American Resistance: From the Women's March to the Blue Wave by Dana R. Fisher (review)

The Resistance—the mass protests and political activism that sprung up in response to the Trump administration and its policies—feels like decades ago in our turbulent political environment. But this very recent activism has already made a big impact. The activists, organizations, and strategies detailed in Dana Fisher's new book, American Resistance, helped usher in a new Congress with more women and people of color than ever before. Led first by the Women's March but expanding to include a wide range of issues and organizations, this loose and fragile political coalition stands to do much more. Fisher's book offers an important empirical account of where it came from and provides clues as to what lies ahead.

American Resistance chronicles the mass protests (those drawing at least 25 000 participants) challenging the Trump administration and its policies that occurred in Washington D.C. from the beginning of 2017 to the 2018 midterm election, seven in all. Fisher and her research team surveyed protest participants and conducted follow-up surveys with smaller subsamples in the lead-up to and immediately following the election. What emerges is a fresh portrait of Resistance activists, their motivations, and their involvement in electoral politics. The book offers something for everyone. Activists and social movement scholars get a close-up examination of contemporary organizing models. There are also plenty of details on the basics of obtaining samples and surveying at mass protests, much of it in a methodological appendix. For anyone concerned about the state of civic engagement, Fisher presents a treasure trove of new evidence, some of it interesting and encouraging, other pieces not so much.

Let us start with the interesting. The typical protester across all seven events was a highly educated white woman around forty years old. This conforms to most popular accounts of the Women's March, but it holds across a wide range of events and issues from the March for Science to the March for Our Lives (gun violence). We knew from media accounts that the protesters were highly educated, but, wow, 87 percent of Women's March participants surveyed in 2017 had a bachelor's degree or higher compared to a third of the general population. The majority of respondents across protests decided to participate without any connection to or invitation from the organizations sponsoring the events. This partly reflects changes in the meaning and experience of group membership, but also that protesters were moved to march by Trump himself. Aside from the near constant outrage the Trump administration generated among the Left, protesters were motivated by a diverse range of issues that shifted over time and across events while the basic protester demographic held steady. When protesters were asked to list their motivations to protest, 97 percent of those surveyed at the People's Climate March not surprisingly cited the environment, but 45 percent also pointed to equality issues, another 40 percent included Women's Rights, and 25 percent cited labor.

If you care about civic engagement, some of Fisher's findings are highly encouraging. For example, many participants in the 2017 Women's March were new to protest. The percentage of new participants decreases consistently across the major protests of 2017 and 2018 as people returned to the streets again and again. At least three quarters of those surveyed at the big 2018 marches had participated in the first Women's March the year before. Even without social movement organizations at the forefront, the marches themselves helped forge collective identify and commitment to progressive causes. The follow-up surveys show how resisters continued their activism in electoral politics by contributing to candidates, canvassing, phone banking, writing post cards (this is back in apparently), and signing petitions. Notably, many of them did so with the Democratic Party and its state and local affiliates. A weak and out of touch Democratic Party is one reason that...