Hope, Change, and Fear, 2007-2016

Eunice Zapata of San Antonio, Texas, considered herself a recruit in an invisible army, workers who daily turned hotel rooms from a dirty, humid mess in the morning to cleanliness and order by the afternoon of her shift. Zapata’s workload felt backbreaking—thirty rooms per eight-hour shift. She was making between thirty and sixty beds a day. Predictably, one day she slipped and fell on a wet floor and injured her arm. “The problem is they give us too many rooms, but we can’t complain because they give us disciplinary warnings,” Zapata explained. Her employers gave her no time off to heal; quite the opposite. They required her to prove that she could still maintain her crushing daily workload. A new mother, Zapata suffered pain every time she held her infant. 

Zapata’s experience of relentless work for low pay was not unique or tolerable, and workers like her put up a fight. Beginning in 2006 hotel housekeepers organized a multiyear national campaign involving more than fifty thousand workers. They dubbed the campaign “Profits, Pain, and Pillows.” Soon they had adopted the slogan “Hotel Workers Rising.”

The rapid growth of service-sector employment and service work as a percentage of the gross domestic product in countries around the world was one of the early-twenty-first century’s most dramatic economic changes. It also was the dawn of the age of the so-called gig economy. In this new economy, increasing numbers of post-industrial workers had no security, seniority, health, or retirement benefits. Rather than steady employment with a single employer, a new trend was to employ the precariat—a play on the words “precarious” and “proletariat”—those who worked on short-term contracts sometimes for a third-party contractor, often with part-time hours and minimal wages. Many worked multiple jobs at once and experienced periods of unemployment between contracts, and most gig economy jobs were unprotected by labor laws.

Despite a dramatic rise in militant organizing campaigns by non-traditional workers—service workers, day laborers, fast-food workers, and those forced into the gig economy—the continuing enrichment of the super wealthy accelerated the already substantial gap between the very rich and everyone else. The story of U.S. economic and social life in the 2010s, who benefited and who didn’t, was increasingly determined by the vast disparities in basic income and accumulated wealth that separated the privileged and enriched 1 percent of the population from the 99 percent of their fellow Americans—many of whom struggled to make basic ends meet. Most workers saw their real wages and standard of living stagnate or even decline; millions faced massive debts from student loans; medical bills, mortgage debt, and ballooning mortgage rates pushed many into bankruptcy. Banking deregulation enacted in the 1990s allowed exploitative lending practices that targeted African American and Latinx homeowners and created in 2007–2009 the worst recession since the 1930s. Although the nation elected Barack Obama in 2008, the country’s first African American president, with hopes for a renewed sense of national unity and progressive social change, his centrist approach combined with conservative resistance to his presidency succeeded in limiting Obama’s legislative agenda and effectively torpedoed international efforts to address issues of climate change, ongoing wars, and an international refugee crisis.

These economic and political changes were accompanied by the emergence of massive corporate monopolies in the technology sector and a growing reliance on a variety of digital technologies to manage many aspects of modern life, from health care and education to entertainment and dating. Online services, social media, and big tech corporations helped reshape urban centers, political campaigning and political discourse, the nature of work, and the definition of community engagement. Many social media companies had been formed with lofty goals of creating a broad sense of community and strengthening human communications and networks; to some extent these new platforms indeed helped individuals and organizations connect and share information. But ultimately, the tech companies’ motives were to generate profits from advertising revenue, which required more users spending more time online and with little regard for the quality of the content or the privacy of user information. While activists on both the left and right were able to use social media to help organize members and protests, digital media did little to bring diverse groups together and doubtlessly contributed to a growing economic and political polarization within the nation.

As the story of Eunice Zapata and the organizing campaign of thousands of hotel workers illustrated, working people across the country responded in massive numbers throughout the 2010s to the growing income inequality, attacks on unions, ongoing racism and police violence, prevalence of sexual assault and harassment, and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people. From public sector and fast-food employees to Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ activists, low-wage workers, people of color, the unemployed, and students organized in a variety of forms, including occupying public spaces, utilizing the MeToo hashtag, and taking to the streets as well as to the courts.

The first decade of the twenty-first century had seemed to be a good time to buy a house or an apartment. In 2000, interest rates were extremely low and lending institutions aggressively recruited people to take out mortgages to buy homes. But by late 2007, as millions of families across the country struggled financially, the nation’s economy was in trouble A crisis in the subprime mortgage market precipitated a broad economic collapse. The Great Recession of 2007–2009 was driven by shaky investment strategies and predatory home loans that could not be sustained. Amid this economic crisis, the 2008 presidential election offered a unique vision for national change. Barack Obama ran for president using the slogans “Hope” and “Change,” and many saw the election of a Black president as a potential turning point in the nation’s history. But political conservatives and right-wing activists aligned with the increasingly vocal and militant populist wing of the Republican Party used the financial distress of the early and mid 2000s as an opportunity to continue their attacks on big government and its supposed inefficiencies, which they blamed for wage stagnation and the decline in many Americans’ standard of living. These attacks would take on an increasingly menacing racial tone in response to the Obama presidency. In the decade following 2010, right-wing Republicans were able to appeal successfully to a growing sense of grievance among white Americans, both working class and middle class. Internationally, trade agreements, wars, and climate change created a refugee crisis that increased global economic uncertainty and political divisions.

In the United States, what would be dubbed the Great Recession stemmed from risky corporate investment schemes, financial deregulation, and changes in housing and employment that had been at least a decade in the making.  In 1998, the Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Banking Act, passed during the Great Depression, which had limited risky investments by savings banks and had kept banks separate from investment houses. After the repeal, a flurry of risky investments in mortgage-backed securities—derivatives whose value depended on the worth of private homes—drove sudden and massive stock market gains. In 2004, the Securities and Exchange Commission under President George W. Bush had further loosened restrictions on how the major Wall Street banks could invest, allowing them to use debt to spur greater investments. But as early as 2003, investment giant Warren Buffett had warned: “In our view . . . derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.” Beginning in 2006, the lethal effects of derivatives began to shake the U.S. (and world) economy to its core.

The market for household mortgages was built on this unstable foundation. In 2000, the dot.com bust and subsequent stock market crash (see chapter 15) caused a deep cut in interest rates, helping drive a home construction boom. To ensure sales of all these new houses and apartments, lending institutions offered a confusing array of “creative home loan options”—adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs), interest-only loans, and more. Many of these options fell under the rubric of “subprime mortgages.”  These new loan options targeted potential home buyers, often first-time purchasers, who had low credit ratings or insufficient income to qualify for traditional mortgages. Subprime mortgage agreements often included small print that offered few buffers if home owners found themselves unable to make their mortgage payments for a month or two; adjustable rate mortgages often left borrowers with dramatically higher payments when interest rates rose after the first year or two of the loan. When the Great Recession began in 2007, many people lost their life savings, and banks evicted families whose mortgage payments were past due. The number of borrowers dropped suddenly and sharply.

Borrowers of color were the hardest hit, with millions of African American and Latinx families losing their homes and their life savings. African American and Latinx buyers were much more likely than white buyers to be offered subprime mortgages. And this was true even if their annual income, credit scores, and loan sizes should have qualified them for more favorable loan terms. All too often, subprime mortgages left homebuyers owing more rather than less each month, as they tried to pay down their loans. As a result, almost 8 percent of African American and Latinx borrowers lost their homes to foreclosure compared to about 4.5 percent of white borrowers. In 2010, Barry Zigas, director of housing and credit policy for the Consumer Federation of America, bluntly identified the primary victims of the subprime mortgage crisis: “Minority borrowers were targeted by the sellers of these [risky] mortgages.”

In addition, an oversupply of houses soon triggered a dramatic fall in prices: in two years, the average home price dropped more than 20 percent. Plummeting housing prices left many people “under water” on their home loans, owing more on their mortgages than their houses were worth in the marketplace. Housing construction fell sharply between 2006 and 2009. Las Vegas, Phoenix, Miami, and other cities, where brief red-hot growth had been driven by new construction, saw their economies collapse. Across the country, people walked away from their homes, abandoning brand-new housing developments where the sounds of construction had filled the air just a few years before. And as the construction and housing boom–fueled economies fizzled, so did job opportunities. More than one million jobs were lost between April and August 2008. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 3,000 points, and a week later two of the country’s most venerable brokerage firms and investment banks, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, collapsed.

All but two Wall Street banks failed in the 2008 crash, including, most notably, Lehman Brothers, founded in 1844. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, federal financial institutions intended to bring stability to the housing market by backing bank-held mortgages, also teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. Guaranteeing mortgages meant these federal entities took responsibility for the loans when borrowers defaulted, and the unprecedented wave of home mortgage defaults left Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in need of both a substantial infusion of funds from the U.S. Treasury and outside management in the form of a conservatorship. The huge brokerage house Merrill Lynch hovered on the brink of collapse and was rescued only by a federal government–subsidized buyout. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were saved by agreements with the federal government that allowed them to own banks, thus negating the prior separation of investment banks and depositor-based lending banks.

As the country’s economy reeled, the federal government took action to protect large corporations and banks. In October 2008, President Bush (four months from the end of his term) introduced and the U.S. Congress passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which shored up the big banks and brokerage houses, preventing cascading failures, but at the expense of smaller banks and taxpayers. The Federal Reserve Bank launched new financing methods and foreclosure relief programs that brought the banking industry and brokerage firms back from the brink. And in December 2008, President Bush intervened to bail out the largest U.S. auto manufacturers, providing General Motors and Chrysler with an immediate billion in loans and stock purchases and over billion over the next four years.

But if these actions preserved America’s largest industrial companies and banks, they did little or nothing to help average American borrowers. Over fourteen million mortgage foreclosures were filed between 2007 and 2013, which meant that upwards of fifty-seven million Americans lost their homes during the financial crisis. And though foreclosure rates dropped after 2013 for most of the country, in expensive real estate markets with large immigrant and low-earning populations—New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, the District of Columbia chief among them—foreclosures continued at staggering rates. This trend in mortgage foreclosures after 2008 reflected deeper inequalities that had plagued the capitalist economy in the United States over the course of the previous three decades. 

The housing and economic crisis that affected African American and Latinx home buyers and owners occurred almost simultaneously with the campaign and election of the first African American president of the United States. In 2008, Barack Obama was the first Black presidential candidate to be taken seriously by the mainstream media since the Reverend Jesse Jackson had run in 1988. Obama was contending to be the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party with another history-making candidate, Hillary Clinton, the first woman to make a serious run for president. But Obama was younger, more charismatic, far more digitally sophisticated, and a more gifted public speaker than Clinton. He had vaulted onto the national stage with a speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, which called for an end to divisive partisanship, proclaiming: “There's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America. There's not a Black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. In the end, that's what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism, or do we participate in a politics of hope?”

Throughout the campaign for the nomination, young people flocked to Obama, and African American voters cautiously grasped at the possibility that the country might finally elect a Black leader. Obama had seemed to come out of nowhere, a young U.S. senator whose political experience was limited to a few years in the Illinois legislature and four in the U.S. Senate. Voters appreciated this lack of experience in office and his background. A Harvard-trained lawyer, he was a one-time Chicago community organizer, son of a white mother and a Black Kenyan father, who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia and had put down roots in Chicago’s Black community.  For Americans who were weary of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama appeared as a peace candidate, a consensus builder and political centrist, who would bring a fresh face and voice to tired, corrupt Washington. His lyrical speeches brought women and Native Americans, African Americans and even LGBTQ+ people into the spotlight as central players in a new narrative history of American democracy. That had never happened before in presidential politics, and Obama edged past Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries.

In the 2008 general election Obama ran against John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, and his running mate, Sarah Palin, a media-savvy conservative governor from Alaska. Obama faced a ruthless conservative backlash that accused him of being a Black radical and even an Islamic terrorist. Obama’s well-organized, broad-based campaign succeeded in overcoming the lies and racist outrage directed at him. One of the signature achievements of the Obama campaign staff was its digital sophistication—especially its ability to harness the organizing power and fundraising potential inherent in the use of targeted advertisements on Google and email outreach to small donors, as well as on new social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The campaign’s innovative use of digital media fundamentally transformed the nature of electoral politics in the years after the 2008 election. On November 4, 2008, millions watched with deep emotion as the first African American president was elected. For many, the moment was a little hard to comprehend.

Once Barack Obama was sworn in as president on January 20, 2009, his administration immediately had to respond to the ongoing fiscal crisis. Obama and his economic advisers asked Congress to approve a substantial economic stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). The ARRA boosted federal government spending on unemployment insurance and job creation by almost 0 million, helping lift the faltering U.S. economy out of recession. Some policy analysts, particularly those on the left, argued that an even larger stimulus package would spur greater job growth, which would have blunted the most profound negative impact of the Great Recession—rising unemployment, which peaked at 10 percent in October 2009. But Obama and his advisers, many of whom were Wall Street veterans, resisted that effort in the face of staunch Republican opposition.

They chose instead to quickly pivot to what would become the Obama administration’s signature policy issue: reform of the nation’s far too expensive and grossly inequitable and inadequate health insurance system. In January 2009, nearly forty million Americans had no health coverage at all. Unlike almost all industrialized economies in the world, the cost of U.S. health care was one of the driving forces behind overall economic stagnation nationally, and was a profound financial and emotional burden on millions of ordinary citizens. Nearly one third of Americans who lost their homes during the Great Recession had done so because they missed mortgage payments due to medical emergencies that had stretched their family finances to the breaking point. With health care and health insurance costs skyrocketing, a single medical crisis could bankrupt the average middle-class family—and did, many times over.

Since the 1960s, health-care legislation had been deemed too complex and too controversial for elected officials to tackle. Though there was talk as far back as Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency of modeling a national U.S. health-care plan on the comprehensive and centrally managed system enjoyed by members of the United Mine Workers union, resistance from insurers and the American Medical Association (a professional organization representing doctors) derailed that early plan. Harry Truman tried again to pass national health care during his presidency but was unsuccessful. Only Lyndon Johnson was able to achieve significant health-care reform when he pushed through legislation in 1965 to enact Medicare, a single-payer system that provided health coverage for all senior citizens, and Democrats also passed Medicaid to provide health care to the poorest Americans.

The fight to pass the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was an epic one. Congress debated the bill for nine months. Two different committees drafted their own versions of the bill, each of which contained over five hundred amendments. Battles raged within the Democratic caucus over some key issues, such as provisions that would have guaranteed a public option (a lower-cost health insurance program run by the government) and allowed all Americans between fifty-five and sixty-five years of age to enroll in Medicare coverage. The Democratic Party also split over abortion coverage, with Democrats from more conservative, heavily Catholic districts insisting that they could not vote for a bill that would provide federal coverage for abortions. Again, as in the late 1940s and in 1964, insurance companies and the AMA lobbied hard to prevent passage of a public option. Three Republican talking points dominated the national discussion over the ACA. One concerned the ACA’s individual mandate, the requirement that all Americans buy into health insurance or pay a fine. Here the critics said that the left was trying to enslave young people by making them pay for health insurance that they “didn’t need.” Secondly, some Republican critics insisted that there would be “death panels” deciding what and how much medical care each patient would receive (despite the fact that most Americans already faced insurance company reviewers deciding what treatments their insurance would pay for). Finally, opponents charged that the ACA would harm the elderly, that the left was trying to “kill grandma” and any elderly person who became ill. These simple but emotionally powerful critiques, all of them untrue, galvanized strong grassroots opposition to the ACA and the Obama administration in conservative white communities across the country.

What finally passed as the Affordable Care Act fell far short of what advocates of universal coverage had hoped for. It was far more convoluted, more expensive, made greater concessions to drug and insurance companies, and was less complete than a single-payer program in which the government pays for all medical care (as it does in many Western European countries) and thus has the clout and leverage to keep prices down. Since it became law, the ACA has survived numerous challenges, including a suit brought by Republican-led states to stop the bill’s mandate that individuals carry insurance or pay monetary penalties. In 2012, the Supreme Court upheld most of the provisions of the ACA, but over the next decade, the Republican-controlled Congress voted fifty times, unsuccessfully, to repeal it. Despite these attacks, the ACA had a far-reaching impact. Over twenty million formerly uninsured Americans gained medical coverage—both through the insurance exchanges created by the ACA and by expansions of Medicaid coverage for the poor in those states that opted to do so, where the percentage of uninsured people dropped most dramatically. It is worth noting that Republican-controlled states never approved such expansions.

Equitable health care was only one of many progressive goals Obama supporters hoped to achieve during his administration, but the battles over passage of the ACA drained much of the progressive momentum that propelled Obama into the presidency in 2008. During his first term, Obama and the Democratic Party failed to counter state-level voter suppression and gerrymandering or to help build a mass movement that could counter the conservative national and international agenda. They also hewed, with the exception of fighting for the ACA, quite closely to the neoliberal playbook of reduced social spending, privatization of government services, and increased economic market deregulation embraced by Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party two decades earlier. The Obama administration resisted calls for a larger progressive agenda of social, economic, and political reforms. In the 2010 and 2012 elections, Republican candidates won a majority of seats in Congress and in state legislatures, as well as a majority of governorships. Obama won a second term in 2012, but without Democratic control of Congress he could get no new legislation passed. The Republican strategy in response to his second term was simple: Party leaders employed fiercely obstructionist tactics, ensuring any legislation Obama proposed would be dead on arrival in the House of Representatives. In response, Obama resorted to issuing a series of Executive Orders to act on important national and international policy issues, including immigrant rights, LGBTQ and transgender rights, climate change, the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and reduction in tensions with Iran and Cuba. 

In the early years of his administration, Obama ramped up law enforcement along the southern border and increased the numbers of immigrants forcibly returned, policies that earned him the enmity of many immigrant rights activists and the nickname “Deporter in Chief.”  Throughout Obama’s two terms in office, public opinion regarding immigration policies remained generally stable, with 35–40 percent of Americans favoring no policy changes and about the same number favoring a decline in immigration to the United States. Although these opinions remained fairly consistent, Republicans increasingly called for more restrictive policies, making Democrats more reluctant to champion pro-immigration policies. In his second term, Obama made several attempts at immigration reform. Through executive action, he created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that offered temporary protection from deportation to students who had been brought to the United States as young children by their immigrant parents. And he issued guidance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency in charge of enforcing border security, that its agents could only arrest and deport immigrants with criminal records. Since 2010, the United States has admitted a smaller percentage of immigrants from Mexico (the country of origin for 30 percent of immigrants in 2000), but increased numbers from China and India. Along with the geopolitical shift toward preferring immigrants from Asia, the proportion of immigrants with college degrees has also risen in the past decade.

Following the mass shooting of schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December 2012, Obama declared reducing gun violence as one goal of his second-term agenda. The Sandy Hook massacre renewed the long-standing struggle over gun control in the United States, with calls for instituting universal background checks for gun purchases, “red flag” laws to remove guns from “at-risk” individuals, and bans on the sale and manufacture of semi-automatic weapons holding more than ten rounds of ammunition. Despite efforts by the Obama administration and actions by three states to strengthen existing gun laws and ban certain firearms, pressure from the National Rifle Association stymied any legislation in Congress. And Obama signed two laws that expanded gun owners’ rights, allowing weapons to be carried in national parks and stored in checked baggage on Amtrak trains. In the end, gun ownership increased from 347 million in 2012 (amounting to one gun for every U.S. resident) to 434 million in 2021, and Americans remain more likely than those in other countries to die in mass shootings if they are at work or in school.

Obama’s record on resolving international conflicts had mixed results. During his first three years in office, the war in Iraq continued, but he succeeded in withdrawing U.S. military forces by December 2011. That same year, Obama ordered U.S. Special Forces to undertake a mission that led to the death of Osama bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda leader responsible for the September 11 attacks. And despite repeated promises to close the U.S. detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the president was unable to convince Congress to close the prison there. Obama continued the U.S. war in Afghanistan, doubling the number of troops there in his first year in office. He expanded and normalized the use of targeted drone strikes as a counter-terrorism strategy, a practice begun by his predecessor, George W. Bush. The Obama administration admitted to authorizing 473 drone strikes between January 2009 and December 2015. By its own estimates, these strikes were responsible for approximately 2,500 “combatant” deaths and between 64 and 116 civilian deaths. The Obama administration increased sanctions against Iran in response to concerns that the country was developing nuclear weapons. Then in 2015, Obama played a key role in negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed by seven nations, allowed Iran to develop fuel for nuclear reactors but limited the country’s access to materials to build nuclear weapons. Obama also reduced tensions with Cuba, loosening economic sanctions that had been imposed on the island for nearly half a century by the U.S. embargo and encouraging the opening up of limited trade and tourism between the two nations.

The use of executive orders for both domestic and international policy enabled Obama to break the legislative logjam, but the result was an expansion of executive power that strengthened the ability of Obama’s successors similarly to legislate by presidential fiat. And this practice left his legacy highly vulnerable to dismantling through countervailing executive orders from later presidents. The legislative branch’s vehement opposition to Obama was graphically illustrated when Congress refused to confirm his nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Merrick Garland, following the death in February 2016 of longtime conservative justice Antonin Scalia. In a complete break with centuries of precedent, Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold a hearing on Obama’s nominee to the court, claiming that the nomination should be made by the winner of the upcoming November 2016 presidential election.      

In the end, Barack Obama’s legacy rested on his historic stature as the nation’s first African American president, his success at stabilizing the economy after inheriting a country whose economy was in free fall, and his expansion of health coverage. The Affordable Care Act, which became known as “Obamacare” thanks to Republican political branding, has been one of the most controversial and politicized pieces of national legislation in the twenty-first century. It was also Obama’s signature legislative achievement and, inarguably, a stepping-stone toward a broader vision of universal coverage that is the goal of many Americans. At the same time, the ACA galvanized a conservative backlash that was at least as transformative of American politics.

Right-wing resistance to Obamacare merged with general opposition to the president’s broader economic and political initiatives with the goal of minimizing government spending on social programs and the tax burdens on major corporations. This resistance played to deeply entrenched racist attitudes many white Americans held toward the first Black president, which the Republican Party capitalized on to take back control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections. Though some of that opposition emanated from the Republican grass roots in rural areas and small towns, the campaign was shaped and funded by powerful and wealthy donors. Perhaps most important were the energy magnate brothers Charles and David Koch, fierce libertarians and owners of the largest privately owned energy company in the nation. They had spent hundreds of millions of dollars over decades in pursuit of their major goal: reducing government at all levels, including public schools, post offices, and local government agencies. The Kochs created Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), which they funded jointly with ExxonMobil, General Electric, Hertz, tobacco giants Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds, and the country’s largest sugar companies. In 2002 CSE founded the U.S. Tea Party Project, an annual online protest against taxes, which launched the Tea Party movement, though it would not receive national attention until after Obama’s election.

While the protest movement was funded from the top, there were real grassroots activists at the bottom, who were excited to make their voices heard. Stefanie Jasky and her husband, Randy, who ran a home-renovation business, initiated a protest in 2009 with other conservative activists, mailing tea bags to every member of Congress to oppose economic bailouts and taxes. When the stock market collapsed in 2008, the Jaskys were hit hard. She said: "We were hemorrhaging money. I was looking for answers—I wanted to know what had happened. The more I looked the more it became clear to me that the problem was our government, that the government had become the criminal."

Just as the Obama campaign had done successfully in the 2008 presidential election, Tea Party activists utilized Facebook and Twitter to organize, and on April 15, 2009, there were a series of Tax Day “Tea Party” rallies across the country. TEA, they said, was an acronym for “taxed enough already.” Fox News talk-show host Glenn Beck promoted the movement prominently on his show, which gave the conservative upsurge a national media platform. The Tea Party actions dovetailed with vocal and well-publicized protests by the National Rifle Association and gun rights activists who believed the Obama administration was “coming for our guns.” Common cause between NRA advocates and Tea Party activists pulled the Republican Party further to the right and galvanized a new voter base at the far-right edge of the Republican Party.

As the product of top-down social engineering (Koch pollsters tested the Tea Party name to see if people might rally around it) and the grassroots revolt driven by the election of the first Black president and fear of rising taxes, the Tea Party movement had an immediate impact on electoral politics. During the 2010 midterm elections, dozens of Tea Party–affiliated candidates won Republican nominations, often displacing so-called “establishment” Republicans. The Tea Party candidates’ actual electoral successes in the 2010 and 2012 elections were mixed, but Republicans nonetheless won control of the House of Representatives and reduced the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate. This new majority pushed Republican leaders even further to the right in terms of cutting taxes, as well as cutting government social welfare programs. Tea Party activists propelled the Republican Party to make opposition to the Affordable Care Act a litmus test for Republican politicians and fanned controversies over social issues such as abortion, LGBTQ rights, and the environment.

During the 2010, 2012, and 2014 elections, most of the Democrats and moderate Republicans targeted by Tea Party protests were voted out of office. The rightward shift continued, and in 2015, Republican House members aligned with the Tea Party voted the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, out of office, replacing him with Paul Ryan, an archconservative. The legislative agenda pursued by the new Republican House majority was a wish list for the Kochs’ Citizens for a Sound Economy and the Tea Party: They wanted to slash most taxes on business, repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, cut federal funding for education to the bone, and move toward privatizing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. By 2015, polls found that 20 percent of American voters said they were Tea Party supporters.

While the Tea Party was achieving astonishing success on the national level, its state-level activism focused on undercutting prior progressive gains made by labor unions, women, and gays and lesbians. Led in part by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—a consortium of business leaders and politicians funded by big oil, tobacco, and pharmaceutical companies as well as Koch family foundations and brewer Adolph Coors—this coordinated right-wing organizing sought Republican control of state capitals across the country. The country’s political landscape had changed dramatically after 2008. When Barack Obama was elected president, Democrats controlled most of the country’s legislatures and governor’s mansions. By 2017, anti-union Republican politicians had majorities in thirty-two state legislatures. Some of those victories came as a result of extreme gerrymandering (drawing voting districts in a way favorable to the governing party) that the Republicans managed to implement following their victories in the 2010 elections. Another factor in their success was implementation of new state-level laws that restricted voting rights for former felons, limited access to absentee or early voting, or required state-issued identification cards, changes that most often benefited Republican candidates. These right-wing politicians used their new power to enact anti-labor and anti-living-wage legislation, to restrict women’s access to abortion and contraception, and to overturn laws protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination.

Between 2010 and 2014, Republican-controlled state legislatures passed more than 130 laws limiting women’s access to safe, legal abortion, more than any time since the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that guaranteed that right as the law of the land. Among the laws were bans on abortion after twenty weeks, mandatory waiting periods and ultrasounds for women seeking abortions, and requirements that abortion-providing clinic doctors also have hospital admitting privileges. Even though 77 percent of Americans continued to believe in a woman’s right to choose whether or not she should have an abortion, by 2014 it was no longer possible to get an abortion in 97 percent of U.S. counties, because those counties no longer contained any abortion providers. American women had to travel long distances, take time off from work, find people to care for their children, endure the costs of travel and lodging in order to exercise a right that the U.S. Supreme Court had guaranteed them more than forty years earlier. Battles between pro- and anti-choice groups had intensified into an ongoing war.

Battle lines were also drawn over labor rights and the right of workers to secure a living wage.  A barrage of fierce Republican attacks on worker rights began after 2010. The primary weapons were twofold: so-called “right to work” bills (which were actually anti-union laws) that restrained unions’ ability to collect dues from their members; and state-level “pre-emption” bills that nullified local ordinances mandating wage increases, paid time off, and requirements that employers provide advance notification to workers about upcoming work schedules.

The proliferation of “right to work” laws after 2010 can mostly be attributed to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and its strategy of writing model legislation, designing detailed plans for passage of that legislation on the state level, and then providing support for conservative legislators across the country to enact these measures. By 2011, ALEC’s membership included one quarter of the nation’s state legislators and eighty-five members of Congress. The group’s goal was to limit workers’ ability to form unions, and to roll back city and county wage increases by passing state regulations to limit local governments’ right to pass ordinances requiring a living wage, overtime wages, and safe working conditions. Together, these pre-emption laws blocked local control over wages and work conditions and placed that control in Republican-controlled state legislatures and governors' mansions.

ALEC also focused on legislation to limit access to abortion, eliminate legal protections for LGBTQ Americans, and weaken environmental regulations. Laws to overturn the Affordable Care Act, narrow governments’ ability to generate income through taxes, and promote privatization of public schools, the U.S. Postal Service, and other government services were introduced in state legislatures more than a thousand times since the passage of the ACA. By 2017, twenty-five states had passed bills reducing the power of city and county governments. “Right to work” laws had passed in states that had previously been bastions of unionism: Michigan, home of the United Auto Workers; Wisconsin, birthplace of public sector unionism; and West Virginia, stronghold of the United Mine Workers union. Such right-wing political initiatives in the United States in these years paralleled the development of similarly reactionary policies and practices across Europe and Latin America, with the ascendance of right-wing politicians who favored restrictions on worker rights, opposition to immigration, and a sharp narrowing of political power in many countries on both continents.

How did the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) affect voting rights?

The decade from 2008 to 2018 saw several sets of interlocking social and economic phenomena of global importance—ongoing wars in the Middle East, the global repercussions of climate change, and international trade agreements that destabilized local economies. In the late twentieth century, a powerful cohort of neoliberal policymakers wholeheartedly embraced free-market solutions to social and economic problems, but growing inequities in the twenty-first century shattered that consensus and fed the rise of populist politicians on the right as well as the left. After decades on the margins, politicians and movements promoting democratic socialism came to be seen as viable for the first time since the 1930s, with the growing popularity of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders in the United States, Jeremy Corbyn, head of the Labour Party in Britain, and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who became president of Mexico in 2018. At the same time, neo-fascist ideas and movements arose again in many parts of the world, including France, Hungary, and Brazil. The growing global threat from climate change exacerbated political divisions and economic displacement and generated major waves of migrations. The immense economic costs and shared responsibilities of nations to address this dire environmental threat came at the same time that a growing polarization between right-wing populist politicians and socially progressive governments made chances of international cooperation unlikely.

Starting in the 1990s, global trade agreements, intended to increase economic opportunities and enhance local economies in order to decrease migration, had ended up disproportionately benefiting U.S. corporations and destabilizing rural economies instead. Obama was a strong believer in the global free-trade regime pushed by most Republican and many Democrat policymakers since the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995. By the end of Obama’s presidency, his advocacy of a free-trade agreement between the United States and Asia earned him disapproval from the left wing of his own party, as labor leaders, rank-and-file unionists, and environmentalists criticized the potential negative effects of the agreement based on the lessons of previous international trade agreements. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, passed by Congress in 1994), the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA, passed by Congress in 2005), and later the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA, ratified in 2017) gave rise to massive corporate agricultural conglomerates engaged in producing commodities such as corn, palm oil, rice, and cotton that cleared massive areas of arable land in the Global South (a group of developing countries in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia) and Eastern Europe.

After the global economic crash of 2008, speculative investment in land increased across the Global South and in affluent cities in the United States, Europe, and Asia, fueling a frenzy of major investments by the wealthy. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide lost their farmland or could no longer afford to rent apartments in the world’s largest cities. One of the most poignant examples of this displacement was the devastation of the corn-growing economy in central Mexico following the passage of NAFTA, which contributed to the loss of almost two million agricultural jobs when Mexican farmers could not compete with the highly subsidized U.S. agricultural industry. Small farmers, though they still provided 70 percent of the world’s food, were driven out of business or off their lands, which often forced them to migrate from their home countries in search of economic opportunities in the United States and Europe. This was especially true for women farmers who did not possess official land titles.

This economic displacement was profoundly affected by recurring and unceasing warfare across North Africa and the Middle East, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Syria.  These conflicts encompassed ethnic and religious factions pitted against not only one another (as in the case of Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds in Afghanistan and Iraq) but also their international enablers and military suppliers, including the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the European Union. Unending wars created tens of millions of refugees fleeing extraordinary levels of military violence and horrendous, indiscriminate chemical bombing attacks against civilian populations, especially in the wars in Syria and Yemen.

Although international treaties define refugees solely as people forced to flee because of war or persecution, throughout the Global South millions of people have also been displaced by extreme heat and storms that caused or exacerbated sustained droughts, damaging floods, massive fires, and starvation. Global climate change has intensified these storms and heat waves, making conditions for living and for agriculture worse. The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has shown that the number of floods has increased globally, leaving countries that suffer from poor infrastructure and urban planning, overcrowding, and poverty especially vulnerable to extreme weather events that destroy homes, workplaces, and public infrastructure and threaten the food and water security of millions. In 2008, for example, Haiti experienced four large hurricanes in a single month; together the storms destroyed more than 60 percent of the country’s agricultural crops, killed more than one thousand people, and displaced thousands. Haiti’s location on the western end of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola always left it vulnerable to hurricanes and other storms, but rising temperatures combined with massive deforestation have heightened the loss of lives and crops as hunger grows, soil erosion worsens, and political destabilization and violence increase. Extreme precipitation in India and Bangladesh has similarly caused massive floods that have displaced millions of farmers and agricultural workers.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, political strife combined with economic and climate inequalities resulted in a global refugee crisis on a scale not seen since the end of World War II. Between 2010 and 2020, over one hundred million people had sought refuge either within or outside their countries. Some of these migrants sought freedom from violence meted out by criminal gangs and the rampant use of murderous weapons of war. Others hoped simply to find a way to support their families after their homelands were devastated. By 2015, they filled refugee camps and detention centers in Jordan, Turkey, Greece, Kenya, and on both sides of the U.S. border with Mexico. Racist, dehumanizing rhetoric toward immigrants characterized the influx of refugees as an invasion of criminals and rapists and an existential threat to national sovereignties, which fueled the rise of right-wing populist movements from the United States to Germany, from Eastern Europe to South Asia and South Africa. 

In the United States, the Obama administration responded to this humanitarian crisis by easing the cap on the number of refugees who could legally enter the country.  But anti-immigrant rhetoric from the right severely limited the national response. In 2010, the United States accepted 73,000 refugees; in 2016, that number had grown only marginally, to 85,000. By contrast, Germany granted asylum to nearly 650,000 refugees in the same year. Not only was this increase minimal given the historic number of refugees who fled their homes because of war or violent oppression during this time; it also epitomized the increased reluctance of the United States to accept most immigrants, including political and climate refugees. Indeed, the U.S. acceptance of refugees plummeted in these years despite their dramatically increasing numbers worldwide, down from the more 200,000 refugees accepted in 1980, when the United States began its refugee resettlement program.

The U.S. government’s meager response to the plight of refugees mirrored the nation’s indifference to the consequences of climate change. Despite overwhelming scientific accord on the need to reduce reliance on carbon fuels, many U.S. politicians continued to deny the problem and reject energy policy changes. In 2016, nearly two hundred nations, including the United States, signed an unprecedented agreement, the Paris climate accords. World leaders had been pushed toward signing the agreement by a series of mass demonstrations, which culminated in late November 2015 in a worldwide day of action that involved more than 600,000 protesters in 175 cities, including Melbourne, London, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Mexico City, and Paris. Demonstrators demanded immediate action by industrialized nations to make a rapid transition from the use of fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. The nations signing the Paris Agreement agreed to voluntarily mitigate their own greenhouse gas emissions, which had substantially contributed to a marked increase in average global temperatures over the past half century. Recognizing the critical nature of the climate-change fight, upon signing the Paris Agreement in September 2016, President Obama noted that “we believe that for all the challenges that we face, the growing threat of climate change could define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other challenge.” But because international agreements need to be formally ratified by the U.S. Senate to have the force of law, and because the Republicans vowed never to approve any of President Obama’s proposals, adherence to the Paris Agreement by the United States, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, remained unenforced.

Beginning in the 2000s, digital technologies, social media platforms, and digital tools and networks provided by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple fundamentally reshaped economic, political, and cultural life in the United States. The emergence of smartphones and social media platforms like Facebook (founded in 2004), Twitter (2006), and Instagram (2010; bought by Facebook in 2012) allowed users to actively produce and share information, ideas, photos, videos, and other forms of personal and creative expression via networked linkages on the internet of individuals and communities of interest. The creation of YouTube in 2005 (purchased by Google in 2006), a digital platform that allows users to post and watch video clips, launched the era of widely accessible video resources at no cost to the viewer because content was sponsored and interlaced with ads. After 2000, desktop computers became a niche market for high-end gamers, graphic artists, and programmers; most consumers began switching to laptops, tablets, and, most important, smartphones. One measure of how ubiquitous the latter have become is that in 2018 alone, 1.45 billion smartphones (the majority using Google’s Android operating system) were shipped from manufacturers across the globe, especially China. Americans became increasingly dependent on digital networks for routine financial transactions such as shopping and banking, for social interactions such as dating and political discussions, as well as for education, political engagement, entertainment, health care, and even sports.           

New technology start-up companies transformed the economy, spurring an explosion of investment and stock market activity and creating new high-tech urban enclaves while driving down wages and reducing jobs in outlying regions. The rise of online shopping changed the landscape as well as the workforce of many cities and towns, as thousands of what have become known as “brick-and-mortar” stores went out of business. Throughout the country, independent retail businesses struggled to compete with massive online companies such as Amazon and chain stores with strong online divisions such as Walmart and Target.

Socially and politically, technology companies heralded the digitally connected world as a democratic and global space for the sharing of ideas and information. New digital tools allowed everyone to produce and distribute various forms of media, bypassing existing gatekeepers. In 2007, one political commentator predicted that “individuals from every corner of the flat world are being empowered . . . and you are going to see every color of the human rainbow take part.” Within a decade, however, the utopian vision of the internet as an international town meeting that could bring disparate factions together shattered as social media groups, news feeds, blogs, and video channels splintered into discrete ideological silos directed mainly to legions of self-selected followers. Social networks did not necessarily help members understand political or cultural differences or build a sense of community, but rather began to surround users with like-minded opinions that would have significant ramifications for the nation’s electoral politics and social cohesion. Digital innovations also reshaped cultural and leisure activities for most Americans as media streaming services and online gaming came to rival traditional cinema and network television in their claims on people’s time and attention.

While the computer age began with many small start-up companies, by the early 2000s the five largest—Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (owner of Google), and Facebook (now named Meta)—dominated the U.S. economy. They benefited from the same public financial support for infrastructure development that had powered the construction of the transcontinental railroad system after the Civil War and the national highway system after World War II. The federal government’s seeding of the internet and the World Wide Web enabled a handful of computer companies to grow into the most powerful corporate entities ever created by U.S. capitalism. Putting their devices and services into the hands of hundreds of millions, then billions, of users enabled these corporations and their founders to accumulate wealth in amounts far exceeding the fortunes of Rockefeller, Carnegie, and others a century earlier. Those fortunes, and the growing chasm of wealth inequality they contributed to, allowed these corporate leaders (Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page) to wield staggering political and cultural power and influence, which has given rise to what many commentators and critics have called “the second Gilded Age.” The new social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, are available for “free” to end users (as were broadcast radio and television when first developed), but the enormous profits enjoyed by each of the corporate entities that control and sustain these platforms are built on the revenue generated by advertisements and by the collection of reams of user data that are sold to advertisers. The difference between television or radio and digital media in terms of their use of advertising, however, is that while broadcast media used a mass approach for its ads, digital media ads on Facebook and Google are tailored or “targeted,” based on individual user data and information gleaned from individuals’ internet usage. The stratospheric profitability of the giant digital companies is testament to their dominance and sheer reach in the global marketplace. Apple’s gross annual profit by 2019 was .4 billion, while Google’s was billion, and Facebook’s only a “modest” billion.

Although the government funded the early research and development of the internet, the industries that emerged successfully resisted government regulation for decades by hiring scores of lobbyists who promoted the social benefits of technology and warned of the military and political need for U.S. dominance in creating and sustaining cutting-edge technologies. Some of the wealthiest U.S. tech companies evaded paying U.S. taxes by shifting their profits to offshore subsidiaries. In 2017 and 2018, Amazon paid no U.S. corporate income tax despite showing profits of over billion. At the same time, many of these corporations won local tax subsidies or property tax breaks by creating bidding wars between cities vying to become the new home for their office campuses, data centers, and warehouses. The tech boom transformed cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, and New York by offering highly paid programming and digital design jobs, which often accelerated gentrification. In most of these cities, a much larger sector of low-paying service jobs emerged to cater to the lifestyle needs of the skilled white-collar employees. Growing numbers of Uber drivers, janitors, nail salon workers, and food deliverers struggled to carve out a living in expensive urban areas with no basic benefits or job security.  

Tech industries helped reinforce the wealth gap in the United States by offering lucrative stock options and elaborate perks to upper-level employees while relying on low-paid offshore workers to produce electronic components and equally low-paid U.S. warehouse workers to distribute those goods. Many of the higher-paid workers were hired as independent contractors, fissuring the workforce into isolated groups of workers without a clearly identifiable employer and thus limiting expenses for employee benefits and hampering worker organizing efforts. Tech companies actively opposed unionization and imposed stunning levels of automation to speed up labor among their lower-paid workers. This growing gap in working conditions can be seen at Amazon, where warehouse workers (a majority of the company's 400,000 U.S. employees) face some of the harshest working conditions in the tech industry, with individual product “pickers” expected to process three hundred to four hundred items an hour. The company also developed surveillance tools to monitor and track worker movements, employed robots to increase the pace of processing orders, and denied responsibility for a growing number of workplace injuries and even deaths among warehouse workers.

The expanding use of artificial intelligence (AI) programming and robots has affected workers and working conditions not just at Amazon but across a wide swath of industries and jobs. Mechanization and automation have reduced the number of jobs in manufacturing and agriculture for decades, but AI programs are increasingly replacing humans in professional fields, service industries, and skilled labor. Programs that review legal contract language reduce the need for trained lawyers and paralegals; “bots” (internet robots) at service call centers can respond to ten thousand queries in an hour while a human can answer only five to ten calls; and a robotic bricklayer can lay up to ten times as many bricks as a skilled mason. Increasingly sophisticated AI programming made many jobs more onerous for workers by closely monitoring, measuring, and devising ways to dramatically raise productivity. It also enabled the creation of online scheduling systems that responded to variable demand, making workers’ hours far less predictable from week to week. These systems enabled employers in the retail and hospitality industries to shift many employees from full time to part time, reducing their pay and benefits. A 2011 survey of 436 employees at retailers in New York City (from luxury establishments on Fifth Avenue to dollar stores in the Bronx) found that half were part time, and only one in ten part-time workers had a set schedule week to week. In 2012, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed that there were two and a half times more part-time workers who would have preferred full-time work than there had been in 2006. Part-time hours that changed from week to week, usually on short notice, made it difficult for workers to arrange child care, attend school, or hold another part-time job. Perversely, if workers were not available for the changing part-time hours assigned to them, they would be assigned even fewer hours in the future. 

While digital technology has changed the nature of work for many, it has also provided new jobs for others; by 2020, over twelve million people in the United States worked in technology-related fields. The vast majority of these programmers, engineers, testers, designers, and other tech workers are not unionized, and no single union has emerged dedicated to representing technology workers. Employees from a smattering of companies have been organizing into existing unions since the 1990s, including professional vendors for Google who joined a United Steelworkers local union in 2019, Kickstarter employees who voted to join the Office and Professional Employees International Union in 2020; in the same year, designers, programmers, and engineers at Glitch won a union contract with the Communication Workers of America (CWA). But many other unionizing campaigns among tech workers have failed. The largest tech companies including Amazon and Google have utilized aggressive anti-union campaigns since the 1990s. Workers at Amazon tried to unionize at the company’s warehouses in Chester, Virginia, in 1999 and 2014, and in Bessemer, Alabama, in 2020, but the company fired organizers and hired union-busting consultants to intimidate workers and block unionization. In 2018, twenty thousand Google employees walked out in protest over sexual harassment issues. Workers then began organizing with the CWA to challenge the company on policies ranging from lack of diversity in hiring to the right to decline work on projects that do not serve social well-being, such as AI programs for the military or facial recognition software for policing. Google retaliated by firing or demoting key activist workers and hiring an anti-union consulting firm. But hundreds of employees joined the Alphabet Workers Union early in 2021 to provide a voice for temporary workers, vendors, and contractors as well as full-time employees and to push Google to uphold its founding pledge to “don’t be evil.”

For the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the large tech corporations continued to drive the U.S. economy, largely impervious to workers’ demands and with minimal government regulation. But as these companies dominated commercial, social, and work life, they faced increasing public outcry over their policies, particularly in response to revelations about violations of privacy and the distressingly frequent security breaches that exposed consumers’ personal information to hackers. Despite the uphill battle against such wealthy and powerful companies, unionization efforts by workers at tech companies did not abate. By 2020, with growing public discontent with big tech industries’ policies and lack of accountability, both Democratic and Republican lawmakers began to support calls for greater regulation and more tax accountability.

The ability of digital networks and mobile devices to connect people instantly and constantly, wherever they are, has enabled oppressed groups to call world attention to their causes and has helped to mobilize large numbers to support democratic and social justice political movements. Digital technologies have also allowed a broader range of voices to emerge in the media through the creation of individual blogs, vlogs (video blogs), tweets, and podcasts. Cell phones, especially smartphones with video and internet capabilities, made it possible for workers and political activists to organize global days and weeks of action online.  At key moments of social upheaval, social media platforms have united communities and their supporters for social change, such the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, the anti-austerity movement in Spain, and the Black Lives Matter and anti-police demonstrations in the United States, all of which spread, in part, via social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.  At the same time, these networks and media have also allowed political extremists to organize and expand. The internet offers anonymity to terrorist groups and has been implicated in fostering, recruiting, and shielding extreme political organizations such as white supremacists. From the very beginnings of home computer networks, white supremacist activists created password-protected message boards that linked white power movement groups and individuals from around the country and allowed their organizing to expand hidden from view.

The impact of social media on political and civic life in the United States and across the globe was rapid and profound. By 2016, there were about 500 million tweets sent each day, seven hours of video uploaded to YouTube each second, and 2.8 billion people, more than a third of the world’s population, active on Facebook. Social media platforms promoted their potential to reach broad audiences and link together disparate communities and constituencies, locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally.  Facebook’s “About” page on their website, for example, claims, “Our mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” But community service was not the driving force behind these digital platforms; their goal was to maximize profits by keeping users engaged on their sites for as long as possible, and their particular technological innovation was to develop automated mechanisms, known as algorithms, that accomplished that task. Stories and content that were emotionally, ethnically, or racially charged kept more users reading and clicking links, so the platforms had no incentive to monitor the accuracy or tone of their news feeds.

The dramatic growth of social media influenced many industries, but perhaps none more than the news media. Very early in the development of the internet, websites replaced classified ads in print newspapers, long a mainstay of their revenue. The highly effective targeted advertising offered by social media accelerated the trend of companies shifting their advertising budgets away from print publications and onto the internet. (Political campaigns also shifted their focus from printed news coverage to social media outlets. Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was one of the first national election campaigns to harness the power of social media to mobilize its supporters.) Many large national newspapers adapted to the new digital world, but thousands of small and medium-size local newspapers went out of business, and a 2015 survey found that most of the smaller newspapers that shifted to digital formats were losing money. The employment of newspaper journalists fell 57 percent between 2008 and 2020. Internet news outlets can report on breaking news rapidly and offer unlimited space for articles; however, the national focus of most digital publications limits coverage of local issues and elections.

The profit-driven nature of journalism has often been at odds with the important role the news media play in democratic societies, but a new paradox in news consumption emerged with the rise of social media. By 2016, more than half of all Americans got some if not all their news and political information from social media. While the explosion of content producers and distributors of internet news and the decentralization of news sources could offer greater diversity of points of view, media companies’ reliance on programmed algorithms actually results in greater limits on the points of view and range of content most Americans view. As a result, many Americans only see news that aligns with their existing opinions. Research into Facebook activity found that the likelihood of someone believing and sharing a story was determined by its alignment with their existing beliefs and the number of their friends who had already shared it—not any inherent quality of the story itself.

 Given the glut of information circulating via social media, tracing the source of any news item became difficult, and “fake news,” or wholly fabricated stories, were able to reach millions of users in aggregated news feeds that do not distinguish between reputable news sources, opinion pieces, and foreign propaganda. The algorithms that prioritize strong emotional content and promote sensationalized news over analytical or research-based content made these platforms an effective vehicle for small political factions or foreign interests seeking to manipulate public opinion and democratic elections (an issue that arose during the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns). For all the hopes that a more connected world would increase political, social, and cultural understandings and challenge biases, researchers have found that all too often social media has actually narrowed peoples’ exposure to diverse points of view. In 2018, the United Nations confirmed a chilling example of the negative aspects of social media when it concluded that hate speech spread on Facebook played a significant role in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, where approximately 24,000 people from this minority ethnic group were killed and 700,000 became refugees.

Digital technologies have created new formats for popular and mass culture, created greater access and distribution to older cultural forms and institutions, and been incorporated into education and research at every level. Early computer games, as a form of entertainment and popular culture, found a home in arcades, but with the rise of home computers and the internet, video gaming became a major entertainment industry with revenues surpassing movies, television, and music. From individuals playing the Candy Crush game on their phones to massive multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft that involve more than one hundred million players from around the world, in the twenty-first century video gaming has become the leading leisure activity for Americans of all ages and of any gender. Initially some parents and social researchers disparaged the rise of video gaming as a passive or anti-social activity, especially given the popularity and prevalence of violent shooting and war games. But online gaming’s genres and markets have diversified beyond the initial target audience of teenage boys. The success of video games in capturing users’ attention, enabling the development of new skills, and transmitting significant amounts of information has spurred the expansion of gaming for a wide range of educational, vocational, and social justice issues. Video gaming has also converged with other realms of leisure activities, such as movies and competitive sports. In 2015, more than one hundred million viewers per month worldwide logged into Twitch, a live streaming service owned by Amazon, to view skilled gamers playing online. Some colleges have recognized video gaming as a sport and even offer e-sports scholarships to gamers.

In its early days, the internet became an essential platform for producing and distributing music, art, and creative media. As early as 1999, programs for sharing music files flourished, and then evolved into commercial streaming services that offered not only music but also movies, television shows, theater, and dance performances on demand. As social media became an essential arena for social interaction, especially for young people, new forms of creative expression and entrepreneurial initiatives emerged on platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. From its inception, the internet was seen as a vehicle for self-publishing, especially for computer scientists and academics, but by the early 2000s blogs became a popular form for individuals and organizations to develop communities and share ideas. Within a few years these individual sites began to be monetized through services that linked advertisers to related blog content. Blogging and vlogging continued to expand as platforms such as YouTube and web design programs such as WordPress made access to the digital tools necessary to reach larger audiences available to anyone, regardless of their level of technical expertise. A number of social media users began to establish themselves as “influencers,” or experts in their field, who could charge for their endorsements. While celebrities of all sorts had been influencers for years, social media opened the field to anyone with a passion and access to the internet. New platforms continue to increase ordinary people’s ability to create and disseminate as well as consume these new forms of popular culture. TikTok, a social media application developed by the Chinese company ByteDance, would become the most downloaded app in 2020 and sweep across the world, allowing users to easily produce and share short-form videos (initially limited to fifteen seconds). One of the selling points of TikTok was its ease in creating content and the ability to view wildly diverse content within a short period of time.

Simultaneous with social media’s popularity for circulating entertainment and popular culture, traditional cultural and scholarly institutions also embraced the internet’s ability to rapidly share research and foster international collaboration to significantly expand and advance scientific, medical, and academic research and knowledge. Digital devices and networks allow the gathering of ever greater amounts of data from a broad range of digital sources (such as satellites, cell phone GPS signals, digital images, and environmental sensors), along with programs for sharing data among teams of researchers. These new scientific research practices are often referred to as “open science” or “big data” and include “citizen-science” experiments that involve thousands of non-scientists contributing their time and curiosity to gather research data on issues and problems like climate change and crime. The volume of information available digitally and the strategies for managing, mining, and analyzing it are constantly evolving and opening up new areas of scientific research, as well as new concerns over privacy, oversight, and potential for misuse.

Digital tools and access to digital resources have also changed the social science and humanities fields and opened up greater accessibility to cultural products from around the world. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, libraries and archives would digitize millions of archival documents and massive numbers of books and articles would become available electronically on digital platforms like JSTOR. Together with the growth of community-based digital archives, crowd-sourcing platforms for research, and new modes of teaching, such developments created unprecedented access to historical and contemporary knowledge. Some universities have increasingly offered online courses or full degree programs that allow anyone in the world to enroll, and online instruction is increasingly touted, especially by university administrators and digital entrepreneurs, as providing free or low-cost access to a broad range of academic courses and certificate programs without the need to formally enroll in a university. Cultural institutions like art museums, theaters, and historical societies have embraced the creation and distribution of digital programs, which in many cases have expanded their audiences and engendered new cultural practices. As one media scholar has noted, the plenitude of digital media available has created a vast and ever-changing universe of digital culture that is not comprehensible as a whole. This abundance of digital resources and learning opportunities offers new possibilities for creative expression, research, and teaching, while also highlighting the disparities between those with and without access to technology, and perhaps contributing to a decline in shared, face-to-face communal events.

Despite the seemingly limitless possibilities of digital media to enhance people’s political, intellectual, and cultural lives, technology could not solve (and in fact likely intensified) the twin problems of economic inequality, reflected in the dramatic growth of poverty worldwide and the continued enrichment of a tiny elite of the super rich. In the years after 2011, low-wage workers, students, women’s rights advocates, and activists confronting the many forms of continued marginalization and violence faced by people of color engaged in sustained collective actions. Many of these actions were subsistence protests—against poverty wages and for a living wage; against the staggering costs of medical care and higher education that were forcing millions to carry crushing debt; and against state-level and local attacks on labor. Black Lives Matter protests and campaigns for LGBTQ+ rights highlighted the realities of violence and discrimination faced on a daily basis by many Americans, and helped build mass movements against intersecting forms of oppression still experienced by many BIPOC and sexual minorities, despite decades of feminist and civil rights activism. And finally, women on college and university campuses waged a new generational rebellion against sexual assault and harassment that set the stage for the larger #MeToo movement.

The first of the progressive uprisings in the 2010s was a protest against legislative overreach by Wisconsin’s Republican governor Scott Walker, who sought to strip public sector unions in the state of their right to collective bargaining, a right that Wisconsin had initiated in the late 1950s. With financial backing from national conservatives, especially the Koch brothers, Walker risked alienating organized labor and had campaigned for office with a plan to reduce the state’s budget deficits by making public employees pay more for their pensions and health care. Elected along with a Republican majority in the state legislature, Walker followed a playbook engineered by the Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and instituted tax cuts and deductions for businesses that caused a state budget deficit. Governor Walker then proposed in 2011 to reduce the state’s budgetary shortfall by stripping the state’s public sector unions of their ability to bargain collectively over pensions and health care. He announced plans to freeze all raises except to keep up with inflation, end automatic union dues collection by the state, and force public employee unions to hold recertification votes every year. Hoping to hold on to the votes of more traditionally conservative, white, and male-dominated unions, he exempted police and firefighters from these new anti-union rules.

On the same day that Walker announced this attack on unions, teaching assistants at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the state capital, staged “Don’t Break My Heart” demonstrations to oppose the bill. By the second day, there were thirty thousand protesters at the State Capitol. The next day nurses, teachers, graduate students, and other protesters occupied the Senate chambers in the Capitol building. Even members of the Wisconsin firefighters’ union, which had initially praised Walker, joined in and rallied behind the union president’s declaration that the state’s “house of labor” was on fire and that the firefighters were there to put the blaze out.

Protesters vowed to occupy the Capitol as long as it took to kill the bill. Knowing that they didn’t have the votes to block its passage, fourteen Wisconsin Democratic senators left town, hoping to stop the vote because there could be no Senate quorum in their absence. Through legislative maneuvering, however, Republicans figured out how to pass the bill without any Democrats present.  Large rallies continued into the late spring, with undocumented immigrant workers joining the protests. Legal challenges made their way through the courts, with hearings so heated that two Wisconsin Supreme Court justices even got into a physical fight. But after the court finally ruled in favor of the governor’s anti-union bill, the protests ran out of steam, because, as one observer noted, “People see that Walker won everything that he asked for.” And yet the Battle of Madison inaugurated years of popular, worker-led protests that spread across the country and around the world.

One of the labor union activists who found inspiration in the 2011 Wisconsin protests was Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the nation’s largest and most influential labor unions, which had helped pioneer organizing efforts in the 1990s among precarious workers, including building janitors. Like many in the labor movement, Henry believed that if unions were to survive in the United States they had no choice but to grow more daring and more creative. Organizing unions in industries like fast food or retail, both of which employed millions of low-paid and often temporary workers, would take a long time and a lot of union resources. SEIU decided to devote its considerable human and financial resources (its membership totaled almost two million) to organize new workers to take on legislative and public relations battles that would highlight the growing movement for a living wage across the country. 

The “Fight for ” was born initially in fall 2012 as a worker-led, SEIU-supported campaign to organize fast-food workers at McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and other fast-food restaurants. Fast-food workers in New York City launched an unprecedented one-day strike in November. One of the organizers was twenty-two-year-old Naquasia LeGrand, a Kentucky Fried Chicken worker from Brooklyn. Before she and her fellow workers started organizing, LeGrand recalled, everyone she knew worked at least two jobs (and many had three) just to make ends meet. Twenty-six-year-old Bleu Rainer, who worked at a Tampa, Florida, McDonalds, was sleeping in bus stations because he didn’t earn enough to pay rent on an apartment, or even a room in shared lodging. The decision to protest was not difficult, Rainer says, showing a check for 9 for two weeks’ work. “We had nothing to lose.” The Fight for movement was not only a union organizing drive, but also a direct assault on the federal minimum wage rate of .25 an hour, as well as on capricious management practices, including arbitrary work scheduling. 

At almost the exact same moment in time that the Fight for drive was being launched by SEIU, Walmart associates (as employees were known within the company)—the world’s number one private employer, with 2.5 million employees and 11,500 stores on five continents—decided to stage the first ever strike against Walmart stores in the United States. Venanzi Luna, a thirty-four-year-old assistant deli manager, and her coworkers drew on their immigrant and union family backgrounds to organize and stand up to the giant retailer in Pico Rivera, California, a small Latinx working-class town where Walmart played an outsize role in the economy. “It was scary,” Luna said. “Really scary.”  But they succeeded: more than one hundred workers and hundreds of supporters joined them in the Walmart parking lot to launch the strike. Similar protests took place at eight other stores around Los Angeles. The New York Times, CNN, Democracy Now, and The Nation hailed the “great Walmart walkout” and called the strike “historic, despite the fact that Walmart ultimately thwarted these local unionization efforts.

The Walmart protests spread quickly over the next weeks and months. Truckers and warehouse workers, retail salespeople and managers held labor actions across the country and around the world. On the day after Thanksgiving 2012, the busiest shopping day of the year, they blocked entrances and sat down on highways in front of stores across the United States. They staged hunger strikes and the first sit-down strikes waged by retail workers since the 1930s. Luna and her Walmart coworkers held up pictures of the 1937 Woolworth strikers and sang labor songs when they were arrested. One worker, Denise Barlage, happily held her hands out to be zip-tied as she was arrested. “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life,” she said. “I owe it to the next generation.” the workers learned something surprising over the course of the strike: Walmart workers in other countries were unionized. Workers from Italy, Spain, Uruguay, South Africa, and elsewhere came to Pico Rivera to support the strikers on the picket lines. Before returning to their home countries, the international delegates met with U.S. Walmart workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), and UNI Global to form the Walmart Global Union Alliance. Going global, the Pico Rivera strikers quickly realized, was necessary if they were to have any real impact on the giant corporation. Despite such global worker solidarity, Walmart management continued to employ forceful and largely successful anti-union tactics, including deceptive anti-union public relations campaigns and lobbying efforts to blunt SEIU’s early efforts to organize fast-food workers.

Like their Walmart counterparts, fast-food workers across the United States (and around the world) quickly caught the organizing bug, staging hundreds of one-day “flash strikes.” Vast, fast, and self-publicized through social media postings, these flash strikes were a twenty-first-century addition to labor’s arsenal at a time when workers seemed to have few tools to improve their wages and working conditions. Images of a shame-faced, weeping Ronald McDonald went viral as young workers posted online stories about their strikes. Singing, dancing flash mobs of young workers poked fun at McDonalds’ expensively publicized global slogans. “I’m Lovin’ It” became “Poverty Wages: Not Lovin’ It.” 

Fast-food protests, supported by SEIU funds and organizers, quickly became global. In May 2014, fast-food workers struck in 230 cities in 34 countries on 6 continents. By 2015, the global fast-food strikes had spread to 40 countries and more than 300 U.S. cities. Workers struck to demand a living wage, against violence on the job, and for consistent scheduling and union recognition. In fall 2018, workers at McDonald’s walked out to protest the corporation’s refusal to take serious action to end sexual harassment of women workers in McDonald’s restaurants. This strike marked the first time since early-twentieth-century women garment workers had walked out in specific protest against sexual harassment. And they promised it was just the beginning. As graduate student organizer and Fight for activist Keegan Shepard said in 2015, “We are all fast food workers now.”

Fast-food organizers, hotel workers, Walmart activists, and others in the living wage movement won more victories faster than many analysts and even trade union leaders had expected. Twenty-one states plus the District of Columbia raised the minimum wages paid to workers in those states. Thirty states passed wage laws that were higher than the federal hourly minimum (a paltry .25, which had remained unchanged since 2009). Forty localities passed minimum wage laws that were higher than those passed by their state governments. And in 2016, the states with the two largest labor markets in the nation—New York and California—passed a minimum wage. Protesters also managed to convince several large corporations to enact a minimum wage. By 2018, even Amazon, infamous for its poor wages and horrible working conditions, would agree to a minimum wage.

Despite these successes, the changes weren’t enough for most workers to make ends meet, some raises would not be fully phased in for several years, and in some locations the increase was vetoed or legally prevented from being implemented. Workers understood this was only a first step, said Laphonza Butler, president of California’s hospital and home health care workers’ union, representing more than 325,000 members. “Fifteen dollars an hour is only thirty-one thousand dollars a year. Nobody is going to Vegas on thirty-one thousand dollars a year. It’s just enough to get by, to get the basics.” But she still considered achieving the wage in California a great accomplishment. “When you’re in communities that have been economically strangled, you see people who are broken, people who are so distracted by their everyday struggles that they are hopeless. We felt the living wage campaign could be a ray of hope, something that could unite people around winning something for themselves, for their families. No one else did it for them.”

These dramatic labor organizing successes among largely non-union workers were also encouraged by changes at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in the Obama years. Following eight years of anti-union decisions rendered by the George W. Bush–era NLRB, Democrats achieved a majority on the five-person board in 2009–2010. What followed were a series of decisions and a significant rule change for union elections. In 2014, the NLRB issued a new rule that streamlined the process for workers to gain union representation and dramatically shortened the pre-election period during which employers ran anti-union campaigns.  The NLRB’s new rule opened up union-organizing possibilities for new groups of workers, including academic, digital media, and museum workers. In a 2016 decision, for example, the board held that graduate students who worked at and for Columbia University were in fact employees covered by the National Labor Relations Act, which led to a successful union-organizing drive of graduate student teaching assistants there and subsequently at numerous other private colleges and universities.  

These changes in the nation’s labor laws and low-wage workers’ organizing successes allowed union activists to change the opinions of a majority of Americans about low wages. By 2016, three out of five Americans backed the an hour minimum wage, and public support for unions and union organizing also increased. Support for increasing the minimum wage transcended party lines. Voters in Republican-controlled states were just as likely as those controlled by Democrats to vote for wage increases. Despite a steady decline in actual union membership, local and state political campaigns for a living wage were effective in making workers and the general public more aware of the growing disparity between the working poor and the ultra wealthy. Campaigns to change minimum wage laws proved more successful for workers than winning unionization and collective bargaining rights.

On September 17, 2011, between eight hundred and two thousand protesters marched through Lower Manhattan, ending up in Zuccotti Park—a small, privately owned park not far from the famed Wall Street statue of a charging bull. Protesters there convened the first Occupy Wall Street public assembly. Sympathizers donated free meals, and animated political discussions lasted until sunrise. On September 18, the newly named “occupiers” issued their first demands, calling for a more equitable distribution of wealth, banking reform, an end to housing foreclosures, and debt forgiveness for students, homeowners, and medical patients.

Occupy protesters identified themselves in a way that would forever change public discourse about wealth inequality, chanting “We Are the Ninety-Nine Percent.” This designation resonated across divides of class, gender, race, and even generations. While professional media and mainstream commentators largely mocked or trivialized the protests and protesters as ragtag, too young, and utterly unfocused, there was clear eloquence in the stories of evictions, housing insecurity, and bankruptcies that the Occupy protesters told. And there was widespread public recognition that people everywhere had been bruised or wounded by the cruel forces of the twenty-first-century global capitalist economy that had led to the devastating 2007–2008 economic crisis. Occupiers leveled sharp critiques of the neoliberal policies that deregulated banking and encouraged free-market capitalism rather than government oversight, and they did it with creative energy and elan. As one journalist and activist noted, “Occupy was kind of a mess, but it was a very exciting mess. It was this group of mostly young people who were full of energy and brilliant and kind of crazy willing to put themselves in the way.”

Occupy activists creatively challenged the neoliberal beliefs (embraced by both Democrats and Republicans) that maximizing shareholder value and privatizing public services and institutions would lead to economic growth. They coined the term “the one percent” to make clear how few people were benefiting—and how disproportionately—from the new global economy. This critique of the cruelties of neoliberalism was a thread that ran through the hotel strikes, the labor protests in Wisconsin, and the Occupy encampments that began spreading across the United States and around the world in 2011 and 2012.

By the sixth day, solidarity occupations had sprouted in Chicago, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Toronto, and other North American cities. Then Occupy encampments popped up in London, Amsterdam, Madrid, Istanbul, Milan, Algiers, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Sydney. Many labor unions expressed sympathy and support, directly linking the 2010 protests in Wisconsin to the Occupy protests. And a handful of politicians started to address the protests (even President Obama weighed in), acknowledging public frustrations with the lack of accountability on the part of financial institutions for the ongoing economic crisis. The Occupiers were part of a global struggle, and protesters across the United States expressed support for the anti-austerity movement in Spain that had drawn between six and eight million protesters in Madrid, Barcelona, and other Spanish cities.

     Occupiers used social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, to spread their message of economic discontent and the belief that “another world is possible.” By late October, six weeks after the movement began, there were protests by self-proclaimed Occupy supporters in 951 cities in 82 countries. Activists also used social media, especially videos of police violence against the protests, to build solidarity. In Oakland, California, for example, police used tear gas to break up an encampment outside City Hall, arresting 75 occupiers for “illegal lodging” and seriously injuring one protester. Occupiers then intensified their tactics. Occupy declared a Bank Transfer Day in protest of Bank of America. An estimated 600,000 Americans moved their money from commercial banks into credit unions, costing Bank of America billions of dollars in deposits. In response, the bank canceled its announced monthly fees on debit card transactions, one small victory that showed that even global behemoths could be forced to pay attention to the 99%.

Soon a wave of city-mandated evictions hit hundreds of Occupy encampments. On November 1, 2011, in the middle of the night, one thousand New York City police raided and cleared Zuccotti Park, destroying in the process the carefully collected library of donated books that Occupy librarians had curated and made freely available to all who came to the park. Thirty thousand marched in New York City to protest the evictions. But urban mayors across the country collaborated on ways to shut down their Occupy encampments, and by that winter most of the parks had been cleared.

Yet the Occupy protests continued. In spring of 2012, small Occupy groups began to stage anti-eviction protests of a kind not seen since the 1930s Depression-era actions. Occupy contingents led many unhoused people to squat in abandoned buildings—declaring the right of all human beings to adequate shelter. Occupy Our Homes sought to publicize the issue of predatory lending, noting that there were more empty homes than unhoused people in the United States. In related actions, students created Occupy chapters on college campuses and called for educational loan reforms and reduced tuition costs. Despite evictions, arrests, and legal battles, the Occupy movement redefined the very nature and forms of political protest and, in the process, injected egalitarian notions of economic democracy into the public dialogue. Occupy also served to inspire many political activists who went on from the 2011–2012 actions to become involved in subsequent progressive political campaigns. Over the next six years, intense debates would continue to rage nationally and internationally about the privileged status of the “1%” and the need for the “99%” to achieve some measure of social justice.

Tied to the issue of economic inequality and the struggles of low-paid workers (led and supported largely by workers of color) was another largely African American–led movement that focused on stopping police violence against Black people. A new national movement for justice and equality emerged out of the long-standing grievances of African American communities across the country about the injustices of systemic racism, wanton police violence, and rampant mass incarceration of Black and Latinx people (the two groups combined constituted 56 percent of the nation’s total of 2.3 million prisoners in 2017, the largest number of the incarcerated in any country in the world). The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement began in 2013 after a jury acquitted white vigilante George Zimmerman of the murder of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. BLM was begun by three queer, Black radical women (as they described themselves): Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometti, all of whom had previously been active in grassroots organizations and movements around racial issues. As the BLM organizers put it: “Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ humanity, our contributions to this society, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.” Arguing that Black liberation struggles had usually foregrounded the contributions of cis gender heterosexual Black men while obscuring the contributions of women, Black Lives Matter was founded “to center the leadership of women and queer and trans people.”

When teenager Mike Brown was murdered by policeman Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, the predominantly Black community near St. Louis exploded in protest. For over two weeks, thousands of protesters in Ferguson faced hostile police, arrests, and 5:00 p.m. curfews. As officers launched stun grenades and tear gas and fired rubber bullets, Fight for activists in the Ferguson McDonald’s provided a safe haven for protesters. Black Lives Matter activists organized a Freedom Ride with more than five hundred members joining the community protests in Ferguson. The movement thanked the people of Ferguson for putting “their bodies on the line day in and day out” and continuing to “show up for Black Lives.”

In the years that followed the Martin and Brown killings, a series of high-profile police shootings of innocent Black citizens, followed by the inevitable acquittals of the shooters, heightened the visibility of and the need for the BLM movement. Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was shot and killed by the police while playing with a toy gun in Cleveland. A woman with mental illness named Tanisha Anderson was killed in Cleveland by the police after her family called 911 for help. A twenty-seven-year-old transgender woman, Mya Hall, was slain by National Security Agency security staff outside its Maryland headquarters after mistakenly taking a restricted parkway exit and then trying to back out. Walter Scott was shot in the back by an officer who stopped him for a broken brake light in North Charleston, South Carolina. And Sandra Bland was found hanged in her jail cell after being stopped and arrested for an alleged traffic violation in Waller County, Texas, on her way from Chicago to start a new job.

Affirming the connection between Fight for and Black Lives Matter, McDonald’s worker and organizer Bleu Rainer said, “We are the same people. We are the people who are harassed by police when we’re coming home from our third job late at night. It’s the same struggle. It’s the same fight.” On April 15, 2015, Rainer marched in New York City along with thousands of Fight for activists from across the country wearing shirts that said both “Fight for ” and “I Can’t Breathe”—the last words of a street vendor on Staten Island named Eric Garner as he was being choked to death by an NYPD officer in the summer of 2014.

Scores of Black organizations across the country teamed up to launch the Movement for Black Lives. In 2015, two thousand activists gathered in Cleveland and drafted a Platform for Black Lives that called for divestment by local and federal governments in policing and investment in resources, infrastructure, and community control of public institutions in the Black community. It called for an end to “the war on Black people,” in the form of mass incarceration, criminalization, and police killings. Those who signed the platform advocated reparations not only for slavery but also for housing redlining, mass incarceration, and police surveillance of Black communities. The platform demanded economic justice for all and the reconstruction of the economy so that Black communities could not only have access but also collective ownership of economic resources, and community control of law, institutions, and policies. In short, the platform called for strategies that would enable poor Black Americans to claim real political and economic power and control over their lives and communities.

How did activists, protesters, reporters, and observers use Twitter as a tool during and after the Ferguson uprising?

Election night on November 4, 2008, was not a moment of unalloyed celebration for all of the members of Barack Obama’s progressive coalition. Even as the country’s first Black president was being elected, California voters passed Proposition 8, an amendment to the state constitution that would outlaw same-sex marriage in the nation’s most populous state. It was the latest legal twist in an ongoing struggle over marriage rights. In 2004, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom had conducted the first legal same-sex marriages on the steps of City Hall. The California courts annulled those marriages, citing Proposition 22 (the statewide initiative passed in 2000 by an overwhelming margin), which defined marriage as being between one man and one woman. When California’s Supreme Court struck down Proposition 22 in May 2008, upwards of twenty thousand same-sex couples in California were married. The backlash from Christian right groups was swift and fierce, as they rapidly mobilized to get enough signatures to put Proposition 8 on the ballot for that fall’s election. Opponents rechristened the proposition as Prop H8 (“hate”) and launched an unsuccessful campaign to defeat it. The California Marriage Protection Act passed that fall and was signed into law.

Protests and court challenges to the law immediately followed, along with other legal challenges to the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled on challenges to DOMA and Proposition 8. In United States v. Windsor, the court decided in favor of eighty-three-year-old Edie Windsor, whose forty-year relationship with her wife, Thea Spyer (who had died in 2009), was invalidated by DOMA, making Edie ineligible for federal estate tax exemptions routinely granted to surviving spouses. The two had legally married in Canada in 2007, and their marriage was recognized by the state of New York, where they resided, following a 2008 court decision ordering New York State agencies to recognize marriages legally performed in other jurisdictions. Still, because their union was not recognized by the federal government, which established federal tax policy, Windsor took her case to the Supreme Court. That same year, the court ruled in favor of two same-sex couples who had argued that Proposition 8 deprived them of their constitutional right to equal protection under the law under the Fourteenth Amendment. This decision returned marriage equality to California, but it was not yet national law.  In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges (a case brought by dozens of same-sex couples across the country) that all bans on marriage equality were unconstitutional because they denied same-sex couples their Fourteenth  Amendment rights, as well as the right to due process guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. Same-sex marriage then became legal across the United States.

The marriage equality movement represented the interests of some LGBTQ activists, but left other pressing issues unaddressed, including employment discrimination, violence against transgender men and women, and high rates of poverty and suicide in the LGBTQ community. But the arguments in terms of rights, whose origins could be traced back to the rights-conscious mood of the 1960s, were hard to ignore. And the legal decisions affirming marriage equality paved the way for knocking down other obstacles to affirming equal rights for LGBTQ parents. In March 2016, for example, the Supreme Court struck down Mississippi’s sixteen-year-old law banning same-sex couples from adopting children. In so doing, the court affirmed that states cannot discriminate against LGBTQ parents. Yet some states have continued to use religious liberty rights under the First Amendment as a loophole to turn away LGBTQ people seeking to adopt.

Despite decades of advances in women’s rights, sexual violence in the workplace and schools remains endemic in the United States and around the world. During the 2010s, young women studying on college campuses, working in restaurants and garment factories, and serving in the military galvanized a new wave of protests against sexual violence. In 2013, a new generation of women college students erupted in anger over the sexual violence that had become endemic to much college life, and over the refusal of campus administrators to take it seriously. Though the numbers of reported rapes had declined dramatically after the 1970s, aspects of twenty-first-century popular youth culture amplified misogynist attitudes through widespread graphic depictions of sexual violence against women. A 2011 survey by the Department of Justice found that 1.3 million women were raped annually in the United States, 80 percent of whom were under twenty-five. One in four U.S. college women reported experiencing sexual assault or attempted sexual assault while on campus, while one in five U.S. women reported experiencing rape or attempted rape at some point in their lives. Though many had questioned the existence of “rape culture” when 1970s activists first coined the term, by the twenty-first century, the idea of rape culture came roaring back. Even mainstream media outlets began to use the term.

The student movement began at Yale in 2011, after sixteen Yale students and alumnae filed Title IX complaints with the Department of Education, citing a hostile environment after fraternity members marched in front of women’s dorms chanting “No Means Yes and Yes means Anal.” The movement was spearheaded by then undergraduate, later Yale law student, Alexandra Brodsky, who created an organization called Know Your IX to acquaint students with their rights under federal law. Similar suits were launched by students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Amherst College, Tufts University, University of Southern California, and other colleges and universities around the country.

In March 2013, Congress passed and President Obama signed the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act (Campus SaVE Act). This act gave the federal government the authority to require that all colleges and universities receiving federal funds must investigate sexual assaults in a timely fashion; create training programs for students, faculty, and staff; and enhance support for survivors. The bill also mandated that LGBTQ+ students be treated with respect when they reported incidents of harassment and assault. The bill also changed definitions of rape so that men could also be seen as victims of rape. By the end of 2013, students had filed thirteen hundred Title IX cases, arguing that sexual assault and harassment on campus constituted a form of sex discrimination and created a hostile environment. This spate of federal Title IX complaints triggered full-scale Department of Education investigations at fifty-five colleges and universities across the country.

Women’s protests against sexual violence and harassment spread beyond college campuses. An estimated one in three women serving in the military had been victims of sexual assault. Servicewomen denounced a culture pervaded by intimidation and attacks by fellow soldiers and sailors and commanding officers, and pressured President Obama to respond. He gave military leaders one year to reduce rates of sexual assault.

The student and military protests dovetailed with a decade-long campaign begun by African American community activist Tarana Burke, who coined the phrase “MeToo” in 2006 to give voice to women survivors of color like herself, whose stories of sexual assault were often not believed. Her point was “to not only show the world how widespread and pervasive sexual violence is, but also to let other survivors know they are not alone.”

In 2017, actress Alyssa Milano would resurrect the phrase and call on women to tell their stories via social media, using the Twitter hashtag name “#Metoo.” Twelve million women would respond, telling stories of harassment and assault committed by powerful men in a range of public and private institutions. It was as if the floodgates had been opened. Investigative journalists would bolster the work of activists by publishing numerous accounts of unethical and even downright criminal behavior by movie studio and corporate executives, actors, athletes, scientists, and tenured college professors, which sparked investigations, firings, and lawsuits. “What the viral campaign did,” Burke would say, was “create hope. It creates inspiration. People need hope and inspiration desperately.” And so the campaign would continue to unfold. Despite Burke’s optimism, many institutions, corporations, and the U.S. military would continue to struggle to design and enforce codes of conduct that protected sexual assault survivors while also providing due process for the accused.

These important reform efforts by women, African Americans, and LGBTQ+ people, who fought tenaciously for dignity and equality during the Obama years, had succeeded in realizing important gains and successes for each group and for the nation as a whole. But, as we will see, as the 2016 presidential election loomed, the country continued to be stuck between Obama’s initial professed expressions of hope and change for a more unified America and a darker, more malevolent political and ideological vision that harkened back to a deep reservoir of racial and xenophobic rage that had effectively blunted past efforts to realize this country’s democratic possibilities. 

As Obama approached the end of his second term, his heir apparent seemed to be Hillary Clinton, a former first lady, senator from New York, and secretary of state under Obama. Many in the Democratic Party felt strongly that it was Clinton’s turn to lead the party and the nation. Yet many within a rising left wing of the Democratic electorate were not happy with a potential Clinton nomination. Hillary Clinton could not escape her association with the presidency of her husband, Bill Clinton, who was a prime actor in moving the Democratic Party away from its legacy as the party of the New Deal and the Great Society and toward a moderate, neoliberal position. She was opposed in the Democratic Party primaries by Bernie Sanders, an independent socialist senator from Vermont. Throughout the primaries, thousands of people young and old—many inspired by the politics of the Occupy movement five years earlier—turned out to Sanders’s rallies as he called for a system that worked for all Americans, “not just the billionaire class.” By the end of the Democratic primaries, this unlikely candidate, who took no corporate funding and demonstrated the power of using social media to solicit small donations from millions of individuals, had amassed over thirteen million primary votes to Hillary Clinton’s seventeen million. Clinton received the Democratic nomination, but Sanders’s success in the primaries suggested deep divisions in the Democratic Party. His campaign had drawn the progressive wing of the party toward issues such as a minimum wage, free college tuition, lower prescription drug prices, and “Medicare for All,” many of which had come to the fore in the political and ideological struggles by progressives over the previous half dozen years. This was a significant shift away from the “new Democrat” centrism that openly embraced neoliberal, anti-government ideas, launched by Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

In the November presidential election, the divided Democratic Party faced an unlikely Republican opponent, the self-proclaimed New York City real estate mogul and reality television star, Donald Trump. Trump’s openly racist speeches, buffoonery, debauched lifestyle, misogyny, and political extremism made him seem to many Americans to be unfit for the office of the presidency. But in many parts of the American heartland, his showmanship, carefully constructed populism, and open enthusiasm for white supremacy played very well to the conservative, white, Tea Party base of the Republican Party. In the primaries, Trump systematically vanquished a large field of candidates pursuing the Republican nomination, including mainstream figures in the party.  Although pollsters and pundits predicted a decisive Clinton victory, key swing states, including the crucial (and once reliably Democratic) Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, narrowly voted for Trump. His candidacy successfully exploited deep-seated unhappiness among many white, working-class voters, who were fed up with the huge federal bailouts for big financial firms and little if any economic relief directed to average citizens like themselves. Trump’s populist stance also resonated with working communities critical of globalization, neoliberalism, and the perceived elitism of many centrist Democrats. If Obama’s election had represented hope, Trump’s reflected despair among some working people that meaningful change was possible. Although Clinton managed to win the total national popular vote by three million votes, Trump earned a comfortable electoral vote majority—306 to 232—and was elected president.

The 2016 presidential election revealed a nation deeply and seemingly irreconcilably divided on regional, political, ethnic/racial, cultural, and economic lines. The Obama presidency had witnessed unprecedented actions by young people, women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community to challenge systemic key issues of racism, sexism, economic inequality, and environmental degradation. The Trump candidacy and 2016 presidential election also mobilized and empowered conservative extremists, including the white power movement, anti-abortionists, and climate-change deniers. The 2016 campaign rhetoric had deepened the nation’s endemic racial and social divisions. Those divisions would be further intensified in the first two years of the Trump presidency, in large part because of the explosive claims that were made almost immediately after the election about Russian efforts to improperly influence the election’s outcome via voter database hacking, social media disinformation campaigns, and the collection and sale of private information about social media users.