The increase in organized left-leaning movements in the United States has left many wondering about how large they will become under a unified Republican government.
From the major rise in left-leaning movements in 2020 to the most recent presidential election resulting in a unified government, the future of organized political counteraction may lie in the past.
In just five years, the 2020s have already established themselves as a decade of intense social and political change, using the tactics of another revolutionary period in the United States, the Civil Rights movement.
Starting with the same origins, both the 50s and the modern 20s began with a united government, according to the archives of the US House of Representatives, meaning both chambers of Congress are controlled by the same party as the sitting President.
A unified government can mean an easier time passing legislation that aligns with that party’s ideology, because they are the majority in the legislative branch and the ruler of the executive branch.
However, as both the past and present have shown, when the government possesses large amounts of power, people rise proportionally against it.
With the progression of these left-leaning groups comes increasingly more organized forms of protest as their ideologies gain more traction.
While the protests during the Civil Rights Movement focused on a wide variety of marginalized groups, the modern equivalent typically has one main example that comes to mind.
The Black Lives Matter protests, which began organically during 2020, had anywhere from 16 million to 20 million participants, making it possibly the largest movement in United States history, according to The New York Times.
This protest was considerably less organized than protests preceding it, but still outnumbered the Civil Rights Movement substantially, which was estimated to have only hundreds of thousands of protesters, according to The New York Times.
This same trend can be seen with anti-war encampments on college campuses, with an Anti-Vietnam War protest that took place in Columbia University being outdone by a nation-wide movement in support of Gaza that took place in at least eleven states, according to Newsweek.
However, there are still areas where the modern decade has yet to live up to the Civil Rights Movement.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a large-scale boycott of the Montgomery, Alabama bus service that lasted 381 days and, at its largest impact, resulted in 90% of the African American bus-riding population boycotting, according to Britannica.
While boycotting is a tactic being used in modern movements, it has yet to be as successful.
Some recent examples include the BDS boycott targeting pro-Israeli companies, local boycotts in Cincinnati, Ohio after a Nazi Rally took place, and a proposed boycott of major retailers including Target that would begin on Feb. 28 according to USA Today.
By analyzing the methods of protest used in both the Civil Rights Movement and the modern era, students can get a better understanding of ways to utilize free speech in their own movements.
