Take it to Wall Street

Posted on September 18, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Left activists have decided to target big business, as well as the government. Yesterday, in an event that was  months in the making, (at least) hundreds have attempted to occupy Wall Street.

Announced by the anti-corporate group, Adbusters, the hacktivist group, Anonymous posted a youtube video in support.  Over time, others joined in, organizing around the event.

Claiming inspiration from the Arab Spring, the project’s open source site, Occupy Wall Street, called for sustained mass action in lower Manhattan–and announced that they planned to stay and make a new world:

On September 17, 20,000 of us will descend on Wall Street, the iconic financial center of America, set up a peaceful encampment, hold a people’s assembly to decide what our one demand will be, and carry out an agenda of full-spectrum, absolutely nonviolent civil disobedience the likes of which the country has not seen since the freedom marches of the 1960s.

From our encampment we will launch daily smart mob forays all over lower Manhattan … peaceful, creative happenings in front of Goldman Sachs; the SEC; the Federal Reserve; the New York Stock Exchange … and maybe even, if we can figure out where they’re being held, at the sites of Obama’s private $38,500 per person fundraising events happening somewhere in Manhattan on Sept. 19 and 20.

Our strategy will be that of the master strategist Sun Tzu: “appear at points which the enemy must hasten to defend; march swiftly to places where you are not expected.”

With a bit of luck, and if fate is on our side, we may be able to turn all of lower Manhattan into a site of passionate democratic contestation – an American Tahrir Square.

(Wall Street is an obvious, attractive, and very difficult target for activists.  There was a march on Wall Street against the Federal bailout of large financial firms in 2008, organized by critics on the left, and a large antinuclear power rally and civil disobedience action in 1979 [more on this later].  It’s relatively easy for a large police force to shut off access to the Financial district’s narrow streets, and to clear activists out.  Armed, coordinated, equipped, and better trained police forces can stage mass arrests reasonably quickly, carting demonstrators out in plastic handcuffs or on stretchers.)

Calls for the action circulated on all sorts of social media, including Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter, the event as been widely publicized.  But no one applied for a permit.  As a result, New York police were well-prepared to deny access to most of the area (NY 1 Reports).  As with most large actions, people with many different perspectives are participating.  The New York Times that both anarchists and followers of the proto-fascist Lyndon LaRouche (singing patriotic songs) also attended–with their own plans and purposes.

It seems clear that it will be very difficult for any group to control the message that comes out of this event, and for this reason, the larger groups have stayed away.

United for Peace and Justice, for example, has announced a broad anti-corporate campaign, kicking off next week, which lists many events–but not the Wall Street demonstration.

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Ronald Reagan sold out conservative movements

Posted on September 15, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Successful politicians exploit, buy off, and sell out the movements that animate their campaigns.  And Ronald Reagan was a successful politician.  He came into the presidency as the embodiment of a conservative movement coalition, and left, dismissed by movement leaders as a “useful idiot,” by Howard Phillips, chair of the Conservative Caucus.

As aspirants for the Republican presidential nomination invoke President Reagan’s name, and seek to outflank each other on the right to claim his mantle, it’s worthwhile to remember how (and how severely) his presidency frustrated the conservative movements of the time.  (Although it certainly didn’t please people on the left.)

Candidate Ronald Reagan, a two-term governor of California (where he presided over the largest tax increase in California history), tried to ride and unite several conservative movements to the Republican presidential nomination, in a challenge to incumbent Gerald Ford (who employed Dick Cheney as his chief of staff) in 1976.  The effort failed, but damaged Ford.  By 1980, Reagan had the strongest claim among the Republican hopefuls as the conservative movement candidate.

Candidate Reagan pledged fealty to the religious right, promising to bring back prayer in the schools and end legal access to abortion.  He rode the then-rising tide of anti-tax advocacy, promising to reduce taxes and the size of government, and to eliminate the federal budget deficit.  He campaigned for massive increases in military spending and promised a tougher line against the Soviet Union, in adherence to the conservative movement’s line on foreign policy.

In office, Reagan continued to pay lip service to the movements that made his candidacy successful, but he also, increasingly as his term went on, trimmed his agenda to what seemed politically possible.

Putting prayer in the schools and outlawing abortion depended upon the Supreme Court, and two of President Reagan’s appointees (Sandra Day O’Connor and William Kennedy) consistently supported court precedent on those issues, demonstrating an institutionally conservative approach to social change–rather than a movement conservative approach.  Reagan regularly addressed the anti-abortion crusaders at the annual March for Life demonstrations–by telephone hook-up, but pursued their agenda in a more moderate way than they demanded.

President Reagan cut income taxes dramatically when he entered office and, contrary to supply side dogma, revenues decreased and the deficit ballooned.  Reagan presided over several substantial tax increases over the rest of his term.  Federal spending increased dramatically, as did the size of government.  Part of this was the result of unprecedented peacetime military spending, but President Reagan flinched at the idea of harsh cuts to most federal programs (see budget director David Stockman’s memoir of the period).

Increased military spending snaked through the Pentagon for the rest of the 1980s, but President Reagan’s confrontational stance toward the Soviet Union abated before the end of his first term, partly a reaction to the nuclear freeze movement.  Incoming Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev received a note from Reagan, hand-delivered by Vice President George Bush, just as he took office.  Reagan agreed to cuts in strategic nuclear weapons, and was ready to trade away even more nuclear weapons if the Soviets would accept his dream of space based anti-missile weapons (“Star Wars”).  His conservative supporters were appalled, and questioned his lucidity on the matter.

Ask about immigration reform.  President Reagan signed a comprehensive immigration bill that legalized millions of undocumented immigrants.

My point?  I’m not seeking to reconstruct the Reagan presidency as moderate.  Ronald Reagan governed as a conservative, and was the prime target for movements of the left at the time.

Rather, I mean to  point out how successful politicians are willing to compromise on their movement supporters’ vital matters of principle.  Republican presidential hopefuls are terrified of even acknowledging this as a possibility, preferring a plaster saint as iconic hero to the real two-term president.

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Obama backburners the environmental movement

Posted on September 9, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Darryl Hannah arrested outside White House

Successful politicians exploit, buy off, and sell out the movements that animate their campaigns.  And Barack Obama has been a successful politician.

Partly because of his soaring campaign rhetoric, partly because of his personal background, and partly because of his rather limited record in American politics, social movements of the left organized around Barack Obama’s candidacy as a gain all by itself.  (When he and his primary opponent, Hillary Clinton, detailed specific plans, Clinton’s were consistently more liberal.)  The election of a president named Barack, rather than George or Bill or John or James symbolically promised a great break with the past.  Activists imagined a similarly dramatic break with the past on policy matters.

And they were disappointed.

Supporters of health care reform lamented the absence of a public option in the president’s bill; civil libertarians continue to wait for President Obama to make good on his promise to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay.  Gay and lesbian activists steamed when he put the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” on a slow track; immigration activists mobilized while he failed to offer any comprehensive reform bill, and seemed to invest little in the DREAM Act.  Peace activists watched the dollars and casualties roll on up in Iraq and Afghanistan.  And environmentalists have seen little progress on the greener economy candidate Obama promised.

Once in office, like most politicians, Barack Obama has focused more on the voters he thinks might stray than those he assumes he can take for granted.  He tacked back to push for policy reforms on gay and lesbian rights and immigration, because he saw the prospects of gains in policy or politics.  But he’s left environmentalists hanging, on issues big and small.

And what are they to do?  President Obama, in contrast to almost all of the Republican presidential aspirants, says that he believes that human activity is contributing to climate change, and that human action can help ameliorate the adverse impact of changing climate.  Will the environmentalists desert him?  For whom?  The environmental movement is largely comprised of the educated middle-class, who tend to vote, but they’re unlikely to defect to anyone who can get the Republican nomination.  Obama seems to count on this.

So, some have begun to protest, to try to exert pressure and to keep their issues alive.  More than 1,000 activists have been arrested outside the White House so far, pointing to climate change in general as they oppose the specific authorization of a pipeline from Canada to Texas that would carry crude oil.

The Tar Sands Action group has staged repeated civil disobedience actions on the President’s doorstep, deploying celebrities in the movement, like writer Bill McKibben and NASA scientist, James Hansen, who have been crusading for action on climate change for years, and celebrities whose fame sometimes extends beyond the movement, like actress Darryl Hannah, above.

Meanwhile, with the environmentalists being hauled away outside, President Obama announced that he had ordered the EPA to abandon efforts to tighten controls on ozone in the air, even as his administrator, Lisa Jackson, had announced that current standards were inadequate and legally indefensible.  Al Gore has endorsed the civil disobedience action, criticizing the president along the way:

Instead of relying on science, President Obama appears to have bowed to pressure from polluters who did not want to bear the cost of implementing new restrictions on their harmful pollution—even though economists have shown that the US economy would benefit from the job creating investments associated with implementing the new technology. The result of the White House’s action will be increased medical bills for seniors with lung disease, more children developing asthma, and the continued degradation of our air quality.

Explicitly, the President has announced that he will postpone regulating environmental pollution to focus on short-term gains in jobs, a trade-off Republicans have been unwilling to make on the deficit.

Environmentalists have yet to find a way to exert effective political pressure.  As the campaign intensifies, absent a primary opponent for the president, they are unlikely to be able to do so.

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A day for Labor

Posted on September 7, 2011 by David S. Meyer

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.

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Suppose they held a protest, and no one saw

Posted on August 26, 2011 by David S. Meyer

A little follow-up on our last item about a few Republican members of the House returning to their districts and holding public events only for paying customers, uh, constituents.  In addition to raising money, the members of Congress were trying to avoid exactly those embarrassing youtube moments that recirculate in the e-ther.  I said that activists would look to find other places to make news, but it would probably take even more dramatic, loud, and disruptive action to break through into the news.

Over at Slate, David Weigel has found both successes and failures in reaching the news when the member of Congress won’t provide a spotlight and microphone.

Self-described “gay barbarians”have flashmobbed Marcus Bachmann’s clinic, protesting the Christian therapist’s comments about gays specifically, and Michele Bachmann and

Gay Barbarians

conservatives more generally.  It’s theatrical and entertaining stuff, and it’s made some news reports.  The name and the color and the confrontation make news.

Of course, Michele Bachmann is in Iowa, running for president, and not available in her district.

Constituents boo Rep. Ryan

In Wisconsin, Rep. Paul Ryan, who has declined a run for the White House, has been in the district, but constituents say it doesn’t make him any more accessible.  Rep. Ryan, who has been burned before by a videotaped confrontation at a town meeting,  scheduled no open events with constituents, and apparently refused to meet with constituents who have a problem with his political stances.  Weigel’s posted video that shows how hard it has been for political opponents stalking Rep. Ryan to make it into the news.  Here, they are banned not only from their representative’s office, but even the building in which it’s located.

I’d expect that they’ll find some way to make news, and it will look pretty silly and/or dangerous.

The point: authorities have a great deal of control over the sites in which they meet opponents, and therefore, the kinds of tactics that their opponents can use.  People who can’t be heard when talking in a conversational voice are likely to start to yell–or, at least put on costumes.

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Politics driven outdoors

Posted on August 19, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Several Republican members of Congress have stopped holding open meetings or taking questions from constituents who don’t pay for the privilege, Politico reports.  In addition to raising money, they are working to spare themselves embarrassment and to keep their opponents from a useful forum.

We remember that Liberty Belle (Keli Carendar) helped launch her public career as a Tea Partier by confronting Democratic Congressman Norman Dicks (Washington) about health care reform at an open town hall event, waving a $20 bill and daring him to come take it.

Coherence aside, Carendar (a one-time improv comic) understood how to create a theatrical moment.  From the grassroots, she now works as a professional organizer with Tea Party Patriots.

Well, more than one can play at this game.  After the House of Representatives passed his budget, featuring large spending cuts and take cuts for the wealthy, Representative Paul Ryan was met by angry protestors at his town meetings in Wisconsin (below).

Rep. Ryan, chair of the House Budget Committee, was the first to stop taking town meetings.  When in the district he represents, he will speak only to audiences that have paid to see him.

So what do the disgruntled among Rep. Ryan’s constituents do? Maybe some will pay $15-50 to ask a question.  (I doubt many will.)  I expect to see protests outside the events, where it’s harder to make a scene and harder to get coverage. To break through, they’ll have to be more than a little louder and generate larger crowds.

By limiting the space available for his constituents, Rep. Ryan (and several other Republican members of Congress) are pushing politics outdoors, where his opposition may wither.  Or it may get bigger and angrier.

Absent the sloppy ugly vigorous dialogue of democracy, politics will not get more civil.

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Buffett moment, Buffett movement?

Posted on August 17, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Billionaire Warren Buffett (at right, with ukulele), renowned for his investing acumen, claimed space on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times to call for higher taxes on the superwealthy, like him–and even less wealthy–everyone who earns more than $1 million a year (not so many people).  Buffett says that government is coddling the superwealthy, and it’s completely counterproductive.  He reports that he and his superfriends are doing just fine; they can afford to pay more, and they should.

What’s more, Buffet says, none of the justifications offered by anti-taxers hold true.  He claims that higher tax rates won’t discourage investment or prevent the super-rich from hiring.

Buffett’s piece zinged around the e-world, the subject of news stories, blogs, and thousands of comments.  His proposal was newsworthy not because it was original–many others have made the same arguments, nor because Buffett is smart; plenty of very smart people say the same things.  (Some are, however, professors, argh.)  Instead, Warren Buffett’s call for taxing the superrich made the Times and the blogosphere because it seemed at odds with his interests, at least narrowly as narrowly defined.

The “dissident identity” (the term is from Kelsy Kretschmer, a sociology professor at Southern Illinois University) generates attention because it’s unexpected and seems to have more credibility and resonance than those who take the expected positions.

Social movements love to promote such dissenters.  Peace activists push forward supporters with strong military credentials in the spotlight.  Conservative activist David Horowitz reminds his readers that he was once Maoist, suggesting that his subsequent conversion to right wing politics is all the more meaningful.  Abortion rights activists trot out the Catholics for Choice and anti-abortion advocates promote Feminists for Life, emphasizing the rhetorical power of the dissident identity.  Their critics claim, of course, that those dissidents aren’t real Catholics or real feminists.

But it’s hard to argue that Warren Buffett isn’t a real capitalist.

Of course, he could be wrong on the merits.  But his position doesn’t raise immediate concerns about corruption and dishonesty the way that, for example, Charles and David Koch’s funding of efforts to discredit science on climate change.  The billionaire Koch brothers have large holdings in oil and gas, and regulation to limit greenhouse gases could cost them money.  (They might be right, as well as self-interested, but 99+ percent of scientists working on the issue don’t think so.)

But an op-ed, even from Warren Buffett, doesn’t make a movement.  It is, however, an investable asset, however, as Chuck Collins, at Huffington Post, notes:

We now need ten thousand more like Warren Buffett to speak up, people with incomes over $250,000 that know in their hearts that they should pay more.

Of course, we need an engaged public — people in the bottom 98 percent — to mobilize and press for tax increases on the wealthy before any further budget cuts. But enlisting the voices of wealthy people for the common good is a key part of the strategy to change the political dynamics.

The good news is there are already several thousand who have stepped forward and spoken up. Several hundred business leaders and wealthy individuals have joined Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, a joint initiative of the Agenda Project and Wealth for the Common Good. On June 7, the tenth anniversary of the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthy, they issued a powerful video calling on Congress to let the tax cuts expire.

Chuck, a founder of Wealth for the Common Good, has been working for years to organize and publicize the efforts of the more affluent to promote a more fair and more effective taxation and budgeting.  (Check out his books.)

As the list of “patriotic millionaires” grows, perhaps it will no longer seem dissident when the very rich embrace pay for a government that has served them very well.

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Protest, tolerance, and stability

Posted on August 16, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Liberal democracies adopt some degree of tolerance for organized protest.  Demonstrations of hundreds of thousands on the Washington Mall are permitted, protected, and scheduled.  They take place routinely with no threat to the stability of the Republic.  This was, as I pointed out this weekend, part of Madison’s design for stability.

It’s not something to take for granted.  This weekend’s reporting also features two stories of national governments grappling with their, more limited, boundaries of tolerance.  Authorities in India, the world’s largest democracy, launched a preemptive campaign of  arrests, taking anti-corruption activist Anna Hazare and 1,200 of his supporters into custody before Hazare could start a hunger strike and stage demonstrations.  According to the New York Times, most of the would-be demonstrators were released in relatively short order, but Hazare remains in prison because he refuses to promise not to start a fast.  Indeed, he’s begun a hunger strike in prison.  (On fast politics, see this and this.)

And in China, which continues to negotiate how much economic liberalization can take place without significant political openings, officials have announced a harsh security crack-down in Xinjiang, a western province with a separatist movement.  As the New York Times reports, human rights activists say the national government’s efforts at repression and political indoctrination have, unsurprisingly, fed the separatist movement, and strengthened the resolve of the regime’s opponents.

But it’s not just separatists.  More than 12,000 demonstrators assembled in Dalian to call for the shut-down of a chemical plant.  More generally, they were demanding more responsive governance.  And, at least presently, that’s a threat to China’s Communist Party.

Contrast either case with comparable issues in the United States.  Hunger strikers are often ignored by the general public.  If they are prisoners, they can be forcefed.  Public protests against what people see as environmental threats are, if not ubiquitous, certainly common.  In the best of cases for activists, policy responses are, uh, measured.  Usually, it’s less than that.

Madison’s insight, as discussed in the previous post, was that tolerance of dissent and the messiness of popular politics was a better route to stability than repression.  (Note: US officials haven’t always remembered this.)

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When anger isn’t enough

Posted on August 14, 2011 by David S. Meyer
There’s something exciting, sometimes terrifying, about people taking to the streets to get what they want. In Cairo’s Tahrir Square, they gathered to demand the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. In Athens, demonstrators set up a gallows in front of Parliament, threatening the socialist government, which was imposing austerity measures in the face of 15 percent unemployment. Most recently, in London and across England, young people have assembled at night, looting stores and burning cars to demand — well, that’s not clear yet.
Whether you’re inspired or appalled depends on your politics. Demonstrators who play to our hopes are heroes; those who challenge our beliefs are at best misguided and at worst terrorists. Regardless, those in the streets carrying petrol or placards project their anger and aspirations to an audience as broad as possible. When they’re successful, we talk about their concerns as well as their tactics.
What about here in the United States? Polls consistently show that fewer than half of Americans approve of the job that President Obama is doing, and those ratings are far higher than Congress or either political party receives. Unemployment remains stubbornly above 9 percent. There is plenty of anger in America today, anger about joblessness across the nation, about cutbacks in services in the states, about increased tuition at our universities, about economic and political inequality that seems to be increasing, and at a government that seems unable to do anythingabout any of this. Where are the people taking to the streets?
The closest thing to a strong social movement in the United States in recent years has been the tea party, and it demands that government do less. Lately, we hear about the tea party largely from members of Congress and candidates for office, who have drowned out and replaced the activists at the grass roots.This is largely because although movements carry anger, anger doesn’t make a movement — organizers do. Anger helps, of course; it’s a resource that organizers can stoke, channel and exploit.Although saints and psychopaths will take great risks in the service of their beliefs, most people are a little more calculating. People protest when they believe that something is wrong, that it could be otherwise, and that their efforts are both necessary and potentially effective.
They rarely make these calculations by themselves. Rather, they respond to those around them. Ostensibly spontaneous eruptions of political protest reflect the hard work and investment of organizers who cultivate grass-roots activism. Organizers point to a government’s provocations, focusing on the issues that they believe will spur action. They nurse both moral righteousness and a sense that it’s actually possible to get something done — both essential for sustained action. And, perhaps most important, they point to others who are already active, telling the newly recruited that they are not alone and that, together, they can matter.
There’s a long and proud history of Americans standing up for what they want, dating back, at least, to the original tea party in Boston in 1773. That tea party grew into a revolution and ultimately produced a government that would not be so easy to topple. The American political system is structured to channel anger and discontent into political institutions. James Madison, the genius behind the Constitution, envisioned a system of government that would embrace dissent and offer malcontents the hope, however distant, that they can get what they want by working through it. Protesters who start in the streets envision themselves, or at least their causes, entering the halls of power.
We saw how this system works in a city that bears that founding father’s name — Madison, Wis. When newly elected Gov. Scott Walker (R) began his term last fall with a budget bill that stripped public-sector unions of most of their collective-bargaining rights — and their workers of a lot of money — citizens responded. Teachers, firefighters, police officers and those who depend upon them streamed into the Capitol, staging marches, demonstrations and sleep-ins. Aided by Democratic state senators who left the state to deny the majority a quorum, they stalled the governor’s agenda and commanded national attention. Liberal activists saw Wisconsin as the greatest threat to their interests and best opportunity they had to build a national movement to counter the tea party.
When the Wisconsin activists lost, they turned their efforts to institutional politics, moving the battle front to a half-dozen recall elections. Rather than marching, they raised and spent money on campaigns challenging Republican incumbents, producing leaflets and television commercials, and calling on their supporters to bring their protest to the polls. Their opponents responded in kind. More than $30 million from conservative advocacy groups and organized labor flowed into Wisconsin, a kind of stimulus program for political consultants.
The Democrats won two of the six seats they contested this past week, meaning that some of the people who voted for Walker did not support his broad agenda, though not enough to flip the balance of power yet. Almost immediately, both sides turned to the next elections on the horizon, claiming victories, moral and otherwise, and trying to keep people engaged in their political aims. The protest in the streets has flowed into more conventional, if not more civil, politics.
What gets people out into the streets to demonstrate? It’s not general unhappiness about policy, be it on immigration or the national debt. Social movements are products of focused organization. Even the icons of activism in American history wielded influence through larger groups. Rosa Parks wasn’t just a tired seamstress in 1955, when she refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Ala. She was a longtime organizer who served as chapter secretary of the local NAACP, which organized a bus boycott and a lawsuit in response to her action. Earlier that year, she had attended a workshop on nonviolent action at a labor center, the Highlander Institute, where she read about Gandhi and the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Educationdecision striking down segregation in public schools. All of the specific actions weren’t choreographed, but activists had spent many years building the infrastructure and cultivating the ideas that made the bus boycott possible.Without such organizational support, individual actions might be dramatic and heroic, but effective movement politics is a test of endurance. Organization gives individual efforts meaning and staying power.
Today, most of the organized protest in the United States has been from the right side of the political spectrum, grouped loosely under the mantle of the tea party. Conservative activists, funded by large corporate interests, have been building a movement for more than a decade. Americans for Prosperity, founded and funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, has invested in conservative ideas and activism. FreedomWorks, led by former House majority leader Dick Armey, has worked to seed conservatism at the ground level. Groups such as these have produced reports, trained and employed organizers, funded electoral campaigns, and worked the media. When public anger at the Bush-Obama Wall Street bailout bubbled up, followed by public anxiety about Obama’s health-care reforms, professional activists were ready to support and channel it. It’s not that there wasn’t conservative anger and concern at the grass roots, but it took professional expertise, effort and resources to funnel it into a national movement.
There were large national demonstrations and numerous local actions in 2009 through the fall of 2010, but — encouraged by Madison’s design — efforts increasingly focused on the elections. After large Republican gains in the 2010 midterms, the grass roots became harder and harder to find, as activists, organizers and fundraisers turned to the Republican presidential primaries.
The Tea Party Caucus in the House of Representatives was extremely engaged and influential in the budget and debt-ceiling negotiations, though at the grass roots, that issue wasn’t as much of a concern.Local groups are dividing among issues, with some, such as immigration, not so urgent to the tea party’s business sponsors, who value cheap labor. They are also dividing among candidates, with some, perhaps such as Michele Bachmann, not so attractive to large corporate interests that care about winning the general election and governing afterward.

And, for the tea partyers and others across the political spectrum, there’s anger about unemployment. The situation feels much worse than the official jobless rate. Most of us know middle-aged men and women who have lost their jobs and fear they will never work again. As a professor, I routinely encounter earnest and intelligent college graduates who are increasingly desperate to find work that will allow them to begin paying off their student loans or even move out of their childhood homes. But without anything resembling a social movement, they work on formatting résumés and updating networks so they won’t stay among the millions of unemployed. Something more ambitious than that, however, takes organization.

Sometimes, as during the Great Depression, organized labor has spoken for the unemployed as well as those with jobs. In contemporary America, however, most unions have been focused on protecting their members, including funding the Democratic recall efforts in Wisconsin. As the 2012 elections approach, expect to see unions working to protect Obama, putting their differences and disappointments with him on the back burner.

And any Republican candidate with a chance to beat Obama is bound to be a disappointment to tea party ideologues. Expect to see the larger groups working to get voters to the polls, rather than people to the streets.

Frustration and disappointment are butting up against political pragmatism. Just like James Madison planned.

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Claiming victory gracelessly

Posted on August 4, 2011 by David S. Meyer

A win is a problem for a social movement.  Activists never get all they want, and smaller reforms can make it hard to get supported riled up and active.  At the same time, movement organizers need to show that they can be effective in order to get people to continue to ante up their time, money, and attention.

Every response from government is a chance for activists to screw up: seeking to demonstrate their power, they claim credit for policy changes far smaller than they promised; seeking to emphasize their purity and anger, they show how ineffective they’ve been.

The challenge is to find a way to claim credit for partial reforms, while emphasizing just how much more work is to be done: We are powerful, and we’ve got a long way to go.  The trick is to claim credit gracelessly.

The debt deal provides a serious test for the Tea Party.  Recall that some Tea Party leaders, in and out of Congress, railed against any increase in the debt limit, and that the deal Congress approved makes serious, but marginal, changes in spending for most programs.  (Anyone who looks at the numbers knows that reducing spending on health care–we spend roughly twice as much as any rich country per person, half government and half private.  And we don’t get better results.)

When we look at Tea Partiers and Republicans speaking about the debt deal, we get a sense of how they’re trying to walk this balance.

I think Newt Gingrich, more accomplished rhetorically than in any other endeavor, did the best from an activist view, acknowledging the inherent contradictions in what he has to say.  Speaking on O’Reilly, Speaker Gingrich said that Tea Party forced President Obama to back down from his demands for taxes on the wealthy, and that this partial victory could be the foundation for further action:

First, the Tea Party members should feel really good — the left is mad at [Obama] for the right reason —they were effective, they were successful.   We just had an extraordinary moment where a very left-wing president blinked, and that would not have happened without the tea party. Now they have a great opportunity to push to pass a balanced budget amendment by the end of the year — that could be a historic effort for the tea party to focus on.

Second, Washington has to shift and focus on the economy — we are in very grave danger of sliding into an even deeper depression — and I think there is no sign right now that Washington understands that this is a temporary moment,  Ok, we’ve all focused on the debt ceiling; we’re about to launch a big five- or six-month fight — and it’s going to be a fight. This was not the end — this was the beginning of a fight over the whole nature of what happens next.” (Newsmax)

Elected officials, like Senators John McCain and Orin Hatch, who formerly might have tried to represent a sensible center, were careful to give the Tea Party credit for shifting the debate.  Their rhetorical deference represents their ongoing efforts to avoid alienating the increasingly far right wing of their party.

On Fox, Senator McCain said, “I agree the tea party movement has had an effect in that I don’t think without the tea party we would have had an agreement.  I think the tea partiers can claim a lot of credit….the president had to back down…[and give up] “his primary position that we had to have tax hikes.” (Politico)

Outside government, however, activists were quicker to feed the outrage rather than the sense of efficacy.  Tea Party Nation’s Judson Phillips said the Republican leadership  “totally sold the tea party and the conservative movement out.”  (Roll Call)  “We put them in power and now we’re asking ourselves, ‘Why did we do that?’”

Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots (who, unlike Phillips, can actually claim a political following) said the deal was “destroying America’s future (Chicago Sun-Times).

The elected officials want Tea Partiers to feel a sense of power and to focus on the upcoming elections.  The outside organizers want their supporters angry and distrustful of elected officials who would channel activist energies for their own purposes, and to support the cause, rather than any candidate.

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