On Tuesday, Democrats showed that they could mobilize a coalition of voters and begin to take the country’s elected offices back from the Republicans who seized them over the course of the Obama era. You might think this would be cause for celebration among the so-called anti-Trump “Resistance.” But just 24 hours after a stunning series of Democratic victories across the country, the mood on the streets among the resisters was mixed. Perhaps that was, in part, because there were so few of them.
For months, a nationwide series of protests were planned by anti-Trump liberals to mark the one-year anniversary of his election victory. When the day came, however, attendance was sparse. The Weekly Standard’s Alice Lloyd was on the ground in Philadelphia at the site of one such event, billed as a “primal scream against Trump.” And that’s literally what the organizers planned to do: come together for one giant display of impotent rage. A roll call on Facebook suggested as many as 700 would attend, but only a fraction of that number arrived. “I was hoping for a cathartic experience,” one attendee told Lloyd, “and I’m disappointed at the lackluster turnout.” A version of these protests in New York City, where demonstrators planned to “scream at the sky” in a display of utter powerlessness, was only marginally better attended. Still, the demonstrators who protested against a “fascist America” and the coming “nuclear war” in New York struggled to fill even a tight shot of the event.
This is a pretty stark contrast to the spontaneous, grassroots demonstrations that followed the election of Donald Trump, and which shut down major metropolitan downtown areas for days. Those events were followed by the cartelization of the various “Resistance” movements, which popped up ahead of inauguration day. Some of these movements were violent and inchoate while others were placid and sympathetic. None of these self-indulgent, purgative therapy sessions were, however, politically effective. Then something changed; the streets started emptying out and #TheResistance got organized.
Studying the work of University of Maryland sociologist Dana R. Fisher for the New York Times Review of Books, Judith Shulevitz explored the transformation of this loose amalgam of malcontents into a coherent and effective political organization. The primary catalyst for early anti-Trump demonstrations was, of course, Trump. But the groups that devoted themselves to letter-writing campaigns, contacting members of Congress, dominating town hall events, and recruiting candidates up and down the ballot are animated today by a traditionally Democratic issue set. “[T]he big issues for the resistance,” Shulevitz confessed, “are health care and gerrymandering, followed by dark money in politics, education, and the environment.” Notably missing from this list is the subject that has proven the source of most of this decade’s grassroots political upheavals: the economy.
The last left-leaning movement to put as many bodies in the streets as the anti-Trump Resistance movement did in 2016-2017 was, arguably, the Occupy Wall Street movement. The character of these two factions could not have been more different. Before Occupy descended into a squalid archipelago of refugee camps typified by lawlessness, immorality, the abuse of women, and insalubrious filth, it was seen by many as a sympathetic expression of economic helplessness. The movement went global as Europe struggled with a sovereign debt crisis and the freshly ascendant Republicans in the United States promised to cut off the spigot of public funds that had flowed freely for nearly two years.
Economists and political commentators like Jeffrey Sachs heaped praise on this movement, which vindicated his long-held preconceptions about economic inequality. Democrats ranging from Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to President Barack Obama prematurely declared Occupy both effective and compelling. Their hunger to midwife a Democratic answer to the Tea Party led these and others on the left to abandon prudence. Occupy soon became more of an embarrassment to the Democrats who had embraced it than a source of electoral strength. Indeed, Occupy was never interested in elections. Its organizers had no interest in participating in the political process. They were, in fact, generally contemptuous of the Western capitalist system and the republican governmental structures that support it.
It’s a unique irony that the modern left, which came to power on the back of an economic crisis and believed that crisis’s lingering effects would preserve their political position, is only starting to recover as the economy improves. Democrats swept the off-year elections on Tuesday with a national unemployment rate at just 4.1 percent. The number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits is the lowest it has been in 44 years. The economy has grown by a sustainable 3 percent for two consecutive quarters, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average seems to reach a new record high just about every other day. Wages remain depressed and a staggering number of Americans remain outside the labor force, but the economy is good enough that it didn’t even register with Democratic organizers. What’s more, voters do not seem to be giving the president much credit for the state of the economy. It’s as though economic considerations are a virtual non-factor.
Democratic organizers have abandoned the streets and the rabble that typically populates them in times of tumult in favor of traditional political organizing, and it has served them well. Contrary to so much conventional wisdom, this time, it’s not the economy, stupid.
