After the protest, we must hold our course
The history of demonstrations in America holds lessons for where we go now
The 1963 March on Washington: What turns a protest into a movement? Do we have that capacity now?
Since it was about a thousand miles from my hometown to the nearest ocean, my childhood experience on water came in a canoe, not a sailboat. But the woman I married spent her youth sailing around New York’s Little Neck Bay and in the ocean beyond, a salty heritage that brought me opportunities as an adult to absorb the lessons that emerge when your vessel is propelled by just the wind and your wits.
Like, for instance, the afternoon some years ago when I was more than a bit terror-struck by what looked to me like an imminent collision between our 22-foot boat and another that was aiming to round the same buoy at the same moment. Luckily, we had on board an older sailor, a steady hand who had faced such situations often before. “Hold your course,” he said calmly. I heard only the lapping of the water on our hull, a bit of wind vibration in our full sail and the thumping of my heart. Again, insistently this time, he said, “Hold your course.”
Then, in an instant, we rounded the buoy tightly, the sail snapped across the boat’s cockpit to catch the wind on the other side, and suddenly we had cleared the threat of disaster. The other boat trailed in our wake.
It was only a moment in a sailboat on an Upstate lake long ago, but the sound of that sailor’s reassuring voice has always stayed with me: “Hold your course.”
History is full of stories of people who have done just that, and so through such perseverance have powered change. Abraham Lincoln, a failure in two businesses, four campaigns for Congress and a bid for the vice presidency, was elected President of the United States exactly when he was needed to save the union. Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for 27 years for fighting apartheid, emerged from captivity with his message of hope and justice intact, so that he could forge a path toward reconciliation as South Africa’s first post-apartheid president. Thomas Edison purportedly tried 10,000 different versions of a light bulb before he could get one that burned long enough to be practical. He is said to have remarked, “I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that there are 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb.”
Certainly there are examples to the contrary, of unexpected success without a slog beforehand. Notably, Donald Trump arrived at the White House as the only U.S. president without a moment of either military or government service — bone spurs, you know, ostensibly precluding the former, and what I consider the good judgment of New York voters preventing the latter. But that almost proves my point: What’s won without effort is rarely justified. We can cheer the good luck of the woman from west of our place who won $3.3 million from the state lottery a few weeks ago, but only superstition, not inspiration, might lead anyone to visit the convenience store where she bought the winning ticket, and nobody will try to emulate her brave scratch-off technique.
It is perseverance that we admire and that we know is a prerequisite of success. And now, as a growing share of Americans are recognizing that our democracy and our cherished values are threatened, it is perseverance that we need.
In fact, this is the moment for us to consider whether we are up to the task at hand. Millions of Americans were energized by last week’s “No Kings” rallies, which far overshadowed the costly military parade that Trump staged in Washington on his 79th birthday. But those demonstrations, as successful and attention-grabbing as they seemed, raise a question: Will the events in 2,100 communities be forgotten, or at best recalled as merely a diversion from the incessant right-wing effort to undo America’s progress toward economic and social justice, which arguably began with the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt at the start of the 20th century? Or will the anti-democratic thrust of Trumpism finally meet its match, as the people who were inspired by the “No Kings” events hold their course? The answer awaits us.
As widespread social protests roiled America in 1968, a young University of Wisconsin public policy professor, Michael Lipsky, argued in a journal article that the demonstrations wouldn’t yield political results unless they could reach beyond the core constituency in the streets. Lipsky became a distinguished MIT professor and now, at age 85, is affiliated with Demos, a progressive think tank.
Lipsky argued at the height of 1960s activism that if protest organizers hoped to do more than make noise, they would need to “nurture and sustain” an organization that would include people who may not share their own values. They would also need to devise sophisticated media strategies, he wrote, as well as draw in those who might not be directly affected by the immediate issue at hand and, significantly, find ways to appeal to those who hold the levers of power. Lipsky cited the civil rights movement — then fresh off victories such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — as an example of political activism that managed to do all that, and thus achieve many of its goals.1
Because the civil rights and anti-war protests of the 1960s so galvanized Americans, we tend to think of marches in the streets as a tactic of the left. But more recent years have presented right-wing protests that were wildly successful — notably, the Tea Party movement launched by protests in 750 cities in the spring of 2009, just after the inauguration of America’s first Black president. The call for lower taxes and less government regulation propelled the election of a Republican majority to the U.S. House the next year. In turn, the dynamic of that success pushed the Republican party rightward, setting the stage for the launch five years later of Donald Trump’s ultimately successful presidential campaign.
Success in politics tends to breed further success, of course, which is shown by the transition of another conservative campaign from the streets to official success — namely, the anti-abortion movement. The activists pushing to reverse the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion rights initially were largely Catholic, but their ranks were joined in the late 1970s and 1980s by evangelical Protestants. As the cause grew more radical, it often drew attention by creating a spectacle, blockading clinics and even turning to criminal activity: Between the 1980s and the 2000s, there were 153 assaults, 383 death threats, 3 kidnappings, 18 attempted murders and 9 murders related to abortion providers.2 Meanwhile, anti-abortion absolutism grew in the Republican party, so that when Trump’s election yielded an avowedly anti-abortion majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, the protesters’ goals were met: the constitutional right to an abortion was overturned.
Those two examples underscore the validity of the Lipsky framework. In both the Tea Party and anti-abortion ranks, the original protesters set clear strategic goals, reached beyond their initial constituency and eventually drew in those with power.3
Importantly, both of those movements also were able to draw upon wealthy backers and institutional constituencies. While the Tea Party movement posed as a populist revolt, for example, arguably its most important backer was the wealthy businessman David Koch, a member of the hard-right John Birch Society. And the anti-abortion crusaders had the strong support of both Catholic hierarchy and politically active evangelicals.
Yet there have been plenty of notable street protests that failed to turn their initial energy into policy. Occupy Wall Street, for example, captured public attention in 2011 with a 51-day occupation of a park in Manhattan’s Financial District, and copycat demonstrations in other cities. In an environment seemingly ripe for change after the 2008 financial crisis, it targeted corporate greed, economic inequality and the influence of money in politics. Its slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” alluded to the wealth disparity between the top 1 percent of Americans and everybody else. (The top 1 percent nationally now comprises those who earn about $800,000 a year.)
But the movement largely fizzled without accomplishing any clear objectives. Perhaps that was because the Occupy organizers, intent on shared decision-making and eager to please a broad constituency, refused to narrow or even clearly define the movement’s agenda. Organizers were also criticized for not actually representing that so-called “99 percent” of Americans; both the leadership and the rank-and-file at demonstrations were overwhelmingly white. And there was little sign that the movement had a plan for gaining the political clout needed to accomplish its goals, since its argument included a denunciation of those in power. It's hard to see the effort as anything more than a squandered opportunity.4
The effort to sustain our democracy and fight the excesses of the 47th presidency begins with a huge advantage that no other recent protest movement can claim: at least the nominal allegiance of about half the nation’s population. But it also confronts potent opposition that sometimes seems impenetrable, in the remarkable hold that Trump exercises on the Republican Party.
Last month’s House passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — yes, that is the technical title of the Trump spending and tax plan — suggests that Trump’s clout is undiminished. Yet a spate of recent polls show that the American people aren’t on board with key provisions — including cuts to green energy initiatives that fight climate change; to Medicaid, which provides healthcare for one-fifth of the nation’s population; and to SNAP benefits, which provides food aid for 41 million Americans (and a market for U.S. farmers’ crops). Across four major polls analyzed by CNN’s Aaron Blake, on average 55 percent of Americans oppose the bill and 31 percent support it. “The president’s asking a lot,” Blake said this week, pointing to George Washington University research. “In fact, he appears to be asking them to pass the most unpopular major legislation in decades.”5
If the legislation fails, or if something so unpopular passes, it could fuel growing opposition to Trump among people who weren’t among the “No Kings” demonstrations this month. Those people might not be as motivated by the threat to democracy that drew perhaps as many as 6 million demonstrators on June 14, in what was among the biggest-ever single-day protests in U.S. history. But it is a connection to that broader group that is the sort of outreach that the Lipsky theory holds must be made for a demonstration to move toward success.
At the same time, per Lipsky, the anti-Trump movement must make inroads with the mass media in areas where the right has held strength. A prime example is a Tik Tok video recently posted by “The News Girl” (real name: Lisa Remillard, ex-TV anchor) about the real-world consequences if, by mishandling the OBBBA, the Republican-run Congress forces a default on the federal debt. It’s hardly a usual topic to find there, but the attention battleground of network newscasts in the 1960s has shifted now to social media.6
What is most unclear just now, though, is whether the Trump opposition can find the leadership and sustain the energy that combined to motivate past successes in turning street protests into successful political power. Think, for instance, of the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous “I have a dream” speech. It was at the time one of the largest protests in history. There is no such dynamic and acknowledged movement leader today — not yet, anyway, despite valiant efforts by such figures as Corey Booker, Chris Murphy and Gavin Newsom.
And the millions of people who took to the streets on June 14 still weren’t as numerous as the crowds that gathered on the first Earth Day, in 1970, when perhaps 10 percent of the nation’s population took part in events that within two years forced the Republican administration of Richard Nixon to create the Environmental Protection Agency.
Imagine, though, what might happen if we can persevere — that is, if we can make the numbers grow, if we can encourage the leaders to emerge, if we can assure that the media messages are delivered and if we can form the necessary coalitions. If all that can happen, then the direction that was set on June 14 might continue. And that would surely enable us to save our country from the sort of assault that greets each of us daily as we weigh the latest terrible news from Washington.
What we have to do, really, is to calmly but firmly hold our course.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/abs/protest-as-a-political-resource/308D70FEB61CA4B0C800354F39DBF767
https://www.oah.org/tah/november-3/abolishing-abortion-the-history-of-the-pro-life-movement-in-america/
This analysis of the power of protest has drawn greatly on the insights and research of the Brookings Institution’s Darrell M. West. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-power-of-protest-in-the-us/
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/5-reasons-why-occupy-wall-street-wont-work/246041/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/20/politics/big-beautiful-bill-polling-analysis
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/lisa-remillard-interview-tiktok-influencer-news-girl-anchor.php
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
This column suggests that the protests of June 14 won’t yield results unless participants come together in ways that brought success to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Do you have thoughts on how citizens concerned about the excesses of the Trump presidency can make a difference? Let us know.
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ENDNOTE
THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.
-Rex Smith
Thank you for the garden of information and wisdom. The situation reminds me of something I heard Chris Rock say about racism, essentially, that there’s nothing black people can do about it. It’s up to white people to change themselves. Likewise, it’s up to Republicans now to reform
Until more political courage is shown by elected officials, I don’t believe the protests can morph into action. Voting is all that can create the change that’s needed.