Charging the Irvine 11

Posted on February 5, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Students demonstrate against charging the Irvine 11

It’s astonishing to learn that the Orange County District Attorney’s office opted to charge 11 young people with “conspiring to disrupt a meeting” (LA Times Report here).  In filing the charges, the DA is resurrecting a failed event and giving many people a cause to rally around–including people, like me, who did not support the initial protest.

It’s not that the students didn’t plan to disrupt a speech given by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California, Irvine (my school) last year.  It seems very clear that a group within the Muslim Students Union planned to attend Oren’s speech and, one at a time, interrupt the speaker by trying to shout him down.  You can find numerous clips of the event on youtube (here’s one), mostly posted by people who were offended by the action.

One after another, each disrupter was escorted from the room, and Oren ultimately delivered his speech.  I think the action overshadowed the demonstrators’ cause, and in no way advanced any kind of understanding of politics in the Middle East.  The sporadic shouts took attention off Israel and kept it firmly on the UCI campus.

It was very much like the Tea Party shout-downs at town meetings on health care the previous summer, but the Muslim students didn’t have large media outlets weighing in to portray their rudeness as understandable frustration.  Either way, it’s an awful model for democratic change.

Publicity was widespread.  I was at a conference far away when the event took place, but a relative emailed me a youtube link, asking what would happen to the students.  I hoped that the University would make it clear to the disruptive students that such conduct was unacceptable on a college campus, and that whatever sanction conveyed this message be mild enough so as not to disrupt the students’ education or careers.  (My colleague, Erwin Chemerinsky, figured all this out much faster and made the argument I was stumbling toward in an op-ed at the LA Times.)

Whatever sanctions were meted out to individual students are confidential, but the Muslim Students Union, which was found to have coordinated the event, was temporarily banned from campus.

I was involved on the periphery of the event.  I am currently Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy here, one of the groups that cosponsored Ambassador Oren’s visit.  I drafted a letter of apology on behalf of the Center, published on the Center’s website, which stated:

We apologize that the tempest at the event temporarily overshadowed the much more important issues that your talk addressed. As scholars concerned with democracy, we believe it is critical to question—and listen to—people with whom you have even the most substantial differences.  Sitting down and talking with opponents is always preferable to trying to silence them.

I’ll stand by this, and wish that the governments in the Middle East, including Israel, would as well.

As an event, the protest at the Oren speech was, uh, sophomoric and counterproductive.  The actions overshadowed the issues.  By shifting discussion from occupation and settlements in Israel and Palestine to the lack of civility in Irvine, the activists lost the battle.  Very little of the massive coverage addressed what they really cared about.  But stupid and boorish isn’t necessarily criminal.

In taking on this prosecution, the Orange County DA has given the students attention as a collective, generating sympathy for them in the process.  Protecting the campus as a site for open speech means making allowances for mistakes and overstatements, and finding ways to bring people back into the dialogue.  Criminal prosecution, fines, and time in jail don’t do this.  And every weekend on college campuses across the country students make worse–and potentially more damaging– mistakes without even a wisp of a political motive–or lesson.

OCDA Tony Rackauckas should rethink how he wants to use the strained resources of his office, the Courts, and the prison system.  While the university’s discipline gave each individual student the chance to rethink his conduct, the DA has turned them collectively into a symbol, the Irvine 11, a cause for others to rally around.  He should be reluctant to turn student activists into martyrs for free speech.

And where is UCI on all of this?  Well, the interim director of communications at UCI has issued a statement explaining that the University thought it was done with the issue, and this is all the initiative of the OCDA.

The District Attorney’s announcement reflects action independent of the University. He has subpoena power and access to information that we do not. From our perspective we thoroughly and fairly investigated and adjudicated the matter last year. Conduct violations were addressed fully, consistent with the guidelines of the Student Code of Conduct.

Since the university’s resolution of this matter in the summer of 2010, our campus community continues to build bridges of understanding and foundations for respectful and meaningful dialogue.

How’s that for tepid?  If the DA has additional information that merits such a charge, he hasn’t yet shared it with the public.

It’s time for a statement from our Chancellor.  I do not understand why he would let the opportunity to take a moral position for tolerance and civil discourse pass by.

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Rosa Parks’s Birthday

Posted on February 4, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Happy birthday, Rosa Parks!  Born on February 4, 1913, Parks was not a tired old lady in 1955, when she refused to move to the back of the bus.  She was an experienced and committed activist, deeply tied into the civil rights activist networks.  She wasn’t the only one who took a risk to challenge segregation laws in the South, but that hardly makes her less heroic.

Activism in the civil rights movement was hardly a career move for Rosa Parks; her  recognition as an American hero came eventually.  In 1996 President Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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Follow the money: find it first.

Posted on February 4, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Nearly 1,000 activists marched in Rancho Mirage, California this week, protesting outside an invitation-only strategy meeting of leading conservatives inside and outside government.  The demonstration, organized by labor and environmental activists, targeted the meeting’s hosts, billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

For the better part of the past few decades, the Kochs have put serious money into funding the ideas and activities of the conservative movement, sponsoring think tanks, like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, and activist groups, including Citizens for a Sound Economy and Americans for Prosperity–and many others.  The Kochs have put their money in support of their ideals (low taxes, limited government, minimal regulation) and their interests: they control the second largest privately held company in the United States, which holds several large energy companies.  Unsurprisingly, they’ve been particularly aggressive in attacking any effort to respond to climate change with regulation, activism, or taxation.  The Kochs have, over a long period of time, built the intellectual and organizational infrastructure of much of what became the Tea Party.  [Jane Mayer’s portrait of the Kochs, published last summer in the New Yorker, is an indispensable source on their political efforts.]

The protesters mean to expose the influence of big money in American politics.  And, to some degree, their effort worked.  Their demonstration, punctuated by the arrest of 25 protesters, brought more attention to the Kochs and their political efforts–exactly the visibility the brothers have worked hard to avoid.  But some serious money clearly went into opposing the Kochs.  Although I haven’t priced them recently, I don’t think blimps come cheap.

Conservative critics respond, what could be more American than investing in the politics of your ideas?  And they charge anti-Koch activists with a double standard, reflexively pointing to George Soros, the billionaire currency speculator who has put a great deal of money into causes he supports, many of them on the left of the political spectrum.

Reflexive charges of symmetry, accurate or not, are a staple of contested politics, going back, at least, to the school yard (no, you have cooties) and the back seat of the car (he hit me first).  But at least two differences between the billionaire activist funders are worth noting.  First, the Kochs’ ideology aligns very well with their business interests.  Disparaging climate change science and opposing environmental regulation, for example, is a good business strategy–at least for the short term, for companies invested in the oil industry.  I haven’t seen any reports about Soros’s politics working in the service of his business: currency speculation.

Second, Soros has hardly been a shrinking violet about publicity.  The groups he funds, including the Open Society Foundations, use his name and the websites often display his picture.  Soros lectures on his ideas frequently, sits for interviews with reporters, and has published several books detailing his ideas.

In contrast, while the Kochs are not shy about taking credit for their philanthropic contributions to museums or the arts (for example, at the Smithsonian), they’ve tried to keep their political efforts, their ideas, and their interests, out of the public eye.  (Take a look at Americans for Prosperity‘s website and see if you can find Koch brothers’ support.  I couldn’t.  Perhaps they fear that some people would be less likely to buy Bounty towels if they knew their political provenance?)

In the short term, at least, getting mass media reports on Koch politics is a victory for the activities.  But last year’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee (2010), makes it harder to follow the money trail.

Meanwhile, according to Kenneth Vogel at Politico, the Kochs are coming to terms with inevitable visibility, hiring public relations experts to shape their public profile, and filing lawsuits against activists who tried to use satire, in the form of fake press releases, to draw attention to Koch Industries’ environmental policies.

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The Egyptian Revolution: Tipping Points Tip Both Ways

Posted on February 2, 2011 by David S. Meyer

When Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak promised to stay out of the next election, for the moment anticipated in the fall, he figured to change the balance of power in the streets.  Knowing that Mubarak was ostensibly committed to leave office, people out in the streets are recalculating how urgent their grievances are.  Military officers who promised not to fire on peaceful protesters are now telling the crowds to go home, while Mubarak supporters are trying to take to the streets themselves.

Mubarak’s promise to leave office plays out differently for the people who have been agitating for his departure.  While some factions see his promise to depart in September as far too little (and too unreliable), and want to escalate their efforts to get him out–now.  Others see his promised exit from the national stage as the opportunity to plan a transition and focus on what kind of regime replaces him.  For the moment, Mubarak’s commitment not to run presents the opposition coalition with a dilemma about what to do next.

At the moment, the commitments of the political elite and the military are completely unclear, and they will certainly matter.  While the military stands back, Mubarak supporters and opponents have been fighting in the streets, threatening to undermine any hope of a peaceful transition.  The mobilization of Mubarak supporters will make it harder and harder for Army officers to postpone their decisions about which side to tip.

Meantime, authorities and dissidents throughout the Arab world are watching and planning their own efforts.  Ali Abdullah Saleh, President of Yemen, has promised that he will leave office in 2013, and that his son will not try to succeed him.  Such reforms are intended to take the wind out of at least some of the sails that are tacking against the regime, making it possible to govern–and to repress some critics.

Authoritarian leaders in the Middle East are surely trying to figure out how to avoid the unfolding (but unwanted) fates of Mubarak and Saleh.  Reforms as concessions are one strategy; another is repression.  These are not mutually exclusive.

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Korematsu Day: The Politics of Vindication

Posted on January 31, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Korematsu Day

Today Californians celebrate the first Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution.  Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, Korematsu challenged the constitutionality of relocating and interning Japanese Americans during World War II.  Three Supreme Court Justices agreed with him; six did not, finding that the emergency of a World War justified allowing Congress to put civil liberties on the back burner (Korematsu v. US, 1944).

Korematsu’s challenge exacerbated rifts within the Japanese American community; large organizations like the Japanese American Citizen’s League were eager to prove their patriotism by cooperating with internment.

Maybe the arc of history really does bend toward justice; it’s certainly long.  In 1980, President Jimmy Carter established a commission to investigate the internment of Japanese Americans during the war; in 1983, Korematsu’s conviction was vacated.   In 1988, Congress apologized to the Japanese Americans for the internment, and the government paid (modest) compensation to those interned.  In 1998, President Clinton awarded Korematsu the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  More than fifty years later, we recognized courage and heroism in what we first saw as a crime.

We should derive more benefit from the vindication of Fred Korematsu more than he did.  To do so, we need to draw lessons from the cause and the case that extend beyond Japanese Americans in World War II.  This means, I think, paying close attention to discrimination on the basis of race justified by appeals to national security.

We should tell Fred Korematsu’s story in New York City, where the construction of an Islamic Center in lower Manhattan draws opposition.  We should recall the history in Arizona, when the state passes a law mandating that police demand proof of citizenship from people who look like they might be undocumented.

And we should all think about how people learn.  California Attorney General Earl Warren pressed for interning Japanese Americans immediately after Pearl Harbor, arguing that their presence in California represented a threat to civilian defense.  Thirteen years later, as Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Warren organized the Court to issue unanimous decisions prohibiting racial segregation in the public schools.  I want to think he learned from the past, including his own past.

Apparently, one of the justices Earl Warren had to persuade was Robert Jackson, one of the three dissenters in Korematsu.  In dissent, Jackson wrote:

But once a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order to show that it conforms to the Constitution, or rather rationalizes the Constitution to show that the Constitution sanctions such an order, the Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens. The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.

Justice Jackson took a leave of absence from the Court to serve as as the chief US prosecutor during the Nuremberg war crimes trials, putting him in a very good position to think about a government’s use of race politics as a means of mobilization during moments of crisis.

Perhaps Korematsu Day will be an occasion for fireworks and picnics one day.  Today, it seems like a good time for reflection.

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Tunisia, Egypt, and Revolutions

Posted on January 30, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Like most everyone else, I’ve been transfixed by the historic revolutionary efforts that may be sweeping the Arab world.  Most of the little I know about Tunisia

Tunisian protests, 2011

and Egypt, I’ve learned in the past few days, but there are general patterns in the long history of successful and unsuccessful revolutionary movements that help to understand what’s going on.

Revolutions are about coalitions.  They succeed when people who care about overthrowing the government more than anything else in the world are able to mobilize and unite with people who care about lots of other things.  The zealots are important, to be sure, but you’ll get a better sense of how things will turn out by watching those who are not normally committed to revolutionary change.

Evey day when we wake up, we decide how to spend the day.  Mostly, there’s not a lot of agonizing about big changes on food, work, family–and the state of the government, for most of us, is off far in the distance.   Yesterday’s decisions create momentum; the world around us creates constraints and change is always risky.

Risk is relative: not going to work might lose you your job; the other donut shop might not be so good; opposing the government could get you killed.  Obviously, this depends upon context, and upon your position in the world.

Most people take to protest when they believe that there is an urgent problem, that change is possible, and that their efforts might matter.  Each day’s news can change how we think about urgency, possibility, and our own potential efficacy.

A few brave and committed people–and a few crazy people–care less about whether their efforts will be effective than about living up to their values.  These are people who are willing to starve or burn themselves to make their lives their arguments, hoping to inspire others.  Most of us, however, think about tomorrow as well, and are more likely to take action when we think it’s a little less risky or a little more likely to be effective.  Or, they come to a judgment that whatever the risks, inaction is now impossible.

We watch for signals from others about their prospects and their judgments.  These signals affect our judgments, and whether insurgents protest, whether loyalists defect, and whether passersby get involved altogether.  Signals spur others to actions which send signals to others, creating cascades of action, and ostensibly stable regimes fall or powerful insurgencies falter.  Everyone figures out who they can trust–and how much.  Dissidents decide whether they’ll be alone or with friends when they take to the streets.  Generals calculate whether they are more likely to keep their commands–or even their lives–with loyalty or defection.

So, when masses of people took to the streets in the Philippines to protest President

Corazon Aquino and the People Power Revolution, 1986

Ferdinand Marcos’s claim to have won re-election, Marcos decided that he could not count on the Army to defend him.  US Senator Paul Laxalt, speaking on behalf of President Reagan, told him that he couldn’t count on the United States either.  Marcos left for Hawaii, and the insurgents claimed the state.

Likewise, across Eastern Europe in 1989, state Communist governments learned that they could not count on their own armies, nor on the Soviet Union, to repress dissent.

Romanian revolution, 1989

Dissidents learned as well, and flocked to the streets.  Mainstream political figures defected.  In some countries, like Hungary, the lessons were quickly learned and the transitions non-violent.  Watching the Soviets stay out warned the ruling authorities and emboldened the opposition.  In other countries, like Romania, there were dramatic moments of truth when the military refused orders to put down the rebellions.

Tanks in Tiananmen Square, 1989

And sometimes governments facing insurgencies can find loyal bureaucrats and soldiers willing to fire on their countrymen.  Democracy activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989 didn’t anticipate that the government would be willing and able to successfully mobilize the military against them.  They guessed wrong.

When governments respond to dissent with reforms hope to break a movement coalition, bringing some opponents the prospects of political influence, and making it possible to repress or ignore others.   Well-crafted reforms can lower the urgency of protest, but reforms can also lower the risks of taking to the streets.

At this writing, Egyptian elites with grievances, including Nobel-prize winner, Mohamed ElBaradei, have lined themselves up with the people in the streets–vigorously.  The risks of doing so appear much smaller as the regime’s weakness is exposed, and the risks of not doing so, as the numbers in the streets increase, seem greater and greater.

At the same time, Egypt’s President Mubarak is throwing his Cabinet over the side, hoping to offer enough in the way of reforms to get at least some of the people out in the streets to go home–or into government.  (If press reports are accurate, the Obama administration is

Egyptian protests, 2011

encouraging him, privately and publicly, to do exactly this.)  The promise is that the dictatorship of the past three decades will end, but not just yet, and not this way.  The question is whether this reform is just too little and too late.

And the news of the revolutionary movements in Tunisia and Egypt has spread across the Arab world, encouraging authorities, dissidents, and bystanders to make new judgments about what’s possible.

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Beck and Piven, II

Posted on January 27, 2011 by David S. Meyer

The ballad of the pundit and the professor continues to add verses as the story of Glenn Beck’s demonization of Frances Fox Piven hit the blogs, professional and activist networks and mass media.  It raises interesting questions about what a vigorous and honest political debate could look like.

As we’ve discussed recently, Beck has pointed to two of Piven’s articles, published forty-five years apart, to identify her as a great enemy of the Constitution and America more generally.  This new exposure has led to a rash of electronic insults, and scarier: detailed threats on her life.

Many of the mainstream reports have noted Piven’s age, as if to emphasize Beck’s hyperbole.  And she is, after all, a professor, so get a grip, such reports suggest.

Academics and others have called Beck out on tone.  An online petition directed to Fox News head, Roger Ailes, demands that the network rein Beck in.  The American Sociological Association issued a statement with a similar appeal, although (thankfully) not emphasizing her age.  The academics call for a better informed and more civil debate.  (Of course, this isn’t the strong suit of cable news programming.)

Meanwhile, some conservatives have pitched in on another side, agreeing that she’s really awful, and her supporters are too.  Ron Radosh, a conservative historian, remarks with snark:

The editors of the leftist magazine The Nation, where Piven’s writings have appeared consistently since the 1960s, call her “distinguished professor, legendary activist, writer and longtime contributor to this magazine.” The last characterization is the only correct one, although, I’m sure she is “legendary” in their circles.

But this is nonsense.  “Distinguished professor” is Piven’s job title at the City University of New York.  “Distinguished” is surely a fair adjective anyway for someone who has been elected Vice President of the American Political Science Association and President of the American Sociological Association, and someone who has published many articles and books is certainly a writer.  C’mon.  The ad hominem (ad feminem?) stuff is ridiculous.

In the old days of network news, anchors and networks sought mass audiences, and policed themselves rhetorically for fear of alienating a large segment of the market.

The economics of cable are completely different.  Beck can make a lot of money for Fox News and for himself by serving an audience of around 3 million–a tiny fraction of the American public.  There’s no fiscal reason to temper the rhetoric–and every incentive to steer away from an informed discussion (bor-ring!).  Going after Piven (or random and marginal bloggers, as Bill O’Reilly often does) is a way for Beck to lean into his most aggrieved polemics without worrying that his audience might have an alternate understanding of the target.  And working politicians and commentators with other media outlets can get a lot of attention for themselves when they hit back.  In this way, his recurrent attacks on Woodrow Wilson–a former president of the American Political Science Association, as well as the United States, make a lot of sense.  Wilson is, uh, dead.

An academic, even a visible and prolific one like Piven, starts with access to a much smaller audience.  Beck enjoys the freedom to define her mostly unchallenged.

But do we want to shut down a debate on Professor Piven’s work in general or on her recent writing on the politics of unemployment? Piven has been trying to influence public debate and public policy for the better part of the last fifty years, at least.  Getting broad discussion–even vigorous argument about–and arguing about–the ideas she advances–is what she’s been after.  And, as they say in Boston, politics ain’t beanbag.

Mostly, however, the politics has dropped out of the discussion, and this is actually far more interesting and important than the bullying blowhard versus the pedantic professor.

The unemployed march in Minneapolis, 1934

Barbara Ehrenreich tries to bring back the issues in a piece in the LA Times, asking why it’s okay to call people into the streets to protect gun rights and the extraordinarily expensive hybrid health care system in the US, but not to advocate for policies that promote employment.

I’m going to be waiting on the answer to this one.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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