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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What the Tea Party won; what it cost

Posted on August 1, 2011 by David S. Meyer

As we discussed last week, professional politicians sell out movements.  Speaker John Boehner has worked hard throughout the negotiations to play to the most committed elements of the Tea Party in the House of Representatives, advocating positions that he would have previously described as outlandish.  No doubt to his surprise, President Obama validated those positions, and consistently emphasized all that he was conceding in response to the Republicans’ intransigence.  Increasing the debt ceiling, normally a big story for a day or two, became a weeks-long drama that produced large commitments to cut spending and endorse historically low tax rates.

Speaker Boehner is now taking a deficit reduction deal back to his caucus that omits some of the sweeteners he put in the House version to win Tea Party votes.  The cuts, conservative Congressmen have said, are not steep enough, reliable enough, nor are the prohibitions against taxation and future spending strong enough.  But, seeking to claim victory with an ounce of humility, Boehner has emphasized how much the center has moved in the last few years: “It shows how much we’ve changed the terms of the debate in this town.”  (New York Times.)

He’s right.  The entire debate was about how much, how quickly, and how rigidly to cut government spending–all framed in general, not in terms of the specific programs that will fall under the knife.  This, the Tea Party won.

Boehner knows, however, that he won’t keep all the Republican votes he was initially able to cobble together, and replacements will have to come from the Democrats.  Tea Party loyalists in the House–and especially outside the Capitol–will scream betrayal.  They didn’t mobilize and work hard for a better deficit deal, but to end politics as usual.  They got a lot–but much less than they imagined, wanted, or were promised.

This is the standard social movement story in America, repeated on Politicsoutdoors for all sorts of movements.

But what did this Tea Party victory cost the movement? the Republican Party?  the country?

I won’t go on here about the impact of spending cuts during a period of extremely slow growth and very high unemployment.  There are plenty of good reports on macroeconomics on the web.  Here, it’s just worth noting that wise policy was not the prime concern of anyone in the last rounds of debt ceiling negotiations.

The deficit negotiations have defined the Tea Party far more narrowly than the activists who launched the movement just two years ago would have liked.  At the national level, groups are concerned with ending government regulation, stopping health care reform, and generally limiting government.  At the grassroots, activists have championed socially conservative agendas (against abortion, same sex marriage, and stem cell research), vaguely defined Constitutional principles, nativist anti-immigration stances, and, of course, ending health care reform.  All of these, sometimes contradictory, positions, have been flattened into a much sharper (and narrower) anti-spending, anti-tax polemic.  It’s hard to see all of the Tea Partiers signing onto this slighter agenda, and it’s hard to see unity on any of the broader elements of the program/s.

Some Tea Party groups are promising primary challenges to Republican representatives (all conservatives at this point) who refused to toe the line on all aspects of the debt reduction plan.  Others expect to endorse the politicians who stayed true to 90+% of the agenda and were, arguably, more effective.  Likely even more will just stay home.

Big business was behind the large organizations at the start of the Tea Party.  We’ve seen the emergence of a rift between the grassroots and those funders, who need, but distrust, the populist activism that promotes their interests.

And the Republican party?

Speaker Boehner, effectively counting the votes in his caucus, took the Republican party in Congress further to the right than it’s been in generations.  This will be an electoral liability next year, and he’s well aware of this.  The Tea Party has never commanded a majority of the electorate, although it certainly is influential in Republican primaries.

Now, the future of the Party might be seen as a choice between Mike Lee and Lisa Murkowski.  Senator Lee, from Utah, defeated incumbent conservative Republican Robert Bennett for the Republican senate nomination.  He is not interested in cutting deals or compromise, but in articulating the strongest, sharpest positions possible, speaking truth to power.  Senator Murkowski, formerly known as a reliable conservative, lost a primary challenge to a Lee-like opponent, Joe Miller, then defeated him running as an independent.  Since then, she has been behaving like, well, an independent who doesn’t owe the Republican Party much at all, and displays no fealty to the Tea Party movement.  Ostensibly, she can be interested in good (conservative) government.

Senator Murkowski is an ongoing insult and provocation to the Tea Partiers, but a Republican Party that can win majorities and govern will be more heavily weighted to people like her than to people like Senator Lee.

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Crime, punishment, and protest

Posted on July 28, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Tim DeChristopher has been sentenced to two years in jail and a $10,000 fine.  About 2 1/2 years ago, after Barack Obama had been elected president, partly by promising to protect the environment more aggressively than President George W. Bush had, DeChristopher accompanied a group of others intending to protest the auction of mineral and drilling rights for 149,000 acres of wilderness.  While the environmentalists went outside, DeChristopher went in, registered as a bidder, and participated in the auction.

He wielded paddle number 70 aggressively, bidding up prices on many lots; he also won the rights to drill on 13 parcels of land for nearly $1.8 million.  He was arrested when he explained that he didn’t have the money, and was convicted of two counts of felony fraud in a federal court in Salt Lake City.  He could have faced up to 10 years in prison, but people who can’t pay aren’t always prosecuted.  The auction itself was invalidated, and the Obama administration has pulled many of the parcels out of the process.

Environmental activists had been protesting against the auctions, but Tim DeChristopher went further, actually disrupting business as usual.  Partisans of direct action, often in violation of the law, call such efforts “monkey-wrenching,” in homage to Edward Abbey’s novel about a small band of environmentalists who committed small and large acts of sabotage to protect the land.  DeChristopher and his supporters call it civil disobedience.

In addition to the actual damage done to the auction and whatever financial costs DeChristopher imposed on other bidders–who actually wanted to drill–his efforts provided additional visibility for his cause and his allies.

Since he was charged, he and others have been organizing, giving interviews, and staging protests, talking about climate change, oil, and protecting the wilderness.

Peter, Paul and Mary sing for civil rights, 1963

Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul, and Mary, held a benefit concert and published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times.  (He’s been doing this sort of thing for fifty years!)  Activists staged protests at his trial, and 26 were arrested for blocking the courthouse yesterday when he was sentenced.

DeChristopher says that his decision to participate in the bidding was spontaneous, but once the legal proceedings started, he was determined to use everything associated with the trial to build the movement and support for his cause.

He acknowledged deliberately disrupting the auction, and asked to present his reasons for doing so to the jury.  His argument was that the environmental threat he was addressing was so great that his actions were justifiable.  Sometimes called “competing harms,” this necessity defense has a long history in common law and in America.  [The earliest citation I could find was to Ploof v. Putnam (Vermont, 1906), the case of a man who tied his boat to someone else’s dock during a storm.]

Activists who break the law try to use the defense, to make their case to a jury (the “conscience of the community”), and to project their concerns to a broader audience.  Federal District Judge Dee Benson ruled out the defense, limiting the trial to DeChristopher’s actions, rather than his motivations, and noting that he had other ways to advocate for what he believed that didn’t involve a criminal offense.  Judges generally try to keep larger issues out of the courtroom.  [Think, for example, of Norway’s refusal to allow Anders Behring Brevik from publicly testifying about his vision of the threat to Christian culture new immigrants to Europe represent; then think about the difference between disrupting an auction and mass murder.]

Up until the trial, Tim DeChristopher has been speaking on climate change, and on the history of political movements and civil disobedience in the United States, testimony that didn’t appear in the courtroom.  He won the active support of environmentalists across the United States, including James Hansen, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Robert Redford, and Terry Tempest Williams, who all signed a letter of support:

Tim’s action drew national attention to the fact that the Bush Administration spent its dying days in office handing out a last round of favors to the oil and gas industry. After investigating irregularities in the auction, the Obama Administration took many of the leases off the table, with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar criticizing the process as “a headlong rush.” And yet that same Administration is choosing to prosecute the young man who blew the whistle on this corrupt process.

We cannot let this stand. When Tim disrupted the auction, he did so in the fine tradition of non-violent civil disobedience that changed so many unjust laws in this country’s past.

Meanwhile, DeChristopher’s lawyers have filed an appeal, challenging the severity of the sentence and the judge’s decision to exclude them from putting forward their best defense.

Whatever happens in the courtroom, much will be happening outside.  Here’s DeChristopher’s speech to Judge Benson prior to sentencing:

…The reality is not that I lack respect for the law; it’s that I have greater respect for justice.  Where there is a conflict between the law and the higher moral code that we all share, my loyalty is to that higher moral code.  I know Mr Huber [the prosecutor] disagrees with me on this.  He wrote that “The rule of law is the bedrock of our civilized society, not acts of ‘civil disobedience’ committed in the name of the cause of the day.”  That’s an especially ironic statement when he is representing the United States of America, a place where the rule of law was created through acts of civil disobedience.  Since those bedrock acts of civil disobedience by our founding fathers, the rule of law in this country has continued to grow closer to our shared higher moral code through the civil disobedience that drew attention to legalized injustice.  The authority of the government exists to the degree that the rule of law reflects the higher moral code of the citizens, and throughout American history, it has been civil disobedience that has bound them together….

I do not want mercy, Tim DeChristopher says, I want you to join me.

By breaking the law and going to trial, he’s given supporters across the country the chance to do so.

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Will parents protest education cutbacks?: The organizational deficit

Posted on July 27, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Sandy Banks, is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the parent of two daughters studying in the California State University system.  She’s frustrated that it’s costing her so much more to help her kids out, and angry that they’re getting less for their money–and hers.    After expressing relief that one daughter found an affordable apartment, she turns to write about a somewhat bigger problem:

Her tuition will jump again — by about $600 — this fall. That’s the fourth tuition increase imposed by Cal State University trustees since 2009.

That hikes fees and tuition for classes to more than $6,000 a year, about $2,000 more than we expected when my youngest daughter enrolled as a freshman two years ago.

That’s double trouble for me. Her sister is a senior at Cal State Northridge, so our family is on the hook this year for $4,000 more than I budgeted back when an education in the Cal State system seemed like such a great idea.

That’s the personal toll of a public tragedy. State financing for higher education has been rolled back to levels unseen in years. This year’s budget cuts funding by 20%. That translates to $650 million less, and that has to be covered by somebody.

Banks notes that the tuition hikes have been accompanied by real cuts in offerings on campus.  It’s harder for a student to get the courses she needs to graduate; professors and teaching assistants are responsible for more students; and there is a general decline in the environments on campus.

She wants to know why the parents who are, more or less, helping their kids pay for school, aren’t outraged and active.  Parents of college students at the state university, and even parents of K-12 students, know that the marginal savings they’re getting on state taxes don’t come close to covering the increased costs they’re subjected to in trying to educate their children.  They are outraged, or as Banks says, angry and frustrated.

They aren’t active because they aren’t organized.  At the K-12 level, PTAs are incensed, but avowedly non-political.  In well-organized communities, they’ve redoubled their fundraising efforts, trying to compensate for a taxation system that has become less and less fair.  They’ve left it to the teachers unions to do the political work, and their success has been, uh, limited.

At the university level, student governments and campus-based organizations have fought the budget cuts and tuition hikes, but have vented most of their rage, so far, at the administrators who are playing crappy cards, rather than the state legislators who have dealt them.

For the parents of university students, the picture is somewhat bleaker.  But parents, who are also tax payers, are alone and unorganized.  They may write or call their state legislators who, negotiating term limits and the 2/3 tax rule, are themselves overwhelmed.  They won’t respond effectively until pressed to do so.

And the parents won’t press until someone invests the same energy in organizing them that conservative interests have spent in organizing tax payers.  Effective protest and political action isn’t a spontaneous reaction to a threat, but the result of strategic investments.  They need to learn from the people who put them in this position.

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Is there still a Tea Party movement?

Posted on July 25, 2011 by David S. Meyer

If a political movement doesn’t mobilize, is it still a movement?  Although the term “Tea Party” is thrown about a lot these days, particularly in reference to the hard-line anti-debt faction of Republicans in the House, it’s not clear that there’s a social movement underneath them.

At Think Progress, Scott Keyes continues to track the events sponsored by Tea Party groups–using Tea Party sources–and the trend line is very clear.  On the right, you can see the number of Tea Party events, and below that, see the number of events sponsored by Americans for Prosperity.

Think Progress has already shown that the events themselves, when they actually take place, are smaller than in the past.

Of course, there are lots of other Tea Party groups, but the Tea Party Patriots have been the most oriented to grassroots activism, and AFP has been one of the best-funded and visible.

Elsewhere, the story may be worse.  Tea Party Nation, which has been stalwart in pressuring Speaker John Boehner to give no quarter in the debt talks, has its own debt problem.  When it was unable to generate attendance at a planned national conference in Las Vegas, leader Judson Phillips canceled the conference.  The Venetian Casino Resort, which was to host the event, has filed suit to recover nearly $600,000 that Tea Party Nation owes.

Without noise from the grassroots, Washington insiders, including elected officials and professional lobbyists, have the upper hand in defining the movement and what it wants.  They, that is, people like Tea Party Patriots’ JennyBeth Martin and members of the House Tea Party Caucus, say what it wants is NO DEAL on the debt ceiling.

It’s very clear that regular Republicans, including business, haven’t signed onto this vision of the movement–and of government.  It’s not clear yet whether what was active at the grassroots will sign on or just check out.

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The debt debate: Can the Republican Party sell out the Tea Party?

Posted on July 21, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Political parties have to sell out the movements that support them.  First, they exploit the energy, incorporate new activists and ideas, and then find some watered down way to soften the rough edges.

Parties that can’t tame the movements that enliven them, like the Whigs and abolitionism, factionalize, fall apart, and ultimately disappear.  Parties that can, support reforms, generate resentment from the base, but win elections and incorporate new movements.  Think about the Republicans, beginning with Ronald Reagan, and the Christian Right, to whom he was a bitter disappointment.  Think about the Democrats and the nuclear freeze or civil rights.  The concessions were always far less than what the activist base demanded.  But the parties went on.

Right now, we’re watching the Republican Party in government struggle with defining and coopting the Tea Party–and, at least so far, it’s ugly (as discussed before).  The mainstream Republicans, experienced politicians like Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, share the conventional wisdom among professional economists: failing to raise the debt ceiling, in the best case scenario, means higher interest rates for government securities and for anyone else in the United States who wants to borrow.  And they believe it could be much worse.

This is not an odd or idiosyncratic position, even among conservatives.  Big business, as represented by the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, shares this view, and has written to the President and every member of Congress asking that, whatever else the government does, it raises the debt ceiling expeditiously.  From the Washington Post:

“The business community in large numbers is saying to our leaders in Washington, ‘Do your job,’ ” said Business Roundtable President John Engler, a former Republican governor of Michigan. “Failure to raise the debt ceiling would strike an immediate and serious blow to any economic recovery, and failure to make significant progress on long-term debt reduction will continue the uncertainty which is hampering our investment climate.”

Speaker Boehner has repeated his commitment to responsible governance, and he’s tried to bargain hard with a president who’s quick to make concessions.  But he’s had a hard time managing the debt fundamentalists within his party caucus.   Senator McConnell has given up trying to cut a deal, and has proposed giving the President complete authority, then campaigning against him.

True to its rhetoric, however, the Tea Party, or at least the organized part of it that has access to media coverage, has been distrustful of both big business and establishment politicians.  FreedomWorks, the proto-Tea Party organization that preceded and stoked the movement, insists that the debt ceiling not be raised until Congress effects large budget cuts, enforceable spending caps, and an amendment to the Constitution mandating a balanced budget and making it practically impossible to raise taxes.  (Irony alert: Tea Party placards constantly announce fidelity to the Constitution and original intent, even as they plan to change it.)

Tea Party Patriots co-founder JennyBeth Martin sees even the harsh FreedomWorks position as a sell-out.  She’s warned Republican members of Congress that the grassroots Tea Party will punish any member who votes for any increase in the debt ceiling at all.

So far, the Tea Party threat, embodied by politicians like Michele Bachmann and the large and committed freshman class in the House, has pulled the Republican Party further to the Right than it’s been in its 150 year life.  The question is whether the institutional Republicans or the Tea Party fundamentalists will win this tug of war, or whether the rope connecting them will snap.

Whatever else Speaker Boehner says, he’s professional enough as a politician confronting the debt ceiling to see “218” as the most important number of all those numbers bandied about.  That’s the number of votes he needs to find in order to pass the increase in the debt ceiling.  If he can’t get 218 Republicans (out of 242), he needs to find Democrats, who will pull the eventual deal back to the center.  Whatever politicians say to the cameras these days, behind closed doors they are talking about how (and who) to get to 218.

How this deal works out is supremely important to the Republican coalition.  Since the middle-1970s, the Republicans have competed effectively at the national level by joining populist conservative social voters with big business interests.  President Obama, to the chagrin of his own base, has made it clear that business is safe with him.  The Republican struggle now is to sell the Tea Party out and keep the Tea Partiers in.

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Prisoners continue to fast, apparently

Posted on July 13, 2011 by David S. Meyer

News about the ongoing hunger strike in Pelican Bay’s “supermax” prison is leaking out slowly and unreliably.  (We’ve covered the hunger strike a few days ago, as well as the hunger strike as a tactic more generally.)

While there’s little in the mainstream media about the story, Bay View features an alert from Marilyn McMahon, executive director of California Prison Focus.  She writes that circumstances are urgent, and some prisoners are on the edge of death.  Citing an anonymous medical source, she notes:

“The prisoners are progressing rapidly to the organ damaging consequences of dehydration. They are not drinking water and have decompensated rapidly. A few have tried to sip water but are so sick that they are vomiting it back up. Some are in renal failure and have been unable to make urine for three days. Some are having measured blood sugars in the 30 range, which can be fatal if not treated.”

A few have tried to sip water but are so sick that they are vomiting it back up.

Meanwhile, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has suggested that the strike is winding down, affecting far fewer than the 6600 inmates across 13 prisons that participated this past weekend.  Because prisoners are refusing medical evaluation, a CDCR spokesperson suggested, they might be surreptitiously drinking water and/or eating items from the prison canteen.

Reporters have been unable to get into the prison, so the information that emerges is coming from relatives of the prisoners, activist groups, and the CDCR.  Some stories report that prison officials have told hunger strikers that the demands have been met, so the strike can end, and that some prisoners are now on intravenous feeding.

The only leverage the prisoners have in getting response will come from those on the outside engaging the political process.  Absent reliable reports about what’s going on inside the prison, this will be tougher to do.

Some of the prisoners have reaffirmed their commitment to fast to death for their demands.  And, of course, fatalities will be much harder to conceal or explain away.

The lack of reliable information on the strike is a big problem for the hunger strikers, whose only influence will come from reaching a broader audience for their claims.  It’s also a big problem for the rest of us, as citizens.

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Who’s to blame for increased California university tuition?

Posted on July 12, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Tuition at the public universities in California, including the University of California, Irvine, which pays my salary, continues to skyrocket, even as operating budgets in the University of California and California State Universities erode.  The president of the University of California, Mark Yudoff, has asked the Board of Regents to approve an increase of nearly 10 percent, the eleventh tuition hike in the last ten years.  (Cal State is considering a tuition hike of more than 12 percent.)  The UC administration has announced that these hikes will cover roughly a quarter of the last round of budget cuts from the state.

Students are, rightly, angry at paying more for less.  The protests about this latest round of budget increases have already begun.  Last week, a group of about 100 protested outside the offices of La Opinion, whose president, Monica Lozano, sits on the Board of Regents.  When the Regents meet, she will hear President Yudoff say something like: these tuition hikes are awful, as are the budget cuts coming with them.  We’ve been raising tuition and making cuts for years now, and we’re also increasing the number of international and out-of-state students, who pay much more.  Now, it’s more important to preserve the quality of the university than to maintain low tuition.  Tuition can be lowered in the future; at least in the land of hypotheticals: all it takes is money.  Restoring quality and reputation will be harder and take longer.

Talk like this is a gross provocation to students, who are working more hours, taking out more loans, and having a harder time getting the courses they need.  That doesn’t mean Yudoff isn’t telling the truth.

The twin mantras of access and excellence that public university administrators chant really operate at cross-purposes.  (We’ve discussed this before.) Great libraries, active and engaged researchers, and accessible and committed teachers cost money.  If the state won’t pay, someone else has to.  If students have to pay the full cost of what they receive, access will certainly be compromised.  (Let me stipulate: if you throw a rock in any direction on my campus–or any other–you’ll hit something someone regards as wasteful spending!)

If the past is a guide, Yudoff and campus administrators will take more flack from students than the state legislators who refused to put a tax extension on the ballot.  In effect, one of the president’s jobs is to absorb the flack from students when someone else hands them an awful deal.

But how to explain the costs of excellence in populist politics?  Days earlier, the Los Angeles Times ran a piece on the “brain drain” that university faculty and administrators fear, focusing on three cancer researchers leaving the University of California, San Diego, for Rice University.  Rice offered the faculty members raises of more than 40 percent (and they’re currently earning $180,000-$330,000!), plus commitments for research funds, lab space, and work loads that would allow them to focus on their research.  They’ll be taking their labs, their post-docs and students, and their millions  of dollars of grants to Texas.

Even as those salaries are a fraction of what a top professional athlete or hedge fund manager earns, they’re much (much!) higher than what most faculty earn, and much (much!) higher than the salaries of most Californians who worry about paying taxes–and tuition to the University of California.  How to justify?

The University of California could hire people to teach their classes at a fraction of the cost.  They could take away tenure, research support, and health benefits, and still find someone to stand in front of the  room and run powerpoint slides.  Would the courses be the same?  Would it be the same university?

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