Dana R. Fisher’s American Resistance is a timely intervention. The book accomplishes the challenging task of informing a general audience with an interest in social movements while bringing original data and a wealth of political science and sociological research to bear on the study of “the Resistance.” In doing so, Fisher further blurs the fragile disciplinary boundaries that divide political science and sociological approaches to the study of social movements in productive fashion. In American Resistance Fisher covers an impressively broad range of topics, including the conditions that led to the movement’s emergence, the identities of its participants, its novel structure, the challenges it faces for organizing and persisting over time, the diverse tactics deployed, its political consequences, and how the movement has changed since its inception. In the Resistance, Fisher observes the potential for democracy’s revitalization and the Democratic Party’s return to the grassroots.

This book identifies various circumstances that prompted the emergence of the Resistance. These include the increased importance of dark money in US politics, the moral outrage that President Trump ignited, and the hollowing out of the Democratic Party. Fisher traces the roots of the Resistance to the Black Lives Matter movement, Occupy Wall Street, and the women’s, anti-gun, and climate movements. This is in line with previous work on the topic, including Sidney Tarrow and David Meyer’s The Resistance (2018).

Resisters came into this movement with various aims. Some sought to bring newcomers to activism, other groups wanted to challenge the Democratic Party’s minimalist organizing approach, and still others worked to get progressives elected. Fisher finds that these aims changed over time. The study’s design, consisting of three waves of surveys and multiple interviews with movement leaders, allows Fisher to observe that Resisters became increasingly interested in women’s issues, enacting social democratic policies, and building power against corporate interests.

The Resistance has been largely successful on the electoral front. It accomplished swing-state victories during special elections since 2016 and in the 2018 midterm election. Some organizations managed to register vast numbers of voters, fought racial gerrymandering, pushed for ballot measures, and canvassed often-ignored districts. Despite the failure of previous movements to exert influence on political parties, Fisher observes that the Resistance undertook the task of addressing the organizational weakness of the Democratic Party, igniting contention within the party to shift it to the Left and bring it back to the grassroots.

Yet, despite their achievements on the electoral front, resisters were not only focused on electoral politics. Fisher finds that the Resistance is a tactically diverse movement that combines activism in the streets with organizing in congressional districts. Resisters have been credited with thwarting the Republican repeal of the Affordable Care Act, ending the Trump administration’s family separation policy, and engaging individuals in politics for the first time in their lives.

The organizing approach that Fisher identifies in the Resistance—distributed organizing—does not prescribe a series of priorities for the movement’s agenda. Instead, distributed organizing, Fisher argues, entails a fluid form of membership, geographically diffuse organizing, and loosely affiliated networks, all facilitated by the use of digital tools. In American Resistance Fisher demonstrates a dual concern for questions about structuring social movements and identity. The informally structured agenda-setting processes that take place under distributed organizing raise questions about who leads, who decides, where to organize, how to spend and transfer resources, and which issues to prioritize. At stake is the extent to which the Resistance is representative of the diversity of groups it claims to resist for, such as those affected by the Trump administration’s immigration policies and those at the frontlines of efforts to address and adapt to climate change. Activists and scholars have raised these concerns about the Resistance since its inception.

During the 2017 Women’s March, minority activists asked their white counterparts, “Will I see you in the next Black Lives Matter protest?” As these protesters expected, Fisher finds that marches for racial justice drew the smallest crowds in the Resistance, and resisters showed less support for minority issues than other issues. Interestingly, survey results show that broad sectors of the Resistance were motivated by an intersectional array of interests, which are defined as “identity-based interests that … cross race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other categories of identity” (p. 48). Fisher argues that the intersectional motivations for participating in the Resistance can be used to build coalitions within the movement and across different groups, thereby increasing the number and diversity of participants. Fisher confirms this expectation, as she finds that the Resistance was largely able to cope with the controversies that surrounded the increasingly diversified leadership, and the Women’s March protest attendance increased.

Yet, challenges for organizing remain. In American Resistance Fisher confirms what activists and scholars have observed (see, for example, Lara Putnam and Theda Skocpol’s “Middle America Reboots Democracy,” Democracy, February 2018): educated white women make up the largest share of resisters. Challenges remain as resources continue to be injected into organizations with short histories of organizing, and organizations show an overreliance on volunteer work instead of paid staff. This raises questions about who can afford to volunteer their time and whether nonwhite resisters will be interested in engaging in activism in predominantly white spaces. Although Fisher’s observations about the intersectional motivations of Resisters hold promise for the strength-in-diversity and intersectional solidarity perspectives, it is not clear who the Resistance resists for; that is, whether the intersectional motivations and interest that Fisher identifies translate into advocacy agendas that prioritize the issues of intersectionally marginalized groups. Relatedly, the Resistance’s distributed organizing model that Fisher identifies may create barriers to sustained participation for low-income aspiring resisters because of the movement’s overreliance on volunteer work, digital tools, and informal networks.

Fisher finds that, in line with previous research on contemporary protest politics, digital tools lower the costs of movement participation in the Resistance. Yet, attending mass demonstrations in the increasingly gentrified Washington, DC, metropolitan region and canvassing in congressional districts may entail costs that continue to be unbearable for economically and racially marginalized groups. Further, Fisher recognizes that some of the digital tools deployed for the Resistance’s distributed organizing may have the unintended consequence of weakening the development of social ties. Although algorithms may build new bridges for geographically dispersed populations, they may not be a desirable substitute for deeper social ties. Perhaps movements like the Resistance can build on their tactically diverse repertoire of collective action so as to harness the benefits of digital tools while avoiding their pitfalls.

American Resistance demonstrates that this movement is not simply an effort to deter attacks on social policies, bigotry, and hatred. Fisher’s follow-up surveys find that, over time, a larger share of resisters signaled a preference for social policies and a deeper analysis of the policy instruments that a social democratic turn would entail. Fisher shows that the motivation for praxis in the age of Trump has changed over time: it exceeds a push to counter Trump’s political agenda. It is also a movement that is imagining new, more just, democratic, and equitable futures.