New energies are flowing into the abortion rights fight, but it remains to be seen if organizers can marshal them into effective change
“I think that we should toss out everything we are doing organizationally and work on the premise that this is the moment of the whirlwind, that we are no longer organizing but guiding a social movement.”
That was a young organizer named Nicholas von Hoffman (who later became a journalist) describing the overflow crowd that came to a community meeting in Woodlawn, Chicago in May of 1961 to listen to a group of Freedom Riders speak about their experiences in Mississippi organizing for civil rights. He was breathlessly describing the crowd to his boss Saul Alinsky, the veteran Chicago-based community organizer. Alinsky was a champion of structured organizing campaigns, often starting with seemingly apolitical issues like building a block association to get a stop sign installed or garbage picked up. That was work that could steadily build power, but it required patience and careful leadership. The huge crowd that came out to support the Freedom Riders surprised Alinsky and von Hoffman, but they were living through a new era, when people could be galvanized en-masse by far-away events brought into their living rooms by the mass media. In this case, it was images of Freedom Riders being beaten by local segregationist mobs opposed to their effort to integrate public buses that moved Chicagoans to action.
In recent years, organizers have lifted up this concept of “the moment of the whirlwind” to point to the role that a shocking event or series of events can produce in swiftly pushing large numbers of people into political action. Events like 9–11 to Trump’s 2016 win to the murder of George Floyd are good examples of unexpected or traumatic events shocking millions into making new demands or showing up in new ways in the political process.
Are we in a whirlwind moment now? It is tempting to interpret the huge crowds that went to the streets Friday night and through the weekend in response to the Supreme Court’s decimation of abortion rights as a sign of new possibilities to win positive change in America. According to the Crowd Counting Consortium, there were “We Won’t Go Back” rallies in about a thousand cities this past weekend, more than double the number of protests that took place a month ago after the court’s draft ruling leaked. A lot of people are indeed in motion and looking for a way to defend their rights against the court’s conservative tilt.
But there’s one crucial difference between the struggles of today and the early 1960s. Back then, the movement for civil rights was on the offensive. It was seeking, with considerable justice and at great personal risk, to expand basic rights to a long-excluded and oppressed group of Americans. Its efforts and moral framing helped lift up other movements, including gay rights, women’s rights, and various other ethnic identity-based groups. And at that time, commitments by Democratic and Republican leaders alike to the Cold War against global communism made room for domestic advocates who used the rhetorical commitments those leaders made to democracy and human rights overseas into battering rams for change at home.
We are in a different time. The abortion rights movement is on the defensive, reeling from years of patient organizing, movement-building and legal maneuvering by an alliance of the religious right and business Republicans. Even though polls show a majority Americans favored keeping abortion legal, mere public opinion doesn’t translate into power. Back when abortion was illegal in many states, the pro-choice movement was rooted in feminist consciousness raising circles in many places. Those hubs of activism are largely gone, and #hashtag campaigns led by celebrities are hardly a good replacement. As Michelle Goldberg, a leftwing columnist in the New York Times wrote last week in advance of the Dobbs decision:
“Social media…strengthens the forces of entropy. It magnifies anger, rewards trolls, and encourages conflicts to spiral. Second-wave feminism was, of necessity, based on face-to-face organizing. In her forthcoming book Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure and an Unfinished Revolution, Nona Willis Aronowitz writes that her mother, the great second-wave writer Ellen Willis, met with the same women’s group for 15 years. Such groups can keep people tied to a movement, and to one another, through disagreements and lulls in political action. Without them, activism becomes more evanescent; people gather during emergencies and then disperse.”
This weekend’s pro-abortion rallies were a cry of rage and a recognition that we’re in an emergency. But the whirlwind moment that can carry abortion rights forward will only come when people see a plausible path to challenging the times that we live in. That’s a very tough task when the only option on offer in a political system that is biased towards white conservative rural Christian rule is “vote harder” for Democrats whose own commitment to the cause is sometimes quite shallow. It’s up to organizers, like the brave young people who got on those Freedom Rides a half century ago, to figure out what that path may be.