Veliz has been an activist and a poster child for the DREAM Act, a proposal that has been circulating for more than a decade which would provide a pathway to citizenship for people just like her. President Obama and the Democratic Party generally have embraced the DREAM Act, and putting Veliz on the program at the convention visibly ups the commitment.
Meanwhile, outside the convention, advocates for the DREAM and immigration reform–including other undocumented youth–were explicitly breaking the laws to demonstrate their concerns. Ten people were arrested in Charlotte after committing civil disobedience; they were held for several hours before release. It could have been worse.
The civil disobedience at the convention grew out of a much larger effort, the cross-country tour of the Undocubus, a rolling campaign on behalf of immigration reform. Roughly two months ago, a group called “No Papers, No Fear” has evoked memories of the Freedom Rides half-a century ago, explicitly challenging the enforcement of immigration laws. The activists declare their immigration status–and the risks they are taking–trying to make both the DREAMers and roughly ten million other undocumented immigrants visible. They’ve been staging demonstrations across the country.
Even though Benita Veliz wasn’t in prime time, the advocates–and subjects–of immigration reform are becoming more visible–and bolder–than ever before. Institutional and protest efforts feed each other. Mobilizing the opposition can help as well.
There’s a little celebrity angle too: Below, see Rosario Dawson, participating in the protests outside the convention.
A counterpart to Clint Eastwood, Eva Longoria will address the Democratic Convention tonight, prior to President Obama’s speech. Longoria has promised that there will be no empty chairs, and there’s every reason to believe that her remarks, like those of virtually all of the non-Eastwood and non-Clinton speakers at both conventions, will be tightly scripted.
Eva Longoria, as we’ve discussed here before, like Clint Eastwood, is hardly a political novice. In addition to her acting and entrepreneurial efforts, she’s invested a great deal of time in a range of causes, including immigration reform and education, and has been active in presidential politics since volunteering for Bill Clinton’s campaign in 1992. She serves as one of 34 national co-chairs of President Obama’s reelection campaign.
A brief comparison of the two actors gives us some insight into the risks and rewards of employing celebrities in partisan politics.
Clint Eastwood has a long career of accomplishment in the arts, acting in both extremely high quality productions and extreme schlock over the years. Increasingly, he’s been even better known as a director. Annoyed when the City of Carmel (Carmel-by-the-Sea) denied him a building permit for his restaurant, The Hog’s Breath Inn, he sued the city, and ultimately settled out of court with an agreement that allowed him to build. He ran for mayor in 1986, won, and served a two year term, promising to run a business-friendly government. Although Eastwood has been consistently candid about his politics, distrusting government intervention in the economy, business, and personal lives, he has been more interested in arts and business than politics.
Although he endorsed Mitt Romney for president in early August, he has not been heavily involved in the campaign. Having a massive Hollywood star introduce the party’s nominee surely seemed like a great opportunity for Governor Romney’s advisers, and they let the icon choreograph his own time at the podium, which included an improvised dialogue with an empty chair that represented President Obama. Eastwood’s twelve minutes upstaged Governor Romney, and provoked more than a little wincing from Republicans and ridicule from Democrats.
Eva Longoria has already done more for the Democrats, speaking for the Obama campaign across the country. In addition to providing some star power, she represents an outreach to Latino voters. (Eastwood, although an older white man, apparently exudes enough cool to appeal to younger voters.) In addition to public speeches, assume that Longoria has been appearing at smaller, less public events, to help raise funds from donors somewhat more likely to write checks when they get to sip drinks with a star.
Republican pundits will dismiss Longoria as a Hollywood actress, not necessarily versed in the issues, noting that her most visible work has been in daytime and nightime soap operas. Like Clint Eastwood, however, Longoria has other business interests, including a restaurant. Eastwood’s resume is much much longer and more impressive than Longoria’s so far, but she’s 37 and has already directed a short and a documentary. He’s 82, and directed his first film at age 41.
There’s plenty of depth and plenty of frivolity to find in either career. Putting the celebrity on the podium is risking ridicule in exchange for attention, but most viewers will project their politics onto the speaker. Many Republicans found Eastwood’s commentary humorous, pointed, and provocative, and whatever Longoria does tonight will surely generate ridicule from conservative blogs. The more interesting question is how effectively each celebrity can leverage their profile for the causes they care about. I suspect that Eva Longoria’s politics are closer to President Obama’s than Clint Eastwood’s are to Governor Romney. I think she wins this round.
San Antonio mayor Julian Castro gave a barn-burner of a speech at the Democratic convention last night, following a stirring introduction by his identical twin brother, Joaquin, who is running for a seat in the House of Representatives. Someone planning the Democratic convention has an eye for political talent. The American Castro brothers were barely on my radar before the convention (but see the joint portrait by Zev Chafets in the New York Times Magazine in 2010); the speech gave both brothers more of a national profile.
Mayor Castro presented his life story as emblematic of the American dream, presented as a generational relay: his grandmother cleaned houses to support his mother’s college education and, ultimately, the twins’ academic successes at Stanford University, Harvard Law School, and their subsequent–and unfolding–political careers. This is the basic outline of the American dream, with parents investing their time and money in their children’s success, even if the Castro trajectory is far steeper than most. (Barack Obama and Mitt Romney trace the same kind of generational mobility, all starting in very different places; it’s hard to earn and accomplish more than the CEO of a major automobile company and governor of a state!)
Of course, as soon as Mayor Castro was announced as the convention’s keynote speaker (a slot a younger Barack Obama filled not long ago), some conservatives commenced a preemptive attack. Over at Breitbart, the Castro brothers have been portrayed as racists and radicals. To the extent that there is any substance underneath these charges, it comes not from their conduct in office (Joaquin serves in the Texas legislature) or even their rhetoric, but from odd quotes from people associated with one of organizations their mother, Rosie, founded, La Raza Unida, some forty years ago.
Rosie sat with Julian’s wife and young daughter during the keynote, beaming, but it was hardly her first dip into politics. She was a leader in the Chicano movement in San Antonio, an organizer and activist, and a failed candidate for City Council in 1971. She took her kids to political meetings and demonstrations, and reports that she had little to do with the twins’ drive, academic achievements, and political aspirations. Don’t believe it; the Castro brothers don’t, citing her as inspiration.
When Mayor Castro took office, he hung a La Raza poster from his mother’s council campaign in his office. This is the one piece of conduct in office Breitbart’s Charles Johnson takes issue with. Johnson’s take-down, however, is based on interviews Jose Angel Guittierrez, past president of La Raza and current law professor, gave to a Toronto paper, in which he confessed an aspiration to take back Aztlan. Guilt by parental association is a shabby way to do journalistic business.
For Politics Outdoors, the really interesting story is about the generational institutionalization of dissent. Rosie Castro claims a Chicano identity, although neither of her boys does. She practiced a politics of community organizing, outside activism, and protest. The Castro sons, who have cultivated images of pragmatism and moderation, practice their politics indoors, emphasizing management and broad political coalitions. Partly, Rosie Castro didn’t have a law degree or the resources she provided for her sons. Partly, the world has changed, at least somewhat in response to the efforts of activists like Rosie Castro, so that her sons can win access and influence in mainstream political institutions.
Although party conventions in the past have drawn large and disruptive events–as we’ve discussed–so far, that’s a story about the past. Oddly, the relatively small convention protests have followed a period of intense mobilization on both the right and the left, exemplified by the Tea Party and Occupy. But most Tea Party members, even including that large number disappointed in Mitt Romney, has been focused on electoral politics, and throwing out a greater enemy, Barack Obama.
This is a critical moment for social movements. As the final push of the general election takes off (doesn’t it seem like it’s been going on forever already?), both major party candidates are going to try to claim the imagined middle of the political spectrum, trying to portray their opponent as a dangerous radical outside of the mainstream. Mostly this is the conventional wisdom about how to win an election–and it generally makes sense. For activists, however, this is the last good chance to try to lash their candidate to a strong statement of principles.
Take a look, for example, at Mitt Romney’s efforts to avoid talking about abortion, much less taking a strong stand against it, now that he’s got the Republican nomination. Assuming that staunch anti-abortion activists won’t desert him, Governor Romney is more interested in pushing other issues and making a play for suburban voters, particularly women, who are uneasy about the Republican platform. Anti-abortion activists are going to work hard to avoid letting him do so, focusing on the Democrats’ position on legal access to abortion and funding of Planned Parenthood. I’d bet that Democratic operatives welcome this effort while Governor Romney’s advisers try to find more attractive story lines for reporters.
In the same way, President Obama doesn’t figure to lose an election by assassinating foreign (and domestic) enemies with killer drones, keeping Bradley Manning in jail, or not doing more for undocumented immigrants. The left activists in the street want to make it hard for him to tack to the center. Listen to the speeches and see if this works.
For Labor Day Weekend, here’s a reminder about the history of this commemoration in America (reposted from 2011).
Successful politicians exploit, buy off, and sell out the movements that sometimes buoy their campaigns. This American story is an old one, and it’s one that leaves activists disappointed, wary, and cynical, even especially about the politicians who do the most for them.
[Recall that candidate Abraham Lincoln promised to put the preservation of the union higher on his list of priorities than ending slavery, and that abolitionists criticized President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (issued after two years of war), which ended slavery only in the territories that had seceded.] And many do far less.
So, why is the American day to commemorate Labor held at the end of the summer, months after May Day, the workers’ celebration day virtually everywhere else in the world? How do you turn a movement by creating an occasion for a cook-out?
President Grover Cleveland, a hard-money Democrat, and generally no friend to organized labor, signed a bill making Labor Day a national holiday at the end of June in 1894, at the height of the Populist movement, and just after the American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, had launched a boycott and strike, starting in Pullman, Illinois. Protesting the Pullman Palace Car Company’s treatment of its workers, including harsh wage cuts, railway workers across the country refused to handle any train hauling a Pullman car.
The Federal government used an injunction, then troops, to battle the union and get the trains moving. In July, just after announcing a national day to celebrate the contributions of American workers, President Cleveland ordered federal marshals–along with 12,000 Army troops, into Chicago to break up the strike. Workers fought back, and 13 workers were killed, and at least several dozen injured. Debs was tried for violating an injunction, and went to prison, where he discovered the writings of Karl Marx. Clarence Darrow provided a vigorous, but unsuccessful, defense.
Debs would go to prison again, most notably for his opposition to US entry into World War I, and would run for president five times as a Socialist.
But I digress. President Cleveland created a distinctly American Labor Day, explicitly not on May 1, which had already been the occasion for vigorous and disruptive workers’ activism. (Read about the Haymarket affair.) May Day remains the day for international workers mobilization. Instead, our Labor Day is a time to mark the end of summer by cooking outdoors and shopping for school supplies.
The US Department of Labor’s website gives credit for Labor Day to the American worker, but makes no mention of the Pullman Strike or the Haymarket demonstrations.
So, commemoration can actually be a way to neuter the historical memory. See our discussions of commemorative days for Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, and Fred Korematsu, all significantly more difficult characters than what they’ve come to represent.
Somehow Code Pink activists got back on the floor of the Republican National Convention during Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech. After two activists, very briefly, heckled Paul Ryan on the previous night, it’s surprising that anyone without genuine credentials could get past convention security. But four Code Pink activists did, carrying pink banners, which they unfurled early in Governor Romney’s speech.
As before, the delegates began chanting “USA USA” to drown out the protesters, a relatively simple task. This time, the demonstrators were cleared from the arena even more quickly than the previous night, and the nominee didn’t acknowledge their presence–although he did pause. The slogan was: “People over profits; democracy is not a business.”
Here, an activist being ushered out is confronted by both mainstream and partisan media trying to find a better story.
Now, what comes of all this? Certainly the Code Pink contingent was less of a disruption than invited guest Clint Eastwood’s uh, performance. It’s hard to imagine that the banners changed the mind of anyone on the convention floor, nor were the Code Pink arguments articulated in any greater clarity or specificity than the arguments of the invited speakers.
Code Pink rent a little opening in the mostly tightly produced convention, giving people who wanted to talk about something else or something critical the space to do so. Probably more significantly, Code Pink demonstrated to its own supporters the capacity to get into the news and into the picture, a picture that wouldn’t be very appealing otherwise. The momentary snippet of guerrilla theater meant more to the faithful than their opponents or a broader audience, but it may inspire some of those activists to continue their efforts.
Two members of Code Pink, the feminist antiwar group, somehow got inside the Republican convention, and aired their grievances with the Romney/Ryan ticket.
They only had a few moments to battle for prime time attention with Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan, who had the advantage of the microphone, the podium, and the support of the crowd.
The two women, Ann Wright and Laura Mills, shouted “My Body, My Choice,” and unfurled banners with pointed slogans: “Fund Healthcare not Warfare!” and “Vagina. Can’t say it? Don’t legislate it.” Their protest unified the Republican crowd more dramatically than Rep. Ryan’s speech, and the conventioneers shouted down the protesters, chanting “USA, USA” until security guards removed them.
With very tight security, how did Code Pink get into the arena? Sarah Wheaton at the New York Timesreports that a disaffected Ron Paul delegate gave them his credentials. (Remember, Rep. Paul’s supporters think that the Republican establishment quashed their legitimate dissent, ignoring and changing rules to silence the libertarian stream in the party.)
Code Pink took advantage of the split in the party to seize a moment or two of prime time.
Meanwhile, outside the convention Code Pink has been more colorful and provocative. Focusing on access to abortion, the activists have performed as dancing vaginas: “Take Your Vaginas to the RNC.”
The language and the style, of course, are all about getting attention. The important audience isn’t the delegates nearby, but the broader public that might see the videos on youtube or read about the disruption in convention reports. The potential danger is that the tactic will overshadow the issue. No doubt some people will stop listening after they hear the word, “vagina,” much less see an approaching dance troupe comprised of them.
Will the Democratic delegates react as the Republicans did? My guess is that the Democrats will be less likely to shout down the demonstrators than to roll their eyes.
The storms surrounding Hurricane Isaac shortened the Republican convention in Tampa, Florida, and stole some of the headlines Republicans hoped to generate. The rains mostly kept the delegates and party regulars indoors, fairly well insulated from the demonstrators outdoors, who were fewer and less visible than organizers promised. And, in the event that the protest zones weren’t far enough from the staged Republican party action to keep the two groups separate, there have been plenty of police.
What’s going on here? Why are the demonstrators there in the first place, and why have they been so, relatively, invisible?
Long ago, party conventions were places where Republican and Democratic leaders made decisions about important matters, particularly, who would represent them in national elections. While ambitious politicians made speeches, bosses made deals in rooms filled, no doubt, with smoke. The primaries were a sideshow that generated sideshow like attention. There were often several rounds of balloting for presidential and vice-presidential nominations, and bosses shifted their delegations’ votes with an eye toward the November elections and their own political fortunes. Journalists covered the conventions to get real news.
In the old days, before 1976 or so, activists turned out at the conventions to challenge the politicians and to steal some of their spotlight in the media. Activists could make claims directly to politicians who made decisions, from national figures to local precinct captains, and to a broader national audience. Sometimes it was disruptive and ugly. At the Democratic convention in Chicago, 1968, demonstrators assembled in large numbers in Grant Park, protesting against the war, particularly, and against a process that allowed Vice President Hubert Humphrey to win the nomination without contesting a single primary. Mayor Richard J. Daley, the dictionary definition of a party boss, ordered the police, his police, to keep the demonstrators out, and some of the demonstrators fought back. The confrontations, including police attacks on members of the media, made national news–and it wasn’t pleasant. Below, you can see a young security forces rough up a young Dan Rather, who was trying to report on a delegate being kicked out of the convention.
Certainly, it was no help to candidate Humphrey, running against Republican nominee Richard Nixon who promised a return to law and order.
Since then, activist protests have been a fixture at party conventions. As the conventions themselves became less important in making decisions, they remained a tempting target for activists trying to get their message out to a national audience. And the causes proliferated. While there were plenty of grievances in 1968, the conduct of the Vietnam War was the major focus of the demonstrations in Chicago. It’s harder to distill one clear issue from the demonstrations at later conventions, even though even larger numbers of people participated, for example, in the protests outside the Republican convention in New York City in 2004.* (See the section on convention protests in The Politics of Protest.)
Activists promised a substantial presence at the Republican convention, and a vigorous challenge to promised Republican policies on a large number of economic and social issues. But the turnout in “Romneyville,” a protest zone set up a “safe” distance from the convention, underwhelmed journalists looking for a story.
The weather was part of the story; it’s hard to get even the very committed to board buses heading for a hurricane, particularly when plans for where to sleep haven’t quite come together. And activist networks in Tampa are nowhere near as dense and developed as those in New York or Minneapolis-St. Paul. (Even Floridians are staying away. 1Miami is organizing its convention protest in Miami, not Tampa.)
It’s not just a grievance that gets people to turn out, it’s also organizing. Activists from the left side of the political spectrum will have a hard time locating potential allies inside in the developing Republican party, homogenizing and shifting rightward at the same time. This was not the case for previous activists confronting somewhat more diverse parties. And the energy and activism of Occupy has spread into scores of other campaigns on a wide range of issues, with no powerful group taking the responsibility to direct its efforts to an anti-Romney protest in Tampa. Of course, Occupy’s norms of base democracy and consensus would make organizing such an event even more difficult than in the past.
And there were protesters on the left as well. But when the numbers are smaller, the actions need to be more dramatic to get much attention. Code Pink tried to effect a citizen’s arrest of former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice for war crimes. (They didn’t get close enough to yell her her rights, but they’re ready to go after other veterans of the Bush administration.)
So at the moment, the rain has partly drowned out the Republican message, which has pushed the anti-Republican message even further off-screen.
The members of a Russian feminist punk band (sort of) have been sentenced to two years in prison for making a critical video of an anti-Putin song. Most reports suggest that the ambitions of the three young women in the bank are more political than musical, and that their connections to reform movements in Russia developed after their video debut.
The first struggle for reformers in Russia is to create enough space for meaningful political organization and action when government authorities face no effective political or moral constraints in shutting them down. Here’s yet another case where the old dictum, that the losers in any fight have an interest in bringing the crowd in on their side, hold true. When the effort to bring in outsiders crosses national lines, Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink
wrote long ago, we can think about it like throwing a boomerang. Activists get their story out to mobilize external pressure on their opponents.
Pussy Riot is hardly the first effort of dissidents in Russia to do exactly this, but it’s been the most dramatic in recent years, and it’s generated a great deal of attention, as well as the interest of globally famous musicians (e.g., Madonna, Sting, Paul McCartney) who hadn’t been particularly public about whatever their beliefs about Putin’s Russia are.
Sending the women to jail might be the very worst thing that the Russian government could do for their own interests. The presence of these three young women in jail means that everyone who signed onto their cause still has a grievance. And the odd circumstances of Pussy Riot’s actions mean that these three women will get far more international attention than the much larger number of political prisoners. If things go well for the opposition, Pussy Riot will shine a light on others in prison for their opposition to Vladimir Putin.
To think about how a political prisoner can serve as the focus of a long term campaign for reform, think about Nelson Mandela or Vaclav Havel. I pick these examples to show that the international efforts can be important, albeit not quick or easy. There’s been no indication, so far, that the members of Pussy Riot possess the extraordinary resolve, temperament, and eloquence of Mandela, Havel, or Aung San Suu Kyi. Unlike those heroes, Pussy Riot hasn’t grown up within a reform movement and built long term organizational ties to carry on their efforts (thus, it may be right that the drama of their actions attracted international attention that far exceeds their local support). And this may make international reformers reluctant to build their campaign around the band.
The key for activists in Russia is to mobilize enough international pressure to force the authorities in Moscow to afford them some space for politics. Pussy Riot might be the wedge that draws attention to one-time chess champion Garry Kasparov, for example. There’s no sure recipe for this, so a lot of the sentences will have “might” in them.
So, Amnesty International and other groups will work mostly on the politics of attention, getting people and governments to pay attention, again, to Putin and Russia. Their success will depend upon just how much the political and economic powers in Russia care about the good opinion of others. (See Evan Osnos’s excellent piece on The Burmese Spring in the New Yorker. It shows just how much contingency there is in a political revolution.)
An Olympic boycott would be a showy move, but one that would be unlikely to get enough international support to affect the Olympic games of politics more generally. (You recall the boycotts of the Moscow and Los Angeles Olympics, when bloc politics ensured a certain amount of support.) Isolation like this can strengthen the position of authoritarians, who now have a better excuse for cracking down on domestic opposition (think, for example, of Iran or North Korea). Over the long haul, it’s more likely that making it hard for the Russian elite to travel and do business abroad will be more effective in promoting domestic reform–but that’s a long haul effort.
After a boycott announcement, a buycott day, and a same sex kiss-in, the consumption thread of the battle over same sex marriage has taken a new turn. Yesterday (August 7), the front moved from fast food chicken to milk-saturated coffee. (Opponents of same sex marriage can buy their coffee elsewhere, although that outlet might be owned by Starbucks anyway!) Meanwhile, several celebrities tweeted in support.
The examples go on and on and on. Indeed, when its president rejected same sex marriage, Chick-Fil-A identified itself as something of an outlier among national companies; most want to attract all the customers they can, and, like virtually everyone else, gays and lesbians eat cookies, drink coffee and buy clothes. (Adam Smith and Karl Marx would agree that discrimination is bad business. Even Chick-Fil-A is adamant in proclaiming that it does not discriminate in service or hiring; they’ll sell anyone a chicken sandwich.)
So, yesterday, if you wanted to support marriage equality, you could buy a book online, drink a latte, buy sneakers, or install software–things you might do anyway. Or you could do any of those activities because… you do them anyway.
Of course, none of these businesses will survive, much less flourish, because of their political stands–and even if you approve of, say Microsoft’s stance on marriage equality, there will be something else the company does that you don’t like.
More than that, doesn’t consumption as politics make expressing support so easy to do and hard to track as to be virtually meaningless? Activist groups work hard to provide something for their supporters to do, and buying something, posting something, or tweeting can easily set the most modest level of engagement. But the $4.50 you spend on a latte at Starbucks would do more for the cause if contributed to, say, the Human Rights Campaign, which helpfully offers a comprehensive buying guide for its supporters.
In providing easy access to minimally disruptive or effective actions, groups hope to provide a rung on a ladder on which the aspiring activist could climb. But in defining politics in terms of buying behavior, shopping can easily become a substitute for marginally more difficult–and possibly more influential–ways to support political claims.
I'm a professor of sociology and political science at the University of California, Irvine. I've been thinking, and writing about, protest politics for almost ever. This site offers comments on contemporary events, informed (I hope) by knowing something about history and about the academic study of social movements.
their concerns. Ten people were arrested in Charlotte after committing civil disobedience; they were held for several hours before release. It could have been worse.
surely seemed like a great opportunity for Governor Romney’s advisers, and they let the icon choreograph his own time at the podium, which included an improvised dialogue with an empty chair that represented President Obama. Eastwood’s twelve minutes upstaged Governor Romney, and provoked 
The protest story from the Democratic convention so far is pretty similar to the stories from the Republican convention–minus the storms. There are fewer demonstrators than organizers promised or journalists expected, 
So, why is the American day to commemorate Labor held at the end of the summer, months after May Day, the workers’ celebration day virtually everywhere else in the world? How do you turn a movement by creating an occasion for a cook-out?
thread of the battle over same sex marriage has taken a new turn. Yesterday (August 7), the front moved from fast food chicken to milk-saturated coffee. (Opponents of same sex marriage can buy their coffee elsewhere, although that outlet might be owned by Starbucks anyway!) Meanwhile, 
referendum effort in Washington, quickly made the list. 
Politics Outdoors 