ABSTRACT
Resistance is activism bred by social movements to reject existing power hierarchies. "Catalyzing movements", such as the 1960s civil rights movement, build a mass base and help to midwife converging movements of universalizing resistance in wave eras, where the atomization and individualization of people give way to mass interlinked communities of resistance. Universal resistance bursts out like prairie fires in "wave eras". These are periods marked by the eruption of many single- and multi-issue movements. The populists were the "Occupy Movement" of the 19th century. The populist period was a "wave era" because farmers' groups helped to catalyze, and sometimes united with, radical labor unions, such as the Knights of Labor and the American Railway Union (ARU). An unfortunate consequence of the 1960s wave was the rise of the New Right, whose own universalizing trends began in the 1970s and now threaten a system transformation of a very different stripe, with President Donald Trump taking power.
