In 2006, amid anger at the Bush administration’s failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, antiwar rallies reached their peak and Democrats retook both chambers of Congress. The following year, even as American troops “surged,” the antiwar movement dissipated and retreated to its radical core. At the end of the Obama presidency, American troops remain in Afghanistan and, as military advisers in the fight against ISIS, in Iraq. The antiwar movement’s partisan allies in the Democratic Party had taken the reins of power—and yet the movement had fizzled and failed.

This paradox—a moment of seeming political opportunity instead spelled the beginning of the end for the antiwar movement—motivates Party in the Street, a superb activist-eye account of protest as it ebbed and flowed. At the heart of the book lies the authors’ indefatigable shoe-leather research. From 2004 to 2010, Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas, assisted by their own veritable army of field workers, collected wave after wave of surveys that asked antiwar protesters (along with 2008 Democratic convention delegates) about themselves, their organizational ties, and their motivations. Those surveys, some of the most extensive repeated cross-sectional records we have for activists in a social movement, form the core of the authors’ story.

Before 2006, with anger at George W. Bush and his policies riding high and Democrats out of power in Washington, anti-Republican sentiment motivated participation in anti-war protests. As the Democratic Party began to taste power, party loyalists stopped demonstrating. Heaney and Rojas asked their respondents—more than 2,000 of them in each of three waves—the most important reasons you came to this event” (pp. 104–5), and then coded the open-ended responses. In all three periods, most respondents’ reasons emphasized ending the war. The share motivated by opposition to the Republican Party (e.g., “to impeach Bush”), however, fell from 23 percent of respondents in 2004–2005 to 12 percent in 2007–2008 to a mere 1 percent in 2009–2010. Similarly, respondents in 2004–5 reported being contacted to attend a protest most frequently from United for Peace and Justice, a disparate umbrella group, followed by the leftist ANSWER Coalition and then MoveOn, a bona fide member of Democrats’ party network. By 2009–2010, ANSWER was by a factor of two the most common organization mentioned as recruiting protesters, and MoveOn had fallen out of the top ten (pp. 140–1).

Heaney and Rojas situate these striking findings in the context of activists’ multiple, intersectional loyalties and identities. Movements, especially those without deep bases in civil society to ground their efforts, must continually motivate their supporters. Yet in a polarized era—far more partisan, if less tumultuous, than the world of the anti-Vietnam war movement—partisan loyalty easily frames activists’ views and commitments. When Republicans held the reins of power, movement and partisan identities reinforced each other, both for individual Democrats and for groups that sought to mobilize them. After 2007, a climactic presidential election and then a rush to pass domestic legislation crowded out antiwar activism. And once Barack Obama and not George W. Bush was the man ordering troops into battle, activists’ antiwar and partisan loyalties worked at cross purposes.

This book is social science from the bottom up. Although a chapter analyzes co-sponsorship patterns for antiwar legislation in Congress, the book principally asks how and when events shaped protest activity, rather than how protest activity shaped the Democratic Party or American foreign policy. A book meant to celebrate the power of protest and steeped in the intricacies of radical politics gives protesters strangely little agency. We see how events shape the movement, but get far less sense of how the movement mattered.

For Party in the Street, the party is the party in the street. Political parties as sites of democratic struggle, rather than as sums of individual loyalties, play little role in the story. In the 1960s, the antiwar movement asked explicitly, through the McCarthy campaign, the disastrous ’68 convention, party reform, and the McGovern campaign, whether to choose voice in or exit from the party system in general, and the Democrats in particular. Decades on, how did activists understand parties and their roles? Did they view themselves as part of a constituency that a party might recognize as such? One hesitates to pine for more research in a book with so much of it, but parties’ views of the antiwar movement remain opaque here. In what ways did ordinary Democrats (the party in the electorate), precinct captains and fundraising consultants (the party as organization, writ large), and elected officials (the party in government) view the antiwar movement as threat and opportunity? How did those views change over time? In turn, what did state party platforms say about Iraq and Afghanistan, and did those planks reflect pressure from antiwar activists? Should the antiwar movement have used the primary as a weapon against hawkish Democrats in Congress, as anti-Vietnam liberals did sporadically (when, for instance Robert Drinan defeated Philip Philbin in 1970) and as the Tea Party has done far more effectively?

To understand antiwar politics from the Democratic Party’s vantage point, one important factor, surely, lies in the differences, underplayed in the book, between Afghanistan and Iraq. Democratic elites from Barack Obama on down emphasized those differences; an epigraph quotes Obama’s 2002 speech opposing “dumb wars” (p. 71), but the book never really pushes the point. If committed Democrats and other relative moderates swelled rallies to end the war in Iraq, then their decision to shift away from protest looks less like partisan identity trumping movement loyalty than simply a case of a policy victory largely achieved. In those limited terms, Heaney and Rojas undersell shifts in party and policy.

Still, half a century after Vietnam, the antiwar movement, seen in the large, remains strikingly weak and the Democratic Party strikingly hawkish. Except for MoveOn, the organizations and coalitions that Heaney and Rojas describe live far from the political mainstream. The antiwar movement of the 2000s, like its predecessor in the 1960s and 1970s, has left few institutional footprints, and fewer still to bridge the gap between radical critiques and the party mainstream. Democratic foreign-policy mandarins, whatever their views about particular interventions abroad, blanch at the rejection of American power that many antiwar activists espouse.

Nor have the doves a standard-bearer at the top. Without waves of social movement activity, above all from Occupy, which preceded it, Bernie Sanders’s electoral success would have been unthinkable. Yet he never articulated on foreign policy the same kind of comprehensive critique from the left that he mounted on domestic issues. Instead, he referenced his 2002 vote against authorizing force in Iraq, and repeated old criticisms of U.S. behavior back to the days of Henry Kissinger.

Heaney and Rojas write that “Alignment between the antiwar movement and the Democratic Party promoted broader coalitions, while dealignment between the antiwar movement and the Democratic Party promoted narrower coalitions” (p. 140). This claim seems entirely correct—but also something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it reflects not just the fragility of antiwar identities, but the complexities of transforming the Democratic Party.