The protest movement is coming together, but is it up to the task?

As last week’s “Not My President’s Day” protest rally on the steps of the Santa Cruz County courthouse was dispersing, I found myself walking beside a protester carrying a sign that read, in bold, angry all-caps, “Forget This Stuff” — except that first word wasn’t “Forget” and the last one wasn’t “Stuff.” 

“That’s a pretty versatile message,” I said to her, “good for just about any protest occasion.”

“Yeah,” she said, with grim irony. “I keep it well-preserved in my garage.”

As an expression of outrage and a rallying cry against the move-fast-and-break-things drama of the first month of the second Trump administration, maybe that salty message nails it. But as an organizing principle and a strategic vision, it’s weak sauce against the long-gestating Project 2025 now being enacted with alarming speed at the highest reaches of the federal government. 

In-the-streets protest has long been romanticized as a deeply American expression of grassroots people power, as well as a vital First Amendment right. But it’s steep drop from “the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances” to “F–k This S–t.” Just because it’s constitutionally protected — for now, anyway — that doesn’t mean it’s going to be effective. 

Many who attended Monday’s protest in Santa Cruz were pleased with its size and spirit, attracting several hundred people. But you don’t have to be a political cynic to question whether such protests are anything other than a squirt gun aimed at a forest fire. If “Not My President’s Day” will be remembered at all in the coming months and years, it will probably be only as a moment when something significant began, the first step in a long trek up a treacherous mountainside. And that’s the best-case scenario. 

So, as the days grow longer toward spring, and as the headlines get crazier, where does the progressive protest movement go from here? What are its goals? What does it need to reach those goals? What’s productive, what’s irrelevant, and what’s self-defeating? 

A year ago, Santa Cruz County was rife with political protest, but the circumstances could hardly be more different. The protest movement in support of Palestinians in Gaza was largely driven by students and young people, it was aimed at a now out-of-power Democratic administration and its uncritical support of Israel, and it was more focused on genocide than democracy. Nobody was talking about the Constitution.

By contrast, Monday’s protest crowd seemed older and grayer. In chatting with people at the event, I heard a couple of times about the connections people were reestablishing from the days of Donald Trump’s first term. One woman told me that, at 74, she was old enough to have attended protests with Joan Baez singing before the crowd. 

Monday’s event was organized by Indivisible Santa Cruz County, a local chapter of the national organization that began in reaction to Trump’s first ascent to the White House in 2016. Thus far, 2025 has seen a dramatic revival of the local group. “We kinda shrunk [during the Biden years],” said Amanda Harris Altice, an Indivisible Santa Cruz organizer. “But now we’re growing again. People were inactive, but they’re getting reactivated again.”

The Monday protest took place in the context of similar protests happening across the country, sparked by a new movement called 50501 — named for its Feb. 5 rallies across the country, or “50 states, 50 capitols, 1 day.” Eager to join in the movement, organizers Jenny Evans and Angela Marshall at Indivisible Santa Cruz rushed to put together a “rapid response” campaign to get people out to the county courthouse. 

“Angela and I were just texting,” said Evans, “and I said, ‘You think we should do something for this Not My President’s Day?’ And that’s how it started at, like, 3 o’clock on the Friday before.”

Evans and Marshall were elated at the turnout, especially given the last-minute prep. “I was on such a high when I got home,” said Marshall. “For the first time in weeks, I felt actual joy. It was so great to reconnect with our tribe, all the folks we knew from [Trump’s first term].”

So, what’s next? Alongside the sign-waving comes an organized boycott, a National Economic Blackout, slated for Friday, Feb. 28, during which people are asked to buy nothing — no gas, no fast food, no big retailers, no credit card purchases and no online shopping.

And then? Well, nobody quite knows. There are several things cooking at various sites around the country, including a maybe/maybe not protest on March 4. But if there’s a game-changer kind of coordinated mass protest that might put genuine pressure on a triumphalist and brazen president, a demonstration that could meet the moment and match the threat that it faces, it’s still germinating in the imaginations of activists somewhere. 

Progressive activist and former Santa Cruz mayor Christopher Krohn was among the protesters on Monday. He was pleased with the turnout, but he sensed something missing. “It’s all spread out with several different interest groups here. I mean, I remember the Women’s March in 2017, the biggest march ever in Santa Cruz, and there was a great general feeling of solidarity and togetherness,” he said. “Not that there’s no solidarity here, but I don’t think there’s any focus … yet.”

For all its potency, the solidarity of the 2017 Women’s March evaporated soon enough as the progressive left continued to fracture into its camps of various interests, a phenomenon that has ossified further since then. For all the scorn heaped on the simplistic and inane “Make America Great Again” catchphrase, progressives could use a similiarly unifying concept to rally behind. 

The mountain that the progressive movement has to climb is formidable indeed. A successful protest campaign in 2025 will have to mobilize millions — actually tens of millions — of Americans to get out in the streets. It will have to craft a narrative that gets the media’s attention and can articulate a commonality that all the left’s maddeningly siloed constituent groups can stand behind. It will have to revitalize, even colonize an adrift and exhausted Democratic Party. And it will have to find a leader, someone who can throw a punch as well as a take one, someone with a persuasive and intuitive communication superpower comparable to Trump’s. 

It’s a tall order, tall enough to block out the sun. One thing I felt among the protesters on Monday was a pervasive sense that faith and hope aren’t the effective tools for change that they once might have been. Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” feels positively antique these days. When it comes to Democratic Party platitudes of “people power,” doubt and skepticism is the new fashion, reminding us that hope has to be earned.

As the protest waned, I sat down with 77-year-old Davenport resident Maureen O’Connell, an eyewitness to the protest movements of the 1960s, when protesters believed in their power to shape history. She was happy to be at the march, but hopeful?

“Uh, no,” she said. “I just don’t know how efficacious We the People can be anymore. But it can’t get tipped in our favor unless people wake up and make some noise. I want to feel more hopeful. I’d like to get there. But I’m not there yet.”

From the blinkered viewpoint of February, things look wintry indeed for blue-state voters in America. But looking to April, or June, or August, there’s just no telling what the months ahead have in store. This, however, is not some streaming miniseries we can sit back and watch as spectators. As Americans, we are all in the show. 

Now all we need is a script, hopefully one with just a bit more vision and faith than “F–k This S–t.”

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.