A letter to America: what Scotland's post-2014 experience suggested to US progressives in 2017
On 20 January 2017 Donald Trump was sworn in as President of the United States, and protests took place in Washington and other cities. In Scotland, some independence campaigners wrote open letters to American progressives, comparing their shock with the mood in the Yes movement on the morning of 19 September 2014. The comparison was a loose one, but it raises a real question in political science: what do movements do after a defeat, and what tends to work?
Two defeats, two contexts
The differences are obvious. The Scottish referendum was a single decision on a constitutional question, lost by 55% to 45% on an 85% turnout. The 2016 US presidential election was a contest between candidates, decided by the Electoral College although Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by about 2.9 million votes. A referendum defeat leaves a movement without an obvious next date; a presidential defeat comes with a fixed electoral calendar, starting with the midterm elections two years later.
What the Scottish letters emphasised was the emotional similarity: a campaign that had energised people who were new to politics, followed by disbelief at the result. Their main message was practical: anger at the result was understandable, but what had changed Scottish politics after 2014 was not protest but organisation.
What happened in Scotland after 2014
The record supports part of that claim. In the weeks after the No vote, membership of the SNP rose from around 25,000 to over 100,000, making it, by some counts, the third-largest party in the UK by membership. The Scottish Greens and other pro-independence organisations also grew. Many people who had first become active in local Yes groups joined parties, stood for office or turned their groups into permanent networks. At the general election of May 2015, the SNP won 56 of the 59 Scottish seats at Westminster, a transformation that few had predicted a year before.
Other factors contributed, including the collapse of the Liberal Democrat vote across the UK and Labour's position in Scotland after campaigning alongside the Conservatives in Better Together. Even so, the conversion of a referendum campaign's volunteers into party members and candidates was one of the most rapid in recent British history.
What happened in the United States
American progressives followed a broadly similar course, though for their own reasons. In December 2016 a group of former congressional staff published Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda, which advised local groups to focus on their own members of Congress, using tactics they had seen the Tea Party movement employ after 2009. Thousands of local Indivisible groups registered in the following months. The Women's March of 21 January 2017, the day after the inauguration, was among the largest single days of protest in US history.
At the 2018 midterm elections, the Democrats gained around forty seats in the House of Representatives and took control of the chamber, with a historically high turnout for a midterm. Researchers have argued about how much of this was due to new local organisations and how much to the usual swing against a president's party, but most agree that the organising surge played a part, especially in suburban districts.
What the comparison can and cannot show
- Organisation outlasts mood. In both countries, the movements that sustained their influence were those that built structures: local groups with regular meetings, membership lists and links to parties.
- Elections offer a focus. The SNP's 2015 result came from a general election that took place eight months after the referendum. Movements without an imminent vote have a harder time keeping volunteers.
- Success creates new problems. Rapid growth brought internal disagreements over strategy in both cases, from the timing of a second referendum in Scotland to the direction of the Democratic Party in the US.
- Analogies are limited. The Scottish question is constitutional, whereas American politics after 2016 was a contest over policy and leadership within a stable constitutional order.
Why such letters were written
Open letters to other countries were a recurring form in the independence movement, from letters to England in 2014 (see our article) to statements on Catalonia in 2017. They served to place the Scottish question in an international frame and to present the movement as outward-looking. Their value as evidence lies less in the advice they gave than in what they show about how campaigners understood their own defeat.
Sources
- Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2016, popular vote totals.
- Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda, December 2016.
- Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressman, crowd counting of the January 2017 Women's March, Washington Post, February 2017.
- House of Commons Library, General Election 2015 results briefing.
- Clerk of the US House of Representatives, statistics of the congressional election of 2018.