti. There’s a dictator in Haiti. Hundreds of thousands of people leave Haiti. They come to America. That’s an experiment. And they go to places that are predictable.

So what he said is, when there are waves of certain immigrant types, you look at the places where they tend to go. And then that’s sort of an experiment. So when there’s a dictator deposed in Haiti, and hundreds of thousands of people leave Haiti, that’s essentially a parachute drop of Haitians into Springfield Mass, and a couple other places where they’re concentrated. And then that is a real experiment. That’s essentially what we do. We use his method, we adjust a little and say, well, we’re really gonna focus on groups that particularly work in healthcare, like Haitians. We adjusted for that and we actually asked when there’s these parachute drops of people into places, what happens to the mortality rate of the elderly people?

And one thing that’s changed since you and I started research so long ago, Paul, is we now have all these extra tests that we do in empirical work. And one very common test is to say, well, if this is really an experiment, then nothing should be going on beforehand. If it’s something where, gee, immigrants are moving where elderly people are dying less for some other reason, then you should see elderly people dying less over time in those areas. But that’s not true. You see elderly mortality is pretty flat, the immigrants arrive, and then elderly mortality drops. So it really is a pretty compelling application of what David Carr came up with to show that this sort of parachute drop of immigrants is really improving lives.

We then turn to try and understand the mechanisms, which, quite frankly, we don’t understand as well as we’d like. It looks like there’s both less use of medical institutions and better treatment in nursing homes from having more immigrants around. So it looks like it’s really about this long-term care nexus, which is where it’s focused. But we can’t prove that. We can prove that mortality’s dropped, but we’re weak on the mechanisms. And I think that’s why there needs to be more work in this area.

Krugman: This is a complete side issue, but yeah, there’s been this empirical revolution in economics where people really look at the data. David Card’s most famous venture into all that is probably his work on the minimum wage with Alan Kruger. Instead of [merely talking about] supply and demand and abstracting what ought to happen, they actually looked at what actually happened when New Jersey raised the minimum wage and Pennsylvania did not. And it was a shocking thing because the job losses that everyone was saying should happen didn’t. And that’s the start of a now huge body of literature that has forced us to change the way we thought about labor markets. I have to say, in a lot of ways, lots of things have gotten worse since I was younger, but I think that a lot of economic research has gotten better.

Gruber: Yeah, we can have a long, old-bane conversation about this, but I sit in these conferences now and hear young people present papers, and I’m almost sort of embarrassed by what I called research 35 years ago. I mean, you know, a typical paper now has a 125-page appendix with everything you could check and all this. It’s really incredible. Research has gotten quite amazing.

Krugman: Yeah, another trade person said to me, “You know, none of the papers that got you a Nobel Prize would be publishable now. Where’s the empirical work?” That’s true. But yeah, no, it’s great.

Gruber: Hahaha!

Krugman: So, where do think we’re going? I’ve been trying to think a little bit past this moment of the crisis on the affordable care subsidies and future for health care reform. I mean, you were certainly part of the intellectual nexus that got us the Affordable Care Act, which even in its somewhat damaged form makes a huge difference. But what next? Do you think we can actually move forward and get the system better, besides just restoring the subsidies?

Gruber: Yeah, I think obviously restoring the subsidies is a big deal. But in terms of insurance coverage, I think it’s going to be modest changes. I mean, essentially, even if we restore the subsidies, we’ll have 30 million uninsured Americans. Who are they? 10 million are undocumented immigrants. There’s zero political consensus for writing them insurance. About 10 million are people who simply think they’re too healthy to pay for insurance, and without a mandate we’re not going to get them.

Krugman: Right. The original conception for Obamacare was that you would be required to have insurance and pay a penalty if you didn’t, which made absolutely good sense and everybody hated it. But anyway, yeah.

Gruber: Well, once again, that was an idea out of the Heritage Foundation adopted by a Republican governor in Massachusetts. Let us not forget. But the remaining 10 million are people who can actually get insurance and just maybe don’t know it. It’s very cheap. They haven’t signed up for it. So I’m doing some research on international healthcare systems. The big thing that other countries do is they make health insurance seamless in a way we don’t. It’s not necessarily about having a single payer. Germany has many insurance payers. Switzerland has many insurance payers. But it’s still universal coverage because they make it easy and seamless in a way we don’t.

So really, increasing coverage is going to involve a significant move in that direction, which I don’t see happening. I think the focus is going to shift to the supply side. And what do we do about the supply of health care workers? And what do we do fundamentally about health care prices, which are just out of whack? We pay much more for health care services than anywhere else in the world. We know why. Kenneth Arrow taught us why in 1963, when he wrote the first article on health economics and said there’s no market with more market failures than health care.

And when I teach basic economics at MIT, I start by saying the market is great, but I say the market isn’t so great when the market fails. And the market fails nowhere worse than in health care. And every other country in the world has recognized that, and they regulate the prices paid in health care. We haven’t. So I think that’s going to be the next big debate: why is health care becoming unaffordable? It’s being shifted to people and what they can pay.

And so we need to both increase the supply of people in the sector and regulate the prices that are paid in the sector. I think that’s the next big battle. And then, the last thing I would say in sort of my poor prognostication, I really do think the focus is going to turn to this long-term care issue. I really do think this is going to become an issue we’re going to discuss more and more as more and more people are entering this age range. As people see their parents or themselves entering this age range, they’re gonna realize we have a crisis on our hands of an inability to properly care for our nation’s elderly. And, honestly, this is something that smart politicians can jump on and get ahead of, and think of this as a winning issue.

Krugman: Yeah, it has to be. It’s just so visible in your face and it’s so obvious, the system is cruel and dysfunctional and I think the only thing that allows it to persist is that most Americans don’t know that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Gruber: That’s very well put and I think partly the question is how we educate people on that and how we get them to understand that this is a solvable crisis, and an affordably solvable crisis.

Krugman: It’s funny, we do pay medical expenses for seniors. Medicare, by international standards, is a very lavishly funded program. And the reason that we’ve been able to get this big expansion at relatively low cost under the Affordable Care Act is that younger people are kind of cheap. But although we treat elderly generously with hospital expenses, ironically, we don’t take care of them if they aren’t in the emergency room. And that’s a really shocking thing.

Gruber: You know, it’s really interesting, Paul. When we wrote up this Oregon health insurance experiment and newspapers covered it, one of the major findings was, in the short run, health insurance didn’t improve health. That’s been proven to be overtaken by events. But we did find this enormous reduction in depression. And the articles would be like, you know, “Program Doesn’t Affect Health.” The last sentence would say, “Oh, but mental health improved.” It comes to this view of health as acute physical health care where, in fact, I think increasingly we’re realizing a more holistic concept about mental health and social determinants of health. Basically, the truth is we need to be thinking about what makes people well, not what makes people physically healthy.

Krugman: You almost sound a little bit like RFK Jr. except that your opinion is actually based on reality.

Gruber: Look, the one positive thing that he’s doing is starting interesting conversations, thinking about the larger picture of wellness. I mean, the prescriptions are all wrong, but the conversations are right. And I think here is the challenge we face, Paul: measuring outcomes is harder. When you go to the hospital after a car accident, we can measure part of the quality of care by whether you died or not. Or maybe whether you end up back in the hospital.

Krugman: Right.

Gruber: If someone is treated poorly as a senior in a nursing home, they’re gonna die anyway. The question is whether their life will be miserable along the way. Partly that’s on economists and policy experts to come up with better ways to help the public understand the consequences and the measures of what it’s costing. You know, in economics we talk about quality adjusted life years.

Krugman: Yeah.

Gruber: We talk about not just how long you live, but the quality of those years. We’re very bad at measuring the quality part.

Krugman: Yeah. Just to say, all of this seems a lot more urgent to me at this point in my life than it did 40 years ago. Let’s hope that your research and proposals will help move the needle, and if we get past the current nightmare, maybe we can actually make some progress on really making things better.

Gruber: I hope so.

This week, continuing in the vein of some of our previous strategy and military theory primers, I wanted to off a basic 101-level survey of the strategic theory behind efforts, in a sense, directed against the state itself, both violent approaches (what we might call ‘terroristic insurgency’)¹ and non-violent approaches (protest). It may seem strange to treat violent insurgency and non-violent protest together but while they employ very different methods, as we’ll see, they share a similar theoretical framework, attempting to achieve some of the similar effects by different means, both working within the state, against the state (or its policies), focused on the changing minds rather than battlefields.

Naturally this comes in part in response to the significant amounts of protest actions happening right now in the United States, but the framework here is very much intended to be a general one, applicable to both armed insurgencies and non-violent protests worldwide. The world, after all, is really quite big and there are multiple major protest movements and multiple armed insurgencies happening globally at any given time. That said, much as with protracted war, a movement aiming to push against the state is naturally going to be heavily shaped by local conditions, particularly by the nature of the state against which it sets itself as well as the condition and political alignment of its people.

Finally, I want to clarify how I am using terminology here at the outset. I have mostly stuck here to ‘insurgent’ to describe violent actors opposing the state and ‘protestor’ to describe non-violent ones. Obviously in mass movements, violence is not a binary but a spectrum – a single fellow kicking over a trash can does not turn a non-violent march into a riot, but equally having a ‘political wing’ does not turn an organization mounting a terror campaign ‘non-violent.’ However the strategic dichotomy is going to be useful to understanding how these groups in their ideal form tackle problems. Likewise, I am going to describe the violent movements opposing the state as ‘insurgencies’ but I want to note at the outset that I am drawing a distinction here between what I am defining as ‘insurgencies’ which lack the backing of a conventional army or the expectation of soon acquiring one, as opposed to forces in a protracted war framework who have or expect to have the backing of a conventional force, however weak (we might call the latter group guerillas, although this too is imprecise). The line between these two strategies is certainly fuzzy – many insurgencies hope to eventually transition to protracted war and the two approaches share many tactics – but there are worthwhile differences between the two.

In particular, whereas the guerilla’s cause is supported by a conventional army – even if it is in hiding – and anticipates a shift to positional, conventional warfare and thus eventual victory on the battlefield (however distance), the insurgent has no expectation of developing a conventional force capable of meeting his opponent any time soon and is instead wholly focused on the ‘war in the mind,’ often through the use of terror tactics. That said, I mostly avoid ‘terrorist’ here as well, in an effort to avoid the ‘our freedom fighter is their terrorist’ problem of morally loaded language in order to focus on tactics and strategic effects, rather than the rightness or wrongness of the cause. And I should be clear here, what follows – despite being almost 11,000 words long – is very much a schematic overview into which a great amount of detail and nuance could (and probably ought) to be added, still I think the theory foundation here might be useful.

At the end, once we have our theory out, I am going to make a few observations about the current immigration policy anti-ICE protests in the United States generally and in Minneapolis-Saint Paul in particular and how I think they fit in to this framework.

(Bibliography Note: The difficulty in writing this kind of a framework is that much of what is written in terrorism and insurgency is written primarily from the counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency (COIN) perspective. Nevertheless, to the degree these works understand their enemies, they are useful. The standard teaching works for understanding counter-insurgency warfare are typically campaign histories of successful and failed COIN operations, such as J.A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (2005); note also older and influential efforts such as B.B. Fall, Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina (1961), D. Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (1964) and A. Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (1977) . The United States military’s understanding of these lessons is distilled in a field manual, FM 3-24, albeit hardly one without criticisms. For the references here to the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan (2001-2021), many of my observations are drawn specifically from W. Morgan, The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley (2021), which I cannot recommend strongly enough. Though it is hardly a perfect book, I also reference here Max Boot, Invisible Armies (2013) specifically for its discussion of the failure rate of insurgencies. In terms of framing these campaign histories, I lean here quite hard on the framework used by W.E. Lee in Waging War (2015) which was the textbook I taught this topic from when I taught a global survey of warfare. On the strategy of non-violence, what I would without question recommend first is T.E. Ricks, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement 1954-1968 (2022). Also note the strategic thinking of non-violent leaders; Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963) is a remarkably cogent and clear explication of non-violence as a strategy in both its goals and how it was specifically framed for one such campaign. I am not an expert on Gandhi’s writings – which are voluminous – but I did read through the selections in Gandhi on Non-Violence, ed. T. Merton (1964). I am sure a scholar of his writings could do far better; I feel my insufficiency on this topic keenly. Finally, in terms of theory, this post uses as its theoretical foundation a mix of Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Krieg (1832) – I generally use the Howard and Paret translation, though no translation is perfect – and Hannah Arendt’s On Violence (1970).)

(Header image: from left to right, all via Wikipedia: Taliban fighters in 2021, a car-bombing in Iraq in 2005, a non-violent student sit-in in North Carolina in 1960 and an anti-ICE protest in Minneapolis, January 2026.)

Establishing a Framework

Before we dive in to the differences between insurgencies and protest movements, we have to establish their common framework and before we do that we need to establish some terms and for that we will need to rely quite a bit on Carl von Clausewitz, so get your beer mug, wine glass or drinking horn ready.

The starting point for understanding how both insurgencies and protests work is the Clausewitzian trinity. This is, in and of itself, something of an odd statement because Clausewitz, in writing On War (1832) was not focused on either insurgencies or non-violent protest movements but rather on conventional, large-scale interstate war of the sort that he had known. But the framework he constructed to understand the nature of war is so fundamental that it applies effectively to forms of conflict beyond the kinds of war he knew and indeed beyond the activity of war to some significant degree and so it is very useful here.

Via Wikipedia, Carl von Clausewitz. For those playing the Clausewitz drinking game: prepare to get *absolutely* hammered.

To very briefly summarize, Clausewitz begins by noting that war, by its nature, tends to escalate infinitely, each side of a conflict applying more and more force against the other until one side ‘runs out.’ Infinite escalate is an inextricable part of war’s core nature in the ideal. The two sides to a conflict thus increasingly commit their strength until one side can escalate no further – it has no more strength to apply – and thus fails, leading the stronger party in a position to impose their will upon the weaker. But of course in the real world this infinite escalation is restrained by real world factors, which Clausewitz breaks into three. It is these three factors that restrain (or in some cases, enhance) the escalating use of force that are the Clausewitzian trinity we so often talk about. They are:

Friction, the expression of randomness and unpredictability in war, encompassing all of the sorts of things that keep a state from having its full military force where it wants them to be, when it wants them to be there, functioning as intended. Bad weather, logistics snarls, unpredictable human with their emotions, unexpected enemy action – these are all forms of friction. The management of friction – management, not elimination, because it cannot be eliminated – is in Clausewitz view the proper occupation of generals, who apply their genius (natural talent) to it. And of course some actions and methods in war are also designed to increase an enemy’s friction – think something like supply disruption.

Next is Will, sometimes also termed Passion (translating Clausewitz is fun), which is to say the dedication of the people (or at least, the militarily or politically relevant people) to a cause. Clausewitz came up during the Napoleonic Wars, an age of mass warfare, so he thinks about this in terms of mass mobilization and for this post we should too. As such, Will resides with the People and is a product of their emotions, with the willingness of the great bulk of the society to submit to the hardships of a conflict in order to carry on the cause. High amounts of Will enables more escalation because a people will sacrifice more to carry on; flagging Will equally enforces limits on escalation.

Finally there is the political object, the actual aim of the conflict, the goal each side has. A state seeking an objective that is small or trivial or optional is going to be unwilling to spend its full strength in the pursuit of that objective. By contrast, a state whose entire existence is threatened will deploy everything it possibly can. In Clausewitz’ view the political object is managed by politicians, who do (or at least ought) to govern state strategy and the willingness of the state to expend resources by calculations of pure reason.

With these three elements in mind, it becomes possible to overcome an enemy (or to be overcome) without matching their maximum possible strength ‘in the ideal.’ A weak state, for instance, might hold off a stronger one simply because the thing being contested is much more important (the political object!) to them and so they apply a greater portion of their strength. Alternately, weak public support might prevent a strong state from mobilizing its full potential force or friction – perhaps a tricky supply situation at great distance with unpredictable conditions – might prevent the full application of that larger state’s force.

These three elements of the trinity are equally variables, which either side might seek to effect: to sap enemy will so as to limit the force they can mobilize or to structure political conditions so that attacking even a weaker neighbor is simply not worth the cost. In this latter point, this is how nuclear deterrence works: it raises the cost of a conventional war well above any possible gains, so that even a stronger state would profit nothing from attacking and so does not attack.

You may now stop chugging your drink (but have some handy, we’re not done with our good friend Clausewitz just yet).

For a weaker party in a conflict, altering these variables is of course essential: if you are the weaker party then by definition you are not in a position to win the ‘ideal’ trial of strength (which to be clear, never exists in the real world; it is only an ideal construct) in any case and so must seek ways to use the elements of the trinity as ‘levers’ to constrain your opponent’s ability to employ their strength, while keeping yours unconstrained.

And at last that is the key to understanding insurgencies and protests movements, because both insurgencies and protest movements take the form they do because from a perspective of pure force, they are the weakest parties compared to the violent power of the state, whichever state they might find themselves pitted against.

Theories of Victory

Fundamentally, what protests, insurgencies and terrorism campaigns have in common is that neither operates with any hope of directly challenging the armed force of the state. You may note this is a significant contrast to the theory of protracted war: while protracted war is a strategy of the weak against the strong, it envisions a future transition to a phase (or even phases) of direct, conventional ‘positional’ warfare, once the strength of the opposing power has been sapped. A force engaged in protracted war expects to win on the battlefield eventually, just not today. By contrast, while armed insurgencies often adopt a protracted war theory and thus a notional stage where they transition to conventional warfare, they often operate much farther from making that a reality.

Now I am to a degree defining this distinction between insurgency and protracted war – many of the parties involve understand themselves to be practicing both – but I think the distinction is important. A contrast may serve. The forces of North Vietnam (and their sympathizers in the South) waged a protracted war against the United States and the U.S. supported South Vietnamese government in which they were clearly in conventional terms the weaker partner, but at all points in that conflict, North Vietnam maintained a conventional military (the People’s Army of Vietnam or PAVN) engaging in a level of conventional warfare. That included major efforts to transition to direct, positional and conventional warfare in 1964 and again in 1968 and again in 1972 (being badly hammered each time). Practitioners of protracted war – we may, for the sake of simplicity here (if at the cost of some accuracy) call them guerillas – often engage in terrorist or insurgent tactics, but their overarching strategic theory assumes an eventual transition to conventional warfare.

By way of contrasting example, the insurgencies the United States faced in Afghanistan (alongside NATO allies) and in Iraq (alongside coalition allies) never seem to have seriously contemplated engaging the United States military in a conventional battle. Not only was the balance of forces extremely unfavorable, these groups had no real plan to make it favorable. This comes into really sharp relief if you think about airpower – without which engaging in a conventional groundfight against a modern military is simply high-tech suicide. North Vietnam, equipped by its allies, operated one of the most sophisticated air defense systems in the region and regularly inflicted air-to-air loses on United States pilots; they shot down thousands of planes. By contrast, the sum total of American fixed-wing aircraft combat losses in the air in Iraq and Afghanistan 2001-2021 consisted of a single A-10A Thunderbolt II.² Accidents and maintenance issues claimed aircraft far more often than enemy action. At no point, so far as I can tell, did Iraqi or Taliban insurgents make a serious effort to challenge American airpower because unlike the North Vietnamese, it was never required to do so for their theory of victory.

Via Wikipedia (who in turn got the screenshot from Voice of America), a group of Taliban fighters in 2021 in Kabul. You may note the lack of heavy weapons or militarized vehicles: these militants were never going to defeat the United States military in an open battle, nor did they plan to.

Fundamentally insurgencies lack access to substantial amounts of industrial firepower (typically because they have no foreign sponsor willing to hand them modern heavy weaponry; small arms are neat but to wage modern conventional warfare, you need armor, artillery and airpower) and so while they try to achieve their aims through violence, they operate with no hope of directly challenging an opposing force that does have access to industrial firepower. That demands a different approach!

There is thus, I’d argue, a real difference between a weaker force which still aims for and has a practical plan to actually defeat an enemy force – in the above example, to shoot down their planes – as opposed to an insurgency that needs an enemy it cannot defeat to give up or go away.

Of course for a non-violent protest movement, this differential in armed force becomes essentially infinite: such movements bring no armed force at all to the table. And yet non-violence has arguably a better track record than insurgency at achieving its goals. How?

Fundamentally, these groups focus almost entirely on Will. Whereas the force of modern states comes from the ability to harness industrial firepower and is thus a product of economies, the endurance of an insurgency or protest movement derives almost purely from their ability to secure new recruits faster than they are exhausted, which in turn is a product of popular support and internal morale – which is, of course, just that Clausewitzian Will in action. So long as that will remains strong, these groups will aquire new recruits faster than the state can arrest or kill them and so they will grow. And since the weapons (or ‘weapons’ in the case of protest groups) the group is using do not demand an independent industrial base – they’re available commercially for prices individuals or small groups can afford, legally or otherwise – there is no industrial base, no core territory full of factories or warehouses to attack. So long as will remains, the group remains and can continue to advance their agenda.

Which would not add up to very much if insurgent or protest groups had no hope of actually achieving their aims – indeed, it would be very hard to sustain their own Will if that were the case – but of course these groups often succeed. The answer relies on understanding the Clausewitzian trinity as a tool (drink!): if the insurgency or protest movement cannot escalate to match the force of the state, it must use the levers the trinity provides to de-escalate the force of the state. In part this is done through the political object – by raising the cost of denying the insurgency or protest group’s demands until it the rational calculus is simply to give them what they want. That in turn is generally accomplished through degrading popular will, until the costs to the opposing state – in public support, in votes, in public compliance – either lead to capitulation to some or all of the demands or to regime collapse.

Both protests and insurgencies function this way, where the true battlefield is the will of the participants, rather than contesting control over physical space. That’s a tricky thing, however, for humans to wrap our heads around. We have, after all, spent many thousands of years – arguably the whole of our history and pre-history, largely fighting battles over territory. Our emotions are tuned for those kinds of fights and so our instinct is to revert to that style of fighting. One can see this very clearly in young or undisciplined protestors who imagine they will ‘win’ the protest by forcing back a police line, essentially ‘battling’ the cops. But protest groups do not ‘win’ by beating the police into submission and indeed even armed insurgencies generally do not win by victories in open fights.

In both cases, these movements win by preserving (or fostering) their own will to fight, while degrading the enemy’s will to fight.

Of course they use very different tactics to achieve that same goal.

The Tactics of Insurgency

Of course to begin with, as a product of the definitions we’re working with here, insurgents and terrorists use violent means to achieve their ends. But whereas one conventional army engages another with the intent of destroying it, we might say that the insurgent or terrorist instead engages in violence with the intent to communicate a message.

That is going to seem like a very odd statement, so let me explain.

The strategic effect the insurgent aims to achieve is not located in his target. Remember, we’re talking about violent movements that have no real hope in the foreseeable future of actually destroying the armed forces of their enemy, so while they may spend a lot of time blowing things up, they cannot win purely by blowing things up. Instead, they seek to persuade key audiences by violence as an alternative to the destruction of the enemy (of which they are incapable). So they stage attacks, destroying targets, to communicate their message to persuade those audiences. The precise framing of the messages may vary, but (and here I am following Lee, op. cit.), there is a standard set of audiences and messages the group wants to convey:

To its own members, the insurgency needs to communicate that the group is active and making progress in order to sustain its own will. Inflicting casualties – often in spectacular, filmed and documented fashion – on real or perceived enemies can accomplish this, hardening the group member’s resolve to continue (and to sustain casualties).
To potential members, the insurgency needs to communicate this same effectiveness, because it will take substantially losses, often much higher losses than the enemy. As a result, it needs a steady stream of young, angry and motivated recruits. The very inexhaustible nature of its recruitment is a key element of messaging to enemies (see below).
To potential supporters of the enemy (which might be locals collaborating with an occupation government or civilians acting in support of a regime) the insurgency needs to communicate that it can inflict violence on enemy supporters and also that it will inevitably win. Essentially the message being communicated is, “if you support our enemies, we will eventually win and then kill you and your family.” The aim is to terrify opponents into passive acceptance of the insurgency, rather than active opposition.
To the enemy itself, the insurgency aims to communicate its continued existence and ability to extract continued costs. The message is, in effect, ‘give up, we’re not going away.’ That message can be directed at leaders, but equally at rank and file members of the opposition, encouraging them to ‘melt away’ rather than endure year after year after year of fear and hardship combating the insurgency.

There is, it must be noted, a distinction here between two kinds of terror or insurgency aims: those that target primarily their own (independent) state and those attempting to expel the forces of another state (some kind of occupation or imperial government). In the former case, where the enemy leadership has nowhere else to go, the sense of inevitability the insurgency has to build is considerable in order to get supporters of the regime to abandon it completely, whereas by contrast encouraging an occupying force to leave is far easier: only the high cost and intractability of the insurgency – its inability to be destroyed rather than the inevitability of its success – may be required to make a foreign power decide that occupation is simply no longer worth it. Unsurprisingly, then, insurgency campaigns have significantly higher success rates against foreign occupying forces or foreign-supported occupation governments (and indeed, as Max Boot, op. cit. notes, the success rates for insurgencies generally and against independent indigenous governments specifically is abysmal; insurgents usually lose).

It may be easier to understand these strategic aims in the context of the concrete actions insurgents take to further them. The Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2021 can serve as a ‘model’ for how many of these functions work. By 2002, there was little question of the Taliban directly opposing the military forces of the United States and its coalition partners: they had been roundly and comprehensively defeated, pushed into small cells or mountain hideouts, with no conventional military force to speak of.

The most visible actions by the insurgency are what we might term ‘spectacular attacks’ – spectacular in every sense of the word because these are spectacles intended for spectators. This is the propaganda of the deed, the defining feature of terrorism, where through an act of spectacular violence, often (but not always) against civilians, a group aims to garner attention and support for its core message. In the context of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, the 2009 car bombing of the NATO HQ in Afghanistan serves as an example, as did the release of video of the captured Bowe Bergdahl the same year (of course the 9/11 attacks that started the conflict are also an example), alongside many others. Sometimes these attacks are focused on military targets, but as frequently not – what we are focused on here is that the attack’s primary role is messaging rather than direct military utility. What we need to understand about these attacks is that they are not expected to bring about military victory directly: they do not seriously endanger the military force of the insurgent’s opponent. Instead, they are exercises in messaging, which is why their spectacular nature is important, indeed central: they are intended to get news coverage, to be discussed and talked about and thus create a platform for the insurgent to spread his message: to supporters that the insurgency still exists and is ‘making progress’ and inflicting pain on the enemy (and thus worthy of support) and to the opposing force that the insurgency still exists and is capable of inflicting costs (and thus, perhaps you should just go away and give them what they want).

But while foreign media coverage often focuses on these larger spectacular attacks – they are designed to attract such coverage – insurgents are often doing a lot more less well-covered things. Core to the Taliban’s success was not attacks on United States forces but assassinations and a campaign of terror among Afghans who might support or collaborate with United States forces. The messaging in this case was very deliberate: that at some point the Americans would leave and the Taliban would remain at which point those who continued to work with the United States or the Afghan government it had supported would be killed (frequently along with their families). Note that while this message ended up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy in Afghanistan, that is not always true: Iraqi insurgents did the same kind of messaging, but AQI/ISIS has been very greatly reduced, while the government set up by the United States and its coalition partners in Iraq remains. Insurgents do not always succeed in their aims.

The campaign of terror, targeting local leaders and officials, police officers, and the US-friendly Afghanistan National Army, was always far more extensive in Afghanistan than direct Taliban actions against the direct American presence. Including civilian contractors, US and coalition deaths in Afghanistan numbered 7,423, but Afghan security forces suffered more than 65,000 KIA; estimates for Afghan civilian deaths at the hands of the Taliban are fuzzy at best but well into the tens of thousands. While Taliban insurgents certainly engaged in propaganda and leveraged sympathetic local leaders and networks to build their base of support among the populace, the ‘hard edge’ of this strategy was a clear willingness to ‘make a demonstration’ of local non-sympathizer Afghans through (locally) spectacular assassinations. Once again the goal was not to kill every person who supported the U.S. backed government but to, by very visibly assassinating a few, frighten the remainder into withdrawing their support, which steadily rotted away the foundations of the Afghanistan security forces.

There is also an element of friction in this kind of insurgency: after all, the insurgent is opposed. Generally in a counter-insurgency context, the powerful conventional military is attempting to set up governance, to convert its superiority of armed force into power (in Hannah Arendt’s sense), that is the more-or-less voluntary cooperation of the local populace. Those forces are trying to set up local police forces, courts, governments, services, schools, roads and so on in order to enable a civilian administration which can organize and govern the populace.³ Even if the insurgency is not ideologically opposed to some of these administrative structures (and they often are; the Taliban was very opposed to efforts to educate women, for instance), they want to prevent or slow their emergence because effective local governing structures drain away the disorganized or supportive human terrain the insurgency needs to function. Countries with well-organized, locally supported police forces are extremely difficult terrain for any insurgency to operate in. And at the same time, once they realize they are in a counter-insurgency framework, the conventional force is likely to begin attempting to hunt insurgents, which is also something the insurgent wants to avoid.

Consequently, insurgents also engage in small-scale attacks on local security forces, with a twin purpose. On the one hand, inflicting casualties, especially on a occupying force, can serve to erode the will of the distant public (informed about these losses by their media) to continue the struggle. Such attacks thus serve as messaging to that public. They they also serve to raise friction (in the Clausewitzian sense, keep drinking) making it harder for the conventional force to leverage its superiority in firepower and materiel. The near perpetual threat of Taliban ambush in large parts of Afghanistan outside of the major cities substantially limited the mobility of coalition forces, limited their ability to patrol and provide security, to supply distant bases, or to set up and maintain services, thus slowing down and eventually reversing progress at setting up a functioning civilian administration in the countryside, which was the one thing that might have actually successfully rooted out the Taliban in the long-term (by eventually transforming a war of insurgency into simply a question of crime, controlled by police and local officials robustly supported by the local populace).

However the theory of victory is not based on friction: the insurgent can delay the conventional force, but it cannot by force stop them completely. Instead, the theory of victory is focused on will and to a lesser extent the political object. An insurgency could plausibly succeed by simply raising the cost of an operation (like an occupation) higher than anticipated gains, causing a rational political leadership to pull the plug. In practice, political leadership rarely wants to admit failure so easily and states will pursue failing strategies for a long time simply to avoid the perception of defeat. Consequently the more common mechanism for successful insurgencies is that the erosion of will, of public support, compels political authorities to accede to some or all of the demands of the insurgents. The ‘center of gravity’ – the locus of the most important strategic objective – for most insurgencies thus often becomes the political support that sustains a government, be that a body of key supporters in non-democratic regimes or the voters in democratic ones. That body of key voters or supporters, of course, is often not even located in the theater of operations at all: the Taliban ultimately won their insurgency in Afghanistan because they persuaded American voters that the war was no longer worth the cost, leading to the election of leaders promising to pull the plug on the war.

This is a remarkably slow process, eroding public will: indeed, the very apparent inexhaustibility of an insurgent force is part of its messaging, that no matter how many fighters the conventional army kills, there are always more replacements and so the violence – the costs – never stop. Meanwhile hunting down insurgent groups catches a conventional force on the ‘horns of a dilemma’. Modern conventional armies are built for tremendous destructive firepower, but the insurgents often hide among supportive (or terrorized) populations. If the conventional force does nothing, the insurgency will grow without check, but if the conventional force tries to engage the insurgents, they run the risk of producing a lot of collateral damage. For insurgent forces – who are often ideologically unconcerned with civilian casualties – this can be turned to their advantage, using the small strikes they are capable of to bait the Big Conventional Army into attempting to leverage its massive firepower, with the collateral damage that results essentially producing a ‘spectacular attack’ for the insurgents when the local civilian population is caught in the blast radius. It is striking, reading something like The Hardest Place how some of the most damaging attacks for American forces in the Pech Valley were not Taliban attacks, but American attacks attempting to hit the Taliban that, through carelessness, excessive force or simply the fog of war, caused civilian casualties that poisoned any goodwill from the local populace.

This isn’t the place to discuss counter-insurgency warfare in depth here, but this problem is why the consensus is that COIN is best done with lots of infantry providing local security and relatively little in the way of airpower (though air mobility is useful) or heavy firepower. Of course, long, infantry-heavy deployments of large numbers of soldiers are both unpopular on their own and also produce higher rates of casualties among the Big Conventional Army. That in turn can sap public will to continue – especially in the case of wars against distant, foreign insurgencies – and thus make things unpopular for politicians, which is, in part, why governments keep trying to go back to counter-insurgency-by-guided-bomb, a strategy which quite evidently does not work well in the absence of ground forces.

However anyone using terror tactics – that is, the targeting of the defenseless for the purpose of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ – of all kinds and thus terroristic-insurgents are caught on the horns of their own dilemma. Remember: the attacks they are engaged in are not sufficient in themselves to produce victory or even meaningfully advance towards it. As a raw matter of manpower and resources, the United States could have sustained the fiscal and human cost of the Afghanistan War forever. Instead, the terroristic-insurgent’s attacks only work when they impact Will (keep drinking), which means they only work when they gain a wider audience, when they gain attention. In some cases that attention is local but in many cases a broad audience of supporters (potential recruits) and opponents is intended.

To get an audience, such attacks must get coverage, they have to draw attention. And what draws attention to these attacks is their spectacular nature: that they are particularly violent, particularly gruesome, that they strike a population (civilians, women, children) normally considered exempt from violence or occur in places (cities, religious or cultural sites) understood to be outside of the war zone. But of course the more spectacular the violence the greater the possibility of a ‘backfire’ of sorts, where the very violence and barbarity that the insurgent is driving in order to get that attention to attract those recruits, to demoralize their enemies, instead convinces their opponents that the insurgency is a dire threat which must be defeated at all costs.

Many insurgencies end up gored on the horns of this dilemma, some multiple times. Indeed, this is what happened to AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq), twice. In 2005, AQI violence alienated key tribal leaders in Iraq’s Al Anbar governate, leading to the ‘Anbar Awakening’ where some of those key leaders forged alliances with local coalition forces: shorn of local support and thus the ‘cover’ the population provided and opposed both by coalition forces and local militias, AQI lost footholds in key cities like Ramadi and Fallujah. AQI would go on to rebrand as the Islamic State (Daesch/IS/ISIL/ISIS), rebuilding itself in the context of the Syrian Civil War and then exploding outward in 2013 and 2014. The Islamic State likewise followed a policy of spectacular violence, which garnered it a lot of attention and a lot of recruits, but also produced both a domestic backlash in Iraq and Syria and a foreign backlash, leading to the emergence of a broad anti-IS coalition that by 2016 had destroyed the core of the organization, although various international ‘franchises’ continue to exist. Similarly, of course, the 9/11 attacks on the one hand brought the perpetrators, Al Qaeda (the original) tremendous attention – and an extended anti-terror campaign that has left nearly all of their senior leadership dead and much of the organization shattered. The Taliban may have survived the wrath of the United States, but relatively little of Al Qaeda did.⁴

And this dilemma actually leads us neatly into the mirror-image of a terrorist insurgency: non-violent movements.

The Tactics of Non-Violence

Non-violence is a strategy.

I think that is important to outline here at the beginning, because there is a tendency in the broader culture to read non-violence purely as a moral position, as an unwillingness to engage in violence. And to be fair, proponents of non-violence often stress its moral superiority – in statements and publications which are themselves strategic – and frequently broader social conversations which would prefer not to engage with the strategic nature of protest, preferring instead impotent secular saints, often latch on to those statements. But the adoption of non-violent approaches is a strategic choice made because non-violence offers, in the correct circumstances substantial advantages as a strategy (as well as being, when it is possible, a morally superior approach).

If we boil down the previous section on insurgencies, what we see is that the insurgent wages his ‘attack on will’ through a prolonged campaign of (violent) disruption, often relying on his opponent (the state) to supply the morally uncomplicated spectacular violence by overreacting to his (violent) disruption. I stress disruption here because again, the terroristic insurgent does not expect to car-bomb his way to victory (because he has nowhere near enough car bombs or he’d be waging a different kind of struggle), he expects to car-bomb his way to popular support or at least to the withdrawal of popular support from his opponent. One key way to accelerate that process is to use the car-bombs to bait the authorities into a damaging overreaction. But equally, the peril the terroristic insurgent runs is that his car-bombs will alienate his own support (car-bombs are not popular) faster than it erodes the will of his enemy.

Now to my knowledge no advocate of non-violence has ever expressed their approach this way, but for the sake of understanding it, we could put it like this: under the right conditions, a non-violent strategy resolves the dilemma by retaining the ‘attack on will’ strategy and simply dispensing with the potentially supporter-alienating violence (the car bombs), by in turn exploiting the overreaction of the state.

To simplify greatly, the strategy of non-violence aims first to cause disruption (non-violently) in order both to draw attention but also in order to bait state overreaction. The state’s overreaction then becomes the ‘spectacular attack’ which broadcasts the movement’s message, while the group’s willingness to endure that overreaction without violence not only avoids alienating supporters, it heightens the contrast between the unjust state and the just movement. That reaction maintains support for the movement, but at the same time disruption does not stop: the movements growing popularity enable new recruits to replace those arrested (just as with insurgent recruitment) rendering the state incapable of restoring order. The state’s supporters may grow to sympathize with the movement, but at the very least they grow impatient with the disruption, which as you will recall refuses to stop. As support for state repression of the movement declines (because repression is not stopping the disruption) and the movement itself proves impossible to extinguish (because repression is recruiting for it), the only viable solution becomes giving the movement its demands.

It is the same essential framework – create a disruption to draw attention and fatigue the opponent, use the attention to draw recruits to replace losses to sustain the disruption indefinitely until opposing will fails – as the insurgent, but delivered without violence.

We can see this basic framework in action in each of the Civil Rights Movements’ campaigns, applied both to each campaign individually and also to the whole movement. Let’s take the Nashville Campaign of 1960 as an example.⁵ The aim, formulated by James Lawson and drawing on Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence, was to draw national attention to the evils of segregation (the big picture strategic aim) and begin desegregation in Nashville (the campaign’s specific aim). The campaign was preceded by a significant period of training beginning in 1958 because far from being a weak or cowardly strategy, non-violence demands remarkable discipline. In late 1959, Lawson sent out what were effectively scouting parties to determine the reaction they would get from disruptions at specific locations.

Via Wikipedia, a photograph of white onlookers attacking protestor Paul Laprad during the Nashville sit-ins in 1960.

The planned disruption was a series of sit-ins at lunch counters in downtown Nashville, which were at the time segregated. This would create real disruption and it had to: if there’s no disruption, then no attention is gained and the state does not respond. But the sit-ins would both demonstrate the unfairness of segregation in these stores, while at the same time the backlash against the sit-ins – hecklers, arrests – disrupted the stores’ business, in turn motivating more state reaction. The sit-ins began on February 13th, 1960, drawing angry crowds of pro-segregationist whites and disrupting business but also drawing attention and thus new recruits to the effort. As the effort thus expanded rather than contracted, by February 26th, the local state authorities (chief of police Douglas Hosse) warned there would be arrests and indeed the next day police first withdrew their protection of the protestors (encouraging white mobs to attack them) and then arrested only the protestors in the one-sided altercations that ensued. But of course spectacular, one-sided violence merely confirmed the moral rightness of the protestors, merely demonstrated the injustice of the system and thereby rallied new recruits to their cause.

So as the police arrested one batch of protestors, another group took their place. And another. And another. The police arrested some eighty students that day and then stopped because they hadn’t the capacity to arrest any more. Over the following days, arrests mounted (more than 150 before the end) but of course that just drew more attention, which drew more recruits and the police found themselves in the same trap as counter-insurgents: applying force was creating protestors faster than removing them and Nashville had real, sharp limits on how many protestors they could arrest. Which mattered because it meant the disruption did not stop, which meant that pressure – on local politicians and the business community whose businesses were disrupted – did not stop.

In the event, the Nashville sit-ins had a dramatic climax: the home of Z. Alexander Looby was bombed (dynamite thrown through a window) presumably in retaliation for his support. No one was killed, but this act of terroristic violence against the protest serves as a paradigmatic example of the above dilemma: intended to frighten them, it galvanized support for the protest, creating political conditions in which city leaders (notably Mayor Ben West, confronted by Diane Nash and C.T. Vivian) had to back down. That in turn led to the business owners – directly pressured by the campaign and now abundantly aware that state repression was not going to make the disruption stop – to negotiate with protest leaders, leading (albeit not instantly) to Nashville desegregating its lunch counters.

What I want to note here is that these actions were not disconnected or unthinking but carefully planned and selected. In particular the target of the action is intended to itself demonstrate the injustice (which thereby aids in gaining support) and to provoke overreaction. In this way a non-violent movement does not just receive violence, but it disrupts and provokes, it makes people uncomfortable as a way of drawing attention and baiting overreaction. Perhaps the most famous example of this principle anywhere in the world was Mahatma Gandhi’s strategy of non-cooperation, in which protestors simply refused to buy British goods, work in British industries or in jobs in the British governing institutions. Gandhi also protested the British salt monopoly in India by illegally making his own salt (very much in public, as part of a large demonstration), to which the British responded with more repression. The disruption forced a response (British authorities arrested tens of thousands of Indians): after all if the British authorities did nothing in response to these kinds of actions, British revenues in India would collapse and they would be unable to govern the country anyway. But of course violent British crackdowns further delegitimized British colonial rule.

Moreover, it must be noted that these protect actions, while non-violent were disruptive. They were designed to disrupt something, because if they didn’t disrupt anything, they could be ignored. It is important here to separate two kinds of ‘protest the right way’ arguments here: practitioners of non-violence pointing out that violent actors claiming to act for the movement harm it and people outside the movement demanding that the movement not be disruptive at all. In the very case it is very obviously true that for a movement pursuing a non-violent strategy like this, violent actors are actively detrimental because – again – this is all an exercise in messaging and they harm the message. Crucially, while violent actors may feel like they are accomplishing more by fighting the authorities violently, remember that the entire reason movements adopt these strategies is they they cannot expect to win by fighting the authorities directly, consequently violent actions accomplish nothing (you will not win a street battle with the cops)⁶ but they do harm the message. But at the same time some disruption is necessary to attract attention and a response by the state.

Martin Luther King Jr. is, in fact, incredibly clear-sighted about this in his famous 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail. While he openly notes that he initially tried negotiation and that his direct action is also primarily a means to return to negotiation, he declares openly that members of the movement must be “nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in a society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism” and that “the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” He also notes that he timed his action specifically to produce the desired pressure on businesses by timing it for the holiday shopping season (disrupting business), delayed only slightly in order to avoid negatively impacting the results of a local election. Disruption was the point, because disruption draws the necessary attention to the message and invites the state to act in repression which draws more attention, empowering the message and thus delivering the ‘attack on will’ at maximum volume and moral clarity.

Like any strategic approach, this approach works best in specific conditions. In particular it works most effectively in challenging a regime, law or practice maintained by violence, because that very violence plays into the kind of ‘throwing technique’ whereby the non-violent activist uses the state’s own violence against it. Such movements can thus, by disobeying the unjust law, take the violence that necessarily maintains it – violence that is normally concealed behind acquiescence to the law – and abruptly surface it. Notably in the above examples, protestors are not doing something unrelated to their cause to draw attention but rather in refusing to support the day-to-day function of colonial rule or by sitting at a specific lunch counter these actions surface the specific violence maintaining that specific law. It follows that laws, practices or regimes whose connection to violence is more indirect are much harder to challenge with these strategies.⁷ Because – and this is important to continue stressing – these methods are about messaging because the ‘target’ is will, so the clarity of the message matters quite a lot.

On the other hand, non-violent approaches can succeed where violent approaches might not have succeeded. It is debatable if Britain in the early 1900s could have handled an effort at armed insurrection in the British Raj – they had successfully quelled a major uprising in 1857 (and smaller efforts in 1909 and 1915 had also failed), of course, but the failure of other imperial powers to resist independence movements in the 1950s and 1960s might suggest they would not have repeated this success. But evidently considerable British preparation to put down an armed uprising didn’t much matter because the Quit India Movement and its predecessors didn’t give them an armed uprising, it increasingly gave them a non-violent movement they were utterly unprepared to effectively counter.

Likewise, it is important to remember that the system of Jim Crow segregation in the American South was sustained by terroristic violence against African-American communities and, backed up by local and state police, extremely well-prepared to meet violence with greater quantities of violence. Horrific events like the Wilmington Massacre (1898) and the Tulsa Race Massacre (1921) were vivid demonstrations of the ability of the white supremacist Jim Crow regime to muster superior quantities of violence (and a greater willingness to murder innocent people) if the question came to a violent confrontation. But one of the things that comes out extremely clearly in reading something like T.E. Ricks’ Waging a Good War is that white supremacist leaders – perhaps none more clearly than Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor – were wholly unprepared to fight a non-violent movement and instead by reacting with spectacular and horrifying brutality repeatedly played into the movement’s hands. By contrast it is striking, reading Ricks’ book, that the Civil Rights Movements tactics’ were most notably stymied in Albany, GA, where the local police chief, Laurie Pritchett realized that he could defeat their approach by having his officers act gently when arresting activists, by having enough jail space prepared for larger numbers and by charging them with things like disturbing the peace rather than with segregation laws, to avoid drawing attention to the injustice of the system.

Via Wikipedia, Bill Hudson’s famous photograph of police attacking Civil Rights marchers in Birmingham with dogs in 1963. Images like this served to demonstrate to much of the country the inherent violence and injustice of segregation.

(It is, of course, not an accident that COIN – counter-insurgency – strategy often follows similar injunctions towards avoiding provocation and what we might frame as gentleness. Fortunately for the protestor against injustice, the sort of people who tend to come to run systems of discrimination predicated on violence tend to be emotionally and constitutionally incapable of following that sort of advice – instead resorting by habit (often expressed in very gendered terms) to violence. The armies of Jim Crow had many a Bull Connor and very few Laurie Pritchetts, not by accident but as a direct result of the kind of system Jim Crow was. Also let me be clear: being tactically smart does not make Laurie Pritchett good; he was still defending a system of segregation, which was bad. Sometimes the bad guys have capable leaders, but they are still bad guys.)

All that said, there are very obviously regimes in the world that have rendered themselves more-or-less immune to non-violent protest. This isn’t really the place to talk about the broader concept of ‘coup proofing’ and how authoritarian regimes secure internal security, repression and legitimacy in detail. But a certain kind of regime operates effectively as a society-within-a-society, with an armed subset of the population as insiders who receive benefits in status and wealth from the regime in return for their willingness to do violence to maintain it. Such regimes are generally all too willing to gun down thousands or tens of thousands of protestors to maintain power. The late Assad regime in Syria stands as a clear example of this, as evidently does the current regime in Iran.⁸ Such regimes are not immune to an ‘attack on will,’ but they have substantially insulated themselves from it and resistance to these regimes, if it continues, often metastasizes into insurgency or protracted war (as with the above example of Syria) because the pressure has nowhere else to go.

The reason regimes such as this aren’t more common is that they tend to function quite poorly: force is expensive and having to maintain large amounts of inward directed force continuously because the regime lacks a strong basis of legitimacy inhibits the effective function of everything else. Indeed, I would argue such ‘prison regimes’ mostly exist today because the negative returns to warfare mean that, unlike in previous eras, it simply isn’t worth the otherwise extremely doable task of better-functioning countries to conquer them. Consequently many authoritarian regimes attempt to ‘split the difference’ by ‘de-politicizing’ much of their population and repressing the small remainder. However building the apparatus and cultural assumptions to support that kind of regime takes a long time and a lot of resources – it generally has to be done well in advance, often as a decades-long project of regime security and coup-proofing. If it was easy to do, there wouldn’t be a half-dozen successful ‘color revolutions‘ in the last thirty or so years.

Conclusions

I haven’t stressed this yet, so let me do so now: obviously the ability of both terroristic insurgencies and non-violent protest movements to succeed is substantially based on the available media technology. It is not an accident that these techniques become increasingly prevalent in the 1900s with the emergence of mass-literary and mass media. Because these approaches are fundamentally about messaging, message technology matters a lot. Of course that technology has only become more rapid and more powerful since the mid-1900s, which further enhances the effectiveness of movements that can harness such technology.

To pull this all together, both violent insurgencies and non-violent protests have the same overall ‘theory of action’ – unable to defeat the armed forces of the state, they aim to instead defeat the state by striking at its popular base of support (at ‘will’ in the Clausewitzian sense). Consequently, because the ‘real battlefield’ is not the battlefield at all, but the minds of the various publics supporting the state, these campaigns – armed or unarmed – are essentially messaging campaigns, engaged in persuasion to convince the relevant public that it is more just or at least easier and less painful to give up the struggle and give the group some or all of its demands.

While such movements often fail, the fact that they can succeed at all is remarkable because these are efforts predicated on the fact of being so immensely weaker than the state they challenge that they have no realistic hope of ever meeting it force-for-force directly.

At the same time it is important to note that while the overall framework of these two approaches is the same their tactics are totally different and indeed fundamentally incompatible in most cases. Someone doing violence in the context of a non-violent movement is actively harming their cause because they are reducing the clear contrast and uncomplicated message the movement is trying to send. Likewise, it is relatively easy to dismiss non-violent supporters of violent movements so long as their core movement remains violent, simply by pointing to the violence of the core movement. It is thus very important for individuals to understand what kind of movement they are in and not ‘cosplay’ the other kind.

That difference ripples into smaller decisions. Insurgent movements generally seek to hide their membership from the state, because they wish to avoid the armed force of the state – they want the state to try to strike them, miss and hit civilians in order to create spectacular moments they can exploit. By contrast, non-violent movements do not seek to hide their membership from the state, because they seek to use state repression as a means to grow too large to arrest. Gandhi is quoted by (ed. Merton, op. cit.) as noting, “I do not appreciate any underground activity. Millions cannot go underground. Millions need not.” Civil Rights protestors repeatedly went to jail, touting their willingness to bear their arrest under their own names, openly, as a badge of honor. Non-violent movements instead invite documentation both of their numbers (they want to seem big) and of the state’s actions against them. Because whereas the insurgent hopes state violence will fall on non-movement-members, a non-violent protest is intentionally inviting state violence to fall on them because doing so dramatizes and exemplifies the injustice of that violence.

A View From America

With all of that laid out, let me draw some conclusions for the current tense political situation in the United States.

First, I think it is fairly clear that the ‘anti-ICE’ or ‘Abolish ICE’ movement – the name being a catchy simplification for a wide range of protests against immigration enforcement – is primarily a non-violent protest movement. Despite some hyperventilating about ‘insurgency tactics,’ anti-ICE protestors are pretty clearly engaged in civil disobedience (when they aren’t engaged in lawful protest), not insurgency. To be blunt: you know because no one has yet car-bombed an ICE or CBP squad or opened fire from an elevated window on an DHS patrol.⁹ As I hope we’ve already demonstrated, mere organization is not an indicator of an insurgent movement: non-violent movements have to be organized (even if just locally so), often more organized and better trained than violent ones. Effective non-violence, after all, comes less naturally to humans, for whom violence has been normal for at least tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.

But the tactics of anti-ICE protestors, most visible in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, follow the outline for non-violent protest here quite well. While protestors do attempt to impose a significant degree of friction on DHS immigration enforcement by (legally!) following and documenting DHS actions, that has also served as the predicate for the classic formula for non-violent action: it baits the agents of the state (ICE and CBP) into open acts of violence on camera which in turn reveal the violent nature of immigration enforcement. In this, DHS leaders like Gregory Bovino have essentially played the role of Bull Connor, repeatedly playing into the hands of protestors by urging – or at least failing to restrain – the spectacular, cinematic violence of their agents. Just as the armies of Jim Crow had many Bull Connors and few Laurie Pritchetts, it turns out that Border Patrol and ICE appear to have many Bull Connors; it remains to be seen if they have even one Laurie Pritchett.

Via Wikipedia a photo (2026) of postors in Minneapolis, protesting the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both shot by ICE and CBP agents while protesting the administration’s immigration policy. As with the earlier Civil Rights Movement, spectacular public acts of violence by the state serve to delegitmize it, broadcasting the protestors’ point about the state’s unjust use of violence.

The result has been a remarkable collapse in public approval for immigration enforcement, mirrored by some pretty clear implications for elections later this year of the trend continues. Indeed, while doubtless many in the movement are impatient at what they perceive as the slow pace of movement given that they are trying to stop deportations happening right now, as non-violent movements go, the public perception shift has been remarkably fast. ‘Abolish ICE’ went from being a fringe position to a plurality position – close to a majority position – in roughly a year. Civil Rights and Quit India took decades. In part I suspect this has to do with both the prevalence of mass media technologies in the United States – a society in which nearly everyone has a pocket internet device that can immediately send or receive text, audio or most importantly video – and the increasing capability of those platforms. Where the public may have experienced the Birmingham protests through a TV screen at a delay on the nightly news, today high-detail color footage of DHS uses of force are beamed directly into people’s phones within hours or minutes of the event taking place.

Via Wikipedia, a photograph of anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis.

By contrast, the administration is fundamentally caught on the horns of a dilemma. Their most enthusiastic supporters very much want to see high spectacle immigration enforcement, both as an end unto itself and also as a sign of the administration’s continued commitment to it. In this, they act much like the white supremacist publics that sat behind men like Bull Connor demanding repression. But while the administration clearly remains unwilling to actually change its immigration policies, it desperately needs them out of the news to avoid catastrophic midterm wipeout. But ‘go quiet’ on immigration and lose core supporters; go ‘loud’ on immigration and produce more viral videos that enrage the a larger slice of the country. A clever tactician might be able to thread that needle, but at this point it seems difficult to accuse Kristi Noem of being a clever tactician.

Finally, we might briefly touch on the question of ‘coup proofing’ and if the administration is capable of insulating itself from public backlash. And the answer appears to fairly clearly be some version of ‘no.’ The United States electoral system is a tough nut to crack: almost anything strong enough to alter the results would be so obvious that you might as well just try and stage a coup. Meanwhile, as noted above, establishing the kind of regime that can rule by violence and the fear of violence in the United States is hardly unprecedented – that’s what the Jim Crow South was – but it is not a system which can be willed into existence overnight. Establishing the Jim Crow regime in the American South required more than a decade of terror and repression. Similar regimes overseas likewise took many years to construct and require a very large ‘in group’ willing to use violence – often on the order of a quarter to a half of a percent of the population. Indications that DHS is already struggling to recruit despite very obviously being far short of the number of agents required to effectively maintain an authoritarian state speak to the difficulty of creating such a large ‘insider’ force.¹⁰

In short then, it seems like the current administration’s immigration policy is facing a non-violent movement and is both vulnerable to that movement and actively playing into its hands, repeating the tactical and strategic mistakes the defenders of Jim Crow made in the 1950s and 1960s. From this framework, the non-violent anti-ICE movement appears to both be succeeding right now and stand a good chance of succeeding eventually, assuming it retains a strategic focus. If the administration could restrain its open embrace of anti-immigrant violence, it might be able to slow that process down, but it is unclear that the administration is actually capable of doing so, since anti-immigrant violence was essentially one of its core campaign promises.

But this dilemma is, of course, the core of why anti-ICE protest tactics work: because the system itself is unjust and its basic function (armed federal agents abducting people from the interior of the United States) unpopular, protestors following a non-violent framework – often all they are doing is just filming what ICE and CBP does – can present the administration with an impossible choice: defang the protests by no longer enforcing the policy by violence (essentially conceding their demands) or continue to engage in open violence against non-violent protestors and lose the battle for the minds of the public. So long as the policy remains to enact immigration enforcement through exemplary violence in places in the United States where that is staggeringly unpopular, the policy remains vulnerable to having its inherent violence exposed by non-violence.