There is an American left, and it has shown in the past few days that it is ready to werq.

It has been easy to forget this in recent years. The left has been under assault by neoliberalism within the Democratic party, out-hustled in the voting booth by the Republican party, and fractured by a corporate mainstream media eager to write off “identity politics” in the interests of preserving patriarchy and white supremacy.

I felt the love – finally – at the Women's March, but what do we do tomorrow? Read more

But I was inspired this weekend by how big, beautiful and broad the American left is right now – emboldened to challenge the status quo in a way it never has out of the gate against any other president. When the Women’s March got about one in every 100 Americans to leave their homes and protest, it was a good sign that the left is on the offense.

I was inspired by a coalition of people who had each other’s backs across such a diverse set of issues. White women carrying Black Lives Matter signs, their kids’ signs reading “another child against white supremacy”. Men holding signs against patriarchy and rape culture. Huge swaths of multiracial marchers chanting that immigrants are welcome and “migration is beautiful”. A Chicana woman standing next to a Chicano man waving a Mexican flag, with a sign reading “I’m not a rapist.” A Japanese American survivor of an internment camp speaking against a Muslim registry.

I was inspired at how the left screamed about issues as diverse as climate change, abortion rights, mass incarceration, Palestine and police violence. This was powerful because the left has many causes, and because “ignoring difference within groups contributes to tension among groups,” as Kimberle Crenshaw wrote in the same essay in which she coined the word “intersectionality”. A left unafraid of engaging our different but intersectional fights – while joining forces to challenge the status quo and humiliate a petty man who is easily humiliated – is a powerful left.

I was inspired because I saw the left engage with critiques of the actions this weekend. I saw black women (who went 94% for Hillary) pointing out that 53% of white women had voted for Trump – and that these were the beginning, not the end, of good conversations. I read smart takes on how a lack of arrests at the marches (and few complaints about the disruptions they caused) raise tough questions about why police and society were willing to be nice to (many white) women protesters in a way they weren’t to Black Lives Matter protesters. I’ve read brilliant things on how not all women have vaginas and how not all vaginas are pink. But these tensions have not revealed the left to be weaker but have shown how it is developing a sophisticated, thinking activist culture, unafraid of conflict or intelligence.

As the marchers I walked with passed Trump’s Pennsylvania Avenue hotel, everyone screamed “Shame! Shame! Shame!” at it. But inspiringly, the protesters had no shame of their bodies or their stories – not the women who talked openly about their pussies and of menstruation, or the transgender women of color who demanded not to be marginalized, or the undocumented families who refused to shrink. This total lack of shame made the day feel as deliriously joyous as a gay pride march, but better: it wasn’t powered by corporate sponsors, but by righteous indignation from a broad coalition marching in concert.

Around the time I got near the White House, spokesman Sean Spicer was acting inside it without shame, but by lying about the size of his inaugural crowds (and revealing what a size queen his boss is). This, too, was good for the left, as was Kellyanne Conway’s explanation of Spicer’s “alternative facts” the next day. The Trump administration has openly admitted that it will lie as blatantly as the Trump campaign did, putting the mainstream media on the offense immediately. There was no honeymoon, and the media has been put on notice to be as emboldened as leftist activists have been.

This isn’t to say danger isn’t eminent. Trump still has the power to unleash the full violence of the state upon all of us I was alarmed when my fears about HIV/Aids seemed to come true when the Office of National Aids Policy’s website went missing. After the climate change and LGBT sites came down too, my friend Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano put it best: “The White House website is now a racist white guy’s Grindr profile: ‘No fats, no femmes, no Natives, no immigrants, no queers, no people with disabilities. White, straight and straight-acting guys only. Sorry, just a personal preference.’”

Despite all that, this has been a great week for the left. We haven’t been siloed off from one another. We’ve discovered that the American consciousness has a broad appetite for activism and has been educated to understand that big things are possible.

We’ve also been freed of Barack Obama. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and a lot of great left thinking developed under his tenure. But it was hard for a broad left to go full tilt at him. He was too nice, he looked too much like some of us, and while he was far from its biggest ally, he didn’t obliterate the movement for black lives. It survived its infancy under him and now, everything the left learned under Obama can be targeted without reservation at ugly Trump.

This week was good too because, as the historian Nikhil Singh writes, the emptiness of Trumpism has been repeatedly exposed: “Empty mall, empty ball, empty seats, empty cabinet positions, empty embassies, empty White House, trite visions of an empty land.” But while this is by design, as “corporate fascist rule mandates the death of publics in the name of the people,” the left has said, quite loudly: nah. Minds will not remain empty of critical thought. Rape culture and white supremacy won’t wander freely in an unchallenged vacuum. Wherever Trumpism craves a nihilistic emptiness, the left is going to fill it with rage, questions, receipts, marching, love, screams and anger – again and again and again.