Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
Turning the
March into a Movement
Peter Dreier & Donald Cohen
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
The American Prospect
Saturday’s
day of protest—against Donald Trump and for women’s equality—was successful in
two significant ways.
First, it
was the largest one-day protest in American history. Based on news reports from
cities around the country, as many as 4.5 million people took to the streets.
From 750,000 people in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles to 250,000 in Chicago,
60,000 in Atlanta, 26,000 in Des Moines, and 271 in Morris, Minnesota (with a
population of 3,500 and only two stoplights), protesters took over America on
Trump’s second day in office.
Second, the
protest completely dominated the news on a day when a newly elected president
normally is basking in good press. This is a real defeat for a thin-skinned man
who lives off dominating news cycles. The front-page headlines in most
newspapers focused on the marches in their local cities and around the country.
Many papers had no front-page stories at all about Trump’s first day as
president. Those papers that did report on Trump focused on his rambling rant
at the CIA. The reporters let readers know that Trump lied about the crowd size
at the inauguration—a falsehood repeated later that by his press secretary Sean
Spicer and his advisor Kellyanne Conway, who described those lies as
“alternative facts.”
In
contrast, media coverage of Obama’s second day on the job in 2009 was almost
universally positive throughout the country.
In
reporting on Saturday’s protests, many news outlets estimated the size of the
crowds in their cities without calculating the total number nationwide. Papers
that attempted to gauge the total, like The New York Times,
came up several million people short. But two professors—Jeremy Pressman from
the University of Connecticut and Erica Chenoweth from the University of
Denver—conducted a detailed accounting [1] of
press and other reports from rallies in over 500 cities and towns across the
country. Their conclusion so far: between 3.3 and 4.6 million Americans took to
the streets.
Despite the
remarkable turnout, the question remains whether it heralds the beginning of a
new “resistance” movement that can thwart Trump’s agenda and help Democrats
regain power, or whether it was a one-day act of defiance that will be
difficult to sustain.
This was a
nationwide protest but it was highly decentralized. It began as a Facebook
post. NARAL and Planned Parenthood provided some support, but the march was not
directed by paid organizers for national organizations. There was no central
slogan or theme. There were few professionally printed signs. In most cities,
volunteers found each other via social media or friendship networks and did the
grunt work—getting police permits, identifying march routes, recruiting
speakers and musicians—necessary to pull off a public protest.
We talked
to a few dozen of the 750,000 at the Los Angeles protest.
Most of
them were first-time marchers, not seasoned activists. Shock over Trump’s
election and fear of his presidency inspired them to show up.
The LA
rally was diverse in several ways. Although it was a “women’s” march, at least
one-third of the participants were men or boys. Perhaps one-quarter of the
participants were Latino—not equivalent to their part of the city’s population
(48 percent), but still significant. Speakers from Black Lives Matter and other
black groups were conspicuous at the rally, and African Americans were
well-represented, but not in proportion to their share (9 percent) of LA’s
diverse population.
Perhaps
most remarkable was the generational diversity. Some came in wheelchairs and even
more arrived in baby strollers. There was a large contingent of higher schools,
but the vast majority of the marchers were in their 20s, 30s, and 40s—the age
group that voted heavily for Bernie Sanders in the primaries, and then
supported Hillary Clinton in November. Some of the people we interviewed
indicated that Sanders’s campaign was their first experience with activism, and
that Saturday was their next involvement in a large-scale political event.
The march
exemplified what young activists call “intersectionality” and what older
protesters called “multi-issue” organizing. Many of the signs and
slogans—“Pussy grabs back,” “women together,” “Girls just wanna have
fundamental rights,” and “Get your tiny hands off my uterus”—reflected that
this was a women-sponsored rally. But the participants also focused on themes
that recognized the links between women’s rights and concerns about widening
economic inequality, racial profiling, gun violence, immigrant rights,
declining wages, and other matters: “United against hate,” the signs said,
“Apathy is not an option,” “Bridges not walls,” “Opinions are not facts,” ”Love
Trumps hate,” “Full rights for all immigrants,” “You can’t have my rights—I am
using them,” and “No human being is illegal.”
The
question going forward is whether this one-day protest has legs. This
could be the beginning of a broader movement, but that won’t happen
spontaneously. Such a movement would need national leadership and some level of
coordination (a la the Tea Party) or it would become like Occupy Wall Street,
which created a great slogan and changed the nation’s discourse, but didn’t
have the staying power to contest for real political influence.
Marchers in
Los Angeles and other cities proclaimed, “This is what democracy looks like.”
But democracy isn’t just a display of numbers. The majority only rules when it
wins a contest for power, and that requires organization and strategy—what
organizer Ernesto Cortes calls turning “hot” anger into “cold” anger.
In
movement-building terms, what must be done to keep the marchers involved a
month, six months, a year, and two years from now?
Almost
everyone we talked to said they had learned about the event via Facebook or
other social media. Not one of them indicated that they belonged to an organization—such
as a union, church, an environmental or women’s right group, or the Democratic
Party—that had contacted them about the march.
People came
with their friends, not as part of a contingent of issue organizations or
constituency groups. Most of the signs had slogans and drawings, but few had
the names of organizations.
The
relative absence of such organizational ties at the march demonstrates the
enormous pool of unorganized Americans who are available for mass action in the
age of Trump. But it also poses challenges for building a sustainable movement
for change.
Black
churches and historically Black colleges formed the infrastructure that
mobilized people during the civil rights movement. Unions have traditionally
been the organizational backbone for Democratic Party campaign operations. The
fact that the march in Detroit—once a union stronghold, now a predominantly
African American and low-income city—attracted only 4,000 reflects the waning
influence of these organizations, and helps explain why Hillary Clinton lost
Michigan in November.
Some
pundits believe that the decline in Americans’ organizational affiliations,
identified in Robert Putnam’s 2000 book, Bowling Alone, is not a
serious problem because the internet and social media have created new ways to
recruit people for political action. Facebook was a major catalyst for getting
people—young and old—to the marches in many small cities and towns in red
states. It let them know that despite November’s electoral outcome, there are
many like-minded people in their community. The huge turnout in college towns
and cities with large numbers of young people—175,000 in Boston, 100,000 in
Madison, 50,000 in Austin, 11,000 in Ann Arbor, 10,000 in Eugene, Oregon, and
2,500 in Charlottesville, Virginia—reflects the power of this technology.
But social
media has its limits as an organizing tool. When we asked marchers if or
how they planned to stay connected and involved, most were
unsure. Many said that they’d try to learn what’s going on via Facebook.
But when it came to staying involved after they returned home from Saturday’s
march, they didn’t know what to do or how.
Since the
protest march was highly decentralized, the organizers in Los Angeles didn’t
create a mechanism to sign up the participants for a listserve (the modern
version of a “sign-up sheet”) so they could stay in touch after Saturday.
That's unfortunate, because activist groups will need them for follow-up actions
over the next few months and years—not just for marches, but for calls and
emails to Congress and City Hall, for town hall meetings to demand that local
pols create “sanctuary” cities to protect immigrants, for protests and hearings
at state capitols to protect funding for Planned Parenthood or fight efforts to
roll back environmental protection laws, and for volunteers to canvass and
phone bank for progressive candidates.
Howard
Dean’s 2004 election was the first to utilize social media to recruit volunteers,
raise money, and spread the message. Since then, social media has evolved
exponentially. There is still a digital divide based on age and income,
but most Americans are now connected in some way.
But while
Facebook and other social media are powerful tools for mobilizing for events or
action alerts, they are not as good for building organizational infrastructure
to compete for power against corporations currently extending their sway over
American government. Turning a mobilization into a movement requires
finding ways that people who want to act can stay connected—in issue
organizations, churches, unions, the Democratic Party—for the long haul.
The answer
to whether Saturday’s marches were successful won’t be known until Trump and
his GOP allies try to pass legislation and appoint Supreme Court and other
federal judges. It won’t be known until the four-plus million who took to the
streets on Saturday turn out to volunteer for progressive candidates running
for local, state, and federal offices in 2018 and to work on campaigns that
increase voter registration.
There were
many elected officials, labor leaders, and progressive organizers who spoke at
the rallies in LA and around the country. But the Democratic Party, the unions,
and the progressive issue groups (except for a few national women’s rights
groups) played little role in organizing Saturday’s marches. There are,
however, hopeful signs. Within days after the march, Planned Parenthood, and
other groups held a training session for 2,000 organizers, focusing on how to
turn Saturday’s energy into sustained political action. To fully seize the
moment, however, the entire progressive movement—including the unions, the
NAACP, the Sierra Club, and other progressive groups around the country—need to
work collaboratively like never before. They should be staffed up, target key
states and cities, and link coordinated issue campaigns and protests with
electoral politics.
To make
this happen, they need to figure out how to connect with the millions of people
who marched on Saturday and the millions more who didn’t but are also ready to
fight. In the words of legendary organizer, Fred Ross, Sr., “people power must
be visible”—to the Trump administration, Congress, governors, mayors, and the
media. That doesn’t mean just being visible at a one-day protest, but over the
next months and years.
As union
leader Maria Elena Durazo said in her speech at the LA rally, “this is a
marathon, not a sprint.” On Saturday, millions of Americans indicated that they
are “fired up and ready to go.” But it takes strong organizations and
old-fashioned organizing to help them get to where they want to go.
Links:
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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