The Resistance Rises. How a March Becomes a Movement.

Perhaps the Largest Protest in U.S. History Was Brought to You by Trump.

There is no precedent in U.S. history for the show of collective outrage that answered Trump’s Inauguration. But then, there is no precedent for Trump, either: impetuous, thin-skinned and, for his trouble, entering office facing a grassroots opposition that heated up faster than a cup of ramen.

The face of that Democratic opposition–some call it the resistance–is female, which is to say it’s a face that as a private citizen Trump liked to judge on a scale of 1 to 10, and as a candidate measured by worthiness of his sexual attention. The billionaire made the 2016 presidential campaign about women even before Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination, sliming the Republican primary field by insulting the looks of its only female candidate (“Look at that face!”) and then moving on to Ted Cruz’s wife. So it was that the Women’s March–marches, really, as demonstrations were logged in more than 600 U.S. locations–became the occasion for recovering, in the space of just a few hours, spirits that since election night had spiraled into deep troughs of despair, dread and worse.

Terror is the word that came to Margo Kelly, on a National Mall so crowded with kindred souls, it was difficult to move. “It’s a matter of remaining plugged in and acting on that terror, getting off the couch,” says Kelly, a physician, of what brought her all the way from Portland, Ore., with her ninth-grade daughter, Beatrice. “If there’s any silver lining, it’s that this is a call to action.”

In a time of unexpected loss, there’s an instinct to keep busy. How many dishes are washed and lawns mowed after a death in the family? Who isn’t happy for the distraction? But if the grave is eternal, a presidential term lasts just four years. There are midterm elections in 2018. The entire House of Representatives will have to stand–and a third of the Senate. There’s work to be done–the collective Republican majority hovers near a seven-decade high–and the question hanging over the Mall after the buses headed back home was: Where do we go from here?

Protest organizers actually calculated that framing the march as pro-women rather than anti-Trump would work wonders. Feminism remains an epithet in parts of society, evoking the scolding tone of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who answered the indifference of many young women toward Clinton by recalling that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” That didn’t help. Beyond Clinton’s own limitations, there was the millennials’ preference for ad hoc individual action over membership in any organization.

“Keep your tiny hands off my rights.” “Can’t build wall, hands too small.” “We want a leader, not a creepy tweeter.” “We shall overcomb.” The signs were as bawdily exuberant as the crowds, which inevitably skewed activist but included many who had never demonstrated before, and who experienced in the gatherings both a stirring well of fellow feeling and sudden momentum.

The problem, of course, is how to sustain an insurgency from the highest office in the land. Barack Obama faced the same dilemma upon entering the office in 2009, trying without success to permanently mobilize supporters through something called Organizing for America. No luck. They’d done their work getting him there. It was his turn. It’s much easier to storm the gates from outside, which is why Jan. 21 looms large.

The day produced physical evidence of a grassroots opposition with every bit as much potential as the Tea Party, the diffuse, small-government uprising that started small but soon bedeviled both Obama and the GOP establishment, and ultimately cleared the way for Trump. On the surface, the two insurrections share similarities. Like the Women’s March, the Tea Party movement was deliberately leaderless. But that didn’t stop its members from quickly arriving at a clear understanding of the movement’s goals. By April 2009, it had coalesced around a set of simple policies: limited government, lower taxes, upholding the Constitution. By that summer, it had seized upon another bogeyman: Obama’s health care bill. The anger that boiled over at congressional town halls during the August recess were a vivid illustration of the movement’s budding power.

The Women’s March, even in its striking success, offered more in the way of catharsis than clarity. Its full statement of principles runs more than 1,000 words and includes issues ranging from reproductive rights to gender justice, from the minimum wage to immigration reform, from clean water to criminal profiling to arming police with military-grade weaponry. It’s hard to distill a complicated platform into concrete change when your organizing principle–“intersectional feminism,” a jargony mouthful–opposes elevating any one person’s goals over another’s.

Even so, there was no shortage of intramural dissent. Some female black activists noted that 53% of white women voted for Trump (versus the 94% of black women for Hillary). Transgender activists complained that the vagina is not an apt symbol for those who identify as women but might not have one.

“It’s messy, and that’s the beauty of it,” says Erika Andiola, political director of Our Revolution, the successor organization to Sanders’ presidential campaign, which boasts hundreds of affiliated chapters. “Part of organizing is that we’re not all going to be marching in the same rhythm.”

the incongruous message that came out of a huge turnout–possibly the largest in U.S. history: go home and think small. While holding the White House for the past eight years, Democrats lost big at the state level. With control of only 14 state legislatures (to the GOP’s 32), and 16 governors, the consensus preached at every rally is that the party needs to rebuild from the ground up.

March organizers, a diverse group of women operating by consensus, prepared a discrete plan of 10 follow-on actions, starting with a mail-in postcard to Congress. Meanwhile, on Facebook, a link circulating a few days later read: “It starts with the House.” Winning back control is a very heavy lift; the Democrats are down 47 seats, and young people and minorities are notorious for their low turnouts in midterm elections.

But in January, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which raises funds for House races, added 500,000 addresses to its master email list of 3 million. As for the Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate, after witnessing eight years of GOP obstruction, they were already inclined to use whatever available procedural levers could impede Trump’s agenda–threatening, for instance, to hold up indefinitely any Supreme Court nomination deemed insufficiently “mainstream.”

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