Where’s the Peace Movement? (Protest is a blunt instrument)

Posted on April 26, 2011 by David S. Meyer

It’s rare that social scientists studying protest get much attention from the mainstream press, opinion or otherwise.  Although the scholars may get a whiff of excitement from the attention, they’re usually frustrated by the distortions and oversimplifications that seem inevitable–almost.

Today’s story is about two social scientists, conservative media outlets, and the decline of the peace movement in the Obama era.

Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas have been attending antiwar rallies for several years, bringing teams of students with surveys rather than placards.  They’ve found that the number of self-identified Democrats at the demonstrations declined after Barack Obama took office.

This finding won’t surprise readers of Politics Outdoors.  The question of ebbs and flows of movements generally–and the peace movement in particular, is one we’ve taken up before (here and here).  Most people are likely to protest only when they believe: something is wrong; it could be otherwise; and that their efforts might make a difference.

As soon as people around the world got a sense that President Bush planned to invade Iraq, a global antiwar movement emerged, most strongly in the countries that would support the war.  Some activists were against all wars, but I suspect a larger share questioned the case for this one.  (It’s hard to argue, nearly a decade later, that war supporters had as clear a view as their opponents.)

Some of the numbers and vigor of the demonstrations dropped off as the war started, but many stalwarts remained and activism continued.  In the United States, the President who launched the war stayed in office for another five plus years, and was a ready target.  When the war didn’t go as its architects planned–or, more accurately, imagined, activists could tack on grievances about morality and/or costs, and they had plenty of material to work with.  (It’s hard to get Abu Ghraib out of my mind.)

Democrats seeking the nomination to succeed President Bush flashed their antiwar credentials to primary voters, and Senator Barack Obama’s initial opposition to the war (although he didn’t have to vote on authorization) was an asset against Senator Hillary Clinton (his eventual Secretary of State).   He campaigned on a promise to wind down the war in Iraq, which he did, sort of, and increase the focus and forces in Afghanistan, which he also sort of did.

This course of action certainly didn’t respond to all of the concerns of peace activists, but it seemed far more promising to most than what it replaced.  Some share of the people who might turn out at a demonstration, marked by their willingness to identify as Democrats, stopped turning out.  It’s not necessarily that they were satisfied, but perhaps they were less angry or less hopeful (or less willing to claim affiliation with this president’s party on a survey at a demonstration).

Protest is a blunt instrument; an action pushes a direction or suggests a veto.  The grammar of a demonstration doesn’t accommodate complicated policy alternatives.  When the direction seems more promising, the urgency or possibility needed to engage falters for some people.  Others may feel they can talk directly to policymakers, rather than shouting at them from the lawn.  The demonstrations got smaller and those who did attend had a somewhat different set of concerns than the larger movement.

Movements are coalitions, not unified beasts.  And people and groups in those coalitions respond to the world around them, figuring out their best shot to move the world in the direction they want and recalculating constantly.

Conservative media outlets have seized upon Heaney and Rojas’s work to charge Democrats and/or the antiwar movement with hypocrisy.  John Stossel, at Fox Business, provides a succinct statement of the willful ignorance inherent in such a charge:

The anti-war movement was all over the news before President Obama was elected. But apparently they weren’t really anti-war … they were just anti-President Bush.

Amazing. Especially because the war in Afghanistan ramped up after Obama was elected. American fatalities shot up in 2009 and 2010.

The protesters have remained silent over Libya.

Now, remember that the antiwar movement included more than pacifists; there were also many people who believed that the war in Iraq was different, unnecessary and unjustified, than the war in Afghanistan.  Candidate Obama played to this sentiment in his national campaign–and mostly followed through on it.

Libya wasn’t on the antiwar movement’s radar–for obvious reasons.  And the United States is bombing, but not sending ground forces, and there is a call for intervention from the Arab League and an indigenous anti-Qadaffi force that is doing the fighting.  I don’t mean to endorse the mission here, only to point out that it is fundamentally different from the war in Iraq.

So, is there a surprise?

Perhaps only that no one at Fox Business or the Washington Times or the Wall Street Journal was able to think this through and get it into print.

And, by the warway, this isn’t just an antiwar movement story.  Where were the vigorous deficit hawks and tea partiers during the Bush era?  And why have the Tea Party demonstrations diminished after the Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives?

Samey-samey?

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Reexamining Organization/s

Posted on April 25, 2011 by David S. Meyer

From the comments, olderwoman writes:

Your theoretical point is spot on, but your empirical point about Wisconsin is wrong, and wrong in a way that reflects back to a refinement of theory. Empirically, protests in Wisconsin were organized by a lot of different organizations, and I personally have never even heard of Freedom Works — your link goes to a North Carolina protest! So, yes, organizations and organizing mattered a ton, but it was a whole lot of organizations that were mobilized, not any one. There were a lot of different unions involved who are not all centrally coordinated. There were many different non-union political groups that mobilized. This leads to the theoretical point, which is that it is important to pay attention to the diversity of organizations mobilizing. And even more to the extent to which mobilizing efforts work. Organizations are all the time trying to get people to go to protests or write the legislators etc. But only occasionally do these efforts lead to huge responses. Part of the theory has to be about why organizing works sometimes and not others. In Wisconsin, as the protest spread, people who lacked direct organizational connections started self-mobilizing: it became “the thing to do” to go protest at the Capitol, in some circles, and once previously-nonpolitical people got there, they became involved in networks and became politicized. Highly visible threats and suddenly imposed grievances are part of that answer, along with media attention cycles, and the ways influence flows through informal social networks.

I appreciate the clarification about multiple organizations in Wisconsin.  Unions provided one set of efforts for efforts against Governor Walker’s agenda.  Successful campaigns in the United States are generally comprised of more than one organized group, and negotiating priorities among them is a key element of life within a movement.

On FreedomWorks: I said that FreedomWorks was a key organization working to generate and script protests at the town hall meetings about health care (and pulled a photo from a protest in North Carolina).  It’s more than that.  FreedomWorks grew out of a split within the Koch Brothers’ group, Citizens for a Sound Economy in 2004, as others split off to become Americans for Prosperity.  Although there are differences between the groups, both have worked to spread what would become Tea Party Gospel, funding organizers to do the heavy lifting of mobilizing at the grassroots.

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey chairs FreedomWorks, along with the group’s president, Matt Kibbe, has tried to define and channel the Tea Party movement into an asset for the Republican Party.  Their manifesto is available, cheap, online (on the right).  If you prowl around their website, you’ll see a focus on older school small government Republicanism, with token (or less) commitments on some grassroots concerns like immigration and social issues.

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Anger, Organization, and the Myth of Spontaneity

Posted on April 22, 2011 by David S. Meyer

When protest explodes/emerges/erupts/ after a politician does–or threatens–something unappealing, we talk about the unrest as a response.

So, we saw disruptions at town meetings across the country in 2009 about President Obama’s health care reforms, and we saw large demonstrations and strikes across Wisconsin targeted at stopping Governor Walker’s efforts to strip unions of the right to bargain collectively.  These were, of course, people responding to policies they viewed as threats.  (Note that activists on the left and right shared a slogan: “Kill the Bill.”)

But there’s a step missing in thinking about how they happened; organized groups worked hard to mobilize those people.  FreedomWorks invested a great deal of time, money, and effort in stoking, scripting, and publicizing the town hall protests, and trade unions in Wisconsin, rightly viewing Governor Walker’s policy as a serious threat to their future, mobilized their base to protest.

Protests in Madison, Wisconsin

This doesn’t mean that either protest was illegitimate, or that the people who appeared to chant and hold signs didn’t believe what they were saying.  It also doesn’t mean that everyone attending either set of events was directly mobilized by one of those organizations.

Rather, organized groups plan and publicize events, and activate all their available networks to turn people out.  They define grievances, and try to get people to agree with them enough to turn out and participate.  And, when the events take place, they work hard to get their messages about what they mean out to a larger public.

Activists are often quick to identify the organizations at work in causes they hate.  We heard supporters of health care reform call out FreedomWorks and the big corporate money behind the town meeting campaigns.  And we heard Governor Walker and his allies dismiss the Wisconsin protests as bought and paid for by big labor.  (There’s an unfortunate–and widespread–misconception that legitimate protest, whatever that means, is spontaneous and unorganized.)

They’re both right–at least partly.  The large protests don’t happen without organizing, and a serious investment of time and skill–and often money, spent in convincing people that something was wrong, that it could be different, and that their efforts might matter.  They also wouldn’t happen, at least not on a large scale, if lots of people weren’t convinced.

This is, by the way, my gripe with Frances Fox Piven (very different, by the way, from Glenn Beck’s accusations, discussed most recently here).  Last December, Piven published an article in The Nation, worries that the failure of the unemployed to protest extremely high and sustained joblessness will allow politicians to ignore their plight, or even to adopt policies that hurt employment generally and workers in particular.  (She’s right about this.)

So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs? After all, the injustice is apparent. Working people are losing their homes and their pensions while robber-baron CEOs report renewed profits and windfall bonuses. Shouldn’t the unemployed be on the march? Why aren’t they demanding enhanced safety net protections and big initiatives to generate jobs?

Piven then identifies many of the obstacles to organizing and mobilizing the unemployed (e.g., they’re spread across the country and industries; people blame themselves and try to find individual solutions), but then neglects the organizing that needs to take place for such protests to emerge.  Indeed, she concludes:

A loose and spontaneous movement…could emerge. It is made more likely because unemployment rates are especially high among younger workers. Protests by the unemployed led by young workers and by students, who face a future of joblessness, just might become large enough and disruptive enough to have an impact in Washington. There is no science that predicts eruption of protest movements….We should hope for another American social movement from the bottom—and then join it.

But hoping won’t make a social movement about unemployment or anything else, and–in real life–Frances Fox Piven knows this perfectly well.  Even as she’s emphasized spontaneity and unpredictability in much of her academic work, her treatments of movements identify the contributions of organizers dedicated to mobilizing people.  And, in her real life, she’s spent a great deal of time and effort building organizations to do exactly that, working and organizing more than just hoping.

Waiting for conditions to create movements lets the other side–whoever that is–organize and win.

So, Slate’s David Weigel observes that liberals have been slow to organize against Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, supported by all but four Republicans in the House of Representatives.  Ryan’s budget, which would cut taxes for the rich, reduce government spending massively by cutting unnamed programs–but not defense, and turning Medicare into a voucher system.  Contrasting the relatively small crowds at the meetings hosted by members of Congress returning to their districts with the health care shout-downs, Weigel thinks the Democrats are missing an important opportunity, perhaps relying naively on the offensiveness of the policies themselves to generate protest.

There are some suggestions that organizations on the left get the message.  The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is planning a national campaign to “Fight for a Fair Economy”, spreading Wisconsin-style protests across the country.

Briefcase Brigades

Meanwhile, organizers are working to mobilize Briefcase Brigades of young people protesting unemployment by appearing at Congressional district offices this Wednesday, dressed for work:

On Wednesday, April 27th, when members of Congress are home for recess, we’re going to their offices all around the country to demand they prioritize jobs over budget cuts. We’re going dressed for an interview, briefcase in hand, with our resumes to show we’re ready for work, but the opportunities just aren’t there.

The opportunities for protest, just like the opportunities for employment, have to be created and recognized; nothing happens by itself.

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Clustering Issues: Environmentalism and GLBT Politics

Posted on April 21, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Politico’s Alex Guillen reported earlier this week that young environmentalists were consulting with gay and lesbian activists to figure out how to be more effective, especially in pushing President Obama.

The GLBT movement has won–and is winning–several important victories, so it makes sense that other activists want to bottle whatever they’re doing.  Of course, winning and losing on policy isn’t completely within activists’ control.  (The brave DREAMers didn’t lose on immigration reform because they made tactical mistakes; in very difficult circumstances, they played the cards they had extremely well.)

But the GLBT activists had a few breakthroughs, winning legal

Source: Freedom to Marry

recognition of same sex marriage in a few states, making progress in others–mostly through the courts.  They’re backing a case from California with high visibility/high skill representation (Boies and Olson) percolating up to the Supreme Court.

And the lame duck Congress voted to end the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the military, responding to popular pressure, the Obama administration, and the leadership within the military.

Are there some lessons here for environmental activists?  Here are a couple of ideas:

1.  Even when changes appear quickly, the work takes a very long time.  The modern GLBT movement, frequently dated as beginning with the Stonewall protests of 1969, really dates back much further, and activists have been working for a very long time, without such visible victories.

AIDS activism in the 1980s, in conjunction with organizing around individual decisions about coming out, mattered over the long haul, probably even more than they seemed to at the time.  Organizing in the wake of hostile decisions, particularly Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), which allowed states to regulate private same sex sexual behavior between consenting adults, unified and broadened a movement, helping it make gains.

2.  If you want to change public opinion, work to change policy.  A campaign doesn’t have to win on the policy goal in order to mobilize and change public opinion.   The graph at the right, from Nate Silver at 538, shows a dramatic change in public opinion, driven by policy battles and demographic change.

Importantly, the notion that you should work to change opinion first, independent of an electoral or policy campaign, is mistaken.  Debate about a bill or a candidate pushes a movement’s issues into the window of public attention, which makes it possible to change opinion.

3.  Partial victories matter.  In the case of same sex marriage, it’s not all that long ago that sympathetic politicians responded to GLBT activists by denying marriage, offering “domestic partnership” as an alternative.  Vermont Governor Howard Dean, for example, brokered such a compromise in 2000.  A victory then, it provided an unsatisfactory, but critical, stepping stone just a few years later.

Something else interesting in this story: the environmentalists went to talk to gay and lesbian activists, even though the connections between their concerns aren’t immediately obvious.  (I guess it makes sense that they weren’t talking to anti-tax organizers, who have also been very successful.)  They share a view of President Obama as a somewhat disappointing ally, and still the best shot they have at policy victories.

If the initial consultations come from practical short-term considerations, they need not be limited by them.  The connections  forged through strategy meetings today are likely to influence politics in the future, as GLBT and environmental activists develop personal as well as political ties as they explore next steps in their agendas.  Consultations can become coalitions.

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Passover Politics

Posted on April 20, 2011 by David S. Meyer

We’re two days into Passover, a major Jewish holiday.  The highlight is always two nights of services at the dinner table with families and friends, with varying shares of food, prayer, stories, and discussion.  This service, the seder, varies tremendously from home to home, as each household makes its way through a haggadah, with more and less conflict and warmth–as immortalized in Woody Allen films.

“Haggadah” means telling or narration, and the story that’s told is about the liberation of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt.  Although key elements of the tale are basically consistent, the tone, length, and meanings of the story are all over the place.

On length: the longest service I’ve ever participated in, many years ago, featured commentary and discussion on absolutely everything, and we didn’t get to dinner until after midnight.  All the participants were in their twenties, and there were no hungry kids waiting for dinner.

On meaning: religion helps people make sense of their lives, and rituals reinforce a sense of one’s place in the world.  People take very different messages from the same sets of stories and religious dicta, and devout doesn’t mandate a certain kind of politics.  Radical pacifist Dorothy Day and proto-fascist Father Charles Coughlin both saw themselves as committed Catholics.  Contemporary Christian clerics finds ways to promote tax cuts or tax justice in the Gospels.

The haggadah is a site where we can see the outcomes of activist Jewish efforts.  The story of liberation from Egypt can be used to make many different points.  In one reading, it’s about how special the Hebrews are, and about their sacred tie to the land of Israel.  Another take is about a universal drive for social justice, with an explicit argument that the liberation from slavery should make seder participants particularly vigilant in fighting against the oppression of others.

Such contrasting visions play out in different haggadahs; it’s easy to find conservative, leftist, environmentalist, and feminist haggadahs in bookstores–and now, on line.  All manner of causes have been represented by activists seizing the holiday and appropriating the story for their own purposes.  The rituals and symbols change in response to the concerns of the present: vegans, for example, hold their seders without a shankbone to represent the Passover sacrifice.

But recounting the experience of slavery, even many generations on, should leave a lasting impact on the way we think about the world and about justice.

The drama of the events commemorated–and the flexibility of the service–make it every politico’s favorite holiday.  President Obama–who is not Jewish or Muslim–has been hosting a seder each year  for a long time–well before he got to hold the ceremony in the White House.

You can make your own:

The Open Source Haggadah lists 16 key elements of the service and offers different texts for each, with politics ranging from “revolutionary” to Zionist, and religious orientations that range from orthodox to explicitly secular.  More–and newer–texts are available at Haggadot.com.

Contrasting intepretations of religious doctrines are hardly peculiar to Judaism.  What’s particularly interesting here is that you don’t need to read theological tracts to see the debates played out.

And to see how important movements of the past century have taken on the religious and cultural text of explaining themselves and their visions in the context of traditions that data back thousands of years.  One outcome of feminism, for example, are passages read aloud at dinner tables across the country that were recovered or written by activists a few decades ago.

And, somehow, I think these stories matter: our understanding of the past shapes our visions and actions for the future.

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Coalitions and Linking Issues

Posted on April 18, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Immigrant rights protest

Sunday’s New York Times features an interesting profile of John Tanton, a Michigan physician who has been crusading, effectively, for limited immigration and against reform for more than three decades.

Jason DeParle reports that Tanton, a prodigious fundraiser and organizer, had been active in Planned Parenthood and Zero Population Growth when he grew increasingly concerned with immigration.  He was critical in founding several anti-immigrant groups (Numbers USA, Federation for American Immigration Reform [FAIR], and Center for  Immigration Studies), and has pressed his views with increasing vigor–and venom.

There is much that’s interesting in DeParle’s piece, but what most intrigued me was Tanton’s initial effort to recruit allies from the left of the political spectrum.  Tanton imagined potential supporters from environmentalists and labor, and worked to use arguments that would appeal to them (population pressure was an environmental threat; immigrants would drive down wages), but–despite early support from Sen. Eugene McCarthy and Warren Buffet–was largely unsuccessful.  McCarthy and Buffet also distanced themselves from Tanton, his groups, and his politics.

And those politics became increasingly venomous.  Shelving the environmental and labor arguments, Tanton became increasingly open to arguments about cultural preservation and the racial inferiority of darker skinned people.  Tanton became so toxic that even anti-immigrant activists have begun to distance themselves from him.

There’s certainly a story about one man’s journal told in psychological terms.  That’s not my story.

I’m more struck by how supporters of issues tend to cluster in ways that are not directly related to the content of the issue.

Certainly, labor and environmentalists could have gone into the anti-immigrant camp.  Environmentalism has a history that includes conservative ideology, and labor certainly has a….mixed…history on racial justice and immigration.

And there is a conservative ideological position that supports fairly open borders, so that capital has access to labor.  Recall that President George W. Bush presented a comprehensive immigration reform package that included a path toward citizenship for undocumented immigrants in the United States, and that Senator John McCain worked for it in Congress.  Bush ultimately gave up, and McCain worked hard to distance himself from his own positions so that he could get the Republican nomination for President.  Not much later, facing a primary challenge for his Senate seat, he fixated on building a great wall between the United States and Mexico.

More than that, there’s something odd about the clustering of positions  on abortion, taxation, climate change, war in Iraq, and immigration should cluster the way they do–but they do.

Successful activist organizations work in groups, and they depend on building coalitions across issues and forging alliances within political parties.  The Presidential primary system that became institutionalized in the 1970s gave issue activists disproportionate influence in enforcing ideological discipline.  Thus, George H.W. Bush abandoned support of abortion rights in 1980 when he agreed to run on a national ticket with Ronald Reagan; Jesse Jackson, preparing for a presidential run in 1984, dropped his anti-abortion stance the previous year and made abortion rights a central plank in his campaign for liberal women voters.

I assume that Bush and Jackson thought carefully about their positions on abortion, thought about what they knew about the world and the people they cared about, and searched their souls before staging those political turnabouts.  We also know, however, that they had to shift policies if they wanted to be credible within their respective parties.

The clustering of issues within the political parties makes building issue-based coalitions across parties increasingly difficult.  But outside Congress, in the states and in neighborhoods, the same dynamic is at work, reinforced by social norms and an odd American norm of avoiding political arguments with friends.  Oddly, this makes the vitriol and intolerance for those who disagree with us–because they disagree on almost everything–much worse.

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Tax Day Protest

Posted on April 16, 2011 by David S. Meyer

The cheerleaders during the American revolution led the crowds in chanting, “No Taxation without Representation.”  At least the first part of that cheer has found a permanent place in American political discourse, as activists have found a way to label personal frustration at paying taxes as a moral and political cause.  Every year, conservative and libertarian activists stage protests on tax day.

April 15th (this year, April 18th, but go with me on this) provides an obvious hook for organizing and a news peg for journalists.  I’ve heard rumors of some people who were so grateful to America that they took delight in filling out the forms and writing the check (allegedly, this included the great songwriter, Irving Berlin), but most of us resent the time spent organizing records and, maybe, writing a check for goods and services that we take for granted (roads, food inspection), or even resent (wars, for example, and any kind of waste you want to find).  So, people are more ready to protest–and journalists more willing to cover such protests–on tax day.

Tax Day Protest, Washington DC 2010

Historically, the anti-tax forces have owned the day.  Since the emergence of the Tea Party as an umbrella of conservative causes, demonstrations in Washington–and around the country–have been branded.  The New York Times reported several thousand demonstrators last year,  organized by Tea Party groups, including FreedomWorks, and addressed by political heroes including Michele Bachmann.

This year, however, things may be a little different.  The biggest tea party groups have announced that they’ll be foregoing the Washington rallies in favor of organized events around the country (Roll Call report).  Since the large Republican gains in the 2010 elections, Tea Party groups have had a more difficult time generating large crowds; activists expect elected officials to carry their cause.  Americans for Prosperity’s Tim Phillips, explains, “It’s a little harder on offense. On defense, it’s more unifying. You’re simply saying no.”  (That’s pretty much what I said.)

It’s a great risk for any movement to use the same tactic and generate smaller numbers and less attention.  Announcing that you’re moving out to the grassroots is an effort to make a virtue of necessity.

Meanwhile, liberal activists are staking a new claim on tax day, trying to get into the stories about protest and the larger debate about taxes.  Moveon.org is organizing parties, rallies, and other events around the country about tax justice.  It’s not exactly taking pride and pleasure in writing checks to the US Treasury, but an effort to mobilize people who think that you have to pay for worthwhile services from government—but the emphasis is on making the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share.

As a matter of policy, the interesting thing here is that the anti-taxers talk about keeping taxes low for everyone, but their allies on Capitol Hill focus on cutting the taxes of the very rich.  Their opponents focus their rhetoric on the very rich, mostly avoiding the notion that the rest of us might have to pay more for government.

As a matter of movement politics, the question will be whether the anti-anti-taxers get into the stories on Monday and Tuesday, and into the larger political debate.

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Can the Tea Party Party? (Notes on the Budget Agreement)

Posted on April 14, 2011 by David S. Meyer

It certainly looked as though Speaker John Boehner did pretty well in negotiations about the past year’s budget.  At the last minute, the Speaker, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and President Obama announced that they had come to an agreement to keep the government operating, an agreement that all parties claimed to find distasteful.

The details of the agreement have mostly escaped public scrutiny, but there has been a great deal of attention to the amount cut from the budget: $38 billion.  This was more than Speaker Boehner’s initial position on cuts, but less than the rhetorical $100 billion Republicans campaigned on last fall (which, prorated for what’s left of the year, would have come out to $61 billion).  Boehner, like Democratic leaders, now had to convince his caucus and his constituents, that he cut the best deal he could.

These are large and uncharacteristic cuts for Congress, but for Tea Party activists out to balance the budget or shrink government, they’re somewhat less than a drop in the bucket.  There will be a large deficit next year, and there will be taxes; government will continue to operate.

Fifty-nine Republicans in the House refused to support the new budget resolution funding the government, including more than one quarter of the freshman.  Speaker Boehner has to worry about holding his caucus together, and this means maintaining good relations with the Tea Party, or at least a lot of it.

But he also knows that the Tea Party draws support from a little less than a third of the American public–a significant faction of the Republican party, to be sure, but not enough to win national elections.  Boehner, who knows how to read polls and count heads, also knows that cuts in favored programs are likely to threaten his support and mobilize his opposition.  His dilemma is finding a way to keep the caucus together, the Tea Party firmly in the Republican Party, and still pass legislation.

The Tea Partiers dilemma is how to deal with what can only be described as a partial victory.  This is  a common movement story.  (Perhaps only ambiguous defeat is more frequent.)  It’s really the way movement politics works.

In opposition, the Tea Party could articulate diverse–and even contradictory–claims, as long as there was agreement on opposing President Obama, the Democrats, and their initiatives.  Tea Party groups could disagree about salient social issues (same sex marriage, abortion) or foreign policy, and still continue to work together.  Indeed, the label “Tea Party,” and rhetoric about taking America back, could paper over real differences.  Once Tea Party allies had some responsibility for governance, things become much more difficult.  Cutting $100 billion dollars and balancing the budget sounds much more attractive than cutting spending on particular programs, which all have constituencies of support.  And balancing the priorities of groups that all agreed defeating Democrats was top on the list becomes more difficult once that first objective has been achieved.  Paradoxically, every step forward undermines building a coalition that supports the effort.  If progress is being made, moderates doubt the need for more protest, more rallies, more contributions, and more meetings.  And hard core supporters want more from their efforts than the marginal gains and compromises the are endemic to the policy process in America.

Meanwhile, the Tea Party has been so vaguely defined that real tensions between different factions emerge whenever a deal is made.  Social conservatives saw the Republican leadership trade off a series of proposals devoted to restricting abortion for gains on the budget number–again.  They have to wonder if the Tea Party–or the Republican Party–is a viable vehicle for their concerns.

(If the Tea Party turns out to be an uneasy alliance of mainstream Republicans, social conservatives, libertarians, isolationists and imperialists, it’s just a hopped up version of the Republican Party.)

Speaker Boehner is in the middle of it, as he will be again when the vote about raising the debt ceiling returns, and again when the House takes up the next budget.  He needed Democrats in the House to help pass his budget, and they want different things than his Republican base.  The critical test for a party leader is to be able to negotiate for–and sell out–key constituencies–and still maintain their support.

The test for activists is to learn how to claim victories gracelessly, and continue to mobilize activism and press forward.  James Madison designed America to make this extremely difficult.

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Williams Institute 10th Anniversary

Posted on April 8, 2011 by David S. Meyer

I’m honored to participate in the 10th anniversary celebration of the Williams Institute, at UCLA’s law school.

http://www2.law.ucla.edu/williamsinstitute/programs/10thAnnualUpdate-Anniversary.html

The Williams Institute is an academic think tank focused on law and public policy regarding sexual orientation.  And academics celebrate achievements, like good work for a decade, by holding conferences.  (I understand that people in other fields celebrate in different ways.)

I’m slated to participate in a panel, “Beyond Gay Rights: Lessons from Other Social Movements,” and will post this weekend about what I learn.

Meantime, it’s worthwhile to note that GLBT activists have made extraordinary gains over the past few years in terms of public policy and social acceptance, but they see much more work to be done.  Note, for example, today’s LA Times, which reports on Rep. Michele Bachmann’s efforts to cultivate conservative support in Iowa for her presidential bid.  Bachmann calls the judges who ruled for a right to same sex marriage (who were turned out of office), “black-robed masters.” She’s not alone in seeing political gain in campaigning against gay rights.

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Fast Politics

Posted on April 5, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Fasting is an act of penitence, preparation, and a purification ritual well-established in many religious traditions.   We fast to clear the mind and cleanse the body, turning away from the pressures and pleasures of the world to focus instead on something more important–or even divine.  Hunger pangs pass after a day or so, and fasters report focus, haze, visions, clarity, elation, fatigue, and much else.  With water or juice, a fast can last for weeks.

The activists, authors, and clerics who began a fast against budget cuts to programs that serve the poor last week (discussed yesterday) were twisting a tactic oriented to the self into something that turns outward, toward politics.  They certainly weren’t the first to do so.

Fasting is a standard part of the spiritual repertoire in many religions.  By interrupting the most normal and routine aspects of daily life–making and consuming meals–people can turn their thoughts elsewhere, to the divine.  The Hebrew Bible is replete with tales of whole communities fasting to repent; in the New Testament, Jesus goes to the desert for 40 days to fast before beginning his public ministry.  Fast days (and even fast months) mark the year in contemporary religious life, turning our attention from the routine inward, to something spiritual.

Political activists have taken those trapping and turned them outward.  Mahatma Gandhi staged fasts in the midst of confrontations with the British over independence, saying that he should bear the costs of the conflict he was provoking.  His claim: his belief in the justice of his cause was so great, that he was bearing the costs of that certainty, rather than imposing it on others–through some kind of violence.  (Note the spinning wheel in the photo above; during his political campaigns, Gandhi would spin cotton, as a concrete and symbolic step toward Indian independence.)

Of course, in real life, the British watched this spiritual leader starving himself to death–and others watched the British.  There is something profoundly coercive here–at least to opponents who saw themselves as moral and just.  Gandhi was well aware of this, and also well aware that the British were an opponent who might respond to such pressures.

Cesar Chavez borrowed from Gandhi, and adapted his fasts from Gandhi’s practices.  He defined the fast as a means of spiritual preparation, and also as a way to demonstrate his seriousness.  But he also found a way to keep the spotlight on his efforts–and his concerns.  He would continue his fast until a demand was met, each day increasing the pressure on his opponents.

The idea of forcing an opponent to take responsibility for abominable action is a staple of protest politics, particularly nonviolent protest.  The fast is a recurrent tactic in prison actions, non-cooperation with the daily routines being one of the few approaches available to the imprisoned.

The Irish Republican Army organized serial hunger strikes in the Maze prison in 1981, demanding that imprisoned IRA members be treated as political prisoners.   The strikes followed a five year campaign for political status, which would include the freedom to wear their own clothes and avoid prison work.  In previous efforts, prisoners had refused to wear uniforms (going “on the blanket” instead), and had also fasted.

Bobby Sands, the leader of the IRA members in the prison, refused food on March 1, drawing international attention, and mobilizing both supporters and opponents outside the prison as the strike went on.  Two weeks later, another prisoner joined him in refusing food, followed at intervals by at least eight other IRA prisoners.  Five weeks into the strike Bobby Sands won a by-election for a seat in Parliament, provoking commentary around the world, and increased pressure on the British government.   Members of the European Commission and Pope John Paul II attempted to intervene to save Sands’s life, but were unable to persuade him to stop the strike.

Sands never took office, starving to death at age 27, after 66 days without food.  His death prompted a series of riots in Northern Ireland, and more than 100,000 people attended his funeral.  Meanwhile, one at a time, more prisoners went on strike.

The British would not force feed the prisoners unless their families demanded medical attention, and as several prisoners died, one at a time, other strikers’ families began to demand this intervention.  The strike became increasingly divisive–and horrifying.  Before it was over nine other prisoners had starved to death.

In October, the prisoners called off the strike, having commanded international attention and won some symbolic support from other political actors.

The current anti-hunger strike is unlikely to make a similar impact.  No one intends to starve to death (Mark Bittman, for example, limited his fast to four days), and giving up one meal a day is likely to improve the health of many Americans.  Whether a less dangerous approach to politics, embraced by many more people, can generate similar attention is very much an open question.

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