Sidney Milkis

Has the presidency of Donald Trump spawned a new social movement? What are the core beliefs of his supporters? And how will that affect the presidential election in November? Join us for a conversation with Sid Tarrrow (Cornell University) and Megan Ming Francis (University of Washington), moderated by Sid Milkis, whose book Rivalry and Reform explores the relationships between presidents and social movements.

As we close in on an historic 2020 election, this two-part program begins with an analysis of the state of the current presidential race and then turns to history for an examination of past presidential elections held during times of crisis.

“This clearly has a great deal to do with the economic hardship. How could it not? This is the worst hardship disaster we’ve had since the Great Depression,” Sidney Milkis, a political science professor at the University of Virginia who studies social movements in politics, said of the motivation for the protests. “But the protests, I think, go beyond economic necessity.”

The House impeachment and Senate trial of President Trump—only the third episode of its kind in American history—raise a number of fascinating and troubling questions about American democracy. Did the Trump administration’s actions warrant Congress’ use of this rarely invoked constitutional authority? Did the hope of many scholars and pundits that impeachment would educate the American people about the dangers of executive power disintegrate into partisan theater? How did the Trump impeachment compare with the impeachment investigations of Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton? How will the impeachment and acquittal of Trump affect his and future presidents' exercise of executive power? How will the Trump impeachment—the first to charge a president running for reelection—affect the 2020 election?  

Sidney Milkis and Daniel Tichenor rightly note that the study of movements and politics sometimes falls between disciplinary and subdisciplinary cracks in sociology and political science. Their most welcome book is a powerful argument to jump the cracks and focus on interactions between movements and more conventional institutional politics, particularly the presidency. Reading broadly in social movement theory, and deeply in the cases they present, the authors have opened a wide area of inquiry and provided a substantial first step that is sure to inspire and inform a new generation of scholars.