How partisanship killed the anti-war movement; opposition to war depends largely on which party is waging it.

• Author: Healy, Gene
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Book review

Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11, by Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas, Cambridge University Press, 245 pages, $29.99

PARTY IN THE STREET is a deceptively cheery title for an autopsy. In this book, the social scientists Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas dissect the remnants of "the second most significant antiwar movement in American history" after Vietnam--the post-9/11 effort to restrain the American war machine.

In the years after the September 11 attacks, Heaney and Rojas write, peace activism became "truly a mass movement": From 2001 through 2006, there were at least six anti-war demonstrations that drew more than 100,000 protestors, "including the largest internationally coordinated protest in all of human history" in February 2003.

The authors brought teams of researchers to most of the largest national protests from 2004 to 2010, and gathered reams of survey data from more than 10,000 respondents. Early on, they noticed substantial overlap between anti-war agitation and affiliation with the Democratic Party. That "party-movement synergy" helped the war opposition to expand dramatically during the administration of George W. Bush. It also, eventually, contained the cause of its undoing under Barack Obama. "Once the fuel of partisanship was in short supply," Heaney and Rojas note, "it was difficult for the antiwar movement to sustain itself on a mass level."

The book begins with a scene from the anti-war campaign's height: Saturday, January 27,2007, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The occasion was a rally organized by United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), the leading anti-war coalition during the Bush years. An estimated 100,000 protesters turned out to "tell the new Congress: ACTNOWTO END THE WAR!" In a fit of irrational exuberance, several hundred protesters actually tried to rush the Capitol while the crowd chanted "Our Congress!" at the police officers blocking their way.

On that sunny winter day, the movement's legions looked ready to convert their ire into genuine policy change. In the 2006 midterms, not three months before, Democrats had taken control of Congress for the first time since 1994, in large part because of national discontent with the Iraq War. As Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), put it from the podium: "We have an antidote to this insanity. ...It is what you sent us to do last November!" The following Monday, UFPJ unleashed 1,000 grassroots activists on the Hill to swarm their representatives, demanding they support withdrawal resolutions and join the "Out of Iraq Caucus."

But that rally turned out to be the high-water mark; the tide soon receded and within a few years the sea itself dried up. "At exactly the...