"One of the most striking things in your book is the way you juxtapose the 1963 March on Washington and the 2017 Women’s March. These two historic protests could not have been organized more differently. At the same time, they reflect a larger transition that’s been underway on the left for decades in terms of moving from a top-down, male-oriented leadership to more decentralized, female-led movements.
Absolutely. The way in which the 2017 women’s marches came together was very decentralized, very viral, very bottom up. There were quite a few seasoned organizers who stepped up and took on a lot of the nuts-and-bolts work of putting those mobilizations together. However, the process of mobilizing, of getting the people there, so much of that was work that women and some men, not waiting for permission, not waiting for direction, but just making it happen themselves. And that impulse really carried over into the way the larger resistance to Trump came together in the period after his inauguration in thousands of small, decentralized women-led groups all around the country who are now very busy at work to affect the outcome of the midterm elections.
So what do protests accomplish if they don’t achieve their immediate objectives?
The work of protests unfolds over many years and a lot of times you have to lose repeatedly before you can win. The way that you create change over the long term involves expanding the political possibilities of the moment by empowering others to take action with building and sustaining movements and movement organizations that can do organizing work.
Often people will look at a protest and consider it just as a short-term pressure tactic, which some kinds of protests are meant to be. However, mass mobilizations, be they the ’63 March on Washington or the women’s marches, don’t really work that way. They do much more to help people feel part of something bigger than themselves than they do to concretely achieve change in the short run. The work of change usually happens through multiple tactics and multiple means, not just through marching. But marching matters because it’s part of how we get a sense of collective power. For many people, large protests are the on-ramp to other forms of activism."
