Travkina Natalya Mikhailovna – ScD in Political Sciences, Principal Re-searcher, Head of the Center for Domestic Policy Research at the Institute for the US and Canadian Studies RAS (ISKRAN)
The evolution of social protest movements in the United States, which occurred after the financial and economic crisis of 2007–2009, is analyzed. This crisis, at that time the deepest since the Great Depression of the 1930s, spawned a wave of protest movements of a broad political spectrum, from the far left to the far right. Financial and economic crisis of 2007–2009 emphasized the trend towards growing socio-economic inequality in the distribution of income and wealth in the United States, contrasting the top 1% of people with the rest of the 99% of American society. The most prominent movement of the early years of the 2010s was the Occupy Wall Street move-ment, which became the model for all subsequent protest movements and protest actions. This movement gradually transformed into a movement for democratic socialism, which played a very important role in the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. In the context of the growing polarization of American society, protest movements by the end of the 2010s began to be used by the leading political parties of the United States – Democratic and Republican – in the course of presidential campaigns. In the 2020 presidential campaign, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement played a key role in the victory of the Democratic Party. The mass protests that swept the United States in the summer of 2020 as a revolt against racism and racial injustice in American society, in which 15 to 26 million peo-ple took part, were the largest social protests in American history. In parallel, the formation of a radical right-wing conservative movement, which began in 2009 as the Tea Party movement, which ensured the victory of the Republican Party in the 2010 midterm elections, which made it impossible for the B. Obama Democratic administration to implement large-scale socio-economic reforms in 2011–2017. The right-wing conservative movement Tea Party in the mid-2010s became the basis of D. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. The potential of this movement was fully manifested during the events of January 6, 2021 in Washington, when D. Trump made an unsuccessful attempt to stay in power by storming the Capitol, which was qualified as an “insurrection” in the United States. There is now every reason to believe that during the 2023–2024 election cycle, both BLM and Make America Great Again movements will play an important role in determining the winner of the 2024 presidential race.
growing inequality in the distribution of income and wealth in the United States, the polarization of the US political system, the B. Sanders movement for democratic socialism, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, the Make America Great Again movement,
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