Thirty-five feet

Posted on June 26, 2014 by David S. Meyer

I used to go to a wonderful dentist whose office, on Beacon Street in Brookline, was next door to the Planned Parenthood clinic at the center of today’s Supreme Court decision.  Once, accompanied by my wife (I’m very squeamish about dental work), I was confronted by anti-abortion protesters.  They were determined to dissuade my wife from having an abortion, and didn’t believe that she wasn’t planning to, wasn’t pregnant, and was just accompanying me to the dentist.  The encounter was unpleasant and stressful in a high stress situation for me–going to get dental x-rays–but really a blip.  The dentist explained that the protesters were somewhat more disruptive to her practice, and once tried to blockade the transport of a new dental drill, which they thought was destined for the Planned Parenthood clinic.  (They said, she reported, that it was a baby-sucking machine.)

Not long afterward, a troubled anti-abortion zealot, John Salvi, entered that clinic–and another one down the road–shooting seven clinic workers, killing two.  Salvi was never among the sidewalk counselors, who try to persuade women not to get abortions; he believed the situation demanded more forceful action.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has worked to craft laws that balance the right to free speech with the protection of women’s health clinics and their clientele.  The 2007 version of this balance was a law establishing a 35 foot buffer zone in front of the clinic entrance that restricted entry by protesters–on any issue on any side.  [The figure at the top of this page compares the 35 foot buffer zone to the buffer zone that protects the Supreme Court from free speech efforts.  It’s from NARAL-Pro-choice Massachusetts’s Facebook page.]

Free speech rights in America have never been absolute, but are subject to reasonable restrictions on time, place, and manner.  Just what’s “reasonable,” however, is always a matter of contest.  Justice Holmes’s  offered the famous analogy of preventing someone from crying fire in a crowded movie house to justify prosecuting protesters against World War I and the draft.

Thirty-five feet?

Eleanor McCullen (at right) is a regular Operation Rescue protester who is committed to helping women decide not  to have abortions.  She offers literature and information to those who might enter the clinic, and wants to engage people in a conversational tone, looking them in the eyes.  The 35 foot boundary, she says, stops her from exercising her free speech rights.

In McCullen v. Coakley, all nine justices agreed with Ms. McMullen.  Public streets and thoroughfares, the Court explained, offer a special fora for free speech, and the anti-abortion protesters reported that the 35 foot buffer limited the number of conversations they would have and reduced the amount of literature they could distribute.  To engage women entering the clinic they had to yell.  Justice Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, ruled that Massachusetts could find narrower and less intrusive ways to serve its legitimate interests in public safety.

I don’t know whether 35 feet is too restrictive, or where the right to be left alone fits in here.  Presumably, protesters are entitled to try to dissuade you, peacefully, from doing any number of things: riding the bus, crossing a picket line, eating fast food, grabbing a good parking space, getting a vaccine, or going to a movie.  Those are all individual decisions, however, and I’d think we would want to offer protesters better access to convince people in a position to make decisions on matters of policy that affect larger numbers of people.

If 35 feet is too big a buffer for approaching a women’s health clinic, we’d think that access to the Supreme Court, the state legislature, a presidential speech, the meetings of the International Monetary Fund, or the home of a large company’s CEO, would be somewhat more limited as well.  Public figures and policy makers should be more accessible to dissenters than private citizens making difficult decisions.  This decision should be an important precedent for protesters frustrated with “free speech zones” located miles from their targets.

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Mississippi turning

Posted on June 25, 2014 by David S. Meyer

Drawing the line back from Senator Thad Cochran’s narrow victory in the Republican primary run-off to the contentious politics of the Mississippi Project fifty years earlier is a little easier than you’d think, although it’s doubtful that many of those brave activists would have viewed keeping an ultra-conservative, if courtly, old white Republican in national office as a goal.  But movements work in odd and unexpected ways.  And things could always be worse.

Sen. Cochran was the most vulnerable of the Republican incumbents targeted by the more vigorous conservative wing of their party (now routinely referred to as “Tea Party”).  Truckloads of money from national groups, including FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth, Citizens United (of Supreme Court case fame), and the Senate Conservatives Fund, poured in to support the candidacy of Chris McDaniel, a lawyer who had served two terms in the state senate after a sojourn in conservative talk radio.

McDaniel launched a well-funded insurgent challenge against Cochran based on the Senator’s long service.  Cochran, he charged, had been more successful in his 36 years in bringing federal money into the state than in cutting federal spending and taxes.  Primaries are low turnout elections, where the truly committed, if organized and mobilized, can beat a larger, less concerned, constituency.  And the Tea Party represents, AT MOST, a small but very concerned wedge of the population.  (A recent New York Times poll reports 21 percent of Americans claiming support for the Tea Party.)

The key for Sen. Cochran was finding new voters, beyond those regular Republicans who brought him a little less than half of the primary vote.  What happened in Mississippi is what never happens between a primary and a run-off election: voter turnout increased by nearly 60,000 votes (an increase of 17 percent) (Thank you, 538.com).  Both sides worked hard, and spent aggressively to boost turnout, but the increases were largest in Delta counties with large African American populations.

And here’s where we have to think about Freedom Summer fifty years ago, when organizers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee brought 1,000 mostly white college students to the state to try to register black voters.  (Helpfully, PBS is broadcasting a fine documentary on the subject.)

https://i0.wp.com/www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/media/uploads/films/heroImages/freedomsummer-film_landing-date.jpg

The immediate outcomes of the effort were violent repression and conflict which spurred national publicity.  Would-be voters were humiliated, threatened, and harassed, and three summer organizers were killed. President Lyndon Johnson, running for reelection, worked hard to minimize the visibility of the movement and its impact on the Democratic Party.  The following summer, however, President Johnson would quote a movement song in a national speech pressing (successfully) for the Voting Rights Act.   Blacks registered to vote in Mississippi, and the documentary reports that the state now has more Black elected officials than any other state.

These successes, however, came at the expense of the Democratic Party more generally.  Conservative Whites deserted the Democrats over time, and eventually gave the national Republican Party the electoral lock on the South that Democrats had previously enjoyed (exploited? serviced?).  Aided by decennial aggressive redistricting, the Democratic Party in Mississippi is overwhelming Black, and locked into the political minority.  Republicans hold ALL state-wide elected offices, and political prognosticators universally saw the Republican primary as tantamount to election for Senator Cochran’s seat.

Seeking support beyond typical Republican primary voters, Sen. Cochran worked to mobilize Black voters, mostly Democrats who realized that a Democrat would not win the general election in November.  The McDaniel challenge made those voters valuable to Cochran in a way they had never before been.

The mobilization strategy was clear since the primary election weeks ago, and Tea Party groups worked to monitor the polls, taking notes, and perhaps dissuading some would-be voters.  It used to be that such efforts were directed at keeping Blacks from the polls.  Yesterday, it was about keeping voters who might support a Democrat in November from showing up at the polls.  But you could identify those people by their color.

McDaniel has refused to concede to Cochran, suggesting that he will challenge the vote in court, noting the participation of Democrats in the primary.  The conflict about access to the polls in elections that actually matter continues, fifty years after the Summer Project.

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Is the Tea Party at the polls?

Posted on June 12, 2014 by David S. Meyer

A professor beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in Virginia’s 7th district’s Republican primary; pundits are competing to find the right metaphor (earthquake?).  The common capsule description is that Dave Bratt, a professor of Economics at Randolph-Macon College, represented the Tea Party, rising up–effectively this time–against the Republican establishment.  (Professor Bratt’s websites are likely getting more traffic today than they were designed to handle.)

Rep. Cantor, although boasting an extremely conservative record–to the right of Speaker Boehner–had been attacked from the right at least since 2010, and was particularly vulnerable on the issue of immigration (activists feared he might support some kind of reform).  Prof. Bratt rode that issue, garnering some support from local Tea Party groups and the endorsements of popular conservative radio personalities.  Although he raised and spent very little money, he defeated Rep. Cantor and looks to be on a glide path to the House of Representatives.  He has only to defeat Democratic candidate, Jack Trammell, a sociology professor from the same college–in a district that had become more conservative and more Republican over the years.  (Bratt’s advantage is less about academic disciplines than partisan loyalties.)

So, is this story of a successful Tea Party insurgency in the context of (mostly) lots of primary defeats as mainstream Republicans guarded their right flank by spending lots of money from local Chambers of Commerce?  That’s certainly one story, and it rides against a broader debate about the success of the Republican establishment in controlling the Tea Party.  The basic fault lines:

By paying attention and spending lots of money, “main street Republicans” have marginalized the Tea Party

versus

The Republican regulars have moved so far to the right that the Tea Party wins even when it loses.

There’s plenty of evidence and argument on both sides (e.g.).

But it’s a mistake to draw big conclusions from very small elections.  Turnout in primary elections is almost always very low.  (That’s why, by the way, primaries are a good place for social movements to try to exercise influence.)  Turnout in Virginia’s 7th district this week was about 5 percent–even lower than two years prior.  Prof. Bratt’s percentage win was impressive, but it was only about 7,000 votes.  And the turnout in primary elections skews toward the more engaged; for the Republican primary in the 7th district, this meant an electorate that was older, whiter, and more conservative than you could imagine (from Will Saletan at Slate).  Representative Cantor did a great job at raising and spending money, but apparently didn’t put much effort in turning out his voters.

And what kind of Tea Partier is Dave Bratt anyway?  For sure, he’s an economic conservative who opposes taxes, government spending, and regulations (check).  He’s also against new immigration of any kind and a committed religious conservative.  The Tea Party started, with support from large national organizations, on the first point, but at the grassroots, conservative activists carried flags for additional issues.  Now the appellation Tea Party is applied to any Republican who is particularly emphatic in his conservatism–of all kinds.  Immigration, social issues, and foreign policy offer all sorts of divisions for this movement–if there’s really a movement any more.

Oh, and here’s another note:  Eric Cantor is presently the only Jewish Republican in Congress.  This was apparently not an issue in the primary election, although Dave Bratt and his supporters emphasized the challenger’s very strong Christian commitments.  In one small election, this is another bit of story.

The point is that there are all kinds of story lines that you can pass through the thin point of a Republican primary in Richmond, Virginia: populist uprising; establishment neglect; restless Tea Party; overpriced and ill-conceived electoral strategies; mobilized nativism.  And so on.  What matters now is which story prevails.

 

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Occupy Recapture on wheels

Posted on May 10, 2014 by David S. Meyer

Phil Lyman, elected a county commissioner for San Juan County in Utah, thinks that people should be able to use public land near them as they see fit.  The Federal Bureau of Land Management disagrees, at least partly. Since 2007 about 14 miles of trails have been closed to motorized vehicles in Recapture Canyon to protect Pueblo Indian artifacts amid Anasazi ruins.  The Bureau of Land Management, which regulates the area–and much land in the west–emphasizes that 2,800 miles of trails on nearby public lands were open for use.

For Commissioner Lyman and his allies, this isn’t enough.  To demonstrate their beliefs, about 300 people rallied before a few dozen rode All Terrain Vehicles into a restricted area, while law enforcement officials looked on.  At least some of the protesters were armed.  Commissioner Lyman emphasized the protest was against federal disregard for the interests and opinions of local residents, “Just because BLM owns the property, that doesn’t mean they own the right-of-way that exists.”

The BLM has promised prosecution of people who violate the law, and Commissioner Lyman said that everyone present realized they risked arrest.

Although some protesters were armed, the protest itself was peaceful, and local law enforcement emphasized, orderly and contained.  Other reports emphasized that some of Cliven Bundy’s children were present; they have their own dispute about the use of federal lands.  And it’s hardly surprising that Native American nations and environmentalists were outraged.

Public spaces across the country are regulated by the government which, ostensibly, represents the public interest.  There are rules about access and conduct, and sometimes use fees.  The government is supposed to balance competing interests, including safety, preservation, and revenue.  People who don’t get what they want are, understandably, resentful about what public means in practice.  (Confession: I resent that California charges $15 to park at my favorite surfing beach, which abuts a now-closed nuclear power plant–also on public land.)

Getting what you want from public resources is a function of political action, and elected officials ostensibly have more direct ways to influence political decisions that illegal protest.  But government is big and complicated, with all kinds of different interests and access points.  Change is extremely difficult, and organized interests often fail to see your interests as important and unambiguous as you do.

Taking the space through direct action, even risking damage to the area, isn’t a strategy peculiar to Westerners who want to ride their ATVs in protected areas, and Phil Lyman is hardly the first elected official to engage in civil disobedience.

Even acknowledging very different purposes and constituencies, the ATV riders remind me of the Occupy campaign.  Many more people, of course, seized on the urban spaces to make political claims; they were at it for much longer, and they weren’t armed, but they thought their use of the spaces trumped other interests and concerns.  Most significantly, however, they drew massive attention to their actions and issues.

It’s now up to the BLM to decide how to react to the protesters, and up to the voters of San Juan County to decide how to respond to Phil Lyman, who is running unopposed for re-election as a commissioner.

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Stanford, Steyer, and institutional allies

Posted on May 8, 2014 by David S. Meyer

Here’s a little wrinkle on yesterday’s news about Stanford’s coal divestment:

Billionaire Tom Steyer sits on Stanford’s board of trustees; actually, he’s vice-chair.  Steyer, formerly an extremely successful hedge fund manager, has been raising money for liberal and Democratic candidates for office for thirty years, and has recently announced a commitment to spend at least $100 million to make climate change an issue in this year’s elections.

Tom Steyer and Kat Taylor

He and his wife, Kathryn Ann Taylor, donated $40 million to establish the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy and the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford in 2008.  Steyer is a committed opponent of the Keystone Pipeline.  He is the founder and chief funder of NextGen Climate, an advocacy organization that aims to put climate change at the center of political debate in America.

Meantime, Steyer and NextGen have lately gone directly after the Koch Brothers, the most visible billionaires funding climate skepticism.  The brothers turned down Steyer’s invitation to debate climate change in general and Keystone in particular, noting that they are not really experts on the science and would prefer not to speak on the issue.  OK, in America money talks too.

But back to divestment:

All considered:  I wasn’t at the meeting where Stanford trustees decided how to respond to Fossil Free, but:

Stanford trustees could see an even bigger upside financially to taking a stance against coal.  Stanford trustees were likely to be exposed to powerful arguments about fossil fuels and climate change, made more powerful by the sponsorship of a generous and active supporter of the university.

It helps to have allies in powerful positions.

And institutional power matters.

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Stanford and the Fossil Free campaign

Posted on May 7, 2014 by David S. Meyer

Stanford University announced that it would work to divest holdings in coal companies from its investment portfolio.  It’s a relatively small blow to the coal industry, which is bracing for some bigger hits soon.  It’s also a big victory for the divestment campaign of the climate change movement in general, and 350.org, the awareness/action group founded by Bill McKibben.

Fossil Free coordinates numerous divestment campaigns across the United States, announcing that students are leading the way for the broader movement:

Students have always been key to movements of conscience, and this fight is no different.

Institutions of higher education are charged with preparing their students for lifetimes of work and service. But if those institutions are invested in fossil fuel companies, then students’ educations are being subsidized by investments that guarantee they won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degrees.

Colleges and universities rush to launch greening initiatives, sustainability offices, and environmental curricula, but it makes no sense to green the campus and not the portfolio. Fossil fuel divestment is a reasonable next step — and it’s the right thing to do.

The campaign offers an extremely smart strategy for the movement.  It’s less about putting financial pressure on the oil and gas industry to, uh, find something else to do, than about finding a way to engage young people.  Divestment is something to ask for, organize around, and use as a vehicle for public education.  Particularly for climate change, finding productive action and viable targets, is tricky and extremely important.  It also echoes campus-based efforts that were part of the successful anti-apartheid movement.  Campaigns, even unsuccessful ones, train and politicize activists and generate attention.  And sometimes generate victories, even partial ones.

Stanford is a big hit.  Even though its decision addresses only coal, it’s an extremely prestigious and visible institution–maybe the hardest to gain admittance to in the United States–and it’s a huge endowment.  Early adopters are likely to be moving much smaller chunks of money around and getting less attention.  (The first college to divest its fossil fule investments was Hampshire College, my alma mater, in Western Massachusetts in 2011, which adopted a much stricter investment screen than Stanford plans.  Hampshire was also the first to divest its holdings in companies that did business in South Africa–in 1977, years before any other institutions followed.  See the list of schools and communities committing to some kind of divestment here.)  Many schools and communities have thus far refused the appeals of their students.

Those who reject calls to divest will often note that Boards of Trustees have a fiduciary responsibility to their institutions, and are legally committed to generating the strongest financial returns they can.  This is part of the story about why Stanford is getting out of coal, but not oil or natural gas.    Stanford’s announcement comes just after President Obama emphasized the need for action in the wake of yet another study, this time from the White House, warning about the impact of carbon and climate change.  And just a few weeks before the Environmental Protection Agency will announce new greenhouse gas standards for power plants.  The power industry, and particularly coal manufacturers, expect this to be just awful for them.  (Opponents in Congress are going to be able to complain vigorously, but not much else.)  Divestment looks like good business for the endowment, just as staying in other fossil fuels still looks profitable.

So, what Fossil Free did was help Stanford get good press for something trustees might want to do for completely different reasons.  Successful movements focus on changing conduct as a way to change attitudes; you don’t need to get targets to agree in order to get them to comply.  And, like the predatory lion looking for the zebra with a limp, campaigns do best by knocking off the weaker targets.

Fossil Free activists at Stanford and everywhere are savvy enough, no doubt, to claim the victory, while simultaneously demanding much much more.

 

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The Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP is not going to hold a dinner to honor Donald Sterling and Leland Spencer, as it had previously announced.  Its unpaid president, Leon Jenkins, is stepping down from his position, and the national office of the NAACP has announced it will develop new policies about who the organization might properly honor and why.

The Sterling case was actually pretty clear.  The owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, under fairly constant fire for racial discrimination in his rental policies, had donated tens of thousands of dollars to the organization.  Maybe this was unrelated to his business activities, maybe it was personal atonement.  In any case, it was an opportunity to cleanse a reputation with a second lifetime achievement award.  A fancy black tie dinner advertised in the newspapers is one way to try to sanitize a reputation.

Jenkins himself had surely been thinking about what it takes to rehabilitate a reputation.  Formerly a district court judge in Detroit, Jenkins faced a federal indictment for taking bribes of money and firearms.  Although he was acquitted of criminal charges, the Michigan Supreme Court removed him from the bench, and ultimately he was disbarred.  He moved to California to start over, like so many others, but had been unable to gain admission to the California bar, which found that he was deceptive about his financial dealings.  He had, for example, failed to disclose a $25,000 loan he had taken from restauranteur Leland Spencer, who employed Jenkins–and was also to be honored by the LA chapter of the NAACP.  (details in the New York Times report here.)  It sure looks like impropriety!

But advocacy organizations need money to advocate.  Office space, professional labor, phone lines, computers, photocopiers don’t come for free, and Jenkins reported raising over $2 million, some portion of which went to support the national organization, which has had its own financial problems.  How picky can any organization be when people who are willing to write big checks come calling?  (In this case, obviously at least a little pickier.)  And unlike some sponsors, there’s thus far no indication that Donald Sterling wanted anything more than public praise.  Jenkins took the money from Sterling and the national NAACP took its share from Jenkins’s LA chapter.  No doubt, no matter how scuzzy Donald Sterling appeared, Jenkins and others thought they could do something useful with the money.

[Meanwhile, everyone didn’t make the same calculations.  Ultimately, UCLA rejected a $3 million gift from Donald Sterling that would have gone to research on kidney disease.  Is that a good move?  for science?  Will Donald Sterling spend the money on something more valuable?]

Old notions of democratic theory premised a notion of countervailing resources, in which some groups had more money, some more intense commitment, some more supporters.  Increasingly, however, it seems like money just means more–and if the other resources seem to falter, well, it means even more.

 

Posted on May 2, 2014 by David S. Meyer | Leave a comment

May Day 2014

Posted on May 1, 2014 by David S. Meyer

Same as it ever was, May Day is an international day of protest for workers rights.  Below is a picture of a march in Turkey, taken from Al Jazeera, which reports on protests around the world.

In the United States, where by design we have a different day for workers (Labor Day), May Day always seems like an opportunity to organize and demonstrate around a somewhat related cause, with or without the support of organized labor.

This year, organized labor has many issues, including raising the minimum wage which, not coincidentally, was killed in the Senate just yesterday–before it could be stalled in the House.  Occupy activists are once again trying to use the moment to reestablish visibility, holding meetings and events.  Perhaps most visibly, immigrant rights  activists refuse to let the issue disappear just because Congress can’t act.  In cities large (e.g., Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, San Francisco) and small (e.g., Salem, Oregon), organizers are trying to use the familiar workers’ holiday to break into public attention–again.  Reporters are prepared to look for issues that are often otherwise neglected.

May Day is an opportunity to organize and say something, reminding the rest of the world that constituencies and concerns remain vital and potentially volatile.

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Leveraging against a weak target: Donald Sterling’s reputation

Posted on April 30, 2014 by David S. Meyer

The straw that breaks the camel’s back isn’t always the largest one.  The tempest surrounding the LA Clippers and owner Donald Sterling illustrates much about how social movements work–when they work.

When Sterling’s ostensibly private and clearly offensive comments about blacks, including people in his employ, hit the public, outrage boiled over everywhere–including among the owner’s accomplished and highly paid employees.

The members of the San Diego Clippers threw their warmup suits down and wore jerseys inside-out to hide the Clippers logo during their pregame routine.  Players on other teams joined in sympathy and solidarity, donning black socks for games in a bit of not so subtle and not so disruptive resistance.  In the middle of the National Basketball Association’s playoffs, the symbolic moves here suggested that the players might be willing to do more–like refuse to play the games.

Surely, other owners and the league’s management took offense at Sterling’s comments; the Clippers’ owner was already recognized as a problem.  Sterling underinvested in his team, neglected the interests of the league more broadly, and was a recurrent public relations problem.  There was no residual of goodwill for him to draw upon when things went wrong.  More significantly, an owner or staffer could actually agree with every appalling sentiment expressed and still want to get rid of Sterling.  Sponsors suspended deals with the Clippers team, the players were offended and organized, and press everywhere was awful.  Punishment, even banishment, is good business.  A new commissioner was particularly well-positioned to recognize this and act forcefully, buying himself good will and good press in the process.  Almost everyone wins.

More generally, movements can be effective  by targeting the vulnerable, that is respondents who have something to lose that they care about.  The NBA already had all kinds of good reasons to get rid of Donald Sterling; the players’ collective action gave management a push to do something they might want to do anyway.

There’s an odd additional note to offer here: The Los Angeles chapter of NAACP was set to give a lifetime achievement award to Donald Sterling when the story broke, and had accepted tens of thousands of dollars from the real estate tycoon (who had paid nearly $3 million to settle a federal case of housing discrimination).  (See Alison Griswold at Slate.)  The award was for money, clearly, and the civil rights group has since decided to return the money and cancel the award.

But advocacy organizations are dependent upon large sums that most people can’t provide, and reputations aren’t always Sterling….  Certainly, there are worse things for this billionaire’s money to go to–and they do.  There’s an inherent dilemma in the dependence upon big money that movement groups need to raise. I’ll wait for your answers on this one.

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Cliven Bundy gets real

Posted on April 24, 2014 by David S. Meyer

Sure enough, as the Feds backed down and out–at least for the moment–the camera has shifted to Cliven Bundy, the rancher who doesn’t want to pay to graze his cattle on public lands.  So far, it’s not such a pretty picture.  At The New York Times, Adam Nagourney reports on the scene.  Sure enough, there are a few dozen supporters, at least some armed and girded for battle with the feds.  (In most contexts, we call people who are willing to shoot government agents in the service of their beliefs “terrorists.”)

Absent confrontation, Bundy has been filling the days with sparsely attended press conferences and opining not only about the grazing stand-off with the Bureau of Land Management, but also his beliefs on abortion, African-Americans, and government more generally.  The comments that sound most racist have been reprinted all over the web:

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

Expressing some nostalgia for the benefits of slavery is not quite as problematic for an independent rancher in Nevada than more mainstream (and it doesn’t take much to be more mainstream) political figures who might support him.  And it’s lately been important for Bundy to mobilize such support.  Senators who have lauded him or the cause are backing off–or disappearing from the conflict.  Other ranchers, who are accustomed to paying to graze their cattle on public lands, have already dissociated themselves from the case and the cause.  He’s not quite the poster child that even very conservative politicians want to paste everywhere.

Of course, some supporters remain.  Over time, particularly if government action remains measured and low profile, the ones who stay are likely to be at least as unattractive as Bundy himself.

The challenge for the BLM is to resolve the outstanding fees issue without making stylistic mistakes that take the focus off Bundy.  (The BLM can’t exempt Bundy from the responsibilities that it imposes on all other ranchers who want to graze cattle on public lands.)

The challenge for conservative activists who would use the Bundy case is to find a way to valorize independence, vilify the government, and stay away from the details of the case or the person.

In essence, they need to use Cliven Bundy without being associated with him.  If the focus stays on Bundy, this will be increasingly difficult.

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