Muscle memory kicks in; "we already know how to do this"

On Bluesky, Rebecca Traister, journalist and chronicler of women's persisting demands for our freedom and full humanity observes: 

New generations waking up to fury and grief is how we move forward and extend centuries worth of (often circular, often maddening, often unsuccessful) work to make this country a more just and equitable place for more of the people who live in it. (Re Naomi Beinart's oped in the New York Times - gift.)

Traister's reflections for New York Magazine on the Trump election win are deep; I don't know how to share as a gift article so here are some instructive fragments:

The Resistance Is Dead. Long Live the Resistance?

The women who set out to bury Donald Trump are doing things differently now. ...

... derision of the merchandized detritus of first-stage resistance organizing often worked to obscure the seriousness of what was happening among many Americans who had never before been politically active and who had been both appalled and galvanized by the defeat of Hillary Clinton. The first big public gathering, the Women’s March [of 2017], wasn’t just an Instagrammable party. It was spiky and contentious, bringing together Hillary heads and Berners, leftists and moderates, hard-core activists and wide-eyed newbies, as well as the grifters and profiteers who adhere to any mass movement. ...

... From there, women broke in a dizzying array of organizing directions. Some helped drive the wildcat teachers’ strikes that spread in 2018 across Oklahoma, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Arizona. Others disrupted Republican-lawmaker town halls, helping to save the Affordable Care Act from repeal in Trump’s first year in office, and harried administration officials responsible for the family-separation policy.

The shared fury of women led to the Me Too movement, which resulted in powerful and abusive figures losing positions of institutional authority, and to sexual-harassment walkouts at companies including McDonald’s and Google. A historic number of women ran for office, flooding candidate-training groups like Emerge and Higher Heights. Others got to work organizing on their behalf in municipal and local races, creating Democratic infrastructure in places that the party had left unattended for generations. 

This organizing produced material results all over the country. This iteration of the resistance was the force that flipped the House to Democratic control in 2018, staved off a red wave in 2022, and won majorities in Michigan and Minnesota, where laws were subsequently passed to protect abortion access and LGBTQ rights and ensure free school lunches. It helped secure State Supreme Court seats in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and a streak of ballot referenda on abortion rights post-Dobbs, including in blood-red Kentucky, Ohio, and Kansas — ensuring that, for a while at least, tens of millions more Americans have had access to health care they would otherwise not have had. ...

... The urge to demonize and dismiss these women, despite their impact, is strong from both party and press, neither of which has ever been eager to take seriously — or sometimes even notice — the nation-shaping political activation of women, unless they are of the right-wing Moms for Liberty variety.

There has been little acknowledgment that the almost entirely volunteer efforts of regular-degular women in communities around the country — not just the recent exertions of previously disengaged white women but the electoral labor performed unrelentingly by Black women for generations — has done more to preserve and repair the broken Democratic Party at state and local levels than the efforts of the well-paid, expensively dressed, smooth-brained Democratic consultant class or the political press, both of which tend to obsess over the shiny highest offices, forget local- and state-power building, fly quadrennially into local communities about which they know nothing, and advise candidates against embracing issues that turn out to be more popular with voters than the candidates who listen to consultants’ advice.

... Leah Greenberg [from Indivisible] said that she doesn’t mind watching the resistance being written off as dead, at least for now: “It is a very funny instance of overwhelmingly D.C./male pundits and reporters rushing to declare that things they aren’t personally paying attention to are not happening, while the actual work happens in a thousand homes across the country.” She acknowledged that there are real questions about strategy moving forward. “But our folks ... They don’t give up.”

The legacy of the past eight years is not simply a gutting presidential loss. There are tools and mechanisms in place: shield laws and sanctuary states. People new to engagement now have had practice at losing and getting back up again; that is crucial. 

“The muscle memory has kicked back in as the grief and shock has worn off,” Amanda Litman [from Run for Something which processed 7000 inquiries after Trump triumphed two weeks ago] told me. “It feels more clear-eyed about how hard this will be. But there is also a history of winning against him.”

The Resistance has now experienced both the overturn of Roe and the electoral victories that followed in its wake; they have learned about abortion funds, read Project 2025, and have some idea of what might be coming next. Nothing has to be the same this time because we are not the same.

“I think the 2016 resistance is dead and that’s a good thing,” said Nelini Stamp, director of strategy for the Working Families Party. “That style of resistance was an on-ramp for a lot of people, and a lot of people took it. Now, it is more like, Let’s get to work.... There’s an advocacy infrastructure that’s grown, an electoral infrastructure, a legal infrastructure.”

Or as Litman put it, “This time we can all jump right in without building the plane while we fly it.”

And it's not only activated women that already know how to stand up and stand together against the budding autocracy. 

When Erudite Partner went off to Nevada to work to hold that battleground state for the Dems, I stayed home, knowing I was physically too limited to work in the center of the campaign, though I could and did work the UniteHERE union phonebank. I could be confident that this would be what I call a "hot-and-cold-running-volunteers" election, drawing from the multiple activist bases that people built in the Trump years. It was; the E.P. trained 1400 canvassing volunteers in that tiny corner of the national effort. The Harris-Walz campaign did not lack for people; it lacked for a way to overcome the generalized discontent and distrust of a population thrown off center by the pandemic and the failure -- over a couple of decades -- of governments to deliver.

These activist volunteers come out of the vast infrastructure that, often, began with the 2017 #resistance and has matured into para-campaigns like Seed the Vote, the rare effective Democratic Party like Ben Wikler's WisDems, some NGOs -- and of course the more effectual parts of organized labor like UniteHERE and the United Auto Workers. 

How much of this will survive the current authoritarian challenge we don't know. But what comes now is almost certainly more widespread, more hardened, more inventive, and more durable than oblivious pundits can imagine.