Authenticity at the Town Hall Meetings?

Posted on April 28, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Republican members of Congress who supported Paul Ryan’s budget plan (almost all of them) are having to defend their votes against hostile crowds at town meetings.  (Note that there is a lot to get angry about in this budget plan.  See James Fallows’ succinct take at The Atlantic.)

There have been protests all over, with particular efforts made in the districts of freshmen Republicans (there are plenty of them) in swing districts, but Paul Ryan himself has received a lot of attention as well.

The meeting unrest thus far is a smaller version of the confrontations with Democratic representatives considering support for health care reform.

But who are these people?  We tend to think of the people who agree with us as authentic grassroots activists, citizens pulled into sporadic political engagement by the urgency of the issue.  And the people who yell on the other side are provoked, mobilized, and scripted by nefarious interests.  In real life in the United States, movements are comprised of both focused organizations and the people they are able to reach: No mass mobilization without organization, coordination, and resources; no mass mobilization without real concerned people.

Marin Cogan and Jonathan Allen have a nice piece at Politico, examining the new town hall campaigns.  Quoting organizers and analysts on the left and right, they see continued struggle on budget issues–and more–over the next few years:

“This is the start of it,” said Lauren Weiner, deputy communications director for labor-backed Americans United for Change. “We know that the more people know about this budget, the angrier they’re going to get. We’re seeing two weeks in what the anger looks like … We hope and think it will grow.”

Adam Brandon, vice president of communications at FreedomWorks, put it this way: “The Ryan budget debate will last for the next several years—so we will also be very active in engaging our members. Town halls will become more of a staple on the American political scene… [our members] plant to stay engaged in this process.”

Expect it to continue at least through the next presidential campaign.

It’s completely appropriate for citizens to hold their representatives accountable.  I’ll be happier, however, if these demonstrators allow their reps. to answer questions, rather than shouting them down, and if no placards depict political leaders with Hitler’s moustache.

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Honoring Bill Gamson

Posted on April 27, 2011 by David S. Meyer

I’m off to the University of Notre Dame this long weekend.  Their Center for the Study of Social Movements will be honoring William A. Gamson with the John D. McCarthy Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Scholarship of Social Movements.  The award, won previously by Verta Taylor, Mayer Zald, and Doug McAdam, recognizes mentoring as well as scholarship, and Bill is completely deserving.

Bill, a sociology professor at Boston College, is a prolific author, former president of the American Sociological Association, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  He’s the designer of many educational games and exercises, and the inventor of the first version of fantasy baseball.

I’d add that one of the many admirable things about Bill’s work is his ongoing concern with linking studies of social movements to the work of activists.  He is the founder and a central figure in the Movement/Media Research Action Project.

I’m indebted to Bill’s scholarship and to his mentoring, and very excited to be part of the event.

Very much in the spirit of John McCarthy and those who have been honored, Notre Dame sponsors a Young Scholars in Social Movements conference coinciding with the celebration.  They’ve selected a dozen young scholars within a year or two of the doctoral degree (either way), and are bringing them out to present their work.  I feel very fortunate to be able to participate.

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Are Lawyers Different?: Does the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) Deserve a Defense?

Posted on April 27, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Several large gay rights organizations (e.g.) celebrated the decision of King & Spalding, a large law firm, to forgo work for the House of Representatives.  When the Obama administration declined to defend the

Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) defends an unpopular client

constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the House leadership enlisted the firm to provide a defense instead.

DOMA explicitly defined marriage as between one man and one woman, and relieved states and the federal government of the obligation to recognize other marriage formulations that states might decide to allow.  (Anyone who’s ever taken an American government class would wonder if this wasn’t an obvious violation of the “full faith and credit clause.)  Congress passed the law with large majorities in each house, and President Clinton signed the Act, triangulating the culture wars on the eve of his reelection campaign.

King & Spalding reconsidered taking the case amid a great deal of political pressure and the suggestion that this case might be costly in terms of its reputation and future work.  The Human Rights Campaign had contacted many of the firm’s clients, drawing attention to this other legal work, and suggesting that clients might exercise their leverage on the firm.  At the Washington Post, Greg Sargent reports:

…Fred Sainz, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, shared new details about it. He confirmed to me that his group did indeed contact King and Spalding clients to let them know that the group viewed the firm’s defense of DOMA as unacceptable.

Former Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, the partner who was to take the lead on the case, criticized the decision, resigned from the firm, and announced that he would handle the case with another firm.   According to the Washington Post:

In a resignation letter released to the media, Clement said he felt compelled to resign — not because of his views on the legislation, which he did not disclose, but “out of the firmly held belief that a representation should not be abandoned because the client’s legal position is extremely unpopular in certain quarters.”

He continued: “Much has been said about being on the right side of history. But being on the right or wrong side of history on the merits is a question for the clients. When it comes to the lawyers, the surest way to be on the wrong side of history is to abandon a client in the face of hostile criticism.”

Attorneys make a commitment to an adversary system of justice, in which both sides benefit from strong and honest advocacy, with a judge or jury making decisions about the merits of a case.  And there is something heroic and difficult about lawyers taking on unpopular causes.  You’ll note the fictional Atticus Finch above, who faced social opprobrium to defend an unpopular client.

Novelists can load the dice, however, and make that client worthy–and innocent.  In real life, however, sometimes unpopular clients are unpopular for good reasons.  The ACLU took a great deal of flack for defending the right of Nazis to march in a neighborhood filled with survivors of German concentration camps.  And today lawyers endure serious hardships to represent people who might well be terrorists housed at Guantanamo Bay.  As I understand it, this is what lawyers do.

But Evan Wolfson, at Freedom to Marry, says that while clients deserve representation, all causes do not:

In America, every person deserves a defense, but not every position does.  King & Spaulding has recognized what President Obama, the Department of Justice, and many members of Congress have joined Freedom to Marry in concluding: federal marriage discrimination and the so-called ‘Defense of Marriage Act’ are indefensible.
Freedom to Marry commends the many voices within the firm and outside, including the Human Rights Campaign, who spoke up against the firm’s hasty and wrong-headed decision to take on the defense of discrimination.  DOMA is an odious, oppressive law passed to exclude loving and committed couples from equal respect for their marriages; it cannot be defended without reliance on stereotypes and fears that do not stand up under the Constitution.  The House leaders pushing this abuse of taxpayer money to find a hired gun to defend DOMA should follow King & Spaulding’s lead and reconsider whether they really want to be on the side of unfairness and the wrong side of history.

But Attorney General Eric Holder, who made the decision not to defend DOMA, has praised Clement, explaining, “I think he is doing that which lawyers do when we’re at our best.”

At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick laments the movement strategy of pressuring lawyers off particular cases, even as she excoriates DOMA:

What’s the difference between Liz Cheney’s attack on the Gitmo lawyers and the gay rights groups’ pressure on King & Spalding? One argument, advanced at the Baltimore Sun, is that this is the difference between criminal and civil proceedings; the Constitution guarantees a right to counsel in criminal trials. But no firm has to take a civil case. As a descriptive matter that’s true. DOMA has no “right” to be defended. But as a normative matter it sidesteps the real question: What is the end game here? When groups pressure a firm into dropping representation for an unpopular client, is the ultimate goal to have only bad lawyers defend an unpopular law, or no lawyers at all? And what kind of legal victory would either of those ends represent?

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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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