And it’s kind of appropriate that they would have this more global perspective on what tactics we might use in this moment. The immigrant-rights movement is composed of many people who had experience responding to authoritarian regimes in their own countries before they came here.

Meyer: What does success look like for those tactics in the United States?

Kauffman: There’s many different kinds of protests and mobilizations, and gauging the success of them is always contextual. It depends on what arena you’re struggling in, and what the objectives are, and what the time frame for evaluating the success is.

At this moment, the first and foremost job of the broad resistance is to continue to keep the Trump administration in a state of crisis, to contribute keeping them off balance and on the defensive. [Day Without a Woman] has the potential to be one of many moves that are contributing to that. I think it’s important—the organizers of the Women’s March have been very thoughtful and intentional trying to harness the incredible energy of January 21 and think about how to move forward and transform that mobilizing work into new kinds of organizing.

Bryan Woolston / Reuters

Meyer: What does that kind of mobilization and organization work entail?

Kauffman: Mobilizing is getting people to show up. Organizing is building groups, amassing collective power within some kind of organizational entity that’s going to follow an agenda over time.

So the “Day Without a Woman” is getting a lot of attention, but there hasn’t been as much attention to the fact that in the wake of January 21, the Women’s March called for—and people organized—5,000 small-group meetings all around the country to talk about this moment, to think about what steps people might take, and to take the self-mobilizing energy that made January 21 so massive and powerful and figure out how to put down deeper roots. You don’t keep it going by just calling for march after march.

Meyer: It was interesting reading about the late ’60s in your book, which was another moment of mass mobilization. There, it did get to a point where people were tired of going to protests, and it seemed like that prompted some of the factionalization of the 1970s. People would go to demonstration after demonstration against the Vietnam War, and then they were eventually like, well, what are we demonstrating for?

Kauffman: There’s certain tactics during that specific period, the late ’60s, that are pretty much off the table now. People were like, “Well, our marches and our demonstrations aren’t working, so maybe we need to go to street fighting. Or maybe we need to go to armed struggle.” And all those attempts backfired so spectacularly that those tactics are—and I expect will continue to be—off the table.

But this is a moment where people are looking very thoughtfully at what tools we have at our disposal that we haven’t used as much, like going to town-hall meetings. The left hasn’t particularly done that kind of organizing on a large scale, in the way that we saw during the “resistance recess” [last month]. Part of that is people thinking about running for office and engaging with the electoral process in a different way. We’re seeing a lot of interest in engaging with the Democratic party at a grassroots level in a way that… you know, the left has mostly defined itself against that party for decades.