The March for Life and the risks and rewards of institutionalization

Posted on January 24, 2014 by David S. Meyer

Many abortion opponents showed up for the annual March for Life in Washington, DC this past week, commemorating (mourning) the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that established abortion rights across the United States.

I don’t know how many; the Park Service stopped providing crowd estimates years ago and organizers always inflate their claims (>500,000?) [on the demonstration numbers game, see], but certainly there were at least tens of thousands–and a somewhat smaller number of abortion rights demonstrators.  Because it was cold and snowy, and because it was the 41st March for Life (not the 40th), everyone seems to agree that last year’s march was even bigger.  The March is there every year, with crowds that vary according to weather, organizing efforts, and the political salience of abortion.

The March for Life was most extensively covered by supporters this year (e.g., Warren Mass in The New American; access to the Internet allows well-organized groups like the March to post their own accounts as well, highlighting the supportive tweet from Pope Francis)  Mainstream media coverage seemed to range from standard (local media did best: The Washington Post offered an article and pictures, as did Politico) to somewhat less (The New York Times offered only a picture with a caption).

Why?  Maybe it was the weather? Even The Christian Post used pictures from 2013, but there are other issues, some discussed in The Times‘ Public Editor’s (Margaret Sullivan) column.  The March for Life is a big, well-established group with a substantial professional staff.  It organizes and raises money all year for this event, and succeeds at generating some kind of substantial turnout each year.  This year’s theme, adoption, didn’t represent a new set of arguments or policy demands, just a continuation of a decades-long campaign.  It lacks the novelty or uncertainty of the kind of news that attracts extensive coverage.  Mainstream media were more comfortable, in more ways than one, covering the March in the context of the almost completely partisanized debate about abortion rights.  This means quoting elected officials and speculating on electoral implications.

The irony is that because the March has institutionalized so effectively, reliably turning out large crowds each year, those crowds and those efforts get less attention.

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Martin Luther King Day (2014)

Posted on January 19, 2014 by David S. Meyer

(This is a repost of the MLKing Day holiday note,  with an added image–at right–from the Mall in Washington, DC.  Have a good holiday.)

Martin Luther King died young enough and dramatically enough to be turned into an American hero, but it was neither his youth nor his death that made him heroic.

In his rather brief public life, beginning in Montgomery at 26, and ending with his assassination at 39, King consistently displayed rhetorical brilliance (on the podium and the page), strategic acumen, and moral and physical courage.

The effort to honor Martin Luther King with a holiday commemorating his birthday started at the King Center, in Atlanta, in the year after his assassination.  States began to follow suit, and by 1983, more than half celebrated King’s life with a day.  In that year, Ronald Reagan signed a bill making Martin Luther King day a national holiday expressing ambivalence, acknowledging that it was costly, and that King may have been a Communist.

The King holiday was about Martin Luther King, to be sure, but it was meant to represent far more than the man.  King stands in for the civil rights movement and for African-American history more generally.  I often wonder if the eloquence of the 1963 “I have a dream” speech winds up obscuring not only a man with broader goals, but a much more contested–and ambitious–movement.

The man and the movement are ossified into an iconic image, like a statue, which locks King and the movement into the politics of 1963-1965.  We accept King’s dream, that little children will play together, and that people will be judged by “the content of their character” (a favorite phrase on the right).

The image, like a statue, is available for appropriation to advocates of all political stripes, and the establishment of the holiday itself represents an achievement of the civil rights movement, winning the holiday if not broader economic and social equality.

Before the transformation of the man into an icon, King transformed himself from a pastor into an activist, a peripatetic crusader for justice.

But the pastor didn’t disappear; rather this role grew into something larger, as King himself transformed himself from a minister into a an Old Testament prophet, one whose primary concern was always the people on the margins, the widows and orphans, the poor and hungry.  In standing with those on the margins, King courageously used–and risked–the advantages of his privilege, pedigree, and education.  He also knew that he risked his safety and his life.

In his writing, King used his education and his vocation to support his political goals.  In the critically important “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he cited both the Constitution and the Bible in support of Federal intervention in local politics to support desegregation and human rights.  (We know that other activists now use the same sources to justify pushing the Federal government out of local politics.)

King explained that he was in jail in Birmingham, Alabama, because he had nonviolently defied local authorities in the service of higher laws, the Constitution and the Gospel.  This was not like making a provocative statement on one’s own [profitable] radio or television show.  There were real costs and severe risks.

King was never less than controversial during his life, under FBI surveillance during his political career, and vigorously criticized by opponents (for demanding too much and too strongly) and allies (for not demanding more, more vigorously).

When he was assassinated outside a Memphis motel in 1968, he was standing with sanitation workers on strike, straying from a simpler civil rights agenda.  He had also alienated some civil rights supporters by coming out, strongly, against the war in Vietnam.  And Black Power activists saw their own efforts as overtaking King’s politics and rhetoric.  By the time he was killed, Martin Luther King’s popular support had been waning for some time.

Posterity has rescued an image of Martin Luther King, at the expense of the man’s own broader political vision.

Ironically, in elevating an insurgent to a position in America’s pantheon of historic heroes, we risk editing out the insurgency.

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Thanks to Franklin McCain

Posted on January 11, 2014 by David S. Meyer

Franklin McCain died at the age of 73, another chance for the rest of us to appreciate his commitment and courage, and to say thank you to remind ourselves of what’s possible.

McCain was one of the four freshmen (not those four freshmen) at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College who decided to desegregate the South one Sunday night in 1960.  Along with Ezell Blair, Jr., Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond, McCain sat in at a lunch counter in Woolworth’s on Monday morning, sparking the imagination of activists across the country.  They were determined to stay until they were served, and over the next few days, hundreds joined them, starting in Greensboro and spreading across the South.  (Find all of their biographies here.)

The story always astounds me, and I don’t think it really can be told too often (see here, here, and here, just for Politics Outdoors.)  The civil rights movement was certainly already well underway, and had a few significant victories, but Jim Crow segregation still dominated the South.

The Greensboro sit-in is the moment in Franklin McCain’s life that will appear in our history books, but it’s a substantial and significant life, worth noting beyond the world of his friends and family (please see Nancy McLaughlin’s piece in the local paper, the  News and Record.)

A few notes:

Franklin McCain was certainly a radical in 1960, but like his colleagues, he was determined to show that he was also a patriot, wearing his ROTC uniform when he entered Woolworth’s.  Coming from a relatively advantaged background–for an African-American man in 1960-he thought he had the obligation to do more than talk about civil rights and put his body on the line for his beliefs.  He also was not unduly optimistic about the chances of the sit-in working, but believed that he had a moral obligation to do something.

And his life extended well beyond the sit-in that day–or week–in February 1960.  He was a committed activist, but a professional scientist.  After graduating from college with a chemistry degree, he married Bettye Davis, another activist–who died just last year.  They had three sons and seven grandchildren.  McCain had a successful career working for the Celanese corporation as a chemist and product representative.  He also continued to speak and organize throughout his life, reflecting not only on the sit-in phase of the civil rights movement, but on the activism of young people for years afterward.  He encouraged rhetorically as well as by his example.  Elaine Woo’s LA Times obit ends:

“Never ask for permission to start a revolution,” he told college students in Ohio a few years ago. “If there is something you want or need to do … just do it.”

Franklin McCain was exceptional, and a real American hero, but there are many like him.

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Activism in office

Posted on December 29, 2013 by David S. Meyer

Kshama Sawant joins the Seattle City Council this week, and her support for socialism seemed newsworthy to the editors of the New York Times.

Kshama Sawant campaigns

The headline notes that the election makes Sawant “a rare elected voice for socialism.”  Sawant campaigned for a $15 an hour minimum wage in Seattle, and generally expressed strong support for the disadvantaged and stronger distrust of local, national, and multinational economic powers.

Kirk Johnson’s interesting article focuses on the dilemmas inherent in holding office.  No one, including Sawant, seems to think that there is widespread support for socialism per se, and she knows that she has to govern in order to be of use to anyone, including the movements she comes out of.  She introduced herself to voters as:

…an economics teacher at Seattle Central Community College and a member of the American Federation of Teachers Local 1789. She was an activist in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is a fighter for workers, women, LGBTQ people, and immigrants.

Delivering benefits to the people she wants to represent means working with a City Council and a Mayor who don’t necessarily share all of her commitments, and finding a way to deal with Boeing, a huge local employer that reminds everyone it could leave the City at any time.  It means trimming her rhetorical sails from time to time, negotiating possible deals at the expense of Ideals.

This is a difficult balancing act for any activist who pursues elected office (it’s easier, alas, just to lose and maintain a clear political line), and paradoxically, tougher for someone working at the local level who bears responsibility for making decisions that affect constituent’s lives.  Johnson quotes a Sawant supporter who sketches out the dilemma clearly:

“If she remains only an activist, she’ll be a one-shot wonder,” said the Rev. Rich Lang, the pastor of University Temple United Methodist Church in Seattle and a Sawant supporter. But if she moves too far toward the center, “she’ll be shot down from the left as a compromiser,” he said. “There’s tremendous pressure on her.”

Councilor Sawant’s dilemmas are hardly peculiar to her or to the left more generally.  A member of the House of Representatives from a safe seat can often carve out a political career as an ideologue, while working backstage to bring goodies back to the district.  This was the story of Republican Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas libertarian who excoriated corporate subsidies and earmarks rhetorically, while making sure his allies and district got their share.

But personal ambition and political visibility make this kind of secret balancing tougher to pull off.  Three Republican Senators often tagged as Tea Partiers are confronting the same dilemmas in a brighter spotlight than Councilor Sawant will face–at least for now.  Rep. Paul’s libertarian son, Senator Rand Paul (Kentucky) mouths the same ideals as his father, but also looks to find ways to maintain Medicare and oppose open borders or immigration reform.  Senator Marco Rubio (Florida), an experienced politician, tried to lead the way on immigration reform without seeming to compromise on any other issues.  And Senator Ted Cruz (Texas) took credit for leading the Republican Party into a government shut-down that hurt his country–and more pointedly, his party.

All face the same conflicting pressures that could bedevil Councilor Sawant in seeking to govern effectively without “selling out.”

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Anticipating backlash?

Posted on December 27, 2013 by David S. Meyer

Not that it’s impossible, but it’s hard for any government, particularly the US government, to take rights away.  What seems intractable, like laws mandating schools segregated by race or prohibitions on “interracial” marriage, disappear, and over time, so does polite support for them.

Since the 1980s, we’ve witnessed an immense and seemingly intractable battle of countermovements on same sex marriage, and for a long time, all the victories were on the “against” side.   Over the last decade or so, however, autumn arrived, a leaf at a time, then whole baskets full, as country after country and state after state changed laws.

Massachusetts has sanctioned same sex marriage for about a decade, and the pace of new states dropping the prohibition has accelerated beyond the hopes of all but the most optimistic campaigner, sometimes by legislature or referendum, but more commonly, by judicial ruling.  Mostly, however, it was more socially liberal states that reformed, leaving marriage equality opponents expressing confidence in their ability to defend the rest of the country (e.g.).

And then Utah.

Last week Federal District Judge Robert J. Shelby ruled that Utah’s ban on same sex marriage violated 14th amendment protections for gay and lesbian couples.  Both he and the appellate court refused to stay the ruling pending further appeals; county clerks, first in Salt Lake City but soon throughout the state, began issuing marriage licenses.  Public joy and outrage attended the ongoing run of nuptials.

Historically, defining marriage has been the responsibility of the states–although the full faith and credit clause of Constitution compels states to recognize marriages performed in other states.

Even as public support for marriage equality has grown, such support doesn’t comprise close to a majority in Utah.  As the state’s appeal winds its way up to the Supreme Court, supporters and opponents will try to organize in light of new facts on the ground, particularly marriage licenses and celebrations.

It’s got to be easier to oppose extending marriage recognition to slightly different (read: same gender) couples beforehand than taking such recognition away.  Marriage opponents will be faced with the difficult task of organizing and mobilizing against distinct and identifiable couples.  Maintaining strict moral rectitude in the abstract gets harder when the specifics mean trying to take away something valued from a relative or neighbor (watch health insurance on this as well).  This is one reason why the strategy of coming out was so important and powerful.

Utah’s conservative political culture, buttressed by the institutional infrastructure of the Church of Latter Day Saints (whose members include a large majority of Utah residents) should provide the ideal setting for a powerful backlash–against marriage equality and against Federal intrusion in marriage rules.  Will it?  Or will the obligations of friendship and neighborliness trump the abstract?

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Same as it ever was?: Budget politics and the Tea Party

Posted on December 13, 2013 by David S. Meyer

Successful politicians sell out the movements that give them leverage, visibility, and power.  Until yesterday, when the House of Representatives passed a rather mundane two year budget bill that disappointed virtually everyone, the House Republican leadership, particularly Speaker John Boehner, was having a very difficult time being successful.  It wasn’t just that Congress couldn’t pass very much or that Speaker Boehner couldn’t really negotiate on anything because he couldn’t deliver the votes of his own caucus.  More than that, every so-called Tea Party move seemed to cost the Republican Party public support.  Speaker Boehner publicly acknowledged being dragged to lead a government shut-down just weeks ago, a strategy that played out badly for everyone, but particularly the Republicans.

The shut-down approach undermined as a tactic for at least the near future, House Budget Chair Paul Ryan entered negotiations with his Senate counterpart Patty Murray with reduced leverage and a strong determination to reach an agreement.  It was pretty obvious than any settlement between the two would be some version of the split the difference compromises that characterized most institutional politics in American history.  And so it did.

Conservative interest groups (including Heritage Action and FreedomWorks) saw this coming way in advance, and began firing on the agreement long before it was settled.  Mainstream Republicans have been trying to find a way to manage the Tea Party since 2010, and bits of evidence that they might be able to do so are just emerging.  When the House voted overwhelmingly (332-94) to pass the compromise budget agreement, those Republicans finally got something to be optimistic about–even as they bemoaned the deal.  Mainstream Democrats moaned too, but saw the prospects of the resurrection of old style institutional politics.

Emboldened, pissed off, and buttressed by the (at least momentary) support of most of his caucus, Speaker Boehner fired on those interest groups, announcing the end of their undue influence on his members.  (Remember, he said, these are the folks who brought you the shutdown–which I warned against.) Mainstream media portrayed the speaker as standing up to the Tea Party, but it’s not clear there was anything approaching a grassroots movement ever involved in this round of debate.  Although the Tea Party Patriots national office decried the budget and Boehner in particular (“Boehner declares war on the American people“), in doing so she looked very much like the leadership of those well-funded, but not broadly supported, Washington, DC interest groups.

The question now is whether those conservative groups can keep their promises and remobilize a movement that will hold Republicans who want to govern accountable.  Organizers were able to use the financial bail-outs of 2008-09 and the passage of the Affordable Care Act to stoke the grassroots into action.  I doubt that the agreement to pass a budget and keep government open can do the same thing, but we’ll see.

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Are the movements in Ukraine and Thailand democratic?

Posted on December 10, 2013 by David S. Meyer

I don’t know enough about these cases to say.

Clifford Bob, who knows more than I do, writes with concerns:

I just read your blogpost on Ukraine and Thailand.  I was struck by that juxtaposition today also.  But one thing that bothers me is exactly what the protesters are after.  I haven’t been following either protest too closely, but from what I know about Thailand this is, very broadly, a case of protest aimed at bringing down a democratically elected government.  And that has been a major part of the protest ever since Thaksin won elections in the early 2000s.  The protesters, mostly middle class urbanites, want various changes to the Thai political system, to help ensure that  populists such as Thaksin and his sister, who depend mostly on the votes of poor rural people, can’t win elections or at least dominate politics–even if they won relatively clean democratic elections.

And the protests that helped lead to the downfall of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt are also similar.  Broadly, it seems that relatively well-resourced and “liberal” middle classes are taking to the streets to unseat democratically elected, sometimes “populist” governments.  It’s a very interesting phenomenon, and challenges a number of ideas that are commonplace among scholars of social movements and democracy.  I haven’t seen much about it, but one exception is Joshua Kurlantzick, Democracy in Retreat.  I’m also reminded of the US political system historically and today, with all its limits on democracy and fear of populism.

The New York Times reports that while Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra has called for new elections, she’s refused to step down in advance of those elections.  The opposition is apparently wary of new elections that they would lose, and wants instead a council of wise people to rule the country.  Shinawatra’s achievements include high prices for rice farmers and universal health care.

Similar policies (substitute corn for rice) spurred a conservative populist (but certainly not majority) backlash in other countries you know about.

Protest movements aren’t always pushing for democracy.  The Times reports worries about the undermining of democratic institutions.  This is always a charge made against social movements, from below or not; sometimes, however, it’s appropriate.

Do any readers know more about this story?

(Add Ukraine and Egypt if you want.)

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Recipe for Democratic Revolution: What Works?

Posted on December 9, 2013 by David S. Meyer

Reliably?  Nothing.

Thais assemble in Bangkok to demand new government, November 25, 2013

As we see expressions of people power emerge and reemerge globally, it’s important–and hard–to remember that promoting democratic change isn’t like baking a cake.

When courageous people take to the streets to press for their governments to be more responsive and democratic, the fates of their movements are not fully within their control.

In Thailand, where activists have massed large crowds and escalated demands, the Prime Minister has dissolved parliament and called for snap elections, but this isn’t giving into the demands from the street.  Activists assume that allies of the ruling faction will easily win any election, and are pressing for alternatives.  But the King and the military have maintained neutrality; meaningful reforms seem quite distant.  What activists do will matter, but they’re not alone in this struggle, and opponents and bystanders have a lot of autonomy and consequence.  No magic recipe for success.

Ukrainian protesters topple statue of Lenin, December 8, 2013

In Ukraine, protesters have also escalated, punctuating massive rallies by pulling down a statue of Vladimir Lenin in Kiev.  It’s tempting to think that the dramatic symbolic triumph marks a turning point in real politics.  The provocation for protest at the outset was President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to reject steps toward integration with Europe in order to maintain close ties with Russia.  Activists want to turn West rather than East, and now to bring down the government.

Kindred efforts in Eastern Europe faltered and failed throughout the cold war in the face of the threat–or actuality–of intervention by the Soviet Union….at least until the very end in 1989.  Is Russia as threatening and powerful as the Soviet Union once was?  Again, this is mostly beyond the control of Ukrainian activists.  Again, the outcomes of their actions, no matter how sincerely motivated or well-considered, are largely beyond their control.  Again, no magic recipe for success.

Some of those who bravely challenge powerful authorities fool themselves (or are fooled) into thinking their odds of success are better than they actually are.  Others steel themselves with the sense of moral righteousness that sustains commitment even in the face of defeats.  Maybe most go back and forth.

Now think about Nelson Mandela’s twenty-seven years in prison, working on the same plan, largely insulated from useful information about its progress for most of that time.  Miscalculation?  Faith?  Longterm strategic thinking?

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Claiming Nelson Mandela

Posted on December 6, 2013 by David S. Meyer

The flags are at half-staff here in Irvine, mourning the death, and commemorating the life of Nelson Mandela.Nelson Mandela  President Mandela outlived and outperformed most of his critics, leaving us with an unduly warm and fuzzy picture of a genial elder statesmen.

There’s lots of reporting on Mandela’s life and legacy (I like Mitchell Hartman’s Marketplace piece, which quotes me on the anti-apartheid movement), and entrepreneurial politicians of the left and right are trying to hop in, appropriating the man and the moment to their own purposes.   One egregious example is former Senator Rick Santorum’s long struggle against apartheid in South Africa to his own campaign against the Affordable Care Act (and, implicitly, for president).

We should remember that Mandela mattered most when he was far more controversial.  He went to jail in 1962, explaining that he endorsed the African National Congress’s decision to employ a variety of means, including violence, to end apartheid.  He was labelled a terrorist, not just in South Africa, but also in the United States, and spent 27 years in prison.  He claimed, in 1962 and much later, that he never doubted apartheid would fall and South Africa would develop a multiracial democracy.  I don’t believe that, but I admire his ability to stay on that lofty message.  His cause was supported by Communists, both inside South Africa and outside, and he never renounced those who supported the ANC in difficult times to curry favor with those who did not.  I admire this too.

As President, he was stalwart in advancing a vision of a multi-racial state and NOT punishing or even stigmatizing those who had jailed him.  Given his experience, this is extraordinary.  I think it makes more sense to see him as a man who controlled and managed bitterness and resentment than one who felt no animus about apartheid in general and his own imprisonment.  He was after something bigger.  He got a lot of it.

In 1990 I was part of a crowd of more than one quarter million on the Charles River Esplanade who greeted Nelson Mandela, recently released from prison, when he visited Boston on a fundraising tour.  It was joyous, crowded, multi-racial (unusual in Boston at that time), and inspiring.  Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo played music.

Now that others can try to speak for him, we will hear partisans of all kinds of causes attempting to claim Mandela’s strength, spirit, and effectiveness.  We would do well to remember how the speakers dealt with Mandela when he was alive–and in need.  Conservative Republicans, like Senator Santorum, were actively hostile to the man and the cause.  Without recognition of this turn, it’s probably wise to take such claims skeptically.

It’s hard to figure out what Mandela would have said or done absent the man himself, but we might consider those who supported him and the cause when it was far harder to do so.  Students who campaigned for their colleges and universities to divest their holdings in companies that did business in South Africa, constructing shantytowns on their quads were among them, facing charges of naivete–or much worse.  But they helped get Nelson Mandela out of prison, to visit Boston, and to become president of South Africa.

It’s hard to imagine those people campaigning against immigrant rights or universal health care, or for mindless tax and spending cuts.  It’s easier to see their children, now pushing for their campuses to channel their endowments away from carbon pollution, channeling Mandela’s spirit and his supporters’ dreams.

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Rep. John Lewis, comic book hero

Posted on August 15, 2013 by David S. Meyer

Without cape and tights, Congressman John Lewis is becoming a comic book hero.  (He’s already a hero of mine, and some of his exploits have appeared in this blog.)

From a piece by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, at the New York Times, I learned of a new comic (they call it a “graphic novel,” but this story is true, not fictional) depicting Lewis’s life in three volumes.

By day, Lewis is a long time Democratic congressman from Atlanta, wearing a coat and tie, casting votes and making speeches–not generally the stuff of comic book heroism.

But Lewis is also a crusader for civil rights and social justice.  He was Executive Director of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the early 1960s, a Freedom Rider, non-violent warrior, and a frequent civil disobedient.  His superpowers include extraordinary moral clarity and physical courage.  It won’t take you thirty seconds to find pictures of John Lewis, as a young divinity student or older member of Congress, braving fire bombers or police dogs, or just being hauled away in handcuffs.

Even quicker, you’ll be able to find his Congressional website which details his positions and activities on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged generally, the environment, and civil rights for gays, lesbians, ethnic minorities, immigrants, and generally anyone excluded from some of the benefits of American life.

Representative Lewis has told his story before, in a more conventional memoir of the civil rights movement, in talks before activist audiences, and in speeches on the floor of the House of Representatives.  He constantly reminds his audiences that he is fighting the same fights for social justice in mark-up sessions and committee hearings that he fought on the Edmund Pettus bridge nearly fifty years ago.  And he still takes his politics outdoors as well. keeping civil disobedience in his personal tactical repertoire, even since entering Congress.

Even educated Americans take the story of civil rights in America so much for granted that they actually know little of it.  Among the many very bright and well-educated students I encounter at the University of California, Irvine, I’ve met only a few who had heard of John Lewis.   Most know of two civil rights heroes: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks.  Neither is now around to continue the struggle, their heroism and activism safely now confined to the past.

(Part of what I teach is John Lewis and his story of taking a political struggle into mainstream institutional politics; this is a story, in part, about social change and the resilience of American institutions.)

History is another site of struggle for activists, who need to work hard to claim credit for their achievements in the past and the connections to current struggles.  The graphic memoir (comic book) here becomes another activist tool and tactic.

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