Social movements are not moods — they are organizations with a life span. Herbert Blumer and Charles Tilly described the same arc: diffuse discontent becomes a public grievance, the grievance becomes a crowd with a leader, the crowd becomes an office with a budget, and then the movement ends — sometimes by losing, sometimes by winning. Tap a stage to begin.
Inside a movement
Four stagestap a stage to begin
The four stages — tap one (or tap the diagram)
What the movement looks like here
Read this stage through a paradigm
Decline is not a synonym for failure. A movement declines whenever it stops being a movement — and that happens just as often through victory or absorption into the mainstream as through defeat. The question is never “did it survive?” but “what happened to the claim it was making?”