Welcome to the Decade From Hell, our look back at an arbitrary 10-year period that began with a great outpouring of hope and ended in a cavalcade of despair.





Almost immediately after one of the decade’s bleakest moments—the day President Donald Trump issued an executive order barring travelers from several predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States in January 2017—airports across the nation were swarmed by activists, politicians, celebrities, and ordinary people determined to voice their outrage and do whatever they could to support those who had found themselves swiftly detained. They were joined by legions of attorneys from organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, who volunteered to counsel and represent detainees and their families on the spot.

Andre Segura, an ACLU lawyer who spent much of the weekend after the order at New York’s Kennedy International Airport, told The New York Times that the demonstrations had been unlike anything he’d seen before. “The dynamic between what was happening inside the terminal with all the attorneys, and outside with massive protests and people holding signs—I’ve never experienced anything like that,” he said.

Those, like Segura, who have taken to protest and direct action in the Trump era have not just taken a stand against this administration. They have also fought against a cynicism about protest movements that has pervaded political discourse for years. It’s said routinely that we live in an age of slacktivism—that gathering large crowds in support of a cause has been made both simple and ineffectual by social media. Protests have never been easier to organize, and, as a consequence, have never been more unfocused, disorganized, and prone to failure. “Before the Internet, the tedious work of organizing that was required to circumvent censorship or to organize a protest also helped build infrastructure for decision making and strategies for sustaining momentum,” University of North Carolina sociologist and Times contributor Zeynep Tufekci wrote in 2014. “Now movements can rush past that step, often to their own detriment.”

But any straightforward review of the decade’s major protest movements in America should paint a different picture: The 2010s were the most wildly successful decade for mass protest since the 1960s—an era of astonishing victories that suggest direct action today not only works but may also be among the most effective vehicles for change moving forward, as our nation’s political institutions continue to decline.