13.3 Polarization, Social Movements, and the Changing Supreme Court

Why polarization and the Court belong in a survey course

After 2008, U.S. politics is not only a list of presidents. Independent OpenExamPrep review groups parties, protest, and legal history: extra-party movements (Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter), campaign-finance and family-law landmarks (Citizens United, Obergefell, Dobbs), and civic shocks (January 6, 2021, and COVID-19). CLEP-style questions still reward dates, holdings, and federalism, not your view of later campaigns. This section is a survey to the early 2020s, not a recap of every 2024 headline.

Scholars contest how much of the era is “polarization” (parties moving apart on issues) versus “sorting” (liberals into the Democratic Party and conservatives into the Republican Party) versus media fragmentation. You need the events and doctrines; you do not need to settle the political-science debate.

Tea Party and Occupy

The Tea Party label spread in 2009 after protests against the stimulus, bank rescues, and, soon, the health-care bill—famously catalyzed in public memory by a televised rant against mortgage relief. Activists demanded lower spending, opposition to the ACA, and a more insurgent Republican Party. In the 2010 midterms, Republicans captured the House of Representatives. The movement’s later institutional form included the House Freedom Caucus and primary challenges to Republicans deemed too accommodating. Whether the Tea Party was a grassroots constitutional revolt or an elite-funded brand is contested; either way, it constrained Obama after ARRA and the ACA and trained a generation of anti-establishment conservatives.

Occupy Wall Street began in September 2011 in Zuccotti Park in New York City, using the slogan “We are the 99 percent.” It lacked a single legislative program comparable to the ACA fight. Its durable contribution was to put income and wealth inequality, bank rescues, and student debt into mainstream discussion. Police clearances ended the encampments; the inequality frame outlived them. Pair Tea Party and Occupy as right- and left-coded responses to the same crash: one aimed at federal spending and health-care expansion, the other at finance and distribution.

Citizens United and money in politics

In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (January 21, 2010), the Supreme Court held that the government may not ban independent expenditures by corporations and unions as a category of political speech. The majority treated such spending, not given to a candidate’s campaign committee, as First Amendment expression. Critics said the decision flooded politics with unaccountable money and revived Lochner-era solicitude for corporations. Defenders said it protected documentary-style advocacy and that the real problem was contribution limits and disclosure, not independent speech.

A related D.C. Circuit case, SpeechNow.org v. FEC (2010), cleared the way for Super PACs that raise unlimited sums for independent expenditures. Citizens United did not abolish limits on direct contributions to candidates, a common stem trap. The case is a campaign-finance and corporate-speech landmark, often tested beside Buckley v. Valeo (1976).

Marriage, women, family, and the Court from Obergefell to Dobbs

United States v. Windsor (2013) struck down the federal definition of marriage in the Defense of Marriage Act for purposes of federal benefits. Obergefell v. Hodges (June 26, 2015), a 5–4 decision authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, held that same-sex couples have a right to marry under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. States had to license and recognize those marriages. Opponents argued that the Court had short-circuited democratic debate; supporters analogized to Loving v. Virginia (1967) on interracial marriage. Both readings appear in textbooks; the holding and year are not optional.

Abortion law moved the other direction after a change in the Court’s membership. Roe v. Wade (1973) had located a privacy right to abortion, later recast in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) as an undue burden test before viability. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (June 24, 2022) overruled Roe and Casey. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority held that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion because such a right is not deeply rooted in the nation’s history and tradition as the Court applied that test. Regulation returned to state legislatures and electorates. Some states enforced trigger bans or tight gestational limits; others enacted statutory protections. Dobbs did not create a nationwide ban.

For women and family history, Dobbs is the hinge: it rejected the Griswold–Roe privacy line for abortion, revived federalism as the main legal frame, and guaranteed that family law would differ sharply by state—as it had before 1973. How one evaluates maternal health, fetal status, and equality is contested; a survey exam still expects Roe/Casey overruled, states as decision-makers, June 2022.

The personnel change behind Dobbs is itself testable. After Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016, the Senate did not confirm President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland. President Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch (2017), Brett Kavanaugh (2018), and Amy Coney Barrett (2020, after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death). President Biden appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson (2022) to succeed Justice Stephen Breyer. A 6–3 conservative majority on many issues is the structural fact linking Citizens United’s aftermath, Obergefell’s 5–4 coalition, and Dobbs.

Black Lives Matter

The Black Lives Matter hashtag and network emerged in 2013 after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida, associated with organizers including Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. Ferguson, Missouri (2014), after the shooting of Michael Brown, and later cases made police use of force a national story. On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd; smartphone video fueled protests in hundreds of cities, the largest U.S. demonstration wave in decades.

The movement’s meanings are contested. Supporters emphasize a long pattern of unequal policing and the Thirteenth–Fifteenth Amendment unfinished agenda. Critics emphasize 2020 riot damage, homicide spikes in some cities, and slogans such as “defund the police.” CLEP-useful facts are the 2013 origin, Ferguson 2014, Floyd 2020, and the claim that extra-party protest can set the agenda even when it does not pass a single federal statute comparable to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Me Too (widely amplified in 2017) similarly made workplace sexual abuse a movement story with uneven legal follow-through.

Trump, 2020, and January 6 as civic crisis

Donald J. Trump won the presidency in 2016 via the Electoral College while losing the national popular vote, a reminder that Article II and the Twelfth Amendment process, not a national plebiscite, choose the president. His administration featured tax cuts (Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, 2017), two other Court appointments after Gorsuch, immigration restriction fights, and a 2019–20 impeachment over Ukraine (the Senate did not convict). In 2020, Democrat Joseph R. Biden Jr. defeated Trump in both the popular vote and the Electoral College amid the pandemic. Trump and many allies claimed the election was stolen—a claim state and federal courts repeatedly rejected for lack of proof sufficient to change certified results. Those legal outcomes are part of the civic record; they are not a substitute for a campaign ad.

On January 6, 2021, as a joint session of Congress met to count Electoral College votes, a crowd that had attended a Trump rally breached the U.S. Capitol. The count was interrupted; lawmakers were evacuated. Congress reconvened and, in the early hours of January 7, completed certification of Biden’s victory. The House later impeached Trump a second time for incitement of insurrection; the Senate again did not convict. Criminal prosecutions of rioters followed. Interpretations of Trump’s speech, police preparation, and the word insurrection remain contested. The exam-stable narrative is narrower: a president’s supporters disrupted the constitutional count; institutions completed it; impeachment did not remove him.

COVID-19 as a public-health and federalism shock

SARS-CoV-2 spread globally in 2020. The World Health Organization characterized a pandemic on March 11, 2020; a U.S. national emergency followed. There was no single national stay-at-home statute. Governors and some local officials issued closure and mask rules of very different strictness, illustrating federalism and the states’ traditional police power over public health. The Trump administration restricted some travel, backed hospital capacity, and ran Operation Warp Speed to accelerate vaccines. Congress passed the enormous CARES Act (March 27, 2020)—relief checks, expanded unemployment insurance, and business loans. Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines received emergency authorization in December 2020.

Official U.S. counts later attributed more than one million deaths to COVID-19. School closures, learning loss, nursing-home policy, vaccine and mask mandates, and the balance between emergency power and liberty are all contested. For a survey, hold three ideas: a once-in-a-century public-health shock, state variation rather than a unitary federal lockdown statute, and massive fiscal federal response. Later Biden-era relief (including the American Rescue Plan, 2021) continued the fiscal story; do not turn the section into a 2021–24 news feed.

Using this on the exam

A typical item might ask which case allowed unlimited independent corporate spending (Citizens United), which case required states to license same-sex marriages (Obergefell), or which case returned abortion policy to the states (Dobbs). Another might pair Tea Party (2010 House) with Occupy (inequality). A third might describe January 6 as an interruption of the electoral count, not as a coup that installed a different president—because Congress certified Biden. Keep 2024+ headlines out of the answer unless a stem supplies them.

Exam traps

• Saying Citizens United let corporations give unlimited direct donations to candidate committees.
• Dating Obergefell to Windsor, or calling it unanimous.
• Claiming Dobbs banned abortion in all fifty states.
• Treating January 6 as the day a new president was sworn in; Inauguration Day remained January 20, 2021.