Could we be entering a ‘movement moment’ against Trump?

This article Could we be entering a ‘movement moment’ against Trump? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Amid daily headlines about the Trump administration’s “flood the zone” assault on American government, it is easy to despair. And yet, people should not lose faith in their own ability to defend democracy. History tells us that, even as authoritarians deploy “shock and awe” campaigns to cause confusion and demobilization, they consistently underestimate the ability of movements to break out in opposition. And it has demonstrated that civil resistance — in the form of mass protest, strikes, boycotts and creative noncompliance — can have profound effects in turning public opinion against a regime and ultimately forcing autocrats from power. 

“I have gone through, in my life, a number of social movements,” the radical historian Howard Zinn said in 2008, “and I have seen how at the very beginning of these social movements — or just before these social movements develop — there didn’t seem to be any hope.”

Conditions can alter quickly in part due to the fact that forceful drives for social change do not necessarily take shape incrementally. To be sure, a lot of organizing involves the slow and steady recruitment of new members, development of top leaders and building of organizational structures over many years. Along the way, movement organizations hope to extract concessions from those in power that better the lives of their members — such as protections for tenants in a building, clean-up of industrial pollution that is impacting a community, union contracts with better wages, benefits and conditions of work. Often, the individual wins are not flashy, and the long effort is not glamorous. But this type of work is essential. It is the organizing that has built up the labor movement and groups that form the backbone of an organized left in the United States and beyond.

At the same time, historians, movement theorists and longtime activists alike all tell us that progress does not always come at such a measured pace. Instead, history is punctuated with moments in which mass protests unexpectedly fill the streets, draw large numbers of previously uninvolved people into movement activity, and quickly shift public perception of an issue, changing the bounds of what is politically possible. 

Various scholars and social movement participants have called these “ruptural moments,” “upsurges”or “movement moments.” In social science research, political scientist Aristide Zolberg dubbed them “moments of madness” in a 1972 article describing the exuberance of the student left in France in 1968, where pamphlets declared that “all is possible.” Other examples from throughout the world abound. But even within the U.S., the past generation has seen a sequence of these intermittent outbursts on the political stage: from global justice protests in Seattle in 1999, to historic antiwar demonstrations in 2003, to mass immigrant rights marches in 2006, to Occupy Wall Street in 2011, to the subsequent Women’s March and resistance during Trump’s first term, as well as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. 

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From the Berlin Wall to today — Lessons for harnessing the moment of the whirlwind

In our book “This Is An Uprising,” we call these periods of intense activity “moments of the whirlwind.” We argue that they are of critical importance and should be incorporated into our conception of how social change happens. Unfortunately, these moments have often been downplayed or overlooked by many political pundits, elected officials and the public at large. 

In fact, they are regularly underappreciated by organizers as well. Because whirlwinds break the conventional rules of organizing and require strategists to recalibrate based on an entirely new set of conditions and opportunities, established organizations are often not prepared for these periods of escalated activity. As a result, even when outbreaks of protest are not simply dismissed as fleeting and unreliable, the response to them can be scrambled, pieced together in ad hoc fashion after the critical early period of emergence has already passed.

This is a liability for social movements. As Zolberg argued decades ago, those interested in pushing the pace of progress can ill-afford to neglect those exceptional times in which the status quo, often conceived of as rigid and uncompromising, becomes malleable: “If politics is ‘the art of the possible,’ what are we to make of moments when human beings living in modern societies believe that ‘all is possible?’” he asked, going on to warn that our “prejudgment as to what is normal and what is not hampers our understanding of politics.”

When managed skillfully, these periods of elevated activity can accomplish many things. In a democratic context, they can reframe popular reception of a cause, change the landscape of solutions that are considered feasible, compel politicians and bosses to accede to demands that they might otherwise have rejected out of hand, seed the formation of new groups and campaigns, and allow established organizations to reap the benefits of an inflow of new resources and participants. In more authoritarian settings, they have been instrumental in averting coups, halting undemocratic power grabs, stopping the stealing of elections, and even ousting illegitimate regimes. 

But without having a vision of what moments of the whirlwind can accomplish and how they can be used, organizations fail to strategically escalate. They lack mechanisms to properly absorb the energy of a movement upsurge. They neglect to communicate to the public why it is worth joining and investing hope in outbreaks of revolt. And they are unable to think about how, at times, it might be possible not merely to wait for whirlwinds to appear, but rather work proactively to engineer them.

Only by carefully studying moments of the whirlwind and appreciating their most distinctive qualities can we make the most of the openings they present. To this end, we believe it is crucial to recognize five key characteristics that define whirlwind moments and lend them their unique potency.

1. Whirlwinds draw momentum from trigger events that polarize the public 

Most social movement activists can point to a time in their lives when they felt swept up in a dramatic outbreak of mass protest. Therefore, it is common to hear people describe the experience being in the middle of a “whirlwind.” Yet although this language has long been a part of movement vernacular, it is generally deployed not to refer to a defined theoretical concept, but rather to point to a feeling of expanded possibility — amorphous and inexact but nevertheless real.

As we sought to bring greater specificity to the common understanding of this phenomenon, we drew the phrase “moments of the whirlwind” from a story about Saul Alinsky, the mid-20th century figure widely regarded as the godfather of U.S. community organizing. The founder of groups including the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council in Chicago, Alinsky was known for his disciplined, local approach to community building and his suspicion of mass movements. But something happened in the spring of 1961 that caused him to reconsider his prior beliefs and at least temporarily pivot based on new conditions.

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That something was the Freedom Rides, an effort to desegregate interstate busing in the South that became one of the peak moments of the civil rights movement. After Freedom Riders in Alabama were attacked by members of the Ku Klux Klan, the campaign burst into news headlines nationally and internationally. Amid the excitement, one of Alinsky’s trusted lieutenants, Nicholas von Hoffman, got a call asking if their community organization in Chicago would host organizers for what would be one of the riders’ first public appearances in the North since the start of their campaign.

As Alinsky biographer Sanford Horwitt relates, von Hoffman was skeptical, remembering many civil rights demonstrations in Chicago that failed to draw a crowd. (A few years earlier, Horwitt writes, local leaders had called “a protest rally in Washington Park after a Black man had been lynched in Poplarville, Mississippi. When von Hoffman showed up, he recalled, he was the only one there.”) Nevertheless, he agreed to host and booked the gymnasium at St. Cyril’s Church, a local parish. 

An hour before the start of the event, just as von Hoffman was beginning to despair, people started trickling in. Then they kept coming in greater and greater numbers. Soon, a flood of Chicagoans packed the gym and poured out to fill the foyer, the stairs and the sidewalks. Von Hoffman, in shock, rushed to find loudspeakers to amplify the Freedom Riders’ story to the overflow crowd that spilled down the block. The energy among those gathered was overwhelming. When von Hoffman got home at 3 a.m. that night, exhausted but still buzzing with excitement, he called his mentor. After describing the evening’s events in disbelief, he told Alinsky, “I think that we should toss out everything we are doing organizationally and work on the premise that this is the moment of the whirlwind, that we are no longer organizing but guiding a social movement.”

Alinsky replied, “You’re right. Get on it tomorrow.”

The community group proceeded to use the momentum of the Freedom Rides to organize a historic voter registration drive among Black voters in Chicago, stunning the city’s political establishment and channeling scores of new participants into a school desegregation drive.

This story about the Chicago community organizers highlights several of the distinctive characteristics of ruptural movement moments. The first key trait of moments of the whirlwind is that they arise in response to trigger events. These are dramatic public happenings that thrust a social issue into the spotlight. A trigger might be a wildfire or an industrial accident, a police murder or public health scare, a military invasion or breaking news of a corruption scandal. As social movement theorist Bill Moyer wrote, any number of such highly publicized incidents can create a situation in which, “Overnight, a previously unrecognized social problem becomes a social issue everyone is talking about.” 

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Trigger events polarize the public, meaning that they take people who might previously have been uninformed or apathetic about a given topic and force them to take sides. And they often spark protests, as newly outraged citizens take to public spaces to voice their concerns. But, of course, not all scandals and crises that make news headlines become the impetus for mass protest. Many shocking events, even ones that might be expected to produce widespread outrage, end up quickly fading into obscurity, with only muted reaction from the public at large. 

To counter this, social movements play a critical role. In vital instances, activists have been able to skillfully capitalize on the opportunity presented by a trigger, provide context and framing that directs discontent at particular targets, and escalate whatever initial organic response may have arisen into a more significant and sustained mobilization. What is more, movements have sometimes created trigger events of their own: They have shown that a creative demonstration, a disruptive strike, or a bold occupation is sometimes able to capture the public imagination in an unexpected way and become the spark that sets off a wider revolt. Such organizing helps turn triggers into whirlwinds.

Moments of the whirlwind are dependent on momentum — which can be measured as the number of a movement’s active supporters times the frequency of their mobilization. While a single trigger event can be enough to draw public attention and send people into the streets, whirlwinds generally take shape as movements build momentum through multiple different triggers. These events reinforce one another and create a growing sense of drama. In a given instance, an initial scandal may start things off, but the media and the public might only truly start taking notice after protesters confronting a politician about the incident creates a new set of headlines. Then, a burgeoning mobilization might attract even more attention due to what is known in the field of civil resistance as the “paradox of repression.” Attempts by authorities to quell unrest can end up producing scenes of police abuse and official callousness that prompt much larger crowds to show up in support of dissenters. 

A moment of the whirlwind, therefore, is an unusual state of heightened activity that represents a rare and fortuitous combination of opportunity and effective organizing, planned protest and emergent activity. As we have previously written: “At any given time, history might offer up a ‘trigger event’ that provokes widespread outrage and sends people into the streets. But it takes determined escalation on the part of social movements to keep the issue in the spotlight, to inspire greater participation and sacrifice, and to repeatedly reinforce the sense of public urgency.” 

Although whirlwinds can be national or even international in scale, they can also happen on a more localized basis: They might develop in a specific city or community, on a college campus, or within a single industry. Yet on whatever level they occur, they can be traced back to one or more initial triggers.

The moment of the whirlwind experienced by Alinsky and von Hoffman was just one of the periods of concentrated tumult generated by the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The genius of the Freedom Rides, organized by the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, was that they were direct action protests perfectly designed to cause a succession of dramatic triggers. From the start, the proposal to send an interracial group of young people straight into the Jim Crow South constituted a bold and controversial plan. The rides posed a clear provocation to Southern racists, as activists vowed they would directly challenge and defy segregationist measures. 

“The pace was intended to be slow,” writes historian David Garrow, “with as many stops as possible to test facilities in bus terminals in each town.” The result was a series of staggered incidents. As organizer James Farmer explained, “We planned the Freedom Ride with the specific intention of creating a crisis. We were counting on the bigots in the South to do our work for us. We figured that the government would have to respond if we created a situation that was headline news all over the world. … An international crisis, that was our strategy.” 

At first, the stops produced only minor confrontations, but soon the riders encountered the decidedly violent response that their audacious plan had predicted. Outside of Anniston, Alabama, a mob of white supremacists burned one of the buses. Then, in Birmingham, locals pummeled Freedom Riders as they attempted to disembark onto the bus platform. By the time that a frustrated Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy begrudgingly dispatched 500 federal marshals to protect the Freedom Riders and finally enforce the Supreme Court’s order to integrate bus stations, scenes of bloodied civil rights activists had become a repeated feature of news broadcasts, triggering national debate and motivating fresh waves of recruits to board new convoys of buses to the Deep South.

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More recently, a 2023 campaign against fossil fuel subsidies in the Netherlands again demonstrated how a moment of the whirlwind can emerge from a cascading series of trigger events. Periodic road blockades on the A12 highway in the Hague helped to put the issue on the radar for the public. But other triggers made the popularity of the direct actions explode over the course of the year. A move by authorities to raid the homes of activists sparked indignation and spurred participation. So did a subsequent decision by police to turn water cannons on growing protests in the cold of winter. Once public funding of the fossil fuel industry became a leading political issue, the campaign benefited from the repeated release of new studies and exposés showing that the actual amount of subsidies was far higher than initially estimated. 

Each subsequent report served as a fresh trigger, reinforcing the political controversy and adding to movement momentum. By the time activists completed a whirlwind, month-long period of daily protests in the fall, polls showed that 70 percent of the Dutch population was expressing support for a phaseout of fossil fuel subsidies.

2. Whirlwinds create a new wave of active support for a cause that comes from outside established organizational structures

As a second key trait, moments of the whirlwind create a temporary environment in which social movements are able to rapidly secure and grow something that is essential to their success: an influx of committed and mobilized volunteers. In contrast to other models of organizing, this surge in movement energy and participation comes primarily from outside established groups.

In ordinary times, a lot of the work that movements do is aimed at generating passive support for a cause. Ordinary protest and public education elevates levels of general awareness. In doing so, it turns uninformed bystanders who are neutral, indifferent or otherwise preoccupied into people who agree with the idea that something should be done about an issue. These people may not be doing much to push forward solutions, but their sympathies move to the movement’s side, and that represents an important step forward. 

Although ruptural moments can have an impact in expanding a movement’s passive support, or the percentage of the public that views the cause positively, these periods of intense mobilization have an even more important function: They serve as a key means of taking people to a further level of commitment and participation. During moments of the whirlwind, large numbers of bystanders who may have seen themselves as in agreement with a movement’s goals but were previously disengaged decide to get involved. As these people move off the sidelines and into the fray, they become active supporters: They show up for demonstrations. They donate money. They make the movement’s issue a top concern when voting. And they reach out to persuade others in their networks. Some start attending organizing meetings, taking leadership roles in protest groups, and making significant personal sacrifices in support of the cause. 

Crucially, during moments of the whirlwind, such participation originates predominantly from beyond the ranks of established organizations. Instead of prodding usual suspects from inside existing groups into action, evolving mass protests draw from outside.

This can confound the expectations of veteran organizers. Ordinarily, those who attend meetings, plan actions, sign up for group activities, join electoral canvasses, or show up to demonstrations are people who are integrated into an organizational structure. Their participation over a long period of time is nurtured through relationships they have with peers, staff and leaders within those bodies. When a structure-based organization, such as a union or a community group, wants to put on a demonstration, it deploys participants using something akin to a phone tree. Top organizers might each be tasked with calling 10 committee leaders who are responsible for a given workplace, building or congregation. These leaders, in turn, each activate 10 rank-and-file members. 

The organization achieves scale for the protest either by reaching more deeply into its structure or by joining forces with other allied organizations — groups with memberships of their own that can be tapped in the same way. In this manner, every participant who shows up has been identified in advance and can be traced back through the structure, like leaves on a tree connecting to branches and, eventually, the main trunk. 

In contrast, during a moment of the whirlwind, energy pours into a movement from members of an activated public who may have never had contact with established groups before. Scale is not driven by the phone tree, but by the magnitude of the public response to a trigger event. Longtime organizers of structure-based groups often marvel at seeing all sorts of new participants “come out of the woodwork” during these periods, asking, “Who are all these people?” As Nicholas von Hoffman joked when putting together the Chicago voter registration drive in the wake of the St. Cyril’s event, “In many instances, we were working with people who had never been in any organization larger than a crap game.”

Meanwhile in the South, John Lewis, one of the original Freedom Riders, reported a similar rush of new volunteers. A key leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, who would later become a U.S. Congressperson, Lewis commented on how the campaign morphed from a small direct action with a carefully selected cadre of riders into something much bigger: It became “a more spontaneous event, less like a precise, military-like assault and more like an organism with a life of its own, a thing that seemed to be growing of its own accord[,]” he would write. 

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Within a few weeks, he witnessed the “Freedom Ride [burst] wide open… mushrooming and multiplying into Freedom Rides, dozens of them, buses filled with literally hundreds” who arrived “each day from every direction. Quakers, college professors, rabbis, pacifists, unionists, communists, conscientious objectors, clergymen — they were flooding in from Minnesota, Wisconsin, California, as well as from points east and south, merging with the students of SNCC and CORE and overflowing the jail cells of Jackson.”

During whirlwind moments, it is common for the media to run stories that profile people who have not previously engaged in political activism. This could be seen during the January 2017 Women’s March, when women repulsed by the newly elected Donald Trump turned out in record-setting numbers at marches that took place throughout the country. In this instance, the Associated Press published a representative article remarking on the “unusually high share of newcomers for a demonstration,” while USA Today quoted first-time protester Kristen Phillip of San Mateo, California, who brought her daughter with her to a San Francisco rally: “I’m 44 and I’ve never done anything like this but I feel compelled to be here,” Phillip stated, noting that the march made her feel “powerful and hopeful.” “It makes me feel that we can get through this, if we love each other and don’t let them divide us,” she said.

Indeed, the media plays an important role in driving participation — although sometimes social media and alternative outlets can have a decisive hand in amplifying triggers when mainstream news sources are slow to notice. In 2006, the immigrant rights movement exploded into action in response to the so-called “Sensenbrenner Bill” passed by the U.S. House of Representatives. Fearing the bill would lead to mass persecution of immigrants, rallies started popping up across the country. First, 100,000 people demonstrated in Chicago, followed by a march in Los Angeles of more than half a million protesters, and a day of action the next month in 102 cities. Many mainstream pundits were mystified by the speed at which word of the actions spread. But savvy observers took note of the role of Spanish-language media — and radio stations in particular — in driving turnout. In Los Angeles, two rival DJs, El Pioín and El Cucuy, crucially joined forces to promote their city’s protests. As Spanish-language stations elsewhere joined in, writer Ed Morales quipped in The Nation, “The Media Is the Mensaje.”

The intensity of a whirlwind cannot be sustained indefinitely. And, as we will see, this produces a genuine challenge for organizers who must reckon with how to absorb the energy it creates. Nevertheless, while it lasts, the inflow of active supporters it temporarily encourages is unique and remarkable, distinguishing mass protest from other forms of social movement building.

3. During whirlwinds, actions are viral, decentralized and emergent

John Lewis’ feeling of watching the Freedom Rides become a creature with “a life of its own” is a sentiment commonly shared by organizers who live through moments of the whirlwind. In fact, a third key characteristic of these periods is that, once a cause goes viral, a movement will experience outbreaks of decentralized and emergent activity. Not only do people come in from outside established groups, but many of the actions they undertake are not directed from any unified command. 

In other words, centralized organizations lose control, and people exhibit a much greater degree of self-direction and independent motivation.

When Black Lives Matter erupted into public consciousness, activated members of the public did not merely show up to rallies and make demands of local governments directly related to police violence. They did do those things, of course. But people also pursued a much wider range of activities seeking to confront the ongoing impact of racism in American society. They pushed to see the issue addressed in their workplaces, schools, social institutions and houses of worship. 

As a result, companies were pressured to improve their efforts to diversify their workforces and add more people of color to the ranks of their leadership. Students, teachers and activist parents pushed for the adoption of books and race-conscious curricula that would create greater awareness and give young people better tools to understand and discuss legacies of structural racism. Hollywood producers and New York City book publishers came under fire for their failure to adequately promote marginalized voices, and they faced demands from within their industries to increase representation. Meanwhile, students urged their universities to rename buildings on campuses and some local groups similarly moved to rename streets or remove statues that honored slaveholders, segregationists or Confederate generals. 

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These are just a few of varied and far-flung examples of action that percolated in sometimes unexpected corners. The field of civil resistance sometimes describes this as work to weaken the “pillars of support” that uphold the status quo, while the Gramscian tradition might see it as part of the “march through the institutions” of civil society. Granted, not all of the various drives that emerged were equally impactful or well-conceived. And some of the advances secured in different quarters were later rolled back — pointing to the ongoing need to institutionalize and defend social movement gains, which can be precarious. 

But whatever one makes of the initiatives that arose in these many realms, they reflected a diverse and decentralized outpouring of concern. They show how the impact of the whirlwind moment was not contained within a single legislative drive, election or policy campaign, but rather swept over an expansive social terrain.

Another way emergent activity appears is that new participants wanting to join the movement show up in activist spaces with unsolicited but creative offerings: some people who hear about a protest encampment may call in to send food from local pizzerias — as happened when trade unionists took over the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol in 2011. Others appear with donations of blankets or camping gear. At Occupy Wall Street that same year, independent massage therapists came to protest sites with their tables and offered free body work to participants. During the campaign in the Netherlands, classical musicians organized themselves to provide a free concert for the protests, performing a rendition of Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 7.” Later, after police started confiscating instruments, they assembled again to enact a mimed performance of Mozart’s “Dies Irae,” their hands vigorously, if silently, bowing the air. 

Very little of this type of activity is directed by centralized organizations — and indeed it is doubtful that harried organizers could ever even think to ask for many of the imaginative displays of support that materialize in periods of peak protest. 

In the case of Occupy Wall Street, core organizers in New York City embraced the unpredictability of decentralized mobilization. Two weeks into the occupation in the fall of 2011, the mass arrest of Occupy protesters marching on the Brooklyn Bridge created a new trigger event for the movement. Taking advantage of the expanded attention that followed, organizers issued an audacious call to “Occupy Everywhere!” — an invitation meant to encourage allied encampments well beyond New York’s Zuccotti Park. The response was overwhelming. A week later, the Guardian was reporting that “as many as 70 major cities and more than 600 communities have joined the swelling wave of civil dissent.” The total number of encampments would later expand to more than 1,500 globally. With next to nothing in terms of centralized planning or coordination, Occupiers formed countless working groups, highlighted local issues of economic injustice, held protests opposing evictions, launched campaigns against student and medical debt, and planned actions supporting unionization efforts. 

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This surge in active support for the movement was short lived, and few occupations lasted for more than two or three months. And yet, during that time, the mass protest broke the generally accepted rules of political engagement and encouraged a level of viral participation that would seem almost unimaginable within other traditions of social movement building.

The fact that moments of the whirlwind draw in new activists from outside existing organizational structures and that centralized groups have limited control of the activity that results does not mean that established organizations have no role to play. In fact, these structures very often are activated by their own members, who are charged up by the excitement of the moment and feel called to get involved. Sometimes, the leadership of these groups recognizes the opportunity and makes sure their organizations do what they can to help. Deploying resources and lending expertise, they add organizational heft to the momentum building the streets. As von Hoffman and Alinsky illustrated, skillful respondents can effectively play off of mass protest energies and tap new participants for local campaigns. When they do, these responses from far-sighted and visionary leaders can make an important contribution to amplifying the impact of movement whirlwinds. 

Many times, however, the organizations with the most to offer are also the most reluctant to dive in. As theorists such as Frances Fox Piven and Jeremy Brecher have documented, leaders of established groups have historically been slow to respond to public actions galvanized by trigger events — and are sometimes even hostile to emergent mobilizations that are beyond their control. Veteran organizers may be liable to view protests movements warily, as distractions from the targeted campaigns they are already running and the specific goals they are trying to achieve. For this reason, they can end up as followers, rather than leaders, in recognizing the forceful potential of these unusual moments.

4. Whirlwinds are temporary, as mass mobilizations come in waves, then subside

A fourth characteristic of whirlwinds is that sooner or later, the elevated energy that follows the initial trigger events is destined to subside. 

Mass mobilizations come and go in waves. And there are a number of reasons for this. 

A primary reason is that the ever-fickle media seldom remains interested in one issue or event for long. Activists can attempt to counteract this tendency by escalating their actions to create a sense of growing drama, by deploying novel tactics that keep their protests fresh, and by looking for additional external triggers upon which to capitalize. But inevitably, the use of the media to keep a mobilization in the public eye — something that contributes to the early energy of a mass protest — becomes a double-edged sword as time goes on.

A second reason that whirlwinds die down is that their participants burn out. When momentum is high, it is common to see both hardcore leaders and more peripheral volunteers set aside their ordinary routines to throw themselves into the movement. They miss work, forgo family time, and neglect other obligations. But this level of sacrifice is difficult, if not impossible, to keep up over a long period. Eventually, more and more people must return to their normal lives, leaving fewer committed participants to push the cause forward.

Finally, whirlwinds are quelled because movements face backlash and repression from their adversaries. While at first the opposition may be taken by surprise by a trigger event — much like the movement’s own leaders — the passage of time allows it to solidify a response. As the public grows fatigued with protests, rhetorical assaults may begin to stick more often. And opponents’ attacks usually extend beyond words: State repression commonly means arrests, fines, court dates and jail time that all take their toll on targeted leaders and slow momentum. Sooner or later, a movement must decide it is time to recover, rest and heal in order to resume the fight in the future — until fresh triggers ignite a new round of mobilization. 

All of these factors contribute to a pattern of peaks and valleys for mass protest movements. The rhythms of these rising and receding tides are well known, and both academic scholars and activists themselves have offered a variety of different maps to chart the phases of a movement’s progression. Perhaps the most famous is the Movement Action Plan, or MAP, first developed by Quaker activist Bill Moyer in the 1970s as he sought to “understand the ebb and flow of living, breathing social movements as they grow and change over time.” The MAP model lays out eight stages of a movement’s lifespan, from business as usual, to the initial period of “takeoff,” to later lulls and “re-trigger events” that produce rebounds in mobilization. 

In the past decade, Movement NetLabs has offered a similar but modified take on protest stages it calls “the movement cycle.” Meanwhile, the organization Beautiful Trouble has a resource known as the “movement compass” which combines elements of both, while also incorporating research provided by anthropologist Isa Mayah Mukibi Benros and ActionAid Denmark. In each case, the models can only serve as an approximation of the messy reality of lived practice. And yet, they provide useful insights into the common psychological experience of activists at various points in a mobilization, as well as the disposition of the public and the likely response of inside-game reformers and politicians.

Appreciating the common patterns of ups and downs in mass mobilizations has multiple benefits. Knowing where a movement is located in the cycle allows its members to prepare for emotional swings. It allows leaders to focus on making the most of peak periods when they last: working to intensify whirlwind moments, extend them over multiple triggers, and be less reluctant to escalate when the opportunities arise. And it primes organizations to take on the challenge of absorbing the surge in active support and better institutionalizing the gains that are achieved.

5. The impact of whirlwinds is often indirect and must be tracked over time

Recognizing that cyclical nature of mass protest movements also allows observers and participants alike to better understand the effects that whirlwind mobilizations have. Because this impact is less direct and more diffuse than that of some other approaches to creating social change, it can be harder to track, and it must be measured over time. That said, those who do endeavor to follow the diverse ramifications of mass mobilizations will find that they are often profound and wide-ranging.

The fact that mass protests rise and fall in waves creates a predictable pattern among media pundits: Again and again, we see that as soon as a protest movement begins losing momentum, a raft of commentators will rush to declare it a failure. When a movement falls from public view and becomes “out of sight, out of mind,” casual observers are prone to latch on to this negativity and conclude that mass protests have done little of value. 

For movement participants themselves, entering into a quieter period after the exhilarating peak of a mass protest explosion often feels like a letdown — even if conditions for organizing are much better than they were before. In his mapping of movement cycles, Bill Moyer called this stage the “perception of failure.” He noted that, “By the end of take-off, many activists suffer from ‘battle fatigue.’ After [an intense period] of virtual ’round-the-clock activity in a crisis atmosphere, at great personal sacrifice, many activists find themselves mentally and physically exhausted and don’t see anything to show for it.” As the whirlwind subsides and participants return to their daily lives, the intensity of purpose they previously felt fades, contributing to cynicism about future prospects. 

Meanwhile, veteran organizers who may have been suspicious of movement outbreaks to begin with may find validation for their misgivings: If moments of the whirlwind are doomed to dissipate, then what is the point at all?

The answer is that whirlwinds leave behind them an altered terrain. Social movements do not end up in the same place where they started, but rather are positioned to enter into new cycles of contention from an improved position.

For Zolberg, the impact of the historic “moments of madness” he examined manifests in several ways. First, the experience of the whirlwind transforms people individually, radicalizing those who participate in movement surges and giving them a sense of agency alien in their day-to-day lives. Zolberg explains this in sometimes flowery language: “Minds and bodies are liberated,” he writes; “human beings feel that they are in direct touch with one another as well as with their inner selves.”

Second, mobilizations expand the public imagination, creating a climate in which solutions previously considered remote become regarded as practical and necessary. In this respect, Zolberg describes a peak period of protest as “a sort of intensive learning experience whereby new ideas… emerge as widely shared beliefs among much larger publics.” Or, as veteran organizer Jeff Ordower wrote in 2022, “ruptural moments open a window into a change in thinking. … [I]n changing how space or public order works, [they] contest the story of the dominant culture.” Gramscians might cite this as part of the project of creating a new “common sense” in society, while more mainstream political junkies might talk about shifting the “Overton Window” of acceptable debate on an issue.  

Third, moments of the whirlwind enrich the soil in which movements grow. As Zolberg writes, “From the social structural point of view, stepped-up participation is like a flood tide which loosens up much of the soil but leaves alluvial deposits in its wake.” Rather than being exclusive with longer-term campaigns or institution-building, mass protest feeds the social movement ecosystem, providing an influx of resources, seeding new initiatives, and bringing in new supporters who are prime targets for recruitment.

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All of this has concrete ramifications, which become evident over time. The Freedom Rides directly compelled federal enforcement of desegregation in interstate bussing, and it contributed to a series of protest cycles that ultimately helped usher in landmark measures including the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But even when gains are less immediate or iconic, and in times when Congressional gridlock precludes most federal legislation from advancing, whirlwind moments can have significant consequences — ones too easily overlooked by cynics. The Women’s March and subsequent #MeToo movement during Trump’s first term, for instance, not only gave rise to scores of state and local laws, but had impacts in institutions such as schools, churches and businesses, in the behavior of the legal system, in shifting the culture, and in influencing electoral outcomes — including major defeats at the polls for Trump in 2018 and 2020. 

The work of tracking such affects through multiple social and political arenas is far more involved than documenting the outcome of a single-issue campaign or a contract fight, focused on a more narrow and specific demand. But it also speaks to the potential of mass mobilization to send reverberations over a much wider landscape.

Many of these effects will be felt well after a whirlwind mobilization has progressed through its up and down cycles — after a revolt set off by salient trigger events has drawn active support from outside of existing organizational structures, unleashed a wave of activity not contained under any one centralized command, and finally receded into the past. At that point, pundits and historians will begin to debate the significance of its memory. Meanwhile, new movements can begin to operate in the transformed world of possibilities that it has created.

This article Could we be entering a ‘movement moment’ against Trump? was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/04/could-we-be-entering-a-movement-moment-against-trump/