Why the Women's March on Washington has already failed

This confused protest rally is deflating the anti-Trump resistance before it even begins

The march has been a battle from the start.
(Image credit: REUTERS/Joshua Lott)

Demonstrations serve a useful function in a democracy — but only when they have clarity of purpose. That is not the case with the Women's March on Washington, which will be held in Washington, D.C., the day after Donald Trump is sworn in. Instead the march is shaping up to be a feel-good exercise in search of a cause. And if it fizzles and fails, it'll make it harder, not easier, to fight genuine rights violations under the Trump presidency.

Plans to bring together women from all walks of life started surfacing on social media the morning after the election — partly out of disappointment that Hillary Clinton didn't get elected America's first female president, and partly out of revulsion that a loud-mouthed sexist who berated women did. Well more than 100,000 people have signed up on Facebook and other venues, at least a good portion of whom had already booked hotels and flights to D.C. in anticipation of Hillary's historic inauguration. Whether the Women's March will turn into the "biggest mass mobilization yet that America has seen in response to a presidential inauguration," as Vox's Emil Crockett has predicted, remains to be seen. But even if it does, the more meaningful test isn't how many people show up, but whether they have the seriousness of purpose to be taken seriously.

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Shikha Dalmia

Shikha Dalmia is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University studying the rise of populist authoritarianism.  She is a Bloomberg View contributor and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and she also writes regularly for The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. She considers herself to be a progressive libertarian and an agnostic with Buddhist longings and a Sufi soul.