Quite a few people, perhaps out of despair, didn’t have much hope six months ago for the stamina of the resistance. A few big protests like the 620-plus Women’s Marches that drew 4 million people into the streets, plus other protests and a bit of stepped-up election organizing, and then the resistance, these pessimists said or implied, would fade away.
That’s most definitely not what has happened.
In fact, June was the biggest month for protests since the Women’s Marches in January, according to Erica Chenoweth, Devin Finn, and Jeremy Pressman at The Washington Post. They have been keeping a tally, and they published their sixth monthly installment about public protests Tuesday:
For June 2017, we tallied 818 protests, demonstrations, strikes, marches, sit-ins and rallies in the United States, with at least one in every state and the District of Columbia. Our conservative guess is that from 954,298 to 1,173,771 people showed up at these political gatherings last month, although it is likely there were far more participants. Because mainstream media often neglect to report nonviolent actions — especially small ones — it is probable that we did not record every event that took place. Sometimes no one reports the size of the crowd, which contributes to undercounting. [...]
In this case, we estimate that June saw a staggering ninefold increase from May in the number of people protesting. In May, during which we observed from 100,807 to 128,464 people participating in crowds.
How much of that is a product of what some organizers are calling Resistance Summer is impossible to know for certain, but surely some of what we’re seeing is a consequence of that:
"I see Resistance Summer as the next phase of the resistance to Trump, and to the people in Congresses or statehouses and corporations who are supporting him or standing on the sidelines," says Victoria Kaplan, organizing director for MoveOn, a progressive group. "It's a natural next phase, and it's a great next phase as this movement grows, matures and recommits itself for the long haul."
Much of this resistance has been focused specifically on the shenanigans of Trump and the wretched congressional Republicans. That has helped spread the idea in some circles that all of the resistance is—or should be—just about him, his minions, and the ultra-rightists in the Senate and House.
But as I’ve written before, the resistance isn’t something invented November 9 in the wake of Trump’s victory:
America’s history bristles with resistance. Every great reform was begun by resisters to the established order. Resistance has been a bit more prevalent recently than during some other periods. Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the fight for LGBTQ equality and dignity, the reproductive rights struggle, climate hawks, and the rising up of indigenous people in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico against the relentless plunder of their land all have resisters at work who didn’t start last November [or in the 21st Century].
Many of our Democratic leaders have in the past said disparaging things about such groups and the individual Americans in them when they ought to have been standing shoulder-to-shoulder with these resisters all along.
[...] what’s unfolding right now should not be allowed to become The Resistance™. We don’t need a brand. Nor a pretense in a few months or further down the road that these leading Democrats started the resistance, when, in fact, resisters have been with us all along, often ignored and ridiculed, when they’re not being surveilled, harassed and jailed.
It’s important to acknowledge that public protests—in the streets, in the offices of Senators, at townhalls—are only a small piece of the resistance. While the planning and logistics for a major demonstration or network of simultaneous demonstrations can be daunting, these pale in comparison with work on other long-term, often behind-the-scenes efforts.
Besides marching and occasionally getting arrested, the resistance includes petitioning, letter-writing, phone-calling, canvassing, finding liberal candidates to run for everything from city councils to Congress, fighting for reproductive rights in the face of retrograde state legislatures seeking to control women’s bodies, seeking justice for unarmed people of color murdered or maimed by police violence, struggling for economic and social equality in an era where the 0.01 percent wallows in more half the world’s wealth, working to spread climate friendly energy policies, and creating intersectional alliances of mutual support.
Many of these efforts have been underway not for just a few months or even years, but decades. Predecessors of today’s resisters laid some of the groundwork for what’s happening now.
Happily, despite political divisions, what we’re witnessing is a broad resistance at a level unmatched since the 1960s, and, hopefully, having learned from the mistakes of that era. Now, as then, resisters will see our share of defeats, probably more than our share. What’s important to remember is that successful resisting has to operate for the long haul. There are no shortcuts. The greatest American reforms took years, often decades, to achieve. It’s true that things move faster in this era of instant communications, but that doesn’t make for quick or easy victories. An effective resistance requires steady, patient effort for as long as it takes. It works to avoid frustration, despair and, most of all, surrender.