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The day after Trump’s 2017 inauguration, the freshly minted junior senator from California addressed the crowd at the Women’s March in Washington. “Let’s buckle in,” Kamala Harris declared, “because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”
She wasn’t kidding.
An estimated 470,000 demonstrators poured into DC that day, the pink tide of pussy hats (a defiant rejoinder to Trump’s endorsement of sexual assault) flooding the National Mall. With millions more attending simultaneous demonstrations around the country, the outpouring of resistance was dubbed the largest single-day protest in American history.
For all of the event’s emotional power, however, once the chartered buses groaned back on to the Beltway, Trump settled into the White House and set about implementing his agenda. In that sense, the event was arguably a failure, comparable to a number of recent American mass political mobilizations that delivered less in the way of tangible change than their participants hoped.
The wealth gap has widened considerably since Occupy Wall Street. The Dakota Access pipeline went online in 2017, despite the valiant efforts of Standing Rock’s water protectors. Many of the progressive gains in criminal justice reform made in response to the George Floyd protests were quickly rolled back. Not only is Atlanta’s Cop City still under construction, similar facilities have been approved around the country. And Israel continues its war on Gaza (having extended the theater to the West Bank and Lebanon), with the help of US-supplied weaponry, in defiance of the mass public outcry.
So what gives? As the dazed and beleaguered liberal coalition ponders its future under a second Trump regime, activists might be forgiven for wondering whether taking to the streets en masse can ever make a meaningful difference. For the journalist Vincent Bevins, who has spent years studying grassroots political movements around the world – occasionally dodging teargas and water cannons to do so – and has witnessed many of them fail to deliver on their promise, the answer is complicated.
On the one hand, he says, the American left may have no choice. “If celebrities and elite media and voting every two years were sufficient, we would have already won,” Bevins says, speaking by video conference from London. Characterizing widespread rejection of Biden-Harris-style liberalism as a wake-up call, he adds: “That the Democratic party has failed in such a consequential moment not only opens up space for pressure from below, but it makes it imperative.”
But strategy matters, as Bevins’s extensively reported 2023 book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, makes all too clear. The collective exhilaration of mass popular action and the dashed hopes that often follow are hardly limited to recent US-based movements. Focusing on the 2010s, a decade that began with the Tunisia uprising and ended with the emergence of Covid-19, the book examines roughly a dozen mass protest movements, of which only two (in South Korea and Chile) led to the sort of change advocates envisioned. Nearly all of the remaining instances of high-profile mass protest – including those in Tunisia, Egypt, Hong Kong, Brazil and Ukraine – “experienced something worse than failure”, he writes. “Things went backward.”
As If We Burn demonstrates, some of the same characteristics that allowed a series of people’s movements during the last decade to attract masses of supporters and destabilize the existing order – spontaneity, fuzzy objectives, a reliance on social media and an allergy to structure, central leadership and even designated spokespeople – also carried significant, sometimes fatal, drawbacks. This recipe can be “an incredibly explosive combination when what you need to do is get as many people on to the streets as possible”, he points out. “And these moments are experienced as euphoric victory for the participants. But it’s poorly suited for what comes next, which is filling the power vacuum that has been created or elaborating a set of demands.”
While there is good historical justification for the left’s mistrust of organizational hierarchy – the authoritarian turn of the Bolshevik revolution makes for an enduring cautionary tale – the downside was seen in the ease with which the Muslim Brotherhood managed to usurp the loosely organized Tahrir Square protests in Egypt, or the way rightwing forces in Brazil turned the populist energy unleashed by the left in 2014 to their own ends. For domestic examples of the value of structure and discipline, one need only compare the success of the civil rights movement, with its clearcut demands, well-trained activists and strong leadership, with the ambiguous legacy of Occupy Wall Street.
Occupy’s emphasis on “horizontalism” and consensus-based decision-making is often credited to the efforts of the late anthropologist and anarchist writer David Graeber, an enthusiastic advocate of prefiguration – the idea that a movement should model the world it hopes to create. And Occupy did so brilliantly. During my own visits to Zuccotti Park, I quickly learned to stop quizzing activists about their goals and to instead simply immerse myself in the enthralling if fragile utopia they had somehow conjured in a bleak stone plaza. In addition to reframing US political discourse around a powerful class-based critique, Occupy proved that an entirely different paradigm of human relations, based on direct democracy and mutual aid, could flourish if left to its own devices. In doing so, it provided inspiration for movements around the world.
But of course Occupy wasn’t left to its own devices for long. As Bevins points out, genuine disruptions to state power nearly always prompt a violent crackdown. “There doesn’t even actually have to be a revolution for elites to launch a counterrevolution,” he adds. “They just have to think that their privileges are threatened.” That said, especially in the era of social media, violent government repression often leads to the opposite of its intended effect. In almost every case Bevins studied, “Viral images of police brutality cause a massive scaling-up of the protest” – a dynamic that played out during last year’s campus demonstrations on behalf of Palestine.
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This is the point at which the mobilization of more organized groups – churches, political organizations and especially unions – can prove decisive. While marches, encampments and various forms of civil disobedience are great at commanding attention, they rarely succeed on their own. Strikes, walkouts and boycotts, on the other hand, can cripple an economy – a reliable pain point for the elite class. “It’s often when the economy stops working that the existing leaders in capitalist systems really have to take notice,” Bevins says.
In recent decades, the strength of the US economy – and the relative comfort it has afforded many of us – seems to have acted as a pressure valve, dampening the fervor of domestic protest movements. As much as progressives might wish for a better world, few Americans have so far been willing to take real personal risks to challenge the status quo. (And tweeting doesn’t count.)
For many liberals, the anguish of the first Trump administration was mostly “affective”, Begins suggests – a sense of emotional discomfort brought on by “the stuff you had to see on the news”. He draws a contrast with the enormous hardship Brazilians suffered under Bolsonaro. “People that had jobs at a bank or in a restaurant were living on the streets with their families,” he recalls. “It was when governance became so obviously chaotic that he even lost well-off Brazilians in the large cities that his government began to fall apart.”
Since the Great Depression, that kind of suffering has been fairly limited in this country, but the prospect seems less remote every day. “We’re in a world of polycrisis,” Bevins says. “We’re in a world of environmental collapse. We’re in a world where Donald Trump has promised change that is likely to be quite chaotic and unpredictable and dangerous.”
If there’s a single lesson to be learned from the last decade of mass protest, he adds, it’s simply this: in an atomized, digitally mediated society that has left so many of us feeling alienated and adrift, transformational change will depend on solidarity, community and human connection. “I see people saying, don’t limit yourself to participation in politics, which amounts to pressing buttons in a voting booth every two years. Join a labor union, a social movement, a political party, a tenant union, a community organization, a book club. Literally anything is better than sitting at home and scrolling on your phone and getting mad at the news,” Bevins says.
One opportunity will arise soon enough – another Women’s March is slated for 18 January. In addition to sending a message, it will rally the troops, provide inspiration and fellowship, and ideally give participants the chance to connect with or build the sort of focused, disciplined organizations that sometimes manage to force genuine change. “If groups get large enough and employ tactics like strikes or boycotts, or somehow make the reproduction of routine daily life impossible,” Bevins says, “they can really impose concrete costs on an existing political system.
“The more that you are arm in arm with other human beings and able to act collectively and hopefully democratically,” he advises, “the better you’ll be prepared for whatever comes.”
