{"id":17767,"date":"2016-11-29T17:48:50","date_gmt":"2016-11-29T22:48:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17767"},"modified":"2016-11-29T17:48:50","modified_gmt":"2016-11-29T22:48:50","slug":"what-activist-movements-will-look-like-in-the-trump-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=17767","title":{"rendered":"what activist movements will look like in the Trump era"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dave Karpf has a great piece<\/a> entitled, “Cyclical patterns in activist politics: what do we know about the politics of opposition”? Karpf argues that opposing a government looks very different from the “politics of articulation” (trying to\u00a0develop and promote an agenda). These are some key differences:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Opposition unites. As Karpf notes,\u00a0the Tea Party formed to oppose Obama before he had made any policy decisions. Its original rhetoric–and its very name–implied opposition to tax increases. But Obama mainly cut taxes. That was no problem for the Tea Party, which shifted to opposing the Affordable Care Act. It was nimble about policies because its raison d’etre was opposition to a person, his core values, and the institution\u00a0he controlled.<\/li>\n
  2. Rapid response becomes more valuable. Especially in the age of social media, activist networks are good at getting people out quickly. They are much worse at sustaining pressure, negotiating, and\u00a0achieving new policies. When your side shares formal\u00a0power, rapid response is relatively unimportant. But when the main goal is to block policies coming from the other side, rapid response pays.<\/li>\n
  3. By the same token,\u00a0it becomes harder to advance a positive agenda when a movement must spend all its time\u00a0blocking new initiatives from the government.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I would add two hypotheses:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. I think activists on the left\u00a0will shift from soft, proximate targets to confront their\u00a0main ideological opponents.\u00a0The\u00a0global justice movement<\/a>\u00a0of the Clinton era\u00a0criticized transnational corporations\u00a0and the governments that supported them, yet\u00a0it\u00a0gained attention for protests outside\u00a0the World Bank,\u00a0which funds development projects. Occupy Wall Street claimed to target Wall Street, yet it got\u00a0the most traction in conflicts with Democratic\u00a0big city mayors<\/a> and\u00a0state universities<\/a>\u00a0that were simultaneously\u00a0facing budget cuts from conservative legislatures. The environmental movement focuses on massive destruction caused by fossil fuels but achieved a notable victory by pressuring a Democratic president to block a specific pipeline that could\u00a0be\u00a0easily bypassed<\/a>. The left tends to\u00a0confront\u00a0near-allies for showing hypocrisy or weakness, but that impulse fades when explicit\u00a0opponents take control. (See Bayard Rustin’s absolutely indispensable and totally timely 1965 article “From Protest to Politics<\/a>” for a similar point.)<\/li>\n
    2. Maintaining political discipline will be an enormous challenge. As Rustin reminded\u00a0his fellow Civil Rights leaders in 1965, the point is to win. That requires mobilizing and inspiring a majority of\u00a0Americans, not just fellow travelers. National Review’s Jim Geraghty tweeted earlier today, “Anti-Trump protesters are gonna take the bait, aren\u2019t they? They\u2019re gonna burn flags, thinking they\u2019re irking him, but alienating majority.” It’s very hard for any large, loose network to remember\u00a0what the majority\u00a0of people value, let alone maintain message-discipline. Whether anti-Trump movements can manage that task is enormously important.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      See also:\u00a0we need SPUD (scale, pluralism, unity, depth)<\/a>;\u00a0to beat Trump, invest in organizing<\/a>;\u00a0building grassroots power in and beyond the election<\/a>; and\u00a0democracy in the digital age<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Dave Karpf has a great piece entitled, “Cyclical patterns in activist politics: what do we know about the politics of opposition”? Karpf argues that opposing a government looks very different from the “politics of articulation” (trying to\u00a0develop and promote an agenda). These are some key differences: Opposition unites. As Karpf notes,\u00a0the Tea Party formed to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-revitalizing-the-left","category-trump"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17767"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17769,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17767\/revisions\/17769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}