The anti-Trump resistance is not like the Tea Party, to which it is frequently compared. It’s much more serious, despite repeated denials in the mainstream media. True, it lacks a misleading, self-important moniker, and it’s only been around a few weeks or months, rather than years. But the Women’s March brought out more than 4 million people to more than 900 events on all seven continents. Tea Party protests on Tax Day in 2009 were an order of magnitude smaller in total, with the largest of them in the 10,000 range. Tea Party town halls didn’t gain steam until the August 2009 congressional recess, followed by the 9-12 rally that September, relentlessly hyped by Glenn Beck on Fox News, and falsely touted to have drawn 2 million people. It was really more like 70,000, as Nate Silver explained.

Beyond all those particulars, the Tea Party was far more driven by outside money, organization and media promotion than the anti-Trump protests today. The Tea Party grew from more than 20 years of Astroturf organizing, financed largely by Big Tobacco, as well as Koch Brothers organizing, specifically employing the “Tea Party” brand since at least 2002. What’s more, its level of popular support was always more limited as well, rarely rising above 30 percent. It never represented a majoritarian point of view.

Even within the GOP itself, non-Tea Party Republicans opposed Tea Party ideas on some of its core economic thinking, as Greg Sargent highlighted in January 2014 (“The Tea Party and the Hammock Theory of Poverty”). Most tellingly, Tea Party Republicans (and GOP leaners) overwhelmingly opposed raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 65 percent to 33 percent, while non-Tea Party Republicans and leaners overwhelmingly supported it by precisely the opposite ratio. The Tea Party represented an isolated minority that was wildly out of step with the rest of the country but wielded extraordinary power within a severely dysfunctional party and political system. There has been no comparable polling on the anti-Trump protests, but President Trump’s approval ratings remain well below 50 percent, so opposing him is clearly a majoritarian position.

The Tea Party’s power came from the ability of an organized anti-government minority to wreak havoc in an already long-gridlocked system. They basically don’t believe in governance, and our democracy is fragile enough that they have been able to start dismantling it, though nowhere near as rapidly or radically as they’d like. Anti-Trump protesters want to block the president’s agenda, clearly. But they’re definitely not anti-governance. To the contrary, they support significant enhancements in the effectiveness, responsiveness and scope of government to meet the challenges of the 21st century. They also embrace a much more diverse range of identities and confluence of movements.

It’s harder to build than to destroy, so the anti-Trump movement has a more difficult job before it, made even harder by the structures of American governance, the many veto points, and the enormous money power of the 1 percent. Facile comparisons that ignore these asymmetries misrepresent political reality, and serve to make the anti-Trump movement’s work even harder than it already is.

While many mainstream pundits have equated the two movements, conservatives muddle things even more. A typical example is Rep. RaÃºl Labrador of Idaho, a House Freedom Caucus leader, who recently described the Tea Party as “a large group of people that organically got together eight years ago,” because they were upset with the Republican establishment as well as with President Obama. As Jane Mayer made clear in her book “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” there was nothing organic about it:

Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”, had stopped by to see an early Tea Party rally in Lafayette Square, across from the White House, in February 2009. “It was very much a put-up job,” he concluded. “All the usual suspects were there, like Freedom Works, ‘Joe the Plumber’, and The American Spectator magazine. There were also some people who had Revolutionary War costumes and ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flags, actual activists, and a few ordinary people,” he said. “But it was very well organized by the conservative groups. Back then, it was really obvious that it was put on, and they’d set it up. But then it caught on.” Frank argues that “the Tea Party wasn’t subverted,” as some have suggested. “It was born subverted.” Still, he said, “it’s a major accomplishment for sponsors like the Kochs that they’ve turned corporate self-interest into a movement among people on the streets.”

Make no mistake, it was a remarkable accomplishment, if one that also cost a lot of money. But it took the disastrous failures of the Bush administration, which destroyed the broader conservative brand, to provide an opening for the more radical Tea Party brand to catch on. The Democratic establishment has failed as well — though not as spectacularly, and not around a clearly articulated and agreed-upon ideological identity. But that failure reached a new crisis point with the election of Donald Trump, which in turn led to the anti-Trump movement. Here we can see one true point in common: Like the Tea Party, the anti-Trump resistance is a response to the failures of both parties.

Another symmetry is the influx of new activism and newly created organizations, alongside older, more established ones. Writing for the Hill recently, Heath Brown, author of a book about the Tea Party, argued that the Tea Party displayed “two important dimensions,” which he claimed the anti-Trump movement lacked: First, “bold imagery and clear symbolism,” and second, “the formation of a vast network of new organizations,” numbering around 1,000, citing the work of Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson. Brown’s first point is valid, though it actually illustrates my thesis about how deeply asymmetrical the two movements are. The Koch brothers’ organizations have been fooling around with that imagery, symbolism and faux history since at least 2002, and even before that in embryonic form.

But the second point is simply false. First of all, by 2012, the number of Tea Party groups had declined to 600, Skocpol said, though she considered that “a very good survival rate.” In contrast, today new anti-Trump groups are quickly growing. The Indivisible Guide website has a geographically organized directory of groups, that “are wholly independent; they are listed provided they agree to resist Trump’s agenda, focus on local, defensive congressional advocacy, and embrace progressive values.” Within 50 miles of my home in Los Angeles, there are 238 groups listed, of which 66 begin with “Indivisible” in their names — the bare minimum of new organizations. But that’s just L.A., what do you expect? Well, there are at least eight identifiably new groups within 50 miles of Omaha, six in and around Boise, Idaho, and 19 within 50 miles of Paul Ryan’s home district in Janesville, Wisconsin. And that’s just groups affiliated under one umbrella. There is no doubt that the Trump resistance is forming new organizations at a high rate, just as the Tea Party did — only much faster.