Dr. Jack Goldstone

But the two key things are mass mobilization for the purpose of radically changing the way government is organized and operates.

Well, if you're a revolutionary organizer, the more people on your side, the better.

I think that's true.

But there's no minimum.

The effort of maybe 20,000 students in Tiananmen Square to demand democratic accountability from China's communist government, that was a revolutionary episode.

There were signs that it was spreading to other cities in China, and the communist party brought in the military and crushed it before it could threaten to overturn the government.

But that was a revolutionary moment.

Even, I would say, here in our own capital, if the crowd on January 6th of 2021 had managed to somehow overturn the result of the election, either by keeping Congress too frightened to...

authorize the electoral college results, or if they'd actually pressured Congress into changing the results, that would have been a mass mobilization that brought about a major change in how our government operates, even though it was only a few thousand people.

I don't think there's any minimum.

What matters is

how weak the government is.

If the weak government is going to crumble from having a few thousand people storming a government building or protesting in the streets, that's happened in history and it can happen again.

Well, now you're asking me to talk about how revolutions unfold in a little bit of detail.

So be patient with me.

I love it.

I think the general principle is a government that has the support of administrative and business elites and particularly is able to keep the support of the military because the military believes the government is worth fighting for and worth defending.

In that situation, it's almost impossible to overthrow a government no matter how many people you have in the streets.

In the Arab Spring, the island nation of Bahrain had almost a third of the population protesting.

But the government, with help from Saudi Arabia, crushed that attempted rebellion.