On Friday, as President Trump spoke at a well-attended conference of conservative activists, news emerged that there will be major rally in Washington next month featuring a predicted 500,000 who will speak out on gun issues.

But historians should also note a silver lining: this is a golden age of American political activism. From Tea Party rallies to Black Lives Matter protests to women’s and pro-immigrant marches and this past week’s discussion about gun control, the national conversation is dominated not just by the discussion of politics, but what they can do about it.

When historians look back on the last decade in America they can explore many dark themes: political polarization, growing inequality, disruptive technological change, and mass shootings.


But even on an random Tuesday when there isn’t a major political event planned, everyday Americans are contributing to political causes, commenting on social media, and signing online petitions.

There might not be a lot of action that has come as a result of all this activity. Sure, candidates from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump have benefitted in their own way, but Washington remains as broken as ever. Even with Republicans controlling the House, the Senate, and the White House, only one major bill has passed in the 13 months they have been in power.

It wasn’t much better before Republicans had that power. When there was a Republican Congress and Democrat Barack Obama in the White House, Washington hobbled from one potential government shutdown to the next.

Nevertheless, the activism in the last decade has been a flip of the political landscape from even the ten prior years. Back in the 1990s, the criticism from political scientists was that not enough people were involved in politics. Reform Party presidential candidate Ross Perot, at the beginning of the decade, and Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader, at the close of the decade, gave the same explanation for the apathy: the two political parties were essentially the same.


Not anymore. Over the course of the last decade the Republican Party has moved further right and the Democratic Party has moved further left. As these clear lines are drawn, the conversation among everyday Americans has been less about compromise, and this has brought them out into the streets.

Americans have done this before. Historians note that the nation’s first real election, in 1800, was the nation’s nastiest. Not only was the election between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson personal, but followers of each didn’t even recognize their opponents as fellow countrymen. The Civil War took the fight to battlefields and away from the political arena. The 1960s was an age of American protest, but not of the scale and the ideological diversity as it is today, particularly when one factors in social media.

Indeed there are three things fueling today’s age of activism: technology, political polarization, and the campaign finance system.

Never before have so many Americans been able to engage in such massive participation of political discussion as they have with social media, especially when these tools are right on their smartphones.

The fact that politics has moved toward the extremes has raised the stakes of the debate. It isn’t as though the debate is about incremental differences on a specific bill in Congress, but a culture war between two ways of life, which both sides see as under siege.


And then there is a campaign finance system, which under current law, has created a cottage industry among political professionals for creating these rallies. There has been a floodgate of money in politics in general, but especially for nonprofit groups that can take unlimited money from individuals and companies to organize for certain policy initiatives.

Those three larger developments exist in the background. But for the moment real people are holding real signs and attending real rallies and talking about politics nearly all the time.

James Pindell can be reached at james.pindell@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jamespindell or subscribe to his Ground Game newsletter on politics: http://pages.email.bostonglobe.com/GroundGameSignUp.