I appreciate the opportunity to engage with Fabio Rojas and Michael Heaney, especially given their careful and generous reading. Our books’ appearances within months of each other offer a happy chance for us, and readers, to watch remarkably similar intellectual questions get rather different treatments. We can only hope that, when sharp-eyed graduate students attempt a synthesis, both Party in the Street and When Movements Anchor Parties do not get ripped to shreds in the process.

A month after I submitted page proofs, Freddie Gray died in the back of a police van in Baltimore. For the third time since the Civil War—the previous two were in 1877, during the Great Railroad Strike, and in 1968, following the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.—the National Guard patrolled the city; I spent five nights under curfew. And the week before I write these words, Donald Trump was elected as President of the United States. The events of 2015 and 2016 signal, as Heaney and Rojas suggest, and I discuss briefly (p. 243, 250), the future in this line of research. Disparate elements combine inside decidedly asymmetric parties (a theme taken up also by Matthew Grossmann and David J. Hopkins in their new book, Asymmetric Politics). And brokerage between parties and movements has fractured such that we may not see again a single figure playing the role of John L. Lewis or Paul Weyrich. There is much to unpack. As Trump’s victory suggests, against all the regnant powers inside the GOP, the story is not simply that the Democrats have more factions and claimants. Nor, as labor’s universalistic claims indicate, is it simply a story about groups and ideology. We have much to explain.

Yet we must also take the long view. To the queries about organization and media, let me answer inside a common framework. In recent decades, studies of social movements have celebrated diverse forms and repertoires, fretted over the dangers of hierarchy, and emphasized communication and framing as critical determinants of movement success. When Movements Anchor Parties largely emerges from a different and older tradition, emphasizing the macro environment more than the micro process. To would-be movements, it counsels relentless organizing more than messaging, and offers a healthy skepticism about internal democracy. Behind all these decisions lies a concern about power. Movements want power inside the party system. They puzzle and fight over how to get it. Analyses that foreground forms and tactics without paying attention to the possibilities and limits in the polity at large risk putting the cart before the horse. Although analyses of social movements should continue, as they have done in the last generation, to open up black boxes inside complex processes, the “how” questions must not crowd out the “what difference does it make” questions. In studying the part, we cannot fail to reckon with the whole—because “whatever the issues and whomever the players, when major social movements confront parties, the stakes will remain high” (p. 13).