Table of Contents
AMERICAN RESISTANCE
Surveying the crowd at the 2019 Womens March in Washington, DC.
AMERICAN RESISTANCE
From the Womens March to the Blue Wave
DANA R. FISHER
Columbia University Press
New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright 2019 Dana R. Fisher
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-54739-0
A complete cataloging-in-publication record is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-231-18764-0 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-231-54739-0 (e-book)
LCCN 2019018989
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CONTENTS
MY MOM died on the day of the 2018 midterm elections after an agonizing battle with dementia. After voting with my kids in the morning, we were waiting for the returns to begin coming in when I got the call from the hospice nurse. Although my mom wasnt particularly civically engaged, she was an outspoken progressive who voted regularly, kept up with national politics, and adored Rachel Maddow. My mom had not paid much attention to my work on this book, although she had read my previous books, underlining as she made her way through them. In one of our last real conversations in early fall of 2018, she made it very clear that she thought the title American Resistance was a stinker.
Before the dementia had overtaken her, my mom would tell people that her greatest success was that she had raised three strong-willed and independent daughters in a changing world. Coming of age in the 1950s, she grew up during the era when being a woman in America changed substantially: she was neither old enough to be comfortable following through with traditional expectations, nor young enough to feel comfortable marching in the streets and burning her bras.
Even as she tried to find a path that made her feel fulfilled, she infused my sisters and me with an understanding that being a woman in the United States required that we create our own identities, speak up for ourselves, and pay attention. Thanks to these efforts by my mom, my sisters and I have all created lives that involve clear professional identities that are interwoven with full personal lives that include families. As every working woman with children will tell you, every day is a challenge. But I believe it is one that we were more prepared for thanks to my mom.
Although my sisters and I took different paths, we all fit the profile of the majority of the participants in the Resistance: highly educated, white women, with varying levels of civic engagement and political experiences. At the same time, our participation in the Resistance (and the ways my sisters and I have gotten involved and stayed involved over the past two years) varies substantially in what we each have done and where and how we have focused our efforts.
On November 6, 2018, the people of the United States elected a diverse class of legislators into the House of Representatives, a group that included more women and more people of color than ever before. The outcome of the election would have made my mom happy. At the same time, the 2018 election was plagued with allegations of electoral inequities around the country that were linked to voter suppression and gerrymandering. Clearly, there is still much more work to be done.
This book began as a side project that took advantage of the fact that I had a lot of experience surveying at large-scale demonstrations and a big protest was coming to Washington, D.C.the January 2017 Womens March. My colleagues and I put together our survey specifically to see how many of the different factions of the progressive movement made it into the streets for the Womens March, but as the Resistance grew the project expanded along with it.
In many ways, studying the American Resistance over these past two years has been therapeutic. It has also reinforced my belief in the need for strong social science research, which is the reason I left politics in the first place. Although there are numerous indicators of growing problems in our country, the American Resistance documents how many Americans woke up after the 2016 election, and it has reminded me of the beauty and resilience of our unique (and flawed) version of democracy.
This book is the product of hundreds of hours of observation in the streets of Washington, D.C. as hundreds of thousands of people marched again and again. It includes meetings with civic leaders and activists and numerous conversations with representatives of national progressive groups that were working to cultivate and channel this diverse and unwieldy movement. It tells the story of American democracy as it works to better itself and reminds us all that democracy is a work in progress; it is only as good as the people who take the time and energy to participate in it.
IN CONTRAST to my previous big projects that turned into books, this project had a very different origin story: it began as a small collaborative project with colleagues at the University of Maryland after the 2016 election. I would like to thank Dawn Dow and Rashawn Ray for being interested in learning from the people who are participating in demonstrationsand for working with me to update my survey instrument and going out into the streets of Washington, D.C. with me on a number of occasions to collect data from protesters.
Although the project was initially unfunded, after our research during the 2017 Womens March earned so much media attention, the College for Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland helped us raise the funds to purchase the electronic tablets that have been invaluable tools for data collection over the course of this project. It is possible to do this research without the tablets, but they make it possible to report findings based on the data we collect in almost real time. As a result, I have been able to analyze preliminary findings quickly and get the research out to a broader audience through the media.
I want to thank the many leaders of resistance groups who gave their time generously to speak with me while they were working tirelessly on the 2018 elections. This project also benefited from conversations with a number of scholars who have been invaluable sounding boards for my ideas. Michael Heaney and Lara Putnam talked with me on many occasions along the way, providing alternative perspectives from their own related research. As Sidney Tarrow was completing his own volume on the subject, he shared his insights and advice and even provided invaluable line edits to the drafts of every chapter. Lorien Jasny has been a wonderful collaborator who has worked with me to analyze some of the data in innovative ways and write up the findings for peer reviewed journals.
I also want to thank my editor, Eric Schwartz, who saw the potential of this project from the beginning and pushed me to write the book in a public way. The book is better thanks to his input and the great work of his colleagues at Columbia University Press. I also want to thank the Lund Centre for Sustainability for providing a brief home in exile as I worked on early drafts of this book in the fall of 2017.
