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What happened to the American left after the sixties? Whole bookshelves groan under the weight of histories of the sixties, and both the Old Left and the New Left have been richly and extensively studied. Yet, while significant waves of activism have punctuated the history of the last forty years, the story of American radicalism in recent decades remains almost untold.

That may be, at least in part, because the story is such a difficult one to tell—not for lack of radical endeavors over this time period, but because of their profusion. It’s not simply that there’s no single organization or political tendency or leader that could plausibly represent the larger left. The most significant dynamic in American radicalism in the period after the sixties has been a proliferation of movements, causes, and political identities. These are so numerous that listing them all would be tedious: the landscape of the contemporary left includes feminisms of many forms and hues; radical movements for racial justice as varied as the communities of color that have given rise to them; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer radicalisms, evolving and complex; radical forms of environmentalism, from deep ecology to the climate justice movement; labor-based radicalisms and multiple strains of anarchism and socialism. At times, it can seem like the number of recent radicalisms stands in inverse proportion to their overall influence, for on the whole, the period since the 1960s has been inhospitable for the left. In the face of this tangled multiplicity of movements and political initiatives, it’s perhaps not surprising that there have been few attempts to survey the post-sixties radical landscape as a whole, to tease out broad historical patterns from the plethora of organizations, mobilizations, and events.

This book represents one telling of the tale, a distillation of more than thirty years of observation, reporting, and organizing on the frontlines of many of these movements. The story of American radicalism is told here through the lens of direct action: the fierce, showy tradition of disruptive protest employed by many of the era’s most distinctive and influential movements. Direct action was far from the only approach used by radical movements throughout this era, and there’s no claim here that it’s always the best or most productive one. It has, though, consistently served as a laboratory for political experimentation and innovation, and as an arena for grappling with many of the big challenges facing progressive movements more generally: how to win meaningful victories and sustain communities of resistance in a rightward-shifting political climate; how to build movements that don’t replicate the very power dynamics they seek to challenge, especially in matters of race and gender; how to create effective political alliances that respect the voice and autonomy of all partners; how to inspire vision, hope, and action in hard times.

“Direct action” can refer to a huge variety of efforts to create change outside the established mechanisms of government—it’s a slippery and imprecise term, much debated by the movements that use it. Protest marches, boycotts, and strikes all are, or can be, forms of direct action; the same is true of picket lines, sit-ins, and human blockades. The term itself dates back about a century, having first been widely used by the early twentieth-century Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known colloquially as the Wobblies, the liveliest and most fiercely anti-capitalist labor movement in US history. “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common,” the IWW’s manifesto began, and the organization always considered the complete abolition of capitalism to be its ultimate goal. Toward that end the Wobblies called for “industrial action directly by, for, and of the workers themselves, without the treacherous aid of labor misleaders or scheming politicians,” action that encompassed everything from work slowdowns and factory occupations to industrial sabotage.

It is the black civil rights movement of the 1950s and the 1960s that serves as the most important touchstone for the direct-action movements of recent decades, however. From the Montgomery bus boycott and the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins to the Freedom Rides and the march over Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, the civil rights movement’s acts of resistance to racial segregation and white supremacy have become so emblematic of transformative collective action that every major movement since has referenced them in some way. The mythic status acquired by the civil rights movement over time cemented its role as model and inspiration, even as persistent racial divisions on the left complicated claims to its legacy. But the basic vision of direct action outlined by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his letter from Birmingham jail has shaped its use ever since: “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension,” King famously wrote, “that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”

Direct action is most closely associated with movements of the left, but there is no necessary correlation between a movement’s use of direct action and its politics: disruptive protest can be employed to further all kinds of agendas, some downright reactionary. Most dramatically, the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue organized a massive and sustained campaign of blockades outside abortion clinics in the late 1980s, involving more than 20,000 arrests. The guide that many of these blockaders used, anti-abortion activist Joseph M. Scheidler’s 1985 Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion, directly echoed the catalog of protest methods found in political scientist Gene Sharp’s 1973 classic The Politics of Nonviolent Action, a foundational text of direct-action organizing. But the relative rarity of right-wing direct action is testament to the democratic and anti-authoritarian values that typically pervade the practice: in theory the tactics of direct action might be politically neutral, but in the actual world of grassroots organizing, they have been anything but.

This book, in any case, doesn’t try to catalog the variety of ways that direct action has been used in recent decades. Instead, it follows the unfolding of a specific, linked, and messy set of political experiments. The movements profiled in this book embraced a particular set of organizing practices, deeply shaped by feminism and queer radicalism, in response to a broad sense of crisis and retrenchment after the 1960s. Of course they wanted to remake American society, but many concluded that they first had to remake the American left, much of which seemed dispirited and directionless as the grand hopes of the sixties receded. The new movements rejected hierarchical organizational structures, traditional leadership models, and rigid ideologies, and they sought forms of activism and political engagement that could preserve rather than subsume difference and multiplicity. Women, especially queer women, played crucial roles in this process of political reinvention, infusing this new radicalism with feminist practices and values through the very process of movement-building.

Some of the movements chronicled in this account have had enormous impact: ACT UP saved millions of lives by hastening the development of key AIDS medications and expanding access to their use. Others, though, only added a modicum of political friction as policies they opposed moved forward: though they had a variety of important political impacts, the global justice movement and Occupy Wall Street no more stopped the forward march of neoliberalism than the antiwar movement stopped the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Protest actions that felt important and empowering to participants sometimes had few repercussions outside the small world of activism, while others that seemed futile at the time had far-reaching effects that weren’t felt for years.

The book begins with an ending and ends with a beginning. It starts with the last major protest against the Vietnam War, which was also the largest and most ambitious direct-action protest in US history: a remarkable yet nearly forgotten attempt by antiwar radicals to shut down the federal government through nonviolent action in May 1971. This protest so badly rattled the Nixon administration that it ordered federal troops to sweep up protesters by the thousands, in the largest mass arrests in US history. This Mayday 1971 protest also pointed the way toward a new style and structure of radical organizing that movement after movement would embrace and adapt in the decades to come. The book concludes with another watershed moment more than forty years later, when protests against the August 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri grew into a nationwide movement for black lives, animated by disruptive direct action and an intersectional politics rooted in the feminism of queer women of color. Along the way, the book traces deep connections between movements usually viewed in isolation, and considers how activists have grappled with a political landscape divided by race and dominated by the right.

To weave together this story, much has been left out: the labor movement, for instance, mostly embattled and declining over this time period but with interesting pockets of promising insurgency, receives only glancing attention. Race is central to this narrative, but it’s largely considered in black and white; important traditions of organizing and resistance in other communities of color, from Native American organizing around land rights, environmental justice, and climate justice to the direct-action immigrant rights movement of recent decades, are only mentioned briefly. All stories are of necessity partial renderings of complex realities, this one especially so.

Those who have taken part in direct action know that it’s a profoundly embodied and often personally transformative experience. Organizer Brad Will, a builder of bridges between radical movements until his 2006 murder by right-wing paramilitaries in Mexico, captured it well in a 2000 interview. Direct action, he said, “is like a conduit, like electricity. It moves through you, not just into you. You’re not a battery, you’re a wire.” The movements that have sought to harness this kind of energy in recent decades and channel it into sweeping change have never come close to achieving their full aims. But through direct action, these movements have won more victories and catalyzed more social transformation than one might expect given their relatively modest size. Together they have fashioned a new kind of American radicalism along the way. This is a story about dealing with defeat and marginalization, but its ultimate message—for those who share the values of the movements profiled here—is one of hope: no matter how long the odds, with smart organizing, and the right tools, we can win more than we imagine.