Chapter 26: Social Movements — How Outsiders Change the System from Below

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." — Frederick Douglass, 1857

"We are a movement of citizens, working for the principles upon which our nation was founded." — Tea Party Patriots founding statement, 2009

What this chapter is about

For most of this textbook, we have studied the formal institutions of American government — Congress, the presidency, the courts, the bureaucracy, the parties — and the formal channels of citizen participation: voting, donating, lobbying, running for office. Those institutions and channels do most of the day-to-day work of policy. But every transformative change in American political history — every change so large that the country looks different on the other side — has been driven from outside those institutions, by ordinary people who organized themselves into a force the system had to respond to.

That force is the social movement.

A social movement is collective action by people outside the formal political system, aimed at producing political or cultural change. Movements are not parties; they do not nominate candidates or contest elections directly. Movements are not interest groups; they do not have a permanent professional staff lobbying inside the building. Movements operate on the outside, and their leverage comes from their ability to mobilize numbers, capture attention, frame an issue, and force the inside players to choose sides.

This chapter is going to make a claim that some readers will find counterintuitive at first: movements across the American political spectrum are institutional phenomena that operate by similar mechanics. The Civil Rights Movement and the Tea Party, second-wave feminism and the Religious Right, Black Lives Matter and the Federalist Society, the labor movement and the Moral Majority — these are not the same in their goals or their values. But they are all examples of a single political form. They are all groups of citizens who concluded that the existing political system was not delivering what they wanted, who organized themselves into structures the system would have to deal with, and who used a recognizable repertoire of tactics — protest, persuasion, institution-building, electoral pressure, occasional civil disobedience — to push for change.

If you can describe how the abolitionist movement worked in 1850 (Garrison's newspaper, the speaking circuit, the underground railroad, the eventual capture of a major political party), you can describe how the Federalist Society works in 2026 (a network of lawyers and law students, a speaking circuit, a pipeline into the federal judiciary, the eventual capture of the constitutional jurisprudence of one major political party). The substantive politics differ enormously. The institutional form is recognizable.

Treating movements as institutional phenomena, rather than as moral crusades to be celebrated or condemned, is the only way to understand them as political forces. It is also the only way to write about them in a textbook used at both Berkeley and Liberty.

I. What social movements are (and are not)

Definition

The political-science definition, drawn from Charles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow, and Doug McAdam, runs roughly: a social movement is sustained, coordinated collective action by people who lack routine political access, aimed at making claims on authorities. Three features distinguish movements from other political forms:

1. Outside the system. Movement participants are not, qua movement participants, holders of political office, professional lobbyists, or party officials. (Movement leaders may also hold formal positions — Frederick Douglass was both a movement intellectual and an appointed federal official late in life — but the movement itself operates outside the formal channels.)
2. Sustained and coordinated. A one-day protest is not, by itself, a movement. A movement persists. It develops organizations, leaders, internal communication, and a shared narrative over time. The 1963 March on Washington was a movement event; the Civil Rights Movement is what produced it and what continued after it.
3. Making claims on authorities. Movements demand action from someone with power: a legislature, a court, a corporation, a church, a university, a government agency. Movements that simply express grievance without demanding response are something else (a subculture, a literary tradition, a folk practice). Movements that demand response of authorities are political.

What movements are not

It is useful to fix the boundary by contrast.

Interest groups (Chapter 24) are inside the system. They have offices in Washington, professional lobbyists, paid memberships, and access to the formal channels of government — committee testimony, regulatory rulemakings, campaign donations, personal relationships with members of Congress. The American Petroleum Institute, the National Education Association, the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association — all are interest groups. Many of these groups began as social movements and matured into interest groups (the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, the Sierra Club). The transition from movement to interest group is itself a recognizable life-cycle event, and one of the questions movement leaders argue about constantly: when does institutionalization stop being a sign of success and start being a sign of capture?

Political parties (Chapter 19) contest elections. The Democratic and Republican parties exist to win offices. Movements often interact with parties — pushing them, supplying their activists, forming factions inside them — but movements as such do not nominate candidates or organize legislatures. (When the Tea Party became the House Freedom Caucus, that transition is exactly the point at which a movement became a party faction.)

Riots and one-off uprisings are not, by themselves, movements. A spontaneous urban uprising following a police killing is not yet a movement; the organizational and narrative infrastructure that grew up around the 2014 Ferguson uprising and the 2020 George Floyd uprising — that's the movement.

Conspiracies and small armed cells that pursue political goals through clandestine action, like the Weather Underground in the 1970s or far-right militia networks since the 1990s, are something else again. They occupy a different category in the literature, and the empirical literature finds that movements that incorporate or tolerate this kind of action consistently underperform movements that do not. (We return to the empirical violence question below.)

Why movements matter

If you only studied the formal institutions of American government, you would be unable to explain how the country abolished slavery, gave women the vote, ended legalized segregation, regulated the workplace, expanded LGBT rights, or transformed the federal judiciary. Each of those changes was driven by sustained outside-system pressure that eventually forced the inside players to act. The pressure did not come from interest groups alone or parties alone or elections alone. It came from movements.

Movements matter because:

1. They expand the agenda. Movements get questions onto the political menu that the existing parties find inconvenient. Abolition was on no major party's platform in 1830; by 1860 it was the central question. Same-sex marriage was on no major party's platform in 1990; by 2015 it was the law of the land. Climate policy at the scale the modern climate movement demands was on no party's platform until very recently.
2. They change the cultural ground. Often a movement wins on culture before it wins on policy — and the policy follows. The visibility of LGBT Americans changed before Obergefell (2015) became thinkable. The visibility of women in the workforce changed before legal protections caught up. Movements often work on attitudes, framings, and narratives, not just legislative wins.
3. They reshape the parties. The parties we know in 2026 are downstream of movements: the modern Democratic Party reflects the labor movement, the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, the LGBT-rights movement, and elements of the climate and racial-justice movements; the modern Republican Party reflects the New Right, the Religious Right, the Federalist Society, the Tea Party, and (more recently) the national-conservative and MAGA movements. The parties are coalitions that movements have built up.

Recurring theme — Power flows to those who show up. Most Americans never participate in a social movement. About 6% of Americans say they participated in a protest in any given year (Pew, 2017–22). And yet the agenda of American politics is overwhelmingly shaped by what those 6% do. A small minority of citizens, willing to show up, organize, and persist, has more practical influence on what the country debates than a large majority that does not.

II. The historical American pantheon

The American political tradition is rich in successful social movements. We will walk through the major movements in roughly chronological order. The point is not to celebrate or condemn any of them — the moral judgments will be yours — but to see them as a recognizable institutional form.

Abolition (1830s–1865)

The American antislavery movement runs back to the Quaker antislavery petitions of the 18th century, but the modern movement begins in the 1830s with William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, founded 1831, and the American Anti-Slavery Society, founded 1833.

The movement built infrastructure: a press (the Liberator and dozens of other antislavery papers), a speaking circuit (Garrison, Frederick Douglass, the Grimké sisters, Sojourner Truth, Wendell Phillips), an underground railroad (perhaps 100,000 escapees aided between 1810 and 1860), a network of state and local antislavery societies, and a literature (Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852, sold 300,000 copies in its first year and shifted Northern public opinion). It contained internal factions: Garrisonian "moral suasion," willing to call the Constitution a "covenant with death" and to refuse political action; "political abolitionists" who built first the Liberty Party (1840), then the Free Soil Party (1848), then helped found the Republican Party (1854).

The movement's political success was concrete and measurable. The Republican Party, capturing the antislavery movement's electoral energy, won the presidency in 1860. The Civil War followed. The 13th Amendment (1865) abolished slavery; the 14th (1868) established equal protection and birthright citizenship; the 15th (1870) enfranchised African American men. These are constitutional changes — the highest level of policy success a movement can achieve in the American system. (The post-Reconstruction backlash, which is its own story, dismantled most of the on-the-ground enforcement of these amendments by the 1890s. We return to the question of movements' incomplete victories below.)

Frederick Douglass, who made the transition from movement intellectual to political insider over his lifetime, is the prototypical American movement leader: a former slave who escaped, became an internationally famous orator, edited his own newspaper (the North Star, 1847–63), counseled three presidents, and lived to see slavery abolished and Reconstruction begin and end.

Women's Suffrage (1848–1920)

The Seneca Falls Convention of July 1848 — organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and others — is conventionally taken as the founding event of the American women's suffrage movement. Its "Declaration of Sentiments," modeled on the Declaration of Independence, demanded full civic and political equality for women, including the vote.

The movement's arc to the 19th Amendment took 72 years. It involved:

• Two major rival national organizations (NWSA and AWSA) that merged in 1890 into NAWSA;
• A third, more militant organization (the National Woman's Party, 1916) that adopted picketing and hunger-striking tactics;
• State-by-state campaigns that won suffrage in Western states first (Wyoming 1869 as a territory, by 1914 thirteen states had granted full or partial suffrage);
• An alliance with, and complicated relationship with, the abolitionist movement — including a famous 1869 split over whether to support the 15th Amendment (which enfranchised African American men but not women);
• The mobilization of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (1874), which combined the suffrage cause with the prohibition cause and brought millions of Protestant women into political activism for the first time;
• A long, patient campaign on Congress and on state legislatures.

The 19th Amendment was ratified August 18, 1920. The decisive ratifying state was Tennessee; the decisive vote was cast by Harry Burn, a 24-year-old state legislator who voted yes after receiving a letter from his mother. Movements often hinge on contingencies of this kind — the necessary work having been done over decades, success crystallizes around a single vote.

The Labor / Progressive Movements (1880s–1930s)

The American labor movement was a sustained, often violent, half-century campaign for the legal recognition of workers' rights to organize, bargain collectively, and strike. Its institutional landmarks include the Knights of Labor (peak membership 700,000, 1886), the American Federation of Labor (founded 1886 by Samuel Gompers), the Industrial Workers of the World ("Wobblies," 1905), and eventually the Congress of Industrial Organizations (1935, merged with AFL in 1955).

The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York, in which 146 garment workers (mostly young immigrant women) died because the factory's exit doors had been locked from outside, became a movement-shaping event. The political fallout produced new fire codes, factory-inspection regimes, and — over decades — the workplace-safety apparatus that exists today.

Adjacent to and overlapping with labor, the Progressive movement of the 1890s–1920s pushed for the regulation of corporate power (Sherman Antitrust Act 1890, FTC and Clayton Acts 1914), the introduction of direct democracy mechanisms (initiative, referendum, recall, and the direct election of Senators via the 17th Amendment, 1913), the secret ballot, civil service reform, and pure-food-and-drug regulation (1906). The movement was strongest in the West and Midwest, drew from both major parties, and ultimately reshaped both.

The labor movement's largest legislative victory came in the New Deal: the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) of 1935 established the federal right to unionize and the National Labor Relations Board to enforce it. Union membership in the United States peaked in 1954 at about 35% of the non-agricultural workforce; as of 2024 it stands at about 10%.

Populism / Bryan / Free Silver (1890s)

Often given less weight in the standard pantheon, the Populist movement of the 1890s is worth pausing on because it illustrates how movements can fail to capture either party in their pure form, but still shift both major parties' platforms substantially.

The People's Party (Populist Party), formed in 1892 from the Farmers' Alliance and other agrarian organizations, demanded the free coinage of silver to inflate the money supply and relieve debtor farmers; a graduated income tax; direct election of Senators; an eight-hour workday; and government ownership of railroads and telegraphs. Their 1892 presidential candidate, James Weaver, won 8.5% of the national popular vote and carried four states.

In 1896 the Democratic Party effectively absorbed the populist platform when William Jennings Bryan won the Democratic nomination on the silver issue. Bryan lost the 1896 election to Republican William McKinley, and lost again in 1900 and 1908 — but the Populist movement's substantive demands appear, ten and twenty years later, in the Progressive era's accomplishments: graduated income tax (16th Amendment, 1913), direct Senate election (17th Amendment, 1913), expanded labor protections.

This is the defeat-and-absorption pattern: a movement that loses electorally can still set the terms of the policy debate for a generation.

Civil Rights (1955–1968)

Chapter 6 covers the Civil Rights Movement substantively. Here we treat it as movement: as the example, perhaps the central American example, of how strategic discipline and institutional craft turn moral conviction into political results.

The movement's institutional infrastructure was built over decades before the famous moments. The NAACP (founded 1909) had built the legal architecture for Brown v. Board across thirty years of patient litigation under Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall. The Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, founded in 1932, trained civil-rights organizers — Rosa Parks attended a Highlander workshop in summer 1955, four months before her arrest. Bayard Rustin, a Quaker pacifist who had studied Gandhi in India, brought the disciplined nonviolent methodology to King's circle. James Lawson trained the Nashville student sit-in leaders in nonviolent technique through 1959–60.

The movement's organizations were a coalition: NAACP (national, legal-strategy focused), SCLC (King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded 1957), CORE (Congress of Racial Equality, 1942), SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1960), and many local organizations and religious institutions. They argued bitterly with each other about tactics — the older NAACP often distrusted SNCC's confrontational style; SNCC sometimes saw SCLC as paternalistic — but they coordinated on campaigns: Montgomery (1955–56), Little Rock (1957), the sit-ins (1960), the Freedom Rides (1961), Birmingham (1963), the March on Washington (1963), Mississippi Freedom Summer (1964), Selma (1965).

The legislative outputs: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (public accommodations, employment), the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (federal enforcement of voting rights, especially in the South), the Fair Housing Act of 1968. These are among the most consequential domestic statutes of the 20th century.

Two themes from the civil rights case are central to understanding movements generally:

• Strategic nonviolence is a tactic before it is an ethic. King and Lawson taught nonviolence as a winning strategy: it forced opponents to either grant the demand or to be filmed beating peaceful Americans on national television. The fact that televised brutality in Birmingham (1963) and Selma (1965) shifted Northern white opinion is empirically what produced the legislative breakthroughs. This is the strategic logic of nonviolence — about which the empirical political-science literature has more to say (see Section IV).
• Movement craft is generational work. The Montgomery Bus Boycott in December 1955 looks spontaneous from a distance. Up close, it was the product of decades of NAACP litigation, Highlander training, the Women's Political Council of Montgomery (founded 1946), and a series of less-famous bus protests in Baton Rouge (1953), New York City (1941), and elsewhere. The "spontaneous" moment was the eruption of a long buildup.

Anti-Vietnam-War Movement (1964–1973)

The American antiwar movement against the Vietnam War grew from small student-left and pacifist-religious origins (the Catholic Worker movement, A.J. Muste's networks, early Students for a Democratic Society) into a mass movement that coordinated demonstrations of half a million participants by the late 1960s. The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam on October 15, 1969 produced perhaps the largest single coordinated demonstration in American history to that point, with millions of participants in actions across the country.

The movement's most dramatic political-institutional consequence came in 1968. The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago saw bitter conflict between the antiwar faction (backing Eugene McCarthy and, after his June assassination, Robert Kennedy's delegates) and the party establishment, which nominated Hubert Humphrey. Outside the convention hall, Chicago police clashed violently with antiwar protesters; the Walker Report later called the police response a "police riot." The Democratic Party split that year is a major pivot in postwar American politics — directly producing, among other things, the McGovern-Fraser Commission reforms that opened up the presidential nomination process (Chapter 20).

The war ended in 1973 (Paris Peace Accords) and, definitively, in April 1975 (fall of Saigon). Whether the movement caused the end is a contested historical question; what is not contested is that the movement reshaped the Democratic Party, pioneered organizing tactics later adopted across the spectrum, and defined the political identity of a generation.

Second-Wave Feminism (1963–1980s)

Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) is the conventional starting point for the second wave of American feminism, which followed the suffragist first wave by half a century. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded in 1966; Ms. magazine in 1971; the consciousness-raising group as a movement institution emerged from the late-1960s feminist left.

The legislative output included the Equal Pay Act (1963, signed before Mystique), Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (sex added during floor debate, partly as a poison-pill amendment that backfired), Title IX (1972, prohibiting sex discrimination in education), and Roe v. Wade (1973, federal constitutional abortion right, overturned by Dobbs in 2022).

The Equal Rights Amendment campaign — to amend the Constitution to prohibit sex discrimination — passed both houses of Congress in 1972 with strong bipartisan support, was ratified by 35 states by 1977 (three short of the 38 required), and stalled. Phyllis Schlafly's STOP ERA campaign mobilized conservative women, especially religious women, against the amendment, and succeeded in halting ratification — a movement-vs-movement contest that warrants attention as an example of a successful conservative women's movement defeating a successful liberal women's movement.

LGBT Rights (1969–2015)

The Stonewall riots of June 28, 1969 — when patrons of the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village fought back against a routine police raid — are conventionally taken as the founding event of the modern American gay-rights movement.

The movement's arc included, at different periods:

• The 1970s, when groups like the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance built a public political identity, pursued anti-discrimination ordinances at the city level, and produced the first openly gay elected officials (Harvey Milk, San Francisco supervisor 1977–78, before his assassination).
• The 1980s AIDS crisis, in which the movement's stakes became literally life-and-death and the activist organization ACT UP (1987) developed confrontational direct-action tactics — die-ins, disrupting Catholic masses, FDA blockades — that forced both the Reagan administration and the medical establishment to take the epidemic seriously. The political and biomedical legacy of ACT UP includes the modern HIV/AIDS treatment regime; it also includes the patient-advocacy template now used across many disease communities.
• The 1990s and 2000s, the long campaign for same-sex marriage. Lawrence v. Texas (2003) struck down sodomy laws. Massachusetts became the first state to allow same-sex marriage in 2004. The federal Defense of Marriage Act (1996) was struck down in Windsor (2013). Obergefell v. Hodges (June 26, 2015) extended marriage equality nationwide.

The same-sex marriage campaign is a textbook case of a movement winning by changing public opinion first and policy second. Public approval of same-sex marriage in Gallup polling moved from 27% in 1996 to 60% in 2015 (Gallup historical trend), with the most rapid shift coming in the 2008–14 period. The Supreme Court did not invent the consensus; it ratified one that had emerged.

The post-2015 LGBT-rights landscape is less unified, with the trans-rights movement (treated below) raising distinct legal and political questions and facing distinct backlash.

Environmental Movement (1962–)

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), documenting the ecological damage of pesticides, is the conventional starting point for the modern environmental movement. The movement's early infrastructure included the Sierra Club (which long predates the 1960s, founded 1892), the Wilderness Society (1935), the Environmental Defense Fund (1967), the Natural Resources Defense Council (1970), and Greenpeace (1971). The first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, drew about 20 million Americans to demonstrations and educational events.

The movement's legislative output is impressive: the Clean Air Act (1970), the National Environmental Policy Act (1970, requiring environmental impact statements), the Clean Water Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1973), and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency by President Nixon in 1970. The early environmental movement was bipartisan; many of these statutes passed with overwhelming Republican support.

The contemporary climate movement (treated below in the discussion of progressive movements since 2000) is a distinct, more recent extension of this tradition, with different political coalitions and different legislative obstacles.

III. The American conservative movement

The American conservative movement is older than many readers may realize and has been studied as a movement for decades. Books like George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (1976) and Lily Geismer's recent work treat the postwar American right as a coalition-building project entirely analogous to the building of the postwar American left.

The Buckley / National Review tradition (1955–)

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review in 1955, declaring its mission to "stand athwart history, yelling Stop." The magazine became the central institution of postwar fusionist conservatism, attempting to unite three previously distinct intellectual strands:

1. Traditionalists (Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver), who emphasized cultural and religious continuity;
2. Libertarians (Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard), who emphasized free markets and limited government;
3. Anti-communists (Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham), who emphasized the Soviet threat as the defining issue.

Buckley's editorial project — and Frank Meyer's "fusionism" — was to argue that these three strands shared a common opponent and could share a common political coalition. This intellectual project laid the ground for the political coalition that elected Ronald Reagan a quarter-century later.

The New Right / Reagan coalition (1964–1980)

Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign — Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide, taking only six states — is the conventional starting point for the political mobilization of postwar American conservatism. Goldwater's defeat in the general election obscures the fact that his nomination represented a successful intra-party movement: conservatives had captured the Republican presidential nomination from the Eastern Establishment moderates (Rockefeller, Romney) who had dominated the party for decades.

The institutional buildout in the late 1960s and 1970s included:

• The Heritage Foundation (founded 1973), a conservative think tank designed to provide policy infrastructure parallel to Brookings, with an explicit movement orientation.
• The American Enterprise Institute, older (founded 1938) but rejuvenated and repositioned in this period.
• The conservative legal movement, building toward the Federalist Society (below).
• A conservative talk-radio and direct-mail infrastructure, pioneered by figures like Richard Viguerie.

Phyllis Schlafly's STOP ERA campaign (1972–82), discussed above, is a key chapter in the conservative movement's mobilization of women on cultural issues. Schlafly's A Choice Not An Echo (1964), a self-published book that sold three million copies during the Goldwater campaign, is a movement document of unusual political consequence.

The Reagan victory in 1980 represented the political fruition of two decades of movement work. The Reagan coalition assembled traditionalists, libertarians, anti-communists, and the newly mobilized Religious Right (next subsection) into a governing majority.

The Religious Right (1979–)

The Moral Majority, founded by Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich in 1979, marks the conventional starting point of the modern Religious Right as an organized movement, though its roots run back to the formation of religious-political organizations through the 1970s in response to Roe v. Wade (1973), federal IRS action against segregated Christian schools (the Bob Jones University case, 1971–83), and various culture-war flashpoints.

Falwell's Moral Majority claimed millions of members at its peak in the early 1980s; Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition (founded 1989, run by Ralph Reed) became the dominant Religious Right organization through the 1990s. James Dobson's Focus on the Family (founded 1977) and the Family Research Council (1981) extended the institutional infrastructure.

The Religious Right's integration into Republican politics was deliberate on both sides. By the 1990s, white evangelical Protestants — about a quarter of the American electorate — had become one of the most reliable voting blocs in either party, voting 75–80% Republican in presidential elections. In 2024, white evangelicals voted 81% for Donald Trump (Edison Research exit poll). This is a higher rate of partisan loyalty than that of African American voters for the Democratic Party.

The Religious Right's political agenda has shifted substantially over its history. Initial mobilization focused on abortion, school prayer, and pornography. The 1990s and 2000s added same-sex marriage. The 2010s added transgender issues and religious-liberty exemptions. The Trump-era movement, while still substantively Religious Right in its policy goals, includes a stronger emphasis on cultural-political mobilization and a more populist register.

The Federalist Society (1982–)

The Federalist Society, founded by law students at Yale and the University of Chicago in 1982 with the support of professors including Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork, is one of the most institutionally consequential American social movements per capita in our history. With a relatively small budget and a relatively small membership (perhaps 70,000 lawyers and law students at its 2020s peak), it has substantially restructured the federal judiciary.

Its tactic is unique among the movements covered here: the Federalist Society does not, as a matter of organizational policy, take positions on legal questions. Instead, it builds a network — through chapters at every accredited law school in the country, through annual conferences, through a debate-driven culture of intellectual exchange — that connects conservative and libertarian lawyers to each other and to legal employers (firms, judges, the executive branch). It is, in the language of the network-analysis literature, a brokerage institution: it doesn't tell its members what to think, but it makes it dramatically easier for conservative lawyers to find conservative clerkships, conservative judges to find conservative clerks, conservative academics to find conservative scholarly partners.

The institutional consequences became fully visible in the late 2010s. Six of the nine current Supreme Court Justices have Federalist Society backgrounds (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett). A substantial majority of federal appellate judges nominated by Republican presidents since the 1990s have similar networks. The transformation of constitutional law since 2020 — Dobbs (2022), Bruen (2022), the major-questions doctrine cases (2022–24), the affirmative-action decision Students for Fair Admissions (2023) — is, in part, the policy output of a four-decade movement project.

The Tea Party (2009–2014)

The Tea Party began in February 2009, in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, the bank bailouts (TARP, signed by President George W. Bush in October 2008), and the early Obama administration's stimulus and healthcare proposals. The triggering moment, in the conventional account, was a February 19, 2009 rant by CNBC commentator Rick Santelli against the Obama administration's plan to subsidize troubled mortgages. Within weeks, "Tea Party" rallies were happening in cities across the country.

The movement was not a single organization but a coalition of organizations: FreedomWorks (descended from a Koch-network organization), Americans for Prosperity (Koch-network), the Tea Party Patriots, and hundreds of local and state Tea Party organizations with no national affiliation. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson's careful 2012 study (The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism) documented the movement's grassroots character: mostly older, mostly white, mostly middle-class, mostly Republican, distinct from but allied with the libertarian-funded national infrastructure.

The Tea Party's core demands were small government, lower taxes, reduced federal spending, and opposition to the Affordable Care Act. The movement's electoral effectiveness was substantial: Tea Party–aligned candidates won Republican primaries in 2010 against establishment incumbents (Mike Lee in Utah, Marco Rubio in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky), and the Republican wave of 2010 (the largest midterm seat gain since 1948) is conventionally attributed in significant part to Tea Party energy.

The movement's institutional legacy in Congress is the House Freedom Caucus, founded in 2015 from the most ideologically committed of the Tea Party–era Republicans. The Freedom Caucus has been the central force in the recurring Republican leadership conflicts of the late 2010s and 2020s, including the 2023 ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

The Tea Party is no longer an active movement under that name. Many of its activists migrated, after 2015–16, into the MAGA coalition.

MAGA and National Conservatism (2015–)

Donald Trump's 2015–16 presidential campaign — and his 2017–21 presidency, his 2024 re-election, and the political identity it forged — represents a different kind of movement-political form than the standard American pattern. It is a movement organized around a leader rather than around a movement institution; it has a distinctive political style (combative, populist, anti-establishment); and it has produced a parallel set of institutions to the traditional Reagan-coalition right.

The intellectual and institutional infrastructure of "national conservatism" (NatCon), partly distinct from but adjacent to MAGA proper, includes:

• The Edmund Burke Foundation, sponsoring the National Conservatism conference series (first held in 2019).
• The journal American Affairs, founded 2017 by Julius Krein, providing a policy-intellectual outlet.
• A network of think tanks — the Claremont Institute, the American Compass, sections of the Heritage Foundation — that have repositioned around economic nationalism, immigration restriction, and a more confrontational stance toward the cultural left.
• A media ecosystem (parts of Fox News, the Daily Wire, podcasts including Tucker Carlson's post-Fox project, and figures like Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA), substantially independent of legacy conservative outlets.

Whether MAGA is best understood as a continuation of the Tea Party, a new populist movement on the right, or a personality-driven phenomenon that will recede when its leader is no longer central is a contested question among political scientists in 2026. What is empirically clear is that the substantive policy commitments of the Republican Party in 2026 — restrictionist immigration, protectionist trade, skepticism of foreign military commitments, strong cultural-conservative posture — differ substantially from those of the Reagan-era Republican Party.

IV. The American progressive movement (post-1960)

Just as the conservative movement has its own arc since the 1950s, the modern progressive movement has developed through a series of waves since the New Left of the 1960s.

The New Left (1960s)

The New Left grew out of the civil-rights movement and the antiwar movement, with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Port Huron Statement (1962) as its founding texts. It developed campus-based politics, a critique of bureaucratic liberalism (the "old left"), and the consciousness-raising tradition that fed second-wave feminism.

Its more militant offshoots — the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers (a complex case, with both community-organizing and armed-self-defense elements), and various clandestine cells — illustrate the empirical pattern that movements that adopt strategic violence consistently lose support. By the mid-1970s, the New Left had largely dissolved as a coherent movement, though many of its participants moved into academia, journalism, and electoral politics, where they remained politically influential.

The Rainbow Coalition / Jesse Jackson (1980s)

Reverend Jesse Jackson's two presidential campaigns (1984 and 1988) built a "Rainbow Coalition" — a multiracial progressive alliance that pushed the Democratic Party leftward on civil rights, economic justice, and foreign policy. Jackson did not win the nomination either time, but he placed second in 1988 (winning 7 million primary votes) and substantially shaped the Democratic primary process and the party's policy direction.

The Rainbow Coalition is an example of a movement-faction within a major party — a recurring pattern we examine in Section VI.

Anti-Globalization / Seattle WTO (1999)

The "Battle in Seattle" — protests against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, November 30 to December 3, 1999 — drew between 40,000 and 100,000 protesters and shut down the WTO ministerial. The movement coalition included labor unions, environmental groups, anarchist black-bloc activists, and faith-based organizations. The Seattle protests are conventionally taken as the high-water mark of the late-1990s anti-globalization movement, which contested neoliberal trade policy and corporate-friendly globalization.

The movement did not produce direct legislative output, but it set tactical templates (the affinity-group, decentralized organizing model) that would be picked up in subsequent movements, and its policy critique — that globalization had produced job losses, wage stagnation, and corporate power without adequate distributional protection — has become bipartisan consensus in 2026, with Trump-era Republicans and Sanders-era Democrats both arguing for more restrictionist trade policy.

Occupy Wall Street (2011)

Occupy Wall Street, launched September 17, 2011 in Zuccotti Park in New York City, was a brief, intense, and influential movement. Its central slogan — "We are the 99%" — and its critique of post-2008 economic inequality entered mainstream political discourse.

The movement's tactical commitments — leaderlessness, consensus decision-making, refusal to articulate specific demands — are sometimes blamed for its dissipation. By December 2011 most of the original encampments had been cleared by police; by spring 2012 the movement was largely over.

But Occupy seeded a generation of organizers who would later become central to subsequent progressive movements (Black Lives Matter, the Sanders campaigns, DSA), and its frame of economic inequality reshaped Democratic Party rhetoric (Elizabeth Warren's 2012 Senate campaign and Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign explicitly drew on Occupy's themes).

Black Lives Matter (2013–)

Black Lives Matter began as a hashtag — #BlackLivesMatter, used by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi following the July 13, 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin. By 2014, after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (August 9, 2014), it was a movement organization. By 2020, after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis (May 25, 2020), it was the largest mass protest movement in American history.

Empirical estimates of 2020 protest participation vary substantially, in the range of 15 to 26 million Americans participating in protests in summer 2020 (New York Times analysis of Crowd Counting Consortium and other data, July 2020). If the higher estimates are correct, this is the largest single protest wave in American history by participant numbers, exceeding the antiwar movement at its peak.

The 2020 protests produced varied outcomes:

• City-level reforms: Some cities passed police-accountability legislation, modified use-of-force policies, redirected portions of police budgets to social services, or changed police-officer training requirements.
• Corporate response: Major corporations announced DEI investments, donated to racial-justice organizations, and adopted new HR practices. Some of these have been scaled back since 2023.
• Federal legislation: The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, introduced in 2020 and 2021, did not pass the Senate. There is no major federal police-reform statute from this period.
• Cultural and discursive change: Public discussion of racial-justice issues changed substantially in 2020–21. Some of this has receded; some remains.

The post-2020 backlash is a substantial phenomenon. Public opinion on Black Lives Matter, which had moved sharply favorable in summer 2020, returned to roughly its pre-2020 baseline by 2022 (Pew). State-level legislative pushback included anti-protest statutes in some states and restrictions on racial-justice instruction in K–12 (Chapter 6).

The Bernie Sanders campaigns / DSA (2015–)

Senator Bernie Sanders's two presidential primary campaigns (2016, losing the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton; 2020, losing to Joe Biden) built a sustained democratic-socialist movement inside the Democratic Party. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America grew from about 6,500 in 2015 to over 90,000 by 2020.

The Sanders movement's institutional output includes a faction in the House (the "Squad," beginning with the 2018 election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, expanding subsequently), a network of state-level officeholders, and substantial influence on Democratic Party policy positions (Medicare for All as a discussed option, a $15 minimum wage, expanded climate commitments).

The Climate / Green New Deal coalition (2018–)

The Sunrise Movement, founded in 2017, became the most visible institution of the contemporary American climate movement, pushing for a "Green New Deal" — a comprehensive federal climate-and-jobs program. Sunrise's organizational model emphasizes youth organizing, electoral primary challenges, and direct-action tactics (the November 2018 sit-in at then-Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi's office, with newly elected Representative Ocasio-Cortez joining the sit-in, marked the movement's national arrival).

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 included approximately $370 billion in climate investments — the largest federal climate spending in American history. Whether to credit this to Sunrise specifically, to the broader climate movement, to inside-system actors like Senator Schumer and the Biden administration, or to all three together is a question of political-history weighting; what is clear is that the legislative outcome would not have happened without sustained outside-system pressure.

The trans-rights movement (2010s–)

The contemporary trans-rights movement is institutionally distinct from the broader LGBT-rights movement of the 1969–2015 period. It has produced visible progress (the public visibility of trans Americans, anti-discrimination protections in employment recognized in Bostock v. Clayton County, 2020) and faced sustained backlash (state-level legislation on minors' access to gender-affirming care, on participation in scholastic athletics, and on bathroom access; 2024 election cycle ads).

This is a case where the empirical landscape and the normative debate are both unusually contested in 2026, and we will not attempt to resolve either here. As a movement-institutional matter, the relevant point is that a previously unorganized population built organizations, produced visibility, achieved some legal protections, and faced organized counter-mobilization — exactly the recognizable arc of an active movement.

The MeToo movement (2017–)

In October 2017, New York Times and New Yorker reporting on Harvey Weinstein's pattern of sexual abuse triggered a wave of accusations against high-profile men in entertainment, media, business, and politics. The hashtag #MeToo, originally coined by activist Tarana Burke in 2006, became the movement's identifier.

MeToo has been institutionally consequential in the corporate world (HR policies, executive accountability), the entertainment industry, and parts of the political world. Its effects on legislation are more limited (some states extended statutes of limitations for sexual offenses; federal action has been modest). Its primary effect has been cultural and behavioral — what is acceptable in workplaces, what allegations institutions take seriously, what behaviors carry professional consequences.

This is, again, the culture-precedes-policy pattern characteristic of many social movements.

V. How movements actually work — the political-science view

The academic study of social movements offers analytical tools for understanding why some movements succeed and others fail. Three traditions are central.

Political Process Theory (McAdam)

Doug McAdam's Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (1982) introduced the framework that became dominant in social-movement scholarship. McAdam argues movements succeed when three conditions converge:

1. Political opportunity — a moment of vulnerability in the existing political order. (For the civil-rights movement: the postwar Cold War context, in which segregation was a foreign-policy embarrassment to a country claiming leadership of the "free world"; the Northern shift in Black voting after the 1932 realignment, making the civil-rights vote electorally consequential; the 1954 Brown decision creating an opening for direct-action campaigns.)
2. Mobilizing structures — pre-existing organizations and networks that can be activated. (For the civil-rights movement: Black churches, historically Black colleges and universities, the NAACP's chapter network, sororities and fraternities, the labor unions of A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.)
3. Cognitive liberation / framing — the shared belief that change is possible and the articulation of grievance in resonant terms. (For the civil-rights movement: the prophetic tradition in Black Christianity, the slow translation of the postwar "rights revolution" frame, the experience of Black veterans returning from World War II.)

Resource Mobilization (Tilly, Tarrow)

Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow's tradition emphasizes the mundane resources of political contention: money, organizational capacity, communication networks, leadership development, the repertoire of contention (the available set of protest tactics that participants and opponents both recognize). Tarrow's Power in Movement (1994; 4th ed. 2022) provides the standard text. The argument is that movements cannot succeed on the strength of grievance alone; they need infrastructure.

Framing (Snow, Benford)

The framing literature (David Snow, Robert Benford, and others) studies how movements articulate their grievances and goals in ways that resonate with potential supporters. A movement's collective action frame — its shared narrative about what is wrong, who is responsible, what should be done — is itself a strategic product, refined over time. The civil-rights movement's framing of the issue as American failure to live up to American constitutional commitments was strategically chosen and consequential; the framing of the same demands as Marxist anticolonialism (which some New Left critics preferred) would have been less effective politically.

The empirical literature on violence: Chenoweth

In 2011, political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan published Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, which empirically analyzed every major resistance campaign worldwide between 1900 and 2006. The headline finding:

• Nonviolent campaigns succeeded about 53% of the time.
• Violent campaigns succeeded about 26% of the time.
• The success differential held across regions, regime types, and historical periods.

The mechanisms Chenoweth and Stephan identified: nonviolent campaigns recruit broader and more diverse participation (because participation is less risky), make defection from the regime by security forces and middle-class supporters more likely, and avoid the legitimacy costs that violence imposes on the resistance.

For American social movements, this empirical finding cuts in a particular direction. The most successful American movements have been disciplined in their commitments to nonviolent tactics, as a strategic matter. The most marginal American movements have either embraced strategic violence (the Weather Underground, the militias) or have failed to discipline their fringes (some 2020 protest moments). The Chenoweth finding does not require any moral premise; it is an empirical regularity. Movements that adopt strategic violence consistently underperform.

This is one of the few empirical claims about social movements robust enough to state plainly, across the political spectrum. The analytical implication is that movements interested in their own success should be deliberate about discipline, even when violence might feel justified.

What makes movements succeed

Drawing the threads together, the conditions associated with American movement success have been:

1. An organizational base that predates the moment — the church network, the legal-defense fund, the campus chapters, the think tank, the law-school student group.
2. A strategic and disciplined approach to tactics — nonviolent direct action; legal litigation; institution-building; primary challenges; coordinated framing.
3. A frame that resonates with broader American political traditions (rights, fairness, the founders, the Constitution) rather than that requires a wholesale rejection of those traditions.
4. An electoral pathway — the ability eventually to translate movement demands into the policy agenda of one or both major parties.
5. Persistence — the willingness to sustain the work for decades, often through periods when nothing seems to be happening.

The conditions associated with American movement failure have been the inverse: improvised infrastructure, undisciplined tactics (especially violence), framings that demand wholesale rejection of American traditions, no electoral path to absorption by a major party, and burn-out before the work is done.

VI. Movement-party interactions

Because the American party system is the principal venue in which policy is made, the relationship between movements and parties is the question that determines whether movement demands become policy.

Pattern 1: Parties absorb movements

The dominant pattern of American politics is that successful movements are absorbed by one of the two major parties. The Republican Party absorbed the antislavery movement (1850s–60s), the Religious Right (late 1970s–80s), the Tea Party (2010s), and the MAGA movement (2015–present). The Democratic Party absorbed the labor movement (1930s), the civil-rights movement (1960s–70s, with the 1948 Hubert Humphrey civil-rights speech as the early signal), second-wave feminism (1970s–80s), the LGBT-rights movement (1990s–2010s), and most recently elements of the climate movement (2020s).

Absorption is mutually beneficial: the party gets activist energy, voter mobilization, and a clearer policy program; the movement gets a vehicle for converting demands into policy. Absorption is also costly: the movement loses some independence, has to compromise on edge demands, and runs the risk that the party will drop the demands when politically inconvenient. This is the recurring tension between "movement purists" and "movement pragmatists" in any successful coalition.

Pattern 2: Parties suppress movements

A party that controls government can suppress movements directly (the 1968 Chicago police response to antiwar protesters), through legislation (anti-protest statutes in some states post-2020), or through aggressive enforcement of existing law (federal prosecutions of certain protest activity, varying by administration). The empirical question of whether any given act of state response constitutes legitimate law enforcement or political suppression is contested at the moment of the response and adjudicated, often, only in retrospect.

Pattern 3: Movement-becomes-party-faction

The most important contemporary pattern is the movement-as-faction transformation. The Tea Party of 2009–14 became, by 2015, the House Freedom Caucus — a formal organization of Republican members of Congress, with elected leadership, internal voting rules, and the capacity to act as a bloc. The Sanders / DSA progressive movement of 2015–24 has produced the "Squad" — a smaller and less formal but recognizable faction in the House Democratic caucus. The MAGA movement has substantially become the dominant faction within the Republican Party.

Movement-becomes-faction is a particular and consequential transition. It changes the venue of movement politics from the street to the caucus room, the floor of the House, and the leadership election. It also changes the metric of success from "did we capture public attention?" to "did we hold our votes?"

VII. The 2020 case and the January 6 question

Two recent events in American politics are sufficiently consequential, and sufficiently politically charged, that they warrant explicit treatment in this chapter.

The 2020 protest wave

As noted above, the May–August 2020 protest wave following George Floyd's killing was, by participant numbers, the largest single protest movement in American history. Estimates from research groups (Crowd Counting Consortium, ACLED, and others) put participation in the range of 15–26 million Americans across at least 4,700 protest events.

The substantive question — what did the movement achieve? — does not have a single clean answer, and the partisan disagreement about it tracks the broader partisan disagreement about American policing and racial justice. The empirical record:

• Police-reform legislation at the federal level: the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act (2020, 2021) did not pass the Senate. There is no major federal statute attributable to the 2020 protests.
• Police-reform legislation at state and local levels: dozens of states and cities passed reforms — often modest, sometimes substantial — including changes to use-of-force policies, body-camera requirements, qualified-immunity rules in some jurisdictions, civilian oversight changes, and policy on no-knock warrants. Some of these have been rolled back since 2023.
• Corporate response: Significant corporate DEI investments and donations to racial-justice organizations in 2020–21. Substantial scaling-back of these programs from 2023 onward.
• Cultural and discursive change: Substantial in 2020–21; partial recession by 2024. Some legacy in language, education, hiring practices.

The movement's relationship with violence during summer 2020 is contested. The Crowd Counting Consortium and the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project both reported that the great majority of 2020 protests were peaceful; they also documented property damage, looting, arson, and confrontations between protesters and police or counter-protesters in some cities. The political characterization of the movement varied with that observation, with some on the left emphasizing the predominantly peaceful character and some on the right emphasizing the property damage and disorder. Both observations are empirically defensible; they describe different aspects of a varied phenomenon.

January 6, 2021

On January 6, 2021, the United States Congress was in joint session to certify the Electoral College results of the November 2020 presidential election, which Joe Biden had won. President Donald Trump held a rally that morning near the White House. After the rally, a portion of the crowd marched to the Capitol. They breached the Capitol's perimeter and entered the building, interrupting the joint session. Members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence were evacuated. Some entrants engaged in violence with Capitol police; some property damage occurred; multiple people died during or shortly after the events. The joint session resumed late that evening and certified the electoral results.

In the years since, the Department of Justice has prosecuted more than 1,400 individuals for offenses related to January 6, with the great majority pleading or being convicted. Several were convicted of seditious conspiracy. President Trump granted pardons or commutations to many January 6 defendants in January 2025, after returning to office. The political and historical interpretation of the events continues to be substantially contested.

Was January 6 a "social movement" event in the analytical sense of this chapter? The question is harder than it might appear.

In some respects yes: it was collective action by people outside the formal political system, attempting to influence a political outcome through extra-institutional means; the participants identified with a broader movement (variously, "Stop the Steal," elements of the MAGA coalition, certain right-leaning activist networks); it had a recognizable repertoire of contention.

In other respects no: the empirical claim motivating the action — that the 2020 election had been stolen — had been considered and rejected by more than 60 lower courts and by election officials of both parties; the Supreme Court declined to hear the principal challenges; the goal was the reversal of a certified electoral outcome, which is unlike most movement demands. Whether this constitutes a movement action, a riot, an attempted insurrection, or some other category is itself politically contested.

In keeping with the institutional discipline of this textbook, we state the institutional facts: the events of January 6 occurred as described; the courts have prosecuted the participants under existing statutes; the political dispute over the meaning of those events is unresolved. We do not editorialize. The interpretation of this chapter in American political history will be done by historians not yet writing.

VIII. Where this leaves us

Movements are how outsiders change the system from below. They are messy, frequently morally serious, sometimes successful, sometimes not, and shaped by similar institutional dynamics across the political spectrum.

If you take only one thing from this chapter, take this: the success of a movement depends primarily on its institutional craft, not on the rightness of its cause. Many causes that we now regard as morally obvious — the abolition of slavery, the right of women to vote, the right of workers to organize, the equality of citizens regardless of race, the equal participation of LGBT Americans in civic life — were once minority positions advanced by movements that built infrastructure, disciplined their tactics, framed their demands, formed coalitions, and persisted across generations. Other causes that are equally morally serious to their adherents — across the political spectrum — fail to develop the institutional craft and so fail to produce political results.

The Civil Rights Movement and the Federalist Society are not the same thing morally. They are recognizable as the same institutional thing. They built networks, they trained successors, they cultivated an intellectual frame, they identified an opening, and they pressed it for decades. Movements that do those things tend to win, in the long run, even when their immediate political moment looks unfavorable. Movements that do not do those things tend to dissipate, even when their grievances are real.

The American political system is designed for disagreement. Movements are how disagreement gets organized. They are central, not peripheral, to how the system works.

Recurring theme — Power flows to those who show up. Showing up for a single rally is participation. Showing up for the long haul — meetings, training, fundraising, voter contact, candidate recruitment, the patient work that does not photograph well — is what builds movements. The movements that have shaped American history were built by people who chose to keep showing up.

A note on this chapter's structure

We have walked through movements chronologically and ideologically because that is how the historical record presents them, but the analytical frames in Sections I, V, VI, and VII apply across the cases. A reader who returns to the abolitionist case after reading the Federalist Society section, or who returns to second-wave feminism after reading the Tea Party section, will see institutional patterns that the chronological treatment can obscure. Movements develop through recognizable life-cycle stages: emergence, mobilization, institutionalization, success or decline, and (sometimes) absorption into a major party. Each stage poses its own strategic problems, and movement leaders across the spectrum have wrestled with the same problems — how to recruit, how to discipline tactics, how to frame demands, how to manage internal factions, when to compromise, when to hold the line.

The ideological diversity of the cases is the point. The institutional commonalities are what make the cases comparable. A textbook can be honest about the moral seriousness of the people involved, on every side, while remaining analytically neutral about who was right.

The next chapter turns to public opinion — how Americans think about politics, how those views are measured, and how those views translate (or fail to translate) into government action. The relationship between mass opinion and elite politics that public-opinion research illuminates is one of the bridges between the world of movements and the world of formal institutions.

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