The 2014 movie Pride tells the story of the 1984 coal miners’ strike in England and the unlikely partnership that grows between a group of radical gay and lesbian activists from London who organized in solidarity with the mining village of Onllwyn in Wales. After raising buckets of cash standing in the street in front of a gay bookstore, calling on people walking by to “support the miners,” the activists are invited to the village union hall to meet the people they’ve been trying to help. At first, the miners are skittish about strangers from London. But soon friendships bloom over beer and a rousing spontaneous rendition of the union song “Bread and Roses.”

AMERICAN RESISTANCE: FROM THE WOMEN’S MARCH TO THE BLUE WAVE by Dana R. Fisher Columbia University Press, 216 pp., $26.00

Pride’s climactic scene comes a year later. It’s time for London’s annual Gay Pride March, and while organizers of the march are trying to de-emphasize politics to make themselves more palatable to the public, a stream of buses arrives, each carrying a load of Welsh miners from the towns that had built relationships with the gay activists. The two groups embrace, the music rises, and the miners unfurl colorful banners, each identifying their union local and their town. Some are tattered from decades of age and use. This is solidarity, this is intersectionality, Pride is telling us. And, as the credits roll, we learn that the British Labour Party soon incorporated LGBT rights into its platform, in part because of pressure from the National Union of Mineworkers. But Pride is showing us one thing more. The gay bookstore, the bucket brigades, the village hall, the camaraderie, the local banners held high: This is what democracy looks like when people organize together in place.

In the last 35 years, the ways we participate in political action have shifted significantly. On the liberal-left, we’ve gone from banners to banner ads, and from cash raised in buckets to cash raised by pressing buttons. Hyper-efficient digital tools have transformed the speed and volume of organizing. Since 2004, over $4 billion has been donated to Democratic candidates and organizations, federal to local, using ActBlue, the online fundraising platform. In the third quarter of 2019 alone, more than three million donors (a record) made more than 10 million contributions via ActBlue to nearly 9,000 different recipients, with an average donation of roughly $30. If current trends persist, small donations to Democrats via ActBlue will top $1 billion in 2019, double the total at the same point two years ago.

Since Donald Trump’s election, grassroots participation in the most essential of actions—knocking on doors and making phone calls to voters on behalf of candidates—has been growing. MobilizeAmerica, a hub for creating and listing campaign actions like canvassing, says that more than 800,000 people have signed up for 1.73 million actions since 2017. Half of those sign-ups have occurred since the 2018 election that brought Democrats back to power in the House of Representatives. And the sheer number of Americans marching in protest of Trump administration policies has scarcely let up: Last winter, around 700,000 people marched in 319 U.S. locations to mark the second anniversary of the 2017 Women’s March, despite declining media interest. Between 300,000 and 500,000 came out for the Climate Strike rallies of September, and more than 100,000 people showed up across nearly 700 locales in July to protest Trump’s border detention practices.

By all these measures, the grassroots resistance among Democrats to Trump’s rise is clearly alive and well. But inside the impressive metrics of participation, there’s a worrisome hollowness to the Democratic revival. Grassroots Democrats are resisting a lot, but for the most part, they are not resisting together. Thanks to the affordances of tech and the preferences of big Democratic donors, they are, to borrow from Robert Putnam, resisting alone. This matters, because strong social ties are what keep people involved in the long term, through victories and defeats. The right has gun clubs and circles of home-schooling Christian moms; if the Left mainly builds systems for massing people just for the moments when they are most needed, it will miss a critical opportunity to revive a democracy centered on real people in relationships with one another.