Learning from the Tea Party: The US Indivisible Movement as Countermovement in the Era of Trump

In this article, I chart the origins of the Indivisible movement in the United States, which began online as a response to the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in November of 2016. The Indivisible movement’s founders explicitly modeled their countermovement structurally after the Republican Tea Party that arose to obstruct Obama’s agenda, consciously using the Tea Party’s combination of decentralized organizing made possible by the Internet, its focus on local political races, and its general willingness to work with an established political party. I consider what the case of Indivisible has to tell us about some of the dynamics that movements in the Internet age will likely encounter, namely, the importance of virality and branding for mobilization and social media’s capacity for aggregating the like-minded. I conclude that while it is hard to predict whether Indivisible will be successful in obstructing the conservative Trump agenda, the movement bears watching as an example of movement mobilization in the Internet age.