So far, Trump and Musk are at least as aggressive as I had expected and much smarter. Prominent institutions appear to be buckling–notably, law firms, universities, and Democratic senators. There is some angst about an apparent lack of popular resistance.

Indeed, we still need more grassroots opposition. However, Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman, and Soha Hammam show that “street protests today are far more numerous and frequent than skeptics might suggest”–and more frequent than in the same period in 2017.

Besides, the number and scale of street protests is only one indicator of an effective popular movement, and sometimes a misleading one. I believe that some recent movements have been overly enamored of public displays that miss their real targets. For instance, Occupy Wall Street may have occupied a park two blocks east of the eponymous street, but “Wall Street” is only a metaphor for the financial industry. Occupy put less pressure on banks and private equity than on municipal governments and college presidents. In a widely circulated 2022 article, Ryan Grimm documented how movements for racial and gender equity disproportionately targeted progressive nonprofits. And the most prominent protests against Israel last year chose US colleges (not the defense industry or Congress, let alone Netanyahu) as their primary targets.

I am not against all of these actions, but I doubt that they changed the behavior of the US government, major corporations, or Israel.

On the other hand, Kevin A. Young documents the many victories that grassroots groups did accomplish during the first Trump Administration, including successful opposition to new coal and gas projects, pressure on cities not to cooperate with ICE, and teachers’ strikes. These actions were less prominent than demonstrations against municipalities and colleges, but they effectively used “more disruptive forms of pressure.”

And such actions are happening again–most notably, at Tesla dealerships. Micah Sifry believes that “we’re seeing a qualitatively different opposition movement forming than the one that appeared in 2017, one grounded by working people and led from the center out rather than the left in.” An important component of this opposition–and one that is likely to grow–involves organizing by laid-off federal workers.

Sifry is calling the current movement “The Defiance” instead of “The Resistance” because “we need a new term to describe something new” and because “the opposition that is rising now is less about signaling cultural disapproval in polite society and then channeling voter fury into the mid-term elections and more about actually standing now in the way of the machinery that Trump, Musk, Miller and Vought have unleashed with DOGE and Project 2025.” It is being led by “federal workers who are disproportionately veterans, working-class, younger and people of color who are feeling the front-lash of the DOGE chainsaw.”

As Sherilyn Ifill wrote on Feb 9: “People are doing things. You will meet those people when you start doing things.”

See also: did the first resistance work?; the current state of resistance, and what to do about it (Jan. 22); the tide will turn (Nov 15.) features of effective boycotts; etc.