For two days, crowds have filled the long, grassy expanse of the National Mall in Washington DC: Friday for Donald Trump’s inauguration, and Saturday for the Women’s March (a sort of counter-inaugural).

The mood of the inauguration’s mass assembly of red Make America Great Again caps was triumphant, while the sea of knitted pink “pussy hats” proclaims a spirit of resistance. But since Democrats have limited power to stop the Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress from carrying out their will, the left’s brave assertions of resistance carry an undertone of anger and despondency.

The past several years haven’t been kind to Democrats. Since the Tea Party movement began brewing in 2009, Democrats have lost control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House. During Barack Obama’s presidency, the party also lost nearly a thousand state legislative seats, 30 state legislative chambers, and a dozen governorships. Majority control allows the GOP to cultivate a deep bench of up-and-comers, while the few nationally visible Democratic leaders are mostly elderly.

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As Trump’s inauguration approached, there was a real outpouring of emotion on the left for Obama and deep appreciation for his stellar personal qualities, success in running a relatively scandal-free administration, and historic legacy as the first African-American president. Obama will leave office with a 60% approval rating, among the highest for outgoing chief executives, as polling suggests that nearly two-thirds of Americans rate his presidency as a success.

In legislative terms, however, Obama accomplished little after 2010. His supporters would say that was because he faced unrelenting opposition from Republicans in Congress, and that is true to some extent. But Obama had little contact even with members of his own party on Capitol Hill; he was the antithesis of a flesh-pressing, deal-making political leader like Lyndon B Johnson. As a result, most of Obama’s governing accomplishments in recent years came in the form of executive orders and regulations, which are now about to be undone by Trump and Congress.

Defeat has sharpened divisions within the Democratic party. The unexpectedly close primary contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders revealed tensions between the party establishment – which mostly embraces a pragmatic center-left orientation – and the activists pushing the party toward Sanders’ version of democratic socialism.

In the aftermath of Clinton’s loss, and the Democrats’ failure to retake either house of Congress, there have been heated arguments over whether the party has veered too far toward identity politics – the celebration of diversity and its ever-lengthening list of permanently aggrieved constituencies – or whether, on the contrary, the party has lost its electoral mojo because it has sunk into acquiescent, passionless centrism.

One thing all Democrats can agree on is opposition to Trump, but it is unclear how far they’re willing to go to oppose him. Many on the left still have a hard time believing that Trump won the election, and many others proclaim the need to resist “normalizing” his presidency or even conceding its “legitimacy”. But few really expect that kind of toughness and discipline from Democrats.

It is hard to imagine liberals – attached as they are to concepts of orderly government and democratic process – trying to shut down the government to extract concessions from Trump, as conservatives attempted with Obama in 2013. And with 10 Democratic senators up for reelection in states Trump carried, it is unlikely that the party will present a united front against all Republican nominations and initiatives.

Democratic resistance is likely to crumble if Republicans are canny enough seek common ground with them on issues such as infrastructure repair and modernization.

So Democrats will spend the next two years, at least, in reactive mode. Every Republican action, from cabinet nominations to repeal of the Affordable Care Act, will be met with howls of anger from liberal editorial pages and social media. But these will have little impact unless Republicans overreach – which they may well do if, for example, they deprive large numbers of Americans of the health insurance they gained under Obamacare.

Many Democrats also are counting on Trump to be the loose cannon he appears to be. While few will openly admit that they want him to fail, they expect that sooner or later his shortcomings will lead to scandals, economic and political disasters, diplomatic incidents or worse. The only thing to give them hesitations about impeaching Trump would be the prospect of his succession by vice president Mike Pence, whom many regard as the more dangerous ideologue.

Despite the Democrats’ current plight, the American left still has many advantages. The vast majority of people who work in media, academia, and entertainment are liberal – compare the star power on offer at the Women’s March with the handful of washed-up entertainers at Trump’s inauguration festivities – which means that the left’s victories in the culture wars are likely to continue.

Young people continue to flock to the cities and the population continues to become more diverse and better-educated. America really is becoming two nations, and the growth indicators are all on the side of the nation that showed up to the Women’s March – an impression strengthened by the much larger crowds than at Trump’s inauguration. In the long run, demographics may become destiny if Republicans can’t improve their appeal to millennials, minorities, women, urbanites, and college-educated voters.

And, of course, as speaker after speaker has reminded the crowds at the Women’s March, Clinton won the popular vote. Conservatives would respond that Clinton’s nearly three-million vote margin plus $5 will get you a tofu kebab at the food truck near the Mall, since the electoral college is all that matters. But the scale of the demonstrations should make politicians uncomfortably aware that this is a deeply divided country and that there’s no overwhelming popular mandate for extreme policies.

Geoffrey Kabaservice is research director for the Republican Main Street Partnership in Washington