All The Rage

The surge in activism on the political left is women-led, confrontational— and angry. Is it here to stay?

- Rebecca Johnson

When she arrived for our interview, fresh off the train from D.C., wheeled suitcase at her side, Ana Maria Archila (one of “the very rude elevator screamers,” per Donald Trump) looked anything but angry. With her wide cheekbones, warm smile, colorful scarf, and dangly earrings, the 39-year-old seemed like your kid’s favorite preschool teacher. Could this really be the ferocious activist who, along with Maria Gallagher, 23, famously buttonholed Senator Jeff Flake in the elevator in the midst of the Kavanaugh-confirmation hearings?

“What you are doing is allowing someone who actually violated a woman to sit in the Supreme Court! You have children in your family! Think about them! I have two children!” With each sentence, her voice rose in fury and the senator shrank farther into the corner of the elevator, muttering, ‘Thank you,” “Thank you,” but meaning “Get away,” “Get away,” all while CNN’s cameras rolled.

Archila smiles when I mention the disconnect. “The people in my organization can’t stop laughing about it. I am the quiet one, the one who rarely speaks up in meetings,” she says. “It’s not in my nature to be confrontational.” But these are not ordinary times.

Ever since the 2016 election, activist groups like the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), where Archila is co–executive director, have been shifting from traditional organizing to a tactic they call “bird-dogging”—confronting elected officials in public places, such as the hallways of the Hart Senate Office Building, the outer lobbies of their offices, town-hall meetings, even the entrances to airport bathrooms. It’s a ploy borrowed from the early days of AIDS activism, when ACT UP protesters would do things like chain themselves to the balcony of the stock exchange or shut down the FDA for the day.