Roe v. Wade commemorations

Posted on January 25, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Visitors to Washington, DC can choose either an anti-abortion or abortion rights demonstration this week.

The March for Life started with a rally on the

National Mall, then activists marched to the Supreme Court to protest Roe v. Wade, praying for the health of the justices.  Abortion rights activists started at the Court, and sponsored sympathy demonstrations around the country; they also prayed for the health of the justices.

Thirty-eight years ago the US Supreme Court announced its  Roe decision, establishing a Constitutional right for women to have access to legal abortion s, and finally resolving an issue that had become increasingly contested in the previous decade.  Uh, not quite.

Roe nationalized the abortion debate, and within a few years abortion politics became a critical issue in party politics, mobilizing new activism and demonstrating–and exacerbating–deep divisions in American life. Anti-abortion and abortion rights activists stoked increased interest in existing political organizations, established new movement groups, and mobilized several new generations of activists on the issue.  Politicians have played to one side or the other, often emphasizing the threat represented by their opponents.  The politics of abortion access are more contested in the United States than anywhere else in the world.

And every year, on the anniversary of the decision, activists on both sides assemble by the Court, in varying numbers and varying degrees of civility.  It’s an opportunity for a show of strength, a chance to demonstrate commitment and resolve, and an event to organize and fundraise around.

It’s hard to remember that Roe didn’t generate wide interest in 1973, especially as it’s become the rhetorical and political centerpiece for both sides in the abortion battle.  But changes in national politics made abortion a valuable issue for activists and politicians.  Fundraising and electoral reforms meant that individual candidates gained increasing responsibility to do their own fundraising, cobbling together issues that had traction in the body politic.  Jimmy Carter first demonstrated the value of evangelicals of a political constituency in campaign leading up to his election in 1976, and Ronald Reagan played to that constituency far more effectively in his 1980 campaign.

In the meantime, the anniversary of the decision became an unavoidable event for activist organizations.  The commemorations, of course, generate far more attention each year than the decision did in 1973.  When anti-abortion activists started the commemorations, abortion rights activists responded by putting their side in the streets–and in the news–as well.  Now, locked in a perverse symbiotic stalemate, neither side can give up and cede the day–and the battle–to its opponents.  Looking at the other side each year, sometimes across barricades, sometimes in the news, inspires activists to keep up their efforts, including going to meetings, attending events, and sending money.

The March for Life organizes its efforts around this demonstration every year, doing a little better when there’s a Democratic president committed to abortion rights.  A coalition of women’s and reproductive rights groups organizes in support of the decision, doing a little better when Republican presidents work to erode abortion rights.

Of course, each side mobilizes throughout much of the rest of the year, outside clinics, in state electoral campaigns, and particularly when there’s a vacancy on the Supreme Court.  But the Roe anniversary is the most predictable moment each year when you know that the other side and the mass media will be watching.

Here I predict there will be large demonstrations on both sides next year as well.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Beck and Piven

Posted on January 23, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Glenn Beck has spent a lot of air time over the past year attacking Frances Fox Piven, a distinguished professor of political science at the City University of New York.  Beck’s spotlight has brought Piven to the attention of a larger–and different–audience than she normally reaches: Fox viewers.  Some small fraction of those who have heard Beck describe her as a threat to the Constitution have responded by issuing death threats.

Full Disclosure: I know Piven, not that well, but certainly much better than I know Beck.  I’ve also read much more of her writing than his.  In my, rather limited, experience, I’ve found Frances to be smart, committed, unfailingly gracious, and extremely kind.  Many years ago, when I was finishing my first year of graduate school, she took the time to meet with me and give me some very good advice about academia–which I (foolishly) ignored.  Over the years, we’ve occasionally appeared together on panels at sociology or political science meetings, and have disagreed about how movements work.  What I’ve seen is her keen interest in engaging with people who disagree with her, as if she might learn (and/or teach) something through civil dialogue with people who have a different understanding of the world.  It’s an old model of academia, one that is terribly attractive.  I’ve also heard her praise the engagement of conservative academics who likely agreed with her on little beyond this model.

And I’ve always admired Piven’s willingness to take her ideas seriously enough to work with the activists she writes about.  Unlike Glenn Beck, she’s appeared before all kinds of audiences without demanding large payments, and–to my knowledge–doesn’t travel with a paid security detail–as Beck does.

For more than a year, Beck has periodically described Piven’s work (much of it with Richard Cloward, her husband, who died nearly ten years ago), as an effort to bring down American capitalism in the service of a vision of “social justice.”  [In Glenn Beck’s world, “social justice” is less a moral and political aspiration than codes words for a totalitarian state.]  You can find Fox transcripts of some samples here and here.

In real life, Piven’s work has mostly been concerned with the politics of poor people.  Her argument: government doesn’t do anything for the disadvantaged unless they represent a political threat to governing coalitions.  She’s promoted activism in general and voter registration in particular, because when poor people have the potential of making a political difference to someone, she thinks they’re more likely to get attention when policies are made.  This idea, that squeaky wheels are more likely to get greased, is hardly that radical.  It makes sense to me, and is surely one reason that Glenn Beck organized a rally at the Lincoln Memorial last year.

Piven and Cloward have had more moments of political influence than almost all other political science and sociology professors, but there haven’t been that many of them.  Cloward briefed Attorney General Robert Kennedy on juvenile delinquency in the early 1960s, inspiring some of the programs that became the War on Poverty.  Piven worked hard–and effectively–to get the Motor Voter Bill passed in 1993, which allowed people to register to vote when they were receiving government services.

It’s hard to see comparable influence in the last decade and a half, a period that’s included President Clinton’s welfare reform, President Bush’s efforts to privatize Social Security, and President Obama’s trade and business oriented efforts to address the recession and the deficit.

I don’t know whether there is more than a media strategy in Beck’s attacks on Piven, whether he intends to discredit other political figures by implication, or whether this just makes for good tv.

But words matter.  Even though the overwhelming majority of Beck’s viewers know that his rhetoric of threat is theater, he knows that there are always people on the periphery who take things more seriously.  The larger and more diverse your audience is, the  more you have to think about how your message comes across. (Really:  While most of Bill O’Reilly’s viewers may have seen his “Tiller-baby killer” diatribes as rooted in a clever rhyme, at least one took it seriously enough to murder a doctor at church services.  I can’t imagine the language doesn’t haunt the speaker, years later, at odd moments late at night.)

In our current moment of ostensibly searching for civility, targeting a Professor Piven seems particularly ill-conceived.

Of course, it’s now all over the news and the web, with both charges and countercharges circulating, with more–and far less-civility.

Peter Dreier posted an excellent summary of Beck’s reports on two of her articles–and the actual content of those articles–at Huffington Post, as well as a disturbing collection of the threats she’s received.

And you can see a range of reports: here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

House Repeals Health Care (Symbolically)

Posted on January 20, 2011 by David S. Meyer

The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives voted to repeal President Obama’s health care reforms, which have just begun to come into effect.  It was a big victory for the Republicans and the Tea Party, but it’s unlikely to move any further through the legislative process.  The Democratic Senate leadership is extremely unlikely to let the bill come to a vote, and President Obama would surely veto it if it somehow did.

The Republican leadership in the House is well aware of this, which made wrangling the votes for a repeal, as a symbolic statement, much easier to do.  It also gives the Republicans an issue for the 2012 elections and delivers something to the Tea Partiers who were so strong in opposition to Obama’s health care policies.

Does it matter?  Sort of, maybe.

Nearly thirty years ago, in 1982 the nuclear freeze movement pushed the Democratic Party to large gains in the House of Representatives, responding to what activists described as President Reagan’s egregious departures from previous mainstream policies on national security.  Reagan had increased military spending dramatically–much of it on big ticket nuclear weapons systems, spoke casually about nuclear wars, and denigrated the arms control process.

[I wrote a dissertation and a book on this.  Alas, you can read much much more.]

The freeze was far more popular than the Tea Party, and much easier to link to concrete policy demands.  A call to end the technological arms race–bilaterally–it consistently polled upwards of 70 percent support among the general public, was the stick activists use to attack President Reagan on defense policy and much else.

The larger Democratic majority in the House passed the nuclear freeze in May, and the proposal never came close to the floor in the Senate.  [Knowing that this would happen, House Democrats who were dubious about the freeze as policy could vote for it and then vote for contradictory policies.]

President Reagan responded, however, first rhetorically; he learned the sentence, “nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought,” and delivered it effectively and frequently.  He then sought to reopen arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union.  By the time he ran for reelection in 1984–against nuclear freeze supporter, Walter Mondale, Reagan had become an advocate of arms control and disarmament.  Reagan said that these apparent shifts were actually completely consistent with his long past as a critic of arms control and supporter of nuclear modernization, but this is a hard case to make.  He found a way to change his mind–or to express long-held views that he’d somehow been able to keep well-hidden.

None of it was pretty or neat, but by the middle of the 1980s, both US military spending and the number of nuclear weapons had begun to decline, and in 1989 the world changed forever with the fall of state communism and the Soviet Union.  In effect, the freeze exercised some serious influence, but in ways that were indirect and hard to trace.

Now the question is how much and how seriously President Obama responds to the political pressures of the Tea Party.  There will surely be rounds of amendments to the Health Care bill passed last year.  If Obama follows the Reagan model, he will back away from his reform effort, piece by piece, denying that he is doing so.  This won’t be what the Tea Party wants, but it will be significant.  But Reagan faced far greater pressures from the freeze–and from allied antinuclear movements around the world–than Obama has yet faced from the Tea Party.

There are other possibilities. If Obama is committed, skillful, and lucky, he will use the calls for repeal as excuse to improve the program already passed.  This also won’t be what the Tea Party wants.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Dead Heroes, Martin Luther King, and Original Intent

Posted on January 19, 2011 by David S. Meyer

In the fall of 2001 I sat on a committee charged with planning the program for Martin Luther King Day here at UC Irvine.  American armed forces were then just entering Afghanistan, seeking Osama Bin Laden, and fighting to oust the Taliban and, we were told, establish democracy.  The theme of the day was to be: “What would he say?”

I suggested that we talk about the war.  I thought that a discussion about how a Christian pacifist makes sense of a war would make people uncomfortable, and maybe make them think.  (By profession and disposition, I spend a fair amount of time trying to generate discomfort.)

King opposed war, I said, pointing to his courageous and very unpopular opposition to the war in Vietnam.  A student of Christian theology and Gandhi, King thought a lot about nonviolence more generally.   For the civil rights movement, he advocated nonviolence as both a political strategy and a moral necessity.  In his autobiography, he explained:

True pacifism is not unrealistic submission to an evil power…it is rather a courageous confrontation with evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.

Of course, embracing suffering in pursuit of moral redemption is a tough road for any nation to take.  “But they attacked us,” protested another member of the committee, “He would have seen the difference.”

King was pretty clear in his writing and in his actions, but he couldn’t have anticipated the terrorist attacks of September 11.  A Martin Luther King with forty additional years of life experiences might have rejected his earlier views and endorsed the war.  We can’t know.  Seeking a more cuddly consensus–something Martin Luther King was unlikely to have done–we avoided the issue.

But whether King himself would have (hypothetically) supported or opposed the war is less important, of course, than the moral and political judgments we have to make as we confront a world that keeps changing.  The lives and words of our heroes should help us think through those judgments, not make them for us.

If Christian pacifist Martin Luther King can’t tell us what to do in difficult circumstances decades after his death, what about the Founders, who are much in vogue in contemporary movement politics, where Tea Partiers wearing tri-cornered hats like to haul out the Constitution?

Finding Martin Luther King’s position on new wars, as difficult as that might be, seems far easier than discerning what the framers of the Constitution would think about Federal health care reform nearly 250 years later.

Adams, Franklin, Madison, and the boys didn’t mention health insurance in the Constitution, a topic neglected along with abortion, airports, the internet, nuclear weapons, and women.

The Constitutional convention was filled with pragmatic politicians, not ideologues.  I’m reasonably confident that, were we somehow able to haul them into the present health care debate, they would want to know how medicine worked in contemporary America, whether bleeding was still a preferred treatment, who funded medical care, and how much it cost.  Bold experimenters with government, they would certainly also want to know how other countries managed their own health care programs.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Martin Luther King Day and Dead Heroes

Posted on January 18, 2011 by David S. Meyer

MLK Statue, St. Louis

Martin Luther King died young enough and dramatically enough to be turned into an American hero, but it was neither his youth nor his death that made him heroic.

In his rather brief public life, beginning in Montgomery at 26, and ending with his assassination at 39, King consistently displayed rhetorical brilliance (on the podium and the page), strategic acumen, and moral and physical courage.

The effort to honor Martin Luther King with a holiday commemorating his birthday started at the King Center, in Atlanta, in the year after his assassination.  States began to follow suit, and by 1983, more than half celebrated King’s life with a day.  In that year, Ronald Reagan signed a bill making Martin Luther King day a national holiday expressing ambivalence, acknowledging that it was costly, and that King may have been a Communist.

The King holiday was about Martin Luther King, to be sure, but it was meant to represent far more than the man.  King stands in for the civil rights movement and for African-American history more generally.  I often wonder if the eloquence of the 1963 “I have a dream” speech winds up obscuring not only a man with broader goals, but a much more contested–and ambitious–movement.

The man and the movement are ossified into an iconic image, like a statue, which locks King and the movement into the politics of 1963-1965.  We accept King’s dream, that little children will play together, and that people will be judged by “the content of their character” (a favorite phrase on the right).

The image, like a statue, is available for appropriation to advocates of all political stripes, and the establishment of the holiday itself represents an achievement of the civil rights movement, winning the holiday if not broader economic and social equality.

Before the transformation of the man into an icon, King transformed himself from a pastor into an activist, a peripatetic crusader for justice.

But the pastor didn’t disappear; rather this role grew into something larger, as King himself transformed himself from a minister into a an Old Testament prophet, one whose primary concern was always the people on the margins, the widows and orphans, the poor and hungry.  In standing with those on the margins, King courageously used–and risked–the advantages of his privilege, pedigree, and education.  He also knew that he risked his safety and his life.

In his writing, King used his education and his vocation to support his political goals.  In the critically important “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he cited both the Constitution and the Bible in support of Federal intervention in local politics to support desegregation and human rights.  (We know that other activists now use the same sources to justify pushing the Federal government out of local politics.)

King explained that he was in jail in Birmingham, Alabama, because he had nonviolently defied local authorities in the service of higher laws, the Constitution and the Gospel.  This was not like making a provocative statement on one’s own [profitable] radio or television show.  There were real costs and severe risks.

King was never less than controversial during his life, under FBI surveillance during his political career, and vigorously criticized by opponents (for demanding too much and too strongly) and allies (for not demanding more, more vigorously).

When he was assassinated outside a Memphis motel in 1968, he was standing with sanitation workers on strike, straying from a simpler civil rights agenda.  He had also alienated some civil rights supporters by coming out, strongly, against the war in Vietnam.  And Black Power activists saw their own efforts as overtaking King’s politics and rhetoric.  By the time he was killed, Martin Luther King’s popular support had been waning for some time.

Posterity has rescued an image of Martin Luther King, at the expense of the man’s own broader political vision.

Ironically, in elevating an insurgent to a position in America’s pantheon of historic heroes, we risk editing out the insurgency.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Where’s the Peace Movement?

Posted on January 17, 2011 by David S. Meyer

On the fiftieth anniversary of President Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex speech (his farewell address), it’s worth asking just where the peace movement is these days.  Eisenhower, a vigorous cold warrior and internationalist, sounded an alarm about making decisions about foreign and military policy that served the interests of contractors and the Pentagon, rather than the nation as a whole.  He warned that:

Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Fifty years on, it’s hard to find that alert and knowledgeable citizenry.  Activist antiwar groups remain, to be sure, doing all the things that peace groups do: education, lobbying, demonstrations.  But they lack the reach, visibility, and broad appeal of earlier waves of peace activism.  Why?

The United States supports the only truly global military, and spends more on the military than all other countries put together.   Here’s an inflation-adjusted “topline” of US military spending since the origins of the Cold War.  It’s hard not to notice that we’re spending more than previous peace and war time peaks of spending since World War II.  In the simplest calculations, military spending comprises more than one-fifth of all Federal government spending.  Yet when we talk about the deficit, cuts to military spending rarely appear on the hypothetical table–outside the speeches of (very) liberal Democrats and libertarian conservatives.

And we remain engaged in two wars on foreign soil.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced more than 5,800 deaths for American servicemen and women, and many times that number of injuries; the wars have cost the lives of many many more lives of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.  But, since 1973, the United States has run an all-volunteer military, allowing young men and women so-disposed to ignore the risks and human costs of war.  (The service burden on those volunteers has been onerous in the past decade.)

Candidate Obama challenged the Bush administration on military spending and the war in Iraq, and defeated his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, partly because he hadn’t voted to support that war.  He promised to end both wars, close Guantanamo Bay’s prison camp, and reduce military spending.

He’s almost kind of delivered a little, committing to reductions in deployments of combat troops in Iraq and, eventually, Afghanistan, and continuing to talk about closing Gitmo.  The White House has also ordered cuts in the military budget over the next five years.  (Libertarian think tank, CATO, emphasizes how relatively small these cuts are.)  Fred Kaplan’s analysis of the cuts planned so far stresses what a big change it is for the military, while agreeing that the military budget still far exceeds what the US is prepared to pay for.

In December, the lame duck Congress ratified the New START Treaty negotiated by the Obama Administration.  The treaty would limit the US and Russia to about 1,500 strategic nuclear weapons each.  That’s more than enough to produce plenty of gratuitous rubble-bouncing, but you’ll note (Federation of American Scientists chart on the right) the downward trajectory of the totals, and that the total of nuclear weapons hasn’t been this low since the middle of the Eisenhower administration.

Paradoxically, the peace movement is least likely to grow when it would most likely be effective.  The Obama administration is moving, ever so slowly, in the general direction that antiwar activists would prefer, and this slight movement is enough to make it extremely difficult to mobilize broad activism.

In the same way, anti-tax and anti-deficit activists mostly sat on the sidelines during the George W. Bush administration, cutting their allies a great deal of slack.

Movements are blunt instruments, built around coalitions of people with very different ultimate aims.  Those coalitions grow broad and strong only with big, clear targets.

Movements of the middle-class emerge in the face of gross provocation, that is, threats to depart from previous mainstream consensus policies.  They end up making change more difficult, effectively preserving a status quo that their partisans don’t find all that attractive to begin with.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Words and Deeds

Posted on January 13, 2011 by David S. Meyer

The spotlight on the grief and mourning following Jared Loughner’s attack in Arizona creates an opportunity for people who want attention.    What they do with the opportunity depends upon who they are and what they want.  And the subsequent reactions to speeches and statements are every bit as important as the speeches, statements, and actions themselves.

Fred Phelps and his Westboro Church announced their plans to protest at nine year old Christina Taylor Green’s funeral, bringing their message of God’s contempt for America because of our moral failings, particularly tolerance of homosexuality.  This is already a well-practiced routine for the tiny Westboro group.  (We’ve talked about them before, far more than I expected when I started this blog.) Arizona quickly passed a law creating a 300 foot buffer zone around such funerals, and Arizonans quickly began organizing to provide a human buffer surrounding the mourners and keeping the Phelps family out of view.  Westboro decided to forgo the demonstration in exchange for radio air time for the church’s views.  Mike Gallagher, a conservative radio host, announced that he would give the Phelps family time in order to keep them away from the mourners, calling his decision a “no-brainer.”  This is how blackmail works.

Sarah Palin released a video of nearly eight minutes, commenting on the tragedy. It was an odd speech, which seemed to focus more on the tragedy of Sarah Palin’s vilification by media and pundits than the shooting in Tucson.  It was also an odd speech in that Palin emphasized that words, at least her words, don’t provoke actions.  She then condemned media comments on her language, even as her staff noted to reporters an increase in threats against Sarah Palin–presumably a response to the media’s criticism.   This is, she asserted, “blood libel,” a phrase which provoked a new round of criticism all by itself.

So how do words matter?  Few people are likely to change their minds, one way or another, about homosexuality or Sarah Palin in response to any round of comments.  But rhetoric can make an issue seem more urgent, more promising or threatening, and encourage others to enter the fray–talking, marching, contributing, or more.

Shifting the spotlight from the shooting to herself hasn’t seemed to work very well for Sarah Palin, whose comments have engendered far more criticism than support.   (Samples here, here, and here.)  So far, her supporters include only some of those who usually support her: conservative bloggers, radio and television personalities, and people who generally fill a larger share of the comment sections in news stories than they have this time.  Notably missing are mainstream Republican politicians who, perhaps, see something noxious that might be contagious.

Palin’s video probably didn’t put off people who were already committed to her; it probably did intensify her opposition.  Perhaps most significantly, it seems to have given conservatives with misgivings about allowing the former governor to represent the right in public debates reason to step back for a moment.

(In the wake of the shooting and the comments, a “string of Republican” leaders have resigned their party positions, citing hostile criticism and threats from tea partiers.)

Pundits and political entertainers in the media win by polarizing, playing to their base.  Successful politicians need to do some of this, keeping the true believers engaged, but they also need to reach out to others beyond their core constituencies.

Ronald Reagan gave his conservative base plenty, both in terms of policy and rhetoric, but he would tack back from time to time, projecting optimism and geniality.  Candidate Barack Obama found something to admire in Reagan, much to the discomfort of liberal supporters, who say he should be doing more to identify political enemies and rally the faithful.

But not now, and not in Arizona.  President Obama filled his Tucson speech with details of the six lives lost,  offering politics that were notably vague and aspirational, and winning some accolades from conservatives who don’t often praise this president.  As example, National Review’s Rich Lowry wrote:

…President Obama turned in a magnificent performance. This was a non-accusatory, genuinely civil, case for civility, in stark contrast to what we’ve read and heard over the last few days. He subtly rebuked the Left’s finger-pointing, and rose above the rancor of both sides, exactly as a president should. Tonight, he re-captured some of the tone of his famous 2004 convention speech. Well done.

There’s absolutely no reason to think Lowry’s fundamental take on Obama’s politics and policies has changed but, at least for the moment, the intensity of his opposition softened.

Words matter.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

After Stuff Happens

Posted on January 11, 2011 by David S. Meyer

The politics of Jared Loughner’s attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in a Tucson supermarket are just starting.  It’s not the event itself that matters so much as the positioning after the fact.  Political figures try not to waste crises.

Advocates used the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 as an excuse to increase funding for higher education in America, and provide scholarship aid to students.  (Full disclosure: The National Defense Student Loan helped me get a college education.)  It fundamentally altered the educational landscape in the United States, increasing math and science education in general, and access to higher education dramatically.

The high school shootings at Columbine provoked explanations of the tragedy ranged wildly, variously emphasizing the lack of prayer in the schools, the scourge of homosexuality, the availability of guns, and the nihilism of heavy metal music and video games.  To my knowledge, significant policy reform of any kind did not follow.

President George W. Bush used the horrific attack on the World Trade Center, nearly a decade ago, to legitimate enhanced security measures at American airports and the invasion of Iraq.  It might have been used to improve health care in American emergency rooms or support foreign language instruction in the United States as well.  It wasn’t.

The devastation that Hurricane Katrina brought to New Orleans could have been used to legitimate public investment in infrastructure.  It wasn’t.

An addled young man’s plan to assassinate a sitting member of Congress is an extraordinarily unusual event, not something predictable or traceable to a simple cause.  But when public attention fixes on such an event, activists, advocates, and politicians try to make sense of it, filling the space around the event with their interpretation of the world.

Condemnation of the attack has been universal, of course, but what follows that initial statement of grief varies a lot.  Many commentators (including me) have pointed to the vitriolic rhetoric of Tea Party activists, pointing particularly to Sarah Palin’s Facebook map noting districts ripe for Republican gains with gunsites.   (Palin has since, rather disingenuously, explained that the markings were really surveyor’s symbols.)

I can’t believe that Sarah Palin wanted to inspire supporters to take up arms when she called upon them to reload.  Nor do I think that Giffords’s Tea Party opponent in the last election, Jesse Kelly, wanted his supporters to open fire in the streets when he held a fundraiser at a shooting range.  They used colorful language associated with campaigns and social movements, expecting that their audiences would understand their theatricality and hyperbole.  And almost all of them did.

Sarah Palin has since used the shooting to emphasize her commitment to peace;  Glenn Beck shared a private exchange of emails with the former Alaska governor, in which both expressed their distaste for violence.  Palin wrote:

I hate violence…I hate war. Our children will not have peace if politicos just capitalize on this to succeed in portraying anyone as inciting terror and violence.

I expect that Palin and others, without disavowing or apologizing for previous comments, will be more guarded about the metaphors they use–at least for a while.

In deploring the violence, some partisans have been unable to resist reminding audiences of their grievances with Rep. Giffords and the Democrats more generally.  On Talk of the Nation, Randy Graf, the Republican nominee for Giffords’s seat in 2008, reviewed how appalled he–and others–were at the health care reform bill she supported.

Reviewing the scattered public evidence of Loughner’s life, a few creative critics have tried to find partisan politics, pointing to the presence of Ayn Rand or The Communist Manifesto, or Mein Kampf, on his list of favorite books.   Tea Party Nation’s Judson Phillips sees a threat against the right:

The left is coming and will hit us hard on this. We need to push back harder with the simple truth. The shooter was a liberal lunatic. Emphasis on both words.

But finding any kind of coherent ideology in Jared Loughner’s troubled life is a fool’s errand.

Making politics out of the event, however, is quite another matter.

Thus far, generic calls for civility continue, often followed by specific criticisms of political opponents as threats of various sorts.

Just now, we’re also starting to see some attention to the environment in Arizona where it’s much easier to get guns legally than in most of the rest of the United States, and where the state’s ongoing budget crisis has resulted in radical cuts to community mental health services.

There are, mercifully, very few people like Jared Loughner.  But they live in the same rhetorical environment as the rest of us, finding similar access to firearms or medical care.  The odd event gives advocates the chance to remind us about what our world is–and could be.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Updates on Domestic Terror

Posted on January 8, 2011 by David S. Meyer

I was surprised to see how quickly a conservative

Judson Phillips speaks

activist slipped from condemning the violent attack in Tucson to chastising unnamed members of the left.

The New York Times reports the statement of Judson Phillips, Tea Party Nation’s founder:

(Note: Tea Party Nation is a marginal for-profit group, but Phillips gets disproportionate attention from mainstream media.   See that he feels compelled to label Giffords a “liberal” before explaining that her politics are unimportant.  He then takes aim at “the hard left” which will use the event to victimize the Tea Party.)

Arizona Congressman Gabrielle Giffords was shot and killed along with several others in Arizona. Giffords was conducting a “Congress on your corner” event when the shooting occurred. Six others were killed as well.

The shooter has been taken into custody and let’s hope he gets the death penalty he richly deserves.

Congressman Giffords was a liberal, but that does not matter now. No one should be the victim of violence because of their political beliefs and certainly a member of Congress should not be shot and killed on a street corner.

Take a moment to say a prayer for her and her family, as well as the others who were so tragically murdered this afternoon.

At a time like this, it is terrible that we do have to think about politics, but no matter what the shooter’s motivations where, the left is going to blame this on the Tea Party Movement. Already on liberal websites, the far left is trying to accuse the Tea Party of being involved.

While we need to take a moment to extend our sympathies to the families of those who died, we cannot allow the hard left to do what it tried to do in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing.

Does Tea Party Nation promote a vigorous and honest dialogue?  This is the fundraising call from their home page:

Tea Party Nation is hard at work to defeat liberals and their socialist agenda! We need your help in this fight!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Gabrielle Giffords and Domestic Terror

Posted on January 8, 2011 by David S. Meyer

It won’t take long for reporters to find out enough about Jared Loughner to offer portrayals of a severely disturbed young man.  Reports at this moment detail Loughner attending a district event at a supermarket organized by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was just re-elected to Congress.  Loughner rushed Giffords, shot her in the head with a pistol, then continued firing, killing or injuring 17 others, including Federal Judge John Roll, and Giffords’s staffers.

There are never more than a few Americans who will take up arms against elected officials, when they can vote, campaign, blog, and spew vitriol far more easily and with far less risk.  But social movements, as we’ve discussed, always have crazies around the periphery of the crowds they draw, and activists and political leaders need to take some responsibility for the tone and content of their rhetoric.

When organizers try to mobilize people–to vote, attend a rally, contribute money, go to a meeting–they tend to overemphasize the importance of the moment, the gravity of a threat and the promise of change.  Antinuclear activists talk about the fate of the earth, while anti-abortion crusaders can easily start talking about murderers with medical licenses.  Most people who participate in these events understand the element of theater at work here, even if they take offense at it.  But such words carry far further than speakers may anticipate.

And if the operation of a death factory or the march toward communism is nearby, it’s a little easier to understand how someone at the edge of the crowd might start to see a rally or an electoral campaign as a fairly tepid response.

Gabrielle Giffords is a moderate Democrat who has represented a swing district in Arizona since 2006, when she won an election to replace a moderate (and openly gay) Republican, Jim Kolbe.  She described herself as a supporter of gun rights, but was not vigorous enough to overcome the animus of gun rights groups like the NRA.  She supported comprehensive immigration reform (not just enforcement) and health care reform, and some of those who disagreed with her labeled her positions as threats to the existential survival of the United States.

Movements have to deal with the fallout from the lunatics they inspire.  In 1983, Norman Mayer drove a van he said was filled with explosives to the Washington Monument, demanding a national dialogue on the nuclear threat.  Repeatedly, opponents of legal abortion have had to find ways to distance themselves from those they somehow inspire to bomb clinics or murder doctors.

Rep. Giffords had been threatened with violence before: an armed man was arrested at one of her rallies in 2009, and her district office was vandalized during the health care debate, her glass front door shattered.  (She was one of several Democrats who faced threats and vandalism during the debate; Eric Cantor, now Majority Leader in the House, criticized them for making too much of a fuss about it.)

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin marked Giffords’s district as a prime target for Republican gains, marking it with crosshairs on her own electoral map (on the left).  Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle suggested that activists might have to consider “second amendment remedies” to the threat represented by President Obama.  And it gets worse: scan the comments on any news website and you’ll see warnings about communism, the Muslim president born in Kenya, and various threats represented by immigrants and their advocates.

In the immediate wake of this shooting, politicians on the left and right have been quick to stand with Rep. Giffords and her family, condemning violence.

Somewhere down the line, however, someone with some kind of Tea Party claim will qualify that condemnation, noting the frustration felt by opponents of health care or immigration reform.  The test will be how Tea Party and Republican leaders deal with these putative allies.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment