Why Is There No Anti-War Movement in the US?
Trump’s war on Iran is unpopular, dangerous, and escalating. But without organizing, public anger will not stop it
Donald Trump’s war on Iran is very unpopular. As pollster G. Elliot Morris notes, it is the most unpopular a US war has ever been when it started. And “with just 38% of Americans in favor, support for bombing Iran is lower than retrospective support for the war in Iraq was in 2014.”
Why then has there been so little collective protest against the US-Israel offensive? Answering this question is not easy. What follows are seven hypotheses rather than definitive conclusions. But exploring why we’re lacking an anti-war movement today can help us move to actually start building one. And for the sake of Iranians, the Middle East, and working people in the US, we’d better do so as soon as possible.
1) Americans Feel Powerless
A key reason why so many young people in the 1960s threw themselves into the fight against US military involvement in Vietnam was that the civil rights movement had recently demonstrated the power of mass action. As Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)’s founding manifesto in 1962 put it, “the Southern struggle against racial bigotry … compelled most of us from silence to activism.” Looking back, one participant recalled that such examples of success “gave the feeling that you could actually make a difference, that you needed to take a stand.”
Now the biggest obstacle we face in our country is a pervasive sense of powerlessness. SDS leader Bernardine Dohrn was right to underscore the difference between that era and our current moment: “The issue holding us back today, to me, is the idea that what you do won’t make a difference.”
To overcome this feeling of resignation, we need more inspiring examples of successful struggles. Minnesota’s successful mass resistance against ICE, for example, has begun to energize activism nationwide. The challenge now is to find and scale up winnable bottom-up campaigns, like getting our schools to break with ICE or getting millions of consumers to leave companies like OpenAI that are enabling Trump’s war machine. Proving in practice that we have power in smaller battles can inspire millions to join the fight against this administration’s worst horrors at home and abroad.
2) People Are Hoping the War Ends Quickly
Like so many others, I wake up every morning and hope to see a headline suggesting that the always-mercurial Trump has decided to call a quick victory in Iran, like he did in Venezuela. At least, in that case further atrocities against civilians would be halted.
Given the administration’s disinterest in trying to manufacture consent for this war and the obvious political risks of rising gas prices, it’s been hard to believe that Trump would so willingly risk his presidency — to say nothing of the lives of Iranians and US service members — on a long, armed intervention with no clear endgame. Nevertheless, the war continues to deepen.
The fact that Trump moved so quickly and with so little regard for public opinion has left many of us in a state of shock. Whereas George W. Bush spent a year trying to convince us to invade Iraq — sparking a deliberative process into which mass protests could intervene — Trump’s speed and dismissal of public opinion has created little space for Americans to break out of spectator mode. This helps explain the paradox of why an exceptionally unpopular war has so far been met with exceptionally little mass protest. But insofar as the war continues, expect increasing numbers to start taking collective action.
And even if Trump does call victory in the next few days or weeks, this is unlikely to put a stop to his imperial ambitions. We’ll still need to ramp up our anti-war agitation to stop the administration’s push for regime change in Cuba, its continued funding of Israel, its belligerence towards China — and to make the 2028 presidential election, in part, a referendum on runaway military spending, US imperial wars, and US support for the genocidal Israeli state.
3) Trump is Doing So Many Horrible Things
In contrast with George W. Bush — whose imperialist exploits were his singular focus — it is easy to get overwhelmed by Trump’s across-the-board attacks and it is difficult to quickly respond to every new outrage. Our side’s organized forces have been stretched thin. Personally, I’ve been spending about ten volunteer hours daily for the last month helping support the new Schools Drop ICE campaign; I’ve not had a single extra hour to organize around another issue lately, limiting my ability to participate in other essential efforts like organizing against this war.
The good news is that the upcoming No Kings protests on March 28 and the day of disruption on May 1 provide excellent opportunities to bring together all our anti-Trump demands and struggles. Opposition to war is likely to be a major focus of those actions.
4) People Confuse Mobilizing with Organizing
Even if the upcoming No Kings and May Day actions are massive and denounce imperial domination from Iran to Cuba to Palestine, this doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve rebuilt a powerful movement against the Trump regime generally or its wars in particular. A movement is a movement to the extent that ordinary people organize between protests — in other words, when they get actively involved to win over others to the cause.
One of the challenges of our current era is that digital technologies make it much easier to get existing supporters into the streets without much organizational infrastructure or person-to-person outreach. In other words, social media facilitates mobilizing. But the flip side is that big protests don’t demonstrate as much power as they used to and their preparation doesn’t build the same type of on-the-ground relationships and new leaders that movements depend on for their power.
SDS leader Mark Rudd is right that today’s young people, “lack instruction on how to do the hard work of person-to-person organizing. Instead, contemporary youth are left with the iconographic photos of protests from the sixties — and little understanding of the work that inspired such protests in the first place.”
Angela Davis spells this out even more clearly:
Demonstrations [are] supposed to demonstrate the potential power of movements. … But these days we tend to think of that process of rendering the movement visible as the very substance of the movement itself. If this is the case, then the millions who go home after the demonstration have concluded that they do not necessarily feel responsible to further build support for the cause.
That’s why we should look at March 28 and May 1, not as one-off protests, but as mechanisms to recruit, onboard, and train as many people as possible into ongoing campaigns.
5) Sectarianism Has Helped Marginalize Anti-War Activity
Rather than build the broadest and deepest possible opposition to US military aid and interventions abroad, too much anti-war activity in recent years has leaned into alienating, excessively radical rhetoric and slogans, while tying widely supported demands against war to unjustified and unhelpful romanticization of any and all “anti-imperialist” forces. Consistently opposing imperialism does not require justifying Hamas’s killing of civilians or the Islamic Republic’s repression of pro-democracy activists.
And instead of relentlessly focusing their fire on politicians like Trump, Biden, and Schumer who have pushed or enabled atrocities abroad, a bizarrely high amount of activist energy has gone towards calling out elected officials like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, even though she has never voted for US military aid to Israel and has vociferously opposed the war in Iran.
Unfortunately, the impact and continuity of many righteous encampments in solidarity with Palestine were undercut by provocative rhetoric that cynical opponents could easily misrepresent, by an excessive focus on activist “security culture,” and by the absence of concerted efforts to win over and mobilize majorities on campuses. Intense repression against these valiant but relatively isolated efforts chilled campus organizing. Especially since students are often a vanguard of anti-war and anti-authoritarian organizing, reviving a culture of mass politics on colleges remains a key task.
Reviving an Anti-War Movement
What steps can we take to help revive a powerful anti-war movement in the US? Most immediately, each of us — and each of the organizations we belong to — can commit not only to attending the March 28 No Kings demonstrations, but to going all in to reach out to our neighbors, co-workers, fellow students, and co-congregants to join as well. You can take the opportunity to ask them what they feel about the Iran war or ICE; note how crazy it is that the US spends nearly a trillion yearly on war while everyday people can’t get by at home; and then pivot to a friendly ask for them to join you at the rally.
And don’t just talk to the people who you know are already left-leaning. Most Americans are strongly against this war and just don’t know what to do about it. It’s time to reach widely and to break beyond our echo chambers. That’s what makes a movement real. And what can set into motion the type of mass non-violent disruption at work, school, and beyond that Trump and the war machine can’t afford to ignore.
A second concrete step you can take is to support the QuitGPT campaign. This boycott has taken on an added level of urgency — and anti-war content — after the Pentagon two weeks ago refused to accept Anthropic’s contract stipulations that its AI not be used for mass surveillance or fully autonomous military attacks. Unburdened by any principle beyond profitmaking, OpenAI immediately stepped into the breach and signed a contract with the Pentagon that, as one top company executive who resigned last Saturday put it, “was rushed without the guardrails defined.”
Just as Tesla Takedown succeeded in forcing Elon Musk out of the White House, so too can QuitGPT punish OpenAI for its enabling of a US military machine that is massacring grade school girls in Iran and hurtling the world towards catastrophe. Unlike so many online boycotts, this is an organized effort with a measurable impact that people can get involved in to help scale up. According to QuitGPT organizers, over 4 million people have already taken part in the boycott.
Trump wants us to believe we’re powerless to stop him. But the reality is that this is a widely unpopular regime waging one of the most unpopular wars in US history. As body counts, oil prices, and US taxpayer costs continue to rise, Americans are going to be increasingly looking for ways to stop the bloodshed. Mass collective action in that direction is long overdue.
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One important part of ending US war and imperialism is building a strong voice for our vision in the halls of power. Claire Valdez is a fantastic DSA member and union organizer running for Congress in New York City — she could really use your financial support. (And if you live in the city join us for a labor fundraiser with Claire on March 28.)
ICE is the main arm of Trump’s war at home. Join the Schools Drop ICE campaign to force our colleges to break with ICE and its corporate enablers.
If you’re not a member of DSA yet, what are you waiting for? Join here.
I'm literally attending a "No Iran War" protest today. Believe me, The Resistance is ramping up the anti-war efforts.
Good discussion. I would add one factor: the nature of the opposing parties. Anti-Vietnam War protesters (of which I was one) recognized that the Vietnamese were fighting a nationalist, anti-imperialist war. First against the French; then against us. They were the "good guys." Here, while I don't support this war, I suspect there are many on the left for whom it is not as clear that Iran is a "good guy" in the same way. If true, this would contribute to the difficulty of organizing.