We are grateful to Professor Schlozman for his thoughtful reaction to our book. At the same time, there are a number of issues that we see differently than he does.

We disagree that the purpose of our book is “to celebrate the power of protest.” Rather than “celebrate” protest, we endeavor to explain the interactions of a party and a movement, regardless of whether those interactions proved to have positive, negative, or neutral effects on the party or policy. Indeed, we find the limited effects of the movement to be one of our most interesting findings. In Chapter 2, we document how the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States did little to change the course of policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Chapter 6, we show how the movement prompted the consideration of new legislation—as well as how that legislation was more substantive in nature in 2007 and 2008—but also that most of this legislation failed to become law. We point to the enactment of Public Law 110–28 in 2007, which codified the antiwar movement’s demand that no permanent bases be established in Iraq and that the United States should not control Iraqi oil resources, which appears to be the only policy concession won by the movement. It is true that the Vietnam antiwar movement had substantial effects on policy, but such was not the case after 9/11.

We see our argument as giving strong recognition to the agency of activists. Activists could have continued to protest war after the Democrats gained electoral success, but they chose not to do so. Donors stopped giving money to the movement. Members of Congress stopped sponsoring legislation. Few activists became candidates for Congress. All of these factors point to activists making choices. It just so happens that they exercised this agency in favor of their partisan identities, rather than their movement identities.

We are clear in Chapter 1 that we envision a multi-part party, including a party in government, party as organization, party in the electorate, and party in the street. Of course, we focus on the party in the street—since that is our contribution—but we do not deny the importance of other aspects of the party. We point to multiple ways in which other aspects of the Democratic Party addressed the war and the antiwar movement, including statements by presidential candidates (pp. 49–51), exit polls (pp. 51–55), campaign strategies, and caucuses in Congress (p. 175 and 189).

Finally, we explain that both activists and politicians blurred the differences between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan such that, from a movement perspective, they were essentially the same conflict. When we separately analyzed activism around the two wars (pp. 122–124), we found that the identity of activists had the same effects in both cases.

In essence, we did look for the kinds of effects Professor Schlozman proposes, but the research did not support their presence.