The Atlantic’s Quinta Jurecic argues “Resistance Is Cringe—But it’s also effective.”
After Donald Trump’s win in 2024, commentators declared the so-called Resistance “dead” and “futile.” The opposition movement against Trump had been embarrassing, ineffective, a performative failure that did nothing “besides making the #Resisters feel good about themselves.” With the country now nine months into Trump’s second term, though, reports of the death of the Resistance turn out to have been exaggerated. The movement looks different than it did the last time around. It’s more hard-bitten. But it retains the same underlying idealism about the American project that led first to the explosive growth of the coalition, and then to its dismissal by cynics.
Today, in a reprisal of the first “No Kings” rallies that took place in June, millions of protesters will gather around the country to express their opposition to Trump. Over the summer, protesters waved American flags, dressed as the Founding Fathers and the Statue of Liberty, and held signs with quotes from the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Those rallies drew an estimated 2 million to 5 million people around the country—on the scale of the 2017 Women’s March that convened the day after Trump’s first inauguration, then a competitor for the largest single day of protest the United States had ever seen.
Organizers are now expecting an even bigger turnout.
The evidence that such demonstrations are effective is, well, thin:
The movement that became known as the Resistance grew rapidly in this context, in what the political scientists Theda Skocpol, Caroline Tervo, and Kirsten Walters termed a “civic explosion” of local political engagement across the country, largely by first-time activists inspired by their disdain for Trump’s policies and character.
That movement’s on-the-ground organizing proved to be quietly, but strikingly, effective. The early phase of the opposition to the first Trump administration—before the racial-justice protests following George Floyd’s murder, in 2020—was largely led by white, college-educated, suburban women, and many of them, yes, wore pink “pussy hats” and T-shirts with slogans such as It’s Mueller Time! But they helped secure the “blue wave” midterm victory in 2018 that flipped the House of Representatives for Democrats and allowed the party to begin clawing back Trump’s power through legislative oversight. And though that congressional response had its limitations—neither impeachment of Trump, after all, successfully barred him from office—the Resistance notched continued successes at a local level in countering efforts to pull books from school shelves and restrict access to reproductive health care after Roe v. Wade was overturned. And, of course, a Democrat won the White House in 2020.
This strikes me as incredibly post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Yes, there were protests. Yes, Democrats won the midterms and retook the White House. But Trump was wildly unpopular and, in the current alignment, Democrats are naturally going to have higher turnouts during the midterms because they, not the Republicans, are now the party of the affluent and college-educated. And, I would contend that Biden’s 2020 victory was as much about COVID restrictions and Team Trump’s bizarre attempt to discredit nontraditional voting methods as it was about The Resistance.
Then came 2024, and Kamala Harris’s failure to secure the presidency against the rising tide of inflation and post-pandemic malaise. Lara Putnam, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh who studies grassroots activism in Pennsylvania, told me that the progressive social politics and “focus on protecting democracy” of the Resistance were not well aligned with the concerns of less engaged swing voters, who chose Trump for economic reasons. Still, Putnam’s research shows that local organizing that grew out of the Resistance made an impact in 2024: Activists were able to help Pennsylvania Democrats hold on to control of the statehouse, even as the state swung to the right.
I mean . . . okay?
When Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he did so with a new claim to legitimacy after winning a plurality—though still not a majority—of the popular vote. This time, the streets were quiet on Inauguration Day and immediately after. Some on the right saw this as evidence of a “vibe shift,” a broader turn toward right-wing cultural dominance and away from liberal and progressive ideas. The rapid capitulation of major civic institutions, such as social-media companies and law firms, only emphasized the supposed shift.
In this environment, resistance seemed pointless. Maybe even worse than pointless: It had been kind of cringe. Meaning: unself-conscious; overly sincere; insufficiently insulated from criticism by the protective layer of irony that allows a person to declare, when mocked, “Just kidding!”; and, worst of all, ineffective. Remembering the pussy hats, Liza Featherstone, a columnist for the left-wing magazine Jacobin, mourned, “It’s triggering to even write these things down.” The progressive writer Ross Barkan derided the “hysterics” of the first-term Resistance and hoped the new quiet might “speak to the growing maturity of America.”
The problem with The Resistance—as with most protests—is that it didn’t have a unified message. The fact that the first of the “pink pussy hat” protests preceded Trump’s inauguration signaled that they were simply mad that Trump won the election.
Contrast that with the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the George Floyd murder. While there was certainly some noise—violent rioting and calls for Defund the Police—amidst the larger movement, the central message was crystal clear. And, while they weren’t wildly effective, they did spark meaningful reforms in policing practices across the country.
As to the “cringe” aspect,
As the reference to hysteria suggests, it’s difficult to fully disaggregate the substance of this critique from gender politics, especially because of the predominance of older women in Resistance organizing during Trump’s first term. Liberal politics, the humor writer Clare Haber-Harris assessed in early 2025, had become “middle-aged-women coded” and therefore “uncool.” These Resistance aesthetics contrasted with the macho energy of Trump’s second term, itself a promise that Americans wouldn’t have to listen to those hectoring women anymore.
But these dismissals both ignore the very real victories of the Resistance and miss why cringe was essential to the movement’s effectiveness. These organizers were people “who basically believed that there was such a thing as the rule of law, that there was such a thing as democracy,” Putnam told me, “and that these were things that were worth fighting for.” They were, in that sense, institutionalists—and therefore inherently opposed to MAGA’s devil-may-care desire to burn the place down.
Cringe “implies a kind of naïveté that so often gets coded as feminine,” wrote the New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen, “a silly belief that human beings, through sincere effort, might actually improve themselves and the world.” Such a belief might seem uncool. But it can be a powerful tool with which to cut through the nihilism of Trump and those around him, which draws its power from its insincerity, its refusal to distinguish between truth and falsehood, its willingness to mock and degrade previously treasured beliefs. As one protest sign put it at a demonstration early in Trump’s second term: BE CRINGE. SHIT MATTERS.
Shit does indeed matter. The problem is that roughly half the country seems to have a different opinion on what the solution is.
“I didn’t like resistlib cringe content in the first Trump administration,” wrote Adam Gurri, the editor in chief of Liberal Currents, in a social-media post two months after Trump’s second inauguration, admitting: “I was wrong. I was just being a snob.” As Gurri suggests, the administration’s insistence on irony and insincerity has given a new power to plain, old, corny symbols. Recently, a photo published in the Chicago Tribune went viral, showing a Marine veteran protesting amid clouds of tear gas in front of an ICE detention facility in Broadview, Illinois, stoically holding not one but two American flags. Even the name of the No Kings protest is a reclamation of foundational American heritage that might have felt cheesy a year ago, but today carries a new seriousness.
My longstanding bias is that protest movements rarely achieve the intended results. And, yes, I found the first of the pussy hat protests rather cringe.
In a Schoolhouse Rock world, the energy spent organizing rallies would be better devoted to recruiting effective candidates for the next election, improving party platforms, and the like. But the reality of the matter is that most of our votes don’t matter. There’s next to zero chance the Republican presidential candidate will win in Virginia, where I live, in 2028. The odds that the Democratic candidate will win in Alabama, where my co-blogger Steven Taylor lives, are even less. Ditto House and Senate races.
The study highlighted in my recent post, “The Revolution Will Not Be Happening,” does show that peaceful protest can be effective. But the chosen cases were all cases where the regime was incredibly repressive.
The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s is widely considered the gold standard in the U.S. context. They were wildly unpopular with the broader public, as seen in polls from 1961 to 1963. That flipped by 1965, with Americans supporting Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Selma marches by a nearly two-to-one margin. That’s incredibly effective.
It’s not at all clear that the No Kings marches have anything like the clarity of message. That the President shouldn’t have unchecked power is a wildly popular notion! (Although Presidents who exceed their Constitutional authority to do things the base supports tend to be supported in so doing by said base.) But what’s the actual policy aim? For Congress to start demanding deference to its authority? For the Supreme Court to issue rulings faster? What?
Organizers of today’s No Kings rally have emphasized that the gatherings are just one part of this broader movement, an opportunity to loudly and collectively voice the defiance already happening on the ground. The Trump administration appears to have noticed. Although June’s No Kings protests gained relatively little attention from Trump and congressional Republicans, the party has busied itself over the past week with attacking the upcoming demonstrations as a “Hate America Rally.” The mood this time is darker than in June: The government is shut down, more National Guard troops are deployed on the country’s streets, and the administration is intent on portraying its political opposition as un-American. But the protesters are coming with the Stars and Stripes in hand.
Certainly, it beats showing up with Mexican flags.
