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There really should be more reflection on the symbiosis between a civil society structured mainly around non-profits without formal mass members and the rise of flash protest movements with very low exit and entry costs - the two have a weird and interesting complementarity.
It's sometimes claimed that Mair's 'ruling the void' doesn't apply in the US after 1900 since it always had cadre parties which fused with the state and never formalised membership (excluding some energetic third-party activity in the People's and Socialist Parties etc).
But by 'proxy' even American cadre parties had strong civic ties which made them susceptible to pressure from below - ties which also presupposed a civic landscape that began to decay in the late twentieth century, as Skocpol so powerfully shows in this:
Skocpol focuses on the decline of American civic organisation which are replaced by non-profits as "bodiless heads" - practicing advocacy on behalf of constituencies who can't speak for themselves.
It’s also interesting that the legal reinvention of the non-profit in the 1970s runs parallel to the reinvention of the business corporation a ‘nexus of contracts’, both shedding their integrative function: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.4159/9780674977686-008/html
At the same time you see the rise of extremely fleeting and impermanent modes of protest politics, perhaps correctly termed 'non-movements' in this piece: https://endnotes.org.uk/other_texts/en/endnotes-onward-barbarians
The striking difference between historic and contemporary protests is that there always was a civic core with large membership in those previous episodes of protest (think the Civil Rights movement), while protests today seem to happen without that large civic infrastructure.
One further thing is that they’re both complementary in ‘post-representative politics’ - non-profits and NGO represent a subject that can’t really speak for itself while the movements in question shy away from strong representative claims. "Bodiless heads" and "headless" bodies".
Anyway, this piece hit on some of those issues as well: https://damagemag.com/2020/06/24/the-new-social-movements-against-the-old-left/
