I'm seeing a lot of folks asking "will the Women's March" be more like the Tea Party and have a sustained impact or be like Occupy Wall Street and quickly fade. There is of course no way to tell. Certainly Trump will exist as a catalyst for a sustained movement, but Trump being Trump wasn't enough to keep the Obama coalition together for Clinton.
The numbers yesterday, in DC and in other cities around the world, were incredibly impressive. Amazing. To dispute that would be folly. But one of my first thoughts was not of Tea Party v Occupy Wall Street. It was of the February 2003 anti-war protests that took place in over 600 cities and involved roughly 30 million participants. The invasion of Iraq came 5 weeks later and President Bush was re-elected in 2004 and Tony Blair in 2005. The protest never became an influential political movement.
When I looked at the posters at the protest I certainly saw indications of the challenges it may well face when trying to influence politics. Much like the Democratic party, the protest was clearly an alliance of different groups with different agendas - unified by opposition to Trump. Yes there were folks there for equal pay and for reproductive rights. But there were also folks there for Black Lives Matter, immigration reform, refugee relief, and in support of Muslims. Can such a coalition remain unified? Trump won because many of the white working class voters who had been part of the Democratic coalition decided that they no longer fit in. The challenge for Democrats has always been the agenda diversity of their coalition. It's true that opposition to Obama helped to unify factions within the GOP, but the GOP has a much less diverse coalition.
And the political geography of 2018 suggests that even a sustained movement may not be enough to change the balance of power. So would the movement survive an electoral defeat? So much remains to be seen.
