How May Day Strong Builds the 'Suddenly'

“How did you go bankrupt?”

“Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”

The way Hemingway’s Mike Campbell saw bankruptcy in The Sun Also Rises can be a useful frame for seeing almost everything, especially progress, especially if you’ve been watching what’s been going on in Wisconsin since the 2024 election.

Last month, progressives cemented their majority on the state’s Supreme Court, after defeating Elon Musk’s candidate so badly in last year’s election that he pretended that this one didn’t even happen. Then on Friday, thirteen years after Act 10 stripped Wisconsin public-sector workers of collective bargaining rights, a court ruling gave them back. Thirteen years of legal slog, organizing in the dark, in the light, at Tesla dealerships, building infrastructure that endures, and before you know it, gradually becomes a suddenly.

Then, on the same day, millions of union members and students joined the May Day Strong call for non-cooperation, with Wisconsin leading the way through historic school and business closures."

From the Wisconsin Examiner’s report on the action in Madison:

The march brought out thousands of Wisconsinites angry about increased federal immigration enforcement under President Donald Trump, similar to the No Kings protest in March and an anti-ICE protest held in January.

Silvey said that school closings on Friday as teachers and students joined the May Day march showed that “educators understand the urgency of this moment.” Madison Public Schools and the Sun Prairie School District canceled classes Friday due to anticipated absences of staff. Members of Madison Teachers Inc. (MTI), the union that represents teachers and staff, participated in the protests. MTI and the South Central Federation of Labor AFL-CIO officially endorsed the protests.

Silvey said 250 immigrant-led businesses across 17 cities in Wisconsin shut down for the day.

Wisconsin’s capital city offers a sparkling fractal, revealing the glimmers of May Day Strong’s building success. Friday’s events mark the No Kings movement picking up the mantle of Tesla Takedown and moving toward economic non-cooperation with more than 3,000 planned events, 500 unions on board, and as many as 100,000 students “striking” by walking out of class.

From Protest to Non-Cooperation

Erica Chenoweth, whose research on civil resistance helps form the field’s empirical foundation, explains the power of moving beyond protest: non-violent resistance works when “unarmed civilians use protests, boycotts, strikes, stay-aways, other forms of non-cooperation” to impose costs the regime can’t absorb.

Protest is a way to publicly put your foot down. Non-cooperation puts your foot directly on the money hose.

May Day Strong preliminary findings from Dana R. Fisher and Arman Azedi of the School of International Service at American University, as part of the ongoing Protest Project, show a movement that has crossed that line. 89% of participants took part in a total shopping boycott. 32% of participants, 37% of hosts, stayed out of work. Add the 30% drop in Tesla stock following the Tesla Takedown campaign, and the ongoing financial misery for Target after it unceremoniously dumped its diversity initiatives, and you have a coalition that has moved past wanting to be heard and into the business of making things stop.

The Demographic Wall

Here comes the honesty it’s going to take to defeat fascism.

The movement opposing tyranny in America is geographically broader than ever. All the data shows that. Geographic breadth is not demographic breadth. The survey data from May Day Strong is stark: 94% of participants were white, 78% held a university degree, and the median age was 71. The coalition has grown its map. It has not grown the makeup of its ranks.

This matters because Chenoweth’s research is specific about what the 3.5% threshold actually requires. From Why Civil Resistance Works: “nonviolent campaigns facilitate the active participation of many more people than violent campaigns, thereby broadening the base of resistance and raising the costs to opponents of maintaining the status quo.” Broadening.

A 3.5% that is 94% white, and a median age of 71, is not the 3.5% the research describes.

Non-cooperation reaches its maximum leverage when the people running the machines withdraw alongside the retirees — delivery drivers, warehouse workers, digital laborers. A high-functioning vanguard that doesn’t look like the country it’s trying to save can build for years without ever achieving cross-cutting solidarity.

The Infrastructure

The organizational machinery is more sophisticated than it was six months ago. In No Kings, recruitment through organizations ran at 10%. It’s now 34%. 68% of hosts and 50% of participants heard about May Day Strong through an organization — not an algorithm, but word of mouth. That’s both the strength of this movement, and it’s also a limitation as the word is traveling mostly to people who look like the people who keep participating.

To turn that into a permanent shift, two things still need building: mutual aid robust enough that lower-income workers can withdraw labor without losing rent, and a genuine hand-off between the older cohort with the institutional memory and a younger cohort with the long-term stake in what gets built.

Wisconsin proved that infrastructure eventually produces impact. The people in the streets on Friday weren’t performing — they were building the capacity required to turn a thirteen-year crawl into a sudden win. The goal isn’t just to reach 3.5%. It’s to be a 3.5% that offers most of the remaining 96.5% a mirror into what we can become.