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| No Kings protesters reaching for some joy in Littleton, NH |
Protest movements have played an important role in American history, often prodding the government to do the right thing. Three prominent examples: the suffrage movement of 1910 got women the vote; sit-down strikes organized by the CIO in the 1930s led to dramatic improvements in industrial working conditions and wages (creating the Great America that I assume most Trump voters want to return to); the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s forced the government to finally enforce the 14th and 15th amendments.
Since the Civil Rights movement ended in the mid-60s and devolved into Black Power and other less effective efforts, protest movements have proliferated, and ironically, conservative ones (anti-tax, anti-abortion; anti-ERA, the Tea Party) have had more success than those on the left, some of which I’ve participated in myself (nuclear freeze, anti-gulf and Iraq war protests) and more that I haven’t (anti WTO, Occupy Wall Street, climate, BLM, the great awokening, trans rights). In fact, the backlash to some of these has been greater than the tangible accomplishments. One conspicuous exception: Gay marriage—though its ends were achieved more via courts than legislation.
How could the people who invented protest become so thoroughly overshadowed by their opponents? And can the left make a come-back?
These are questions that those of us who have been going to the “No Kings” protests over the past year should be asking.
Writer Charles Duhigg’s recent New Yorker essay gives answers that confirm some of my own suspicions about the ineffectiveness of the left wing protests and Democratic Party election campaigns I’ve participated in over many years.
It’s a long article (6k words), so I decided to summarize it here (1.6k words), but if you have a chance, go find a copy of the Feb. 2 New Yorker.
Central to Duhigg’s argument is a distinction between mobilizing—"getting people to do a thing’—and organizing—“getting people to become the kind of people who do what needs to be done.” Since the decline of unions and the Civil Rights Movement, liberal protests and Democratic presidential campaigns mostly just try to mobilize people. Duhigg:
In the past century, Democrats have usually counted on outside organizations such as churches and labor unions to provide the kind of year-round, localized infrastructure that a movement needs to survive. But, as unions and non-evangelical churches have shrunk, the left has turned to a different strategy. It's become largely focussed on creating spectacles, such as the No Kings protests, that can mobilize large numbers of people at breakneck speed to march, sign petitions, and contribute money. But much of the energy fizzles away once the protest or the election is over. Indeed, large gatherings and high-profile protests haven't generally been effective at sparking widespread change: a recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which looked at major U.S. social movements between 2017 and 2022, found that "protests generate substantial internet activity but have limited effects on political attitudes."
Ironically, the modern model for successful organizing of presidential campaigns was pioneered by a Democrat, Barack Obama in 2008.Duhigg says that the Obama campaign
recruited tens of thousands of volunteer leaders and basically told them to do what they thought best—in essence, to become franchises. These local leaders began experimenting with different messages and strategies, and then shared their results with one another. In Florida, a volunteer used her own money to rent an unofficial Obama campaign office while others built an "Obama booth," near a dog run, to register voters. In California, one particularly enthusiastic volunteer created an unofficial social-media account for Obama. (Webmasters eventually took it away.) After the official campaign built a website with instructions on how to create pro-Obama videos, more than four hundred thousand of them were uploaded to YouTube. This deliberately varied strategy vastly exceeded expectations; by many counts, it attracted more volunteers, who worked for more hours, than in any other campaign in U.S. history. In the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, a total of more than two million Obama supporters approached their neighbors and colleagues more than twenty-four million times, registering at least 1.8 million new voters and helping Obama and congressional Democrats secure victories.
Since then, Democrats have mostly gone back to mobilizing, with huge sums of money poured into campaigns, mostly to pay the lucrative contracts of professional operatives. The Harris campaign outspent Trump’s $2.9 billion to $1.8 billion and yet Trump send more money to local amateur volunteer organizers. The Trump resistance, led by a group called Indivisible, was similarly a top-down, centralized mobilization effort, great at assembling huge mobs of protesters on short notice, but Theda Skocpol, a scholar who studies movements, told Duhigg, the group failed to build “a sustainable and ideologically diverse membership.” She called that a “tragic lost opportunity.”
Meanwhile, conservative stalwart Ralph Reed, the former leader of the Christian Coalition, took notice of Obama’s 2008 accomplishment, noticing how he had managed to peel away usually-dependably-Republican voters—Catholics and Evangelicals—by significant margins. Even evangelicals who go to church two or more times a week voted for Obama by 8 points more than they did for previous Democratic presidential candidates, according to Duhigg. Obama beat John McCain by 9 points in the usually-Republican-voting Catholic bloc.
Reed applied these tactics to a new right-wing organizing effort, the Faith and Freedom Coalition. In the 2024 election, F&F organized 3.1 million activists, in an outreach effort three times greater than Obama’s 2008 campaign. Other MAGA groups have adopted similar tactics.
The role of the national HQ in these populist efforts has been to distribute money and share successful ideas from local branches’ with other branches. Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, simply tells new recruits to read “Ground-Breakers: How Obama’s 2.2 million volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America,” and then, like Obama and F&F lets the local groups “decide which tactics to adopt and which issues to champion, as long as they align with the group's basic conservative values.”
But that alignment is very loose. Unlike Democrats, who enforce unanimity across a long list of issues (Indivisible imposed policy positions regarding abortion, gender, and voting policies on local chapters, according to Skocpol), MAGA groups accept everyone who is willing to “wear the red hat,” even if they don’t fall in line on every issue. MAGA doesn’t have “in this house we believe” lawn signs—just huge Trump flags.
I’m a good example of someone who has been put off by the purity imposed in left spaces, in spite of a long history of supporting the furthest left candidate in every primary and taking the liberal position on just about every policy issue. And yet, dissenting on some of the more extreme elements of the identarian left—or even just using the wrong words to discuss them—can get just about anyone shunned, disciplined or even fired (I have stories). These days, saying you agree with even one of Trump’s policies or that you can understand why some people might vote for him, makes you suspect—even if you have proclaimed—in writing, on your blog—that you would vote for a ham sandwich before ever voting for Trump.
But Duhigg’s essay offers some hope.
He spoke to a few left-leaning scholars who have noticed MAGA’s successful organizing and to some organizers who are trying to apply those lessons to specific, local efforts.
Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler criticized Democrats’ tendency to impose ideological litmus tests and faculty lounge linguistic codes on movement participants. "That doesn't work… A movement needs people who feel safe with each other, who can hang out and talk about things besides politics. People who like each other. The Republicans are finding those people. The Democrats aren't doing that enough."
"Democrats should be learning from the Republicans about how to build small, socially interconnected communities." That, he said, would involve building "neighborhood teams working year-round and socializing with their neighbors, to form real communities."
The success of F&F, according to one organizer is “just being around—that's our whole secret. Instead of showing up at election time and asking for votes, we're here year-round, asking people what they need…. The election is just the by-product.”
Duhigg’s most promising example of a successful organizing group on the left was Down Home North Carolina, which operates in a rural county, focuses on local bread and butter rather than national culture war issues, stays active in between election and has recruited and empowered many volunteers.
Duhigg gave the group credit for electing Democrats to the state legislature who voted to expand Medicaid and pass “a slew of other pro-rural bills.” And its members are ideologically diverse. A leader of the group said “they're voting for very different people for President. But for the local soil-and-water board, or school board, we're pretty aligned. That's all we need."
The organizer of ISAIAH, a local group in Minnesota, told Duhigg that “one reason the group has thrived is that it doesn't limit participation to people who can pass litmus tests on such issues as abortion or L.G.B.T.Q. rights. Exclusionary tactics ‘are kryptonite,’ she told me. ‘We're focussed on bread-and-butter issues that people agree on, regardless of party.’"
One final ingredient that liberals might borrow from the MAGA tribe: Joy.
As Liz McKenna, a Harvard sociologist told Duhigg, "’Trump rallies are fun…. The Turning Point campus debates are fun.’”… Left spaces tend to be less so, but she argued that Mamdani won in part because his campaign was: ‘joyful, hopeful, creative. and reflected a real sense of collective possibility. And that emotional culture translated into a major electoral upset.’"
I once tried to crash a Trump rally (don’t cancel me!), and found that I would have had to arrive half a day before the doors opened if I wanted to get in. But I did walk around outside and it reminded me of the friendly, festive vibe outside any cultural event. See the Dispatch essay, “Front Row Joes” by Andrew Egger, about “superfans” who follow the Trump rallies from town to town like the Dead Heads used to do (mentioned in “The Rage and Joy of MAGA America,” by David French NYT. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/opinion/maga-america-trump.html
More take-aways from the article
One disadvantage the Democrats face is a religious deficit. Conservative churches and gun clubs have been at the center of right wing organizing efforts. Democrats would have to find other institutional bases to work from. Wikler suggested garden clubs and “community centers,” though I have a feeling most people want those places to be havens from divisive politics. In my local community, certain music venues might be the most promising places from which to organize.
Deama Caldwell, Todd Zimmer, organizers for Down Home North Carolina.
Kate Hess Pace, of Hoosier Action, Southern Indiana:
“It’s really clear how disconnected the Democratic Party is from working class people.”
Sarah Jaynes, director of Rural Democracy Initiative: “the Harris campaign and these big Senate races had more money than they could use—but the groups on the ground who know people, the trusted messengers, they're basically ignored.”
Duhigg mentioned the Women’s March of 2017 as a case study of pointless mobilization that did more to divide than to unite the left.
Duhigg spoke to scholars who found that in conservative groups, people developed strong right wing positions after getting in involved with conservative protest groups. "The left has purity tests," Zaid Munson told Duhigg. "You have to prove you're devoted to the cause. But that means that, once you join, you're spending time with the kind of people you already know, because you already move in the same circles, and you've screened out people who might be ideologically ambivalent right now but might have become activists if you had welcomed them." That seemed like a particularly important observation for the left to absorb.
"Ralph Reed reminded me that, for Faith & Freedom and many similar conservative organizations, there are no showy national rallies. And there's little strictness about ideological consistency. But during elections the group turns out millions of voters. When Reed looks at the left today, he said, 'a lot of times it feels like they're trying to hook people with big parades and free Beyoncé concerts.' That's not how you win, he went on. 'You win by offering people a set of values that give them meaning. Celebrities don't deliver that. Small groups of neighbors do. And, as long as we're building those groups, we're gonna win.'"
Source: Charles Duhigg, “One Direction: What MAGA can teach Democrats about organizing and infighting,” New Yorker, Feb. 2, 2026.
