Painted Grassroots

Posted on December 22, 2010 by David S. Meyer

Reading the sports section of the Sunday New York Times, I was surprised to find a full-page ad attacking the Humane Society of the United States and its president, Wayne Pacelle.

The ad reported that HSUS was soft on quarterback/dog fighter Michael Vick, who has served a prison sentence and renounced the latter identity.   Sponsored by HumaneWatch.org,  the ad urged supporters of the Humane Society to withdraw their donations and support local shelters instead.

I often hear criticism of the Humane Society from Animal Rights activists, who say that HSUS focuses its efforts on moderate policies that have little effect on animals’ lives.  But where would more radical animal rights activists get the money for a full-page ad?  They didn’t.

HumaneWatch is out to discredit HSUS in any way, but it’s certainly not sympathetic to the animal rights cause.  Rather, it’s a project of the Center for Consumer Freedom, a group that describes its sponsorship as:

restaurants, food companies and thousands of individual consumers. From farm to fork, from urban to rural, our friends and supporters include businesses, their employees, and their customers.

Looking at the websites and reading the rhetoric, we can see an effort to look like grassroots activism, but this is clearly an example of well-heeled interests cloaking their efforts to make them look like something different.  They represent the interests of their business funders, rather explicitly, and resist government regulation of any kind.  As they explain:

A growing cabal of activists has meddled in Americans’ lives in recent years. They include self-anointed “food police,” health campaigners, trial lawyers, personal-finance do-gooders, animal-rights misanthropes, and meddling bureaucrats.

Their common denominator? They all claim to know “what’s best for you.” In reality, they’re eroding our basic freedoms—the freedom to buy what we want, eat what we want, drink what we want, and raise our children as we see fit. When they push ordinary Americans around, we’re here to push back.

So what’s the right description?  A chef (or chief?) in sheep’s clothing?

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Defeats and Victories

Posted on December 21, 2010 by David S. Meyer

Movements don’t disappear after a legislative verdict.  Victories and defeats change calculations about what’s possible and how to go about getting it, but they virtually never–at least in the United States–provide a decisive resolution to the sorts of issues that animate movements.

This weekend’s Senate session handed a major victory to the groups working to repeal the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in the American military.  The same Senate dealt advocates of the DREAM Act a staggering defeat.  The weekend drama was heightened by the sure knowledge that the Congress that will take office in January will be less sympathetic to either cause.

[The Senate drama included the first sighting of the new bullet-proof Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), the only Republican to vote for the DREAM and for the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  Having defeated a strong Tea Party challenge in winning reelection, she’s brought herself the space to be the sensible patronage-oriented Republican she’s always wanted to be.  She can work to bring federal dollars back to Alaska and vote for policies she deems practical.)

Both movements have spent many years working to get to these historic votes, and neither will disappear any time soon.  The GLBT movement now faces a different field, as do champions of immigration reform.

Gay and lesbian activists have been working to provide for open service in the military since, at least, the 1980s.  Bill Clinton touted the crazy Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, early in his administration, as a response to the movement, and as a step forward; after all, the military was enjoined from investigating the sexual orientation of soldiers, sailors, and marines.  More than 14,000 discharges later, no one was happy with the policy.  More importantly, both multi-issue gay rights organizations, and specialist groups like Servicemembers Legal Defense Network had been working the issue–and others–winning judicial victories and pushing massive changes in public opinion.

When the policy finally disappears, activists will shift their targets.  I’m sure a few people will savor the victory and go home.  Most, however, saw open service as part of a larger social and political agenda.   Some, no doubt, will work to protect military personnel who come out or seek to rejoin the military.  (They should be aided in this quest by the leadership of the services!)  Others will shift their attention to other key issues for gays and lesbians.  The battles across the country for same sex marriage will surely take a lot of their efforts.  Over time, the military policy will give activists seeking social and political equality a stronger foundation for their claims.

The DREAM Act was also a narrow slice of a broader policy agenda which includes comprehensive immigration reform.  DREAMers saw this small step as the most politically viable path toward larger policy reforms and, perhaps more importantly, a practical and humane approach to a slice of the undocumented immigrant population.

This path shut down, activists can’t really go home.  (The students and servicemembers affected really are home.)  Instead, they will shift their attention to other venues, and play defense against the growing nativist movement.  Much of this, like the gay marriage debates, will be at the state level.  Activists will challenge harsh anti-immigrant policies like that adopted by Arizona.  They will also work for more modest accommodations in the states, including access to state university systems or driving licenses, which will make undocumented lives marginally more livable–and building support for larger reforms.

It’s important to remember that the DREAMers’ defeat was a victory for an anti-immigration movement now poised to push harder for policies that will make life more difficult for workers, students, and families in the United States without documentation.

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Still a Dream?

Posted on December 17, 2010 by David S. Meyer

When we listen to the young people who have come forward about their undocumented legal status, we hear them express unvarnished optimism about the passage of the DREAM Act.  (Listen, for example, to the testimony on NPR’s Talk of the Nation, this week.) After all, the House passed the Act a few days ago, and Senate leaders continue to press for a vote.  More significantly, it’s the best hope for these people to make some kind of decent life for themselves.  Their evaluations aren’t based on counting votes in the Senate so much as hoping for a way forward for themselves–and for the country.  As a college senior who came to the US from Korea at age 9 said:

And I know it will pass next week because it is the only immigration legislation right now that has some kind of chance to actually fix our broken immigration system. And it will happen.

Virtually all the political pundits actually counting votes suggest otherwise.  And, unlike Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal, the DREAMers can’t count on the courts to intervene on their behalf.  The next Congress is likely to be far less sympathetic to the DREAM.

Activists virtually always have undue optimism about their prospects for influence.  It’s the kind of suspension of disbelief that helps the successful salesman pitching after hearing no a few times, and it’s virtually necessary to help change the world.

I suspect, however, that the fallout will be much greater here.  The activists don’t have homes in Korea or Pakistan or Mexico to go to. Rather, they will find ways to continue, as best they can, to find ways to support themselves and continue the political struggle (now more than a decade old) to find a way to create real opportunities for themselves.  All will depend upon how the rest of America responds to the efforts to keep the DREAM alive.

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Resistance in the Military

Posted on December 16, 2010 by David S. Meyer

Birther Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin outside his court-martial

Governments fall when their leaders lose control of the armed forces.   When the soldiers lay down their swords and shields and take the hands of the people in the streets, their leaders get on planes and look for somewhere else to land.  For this reason, resistance in the military is generally the last–and most important–site for organized political action.

In the United States, and in every democracy or Constitutional government, the military is supposed to be responsive to the government.  Like any other bureaucracy, its members are supposed to take orders from civilian authority, executing them as if they were their own idea.  Soldiers smartly salute the Commander-and-Chief whether they voted for him or not.  Respect and obedience carries all the way through the chain of command, regardless of the soldiers’ judgments about the wisdom or ethics of any order.

This ethos informs the way a professional military works at its best, but also explains why soldiers charged fortified encampments at Gallipoli during World War I, marching to their deaths in waves.  It also explains why American soldiers followed orders and massacred unarmed civilians at My Lai during the Vietnam war.

Is there a place for individual conscience?

Since World War II, there has been wide acknowledgment that soldiers should not carry out illegal orders.  Lieutenant Colonel Terrence Lakin, a physician in the Army, refused to deploy to Afghanistan because he does not believe that President Obama has the legal authority to send him there.  It’s not about international law or the War Powers Act, but Obama’s birth.  Lakin doesn’t think Obama was born in the United States; in his view, the Commander in Chief serves illegally, and Lakin himself is duty-bound to refuse orders.  Lakin explains:

I feel I have no choice but the distasteful one of inviting my own court martial…I disobey my orders to deploy because I, and I believe all services’ men and women and the American people, deserve the truth about President Obama’s constitutional eligibility to the office of the presidency and commander in chief.

Colonel Lakin’s beliefs can fairly be described as unpopular and marginal.  A military court found him guilty of refusing to follow a lawful order.  He can be sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison and discharged from the service.  At his trial, however, he announced that he was sorry, and would keep his politics out of his job, and follow orders.  Whoops.

Unsurprisingly, the birthers have championed his case/their cause.  Lakin got the attention they seek, and displayed courage in the service of their beliefs.

Such resistance in the American military is relatively rare, but it has run across the political spectrum.

First Lieutenant Ehren K. Watada refused to follow orders to deploy to Iraq in 2006.  Watada explained that when he studied his mission, he concluded that the Iraq war violated international law.  Citing the Nuremberg precedents, Watada explained that he was duty-bound to refuse to follow such orders.  (He offered to go to Afghanistan, but American soldiers don’t get to pick their wars.)

Watada’s court-martial ended in a mistrial, and after several failed efforts to retry him, the Army negotiated his discharge in 2009.

Watada’s case became a celebrated cause for antiwar activists, who applauded both his judgment and his willingness to follow his conscience.  Activists have encouraged others to follow his lead.  Note the efforts of Courage to Resist, an antiwar group focused on the servicemen and women who refuse to deploy.

Their cases are rarely so simple as Watada’s, who had grievances with the military only on matters of policy.  Other resisters have registered their objections on the basis of their own experiences of mistreatment in the military.

The group has recently taken up the case of Private Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of leading all those documents to Wikileaks.

I suspect that many readers would want to applaud one of these Army officers, but would see the necessity for civilian control of the armed forces in the other case.  (Even if you agree with Private Manning’s judgments about American foreign policy, do we want to have the judgment of a high school dropout supplanting that of a government that, after all, has to answer to an electorate?)

The American military provides yet another complication: everyone in the service is a volunteer who signed a contract, effectively letting the rest of the country off the hook.

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Diluted Tea

Posted on December 15, 2010 by David S. Meyer

Sharron Angle, the failed Republican/Tea Party Senate candidate in Nevada, has just announced that she’s forming a PAC to advance Tea Party ideals and Tea Party candidates.  Angle, whose candidacy was buoyed by Sarah Palin and the Tea Party Express, lost the Senate race to Harry Reid, a seat widely viewed as winnable for Republicans.

The Tea Party Express made Angle’s candidacy possible, and also invigorated other problematic Senate campaigns, including those of Christine O’Donnell (Delaware), Joe Miller (Alaska), and Ken Buck (Colorado).  In fact, the Tea Party Express may well have cost the  Republicans control of the Senate.

Conservative political consultant Sal Russo renamed his PAC  (originally, “Our Country Deserves Better”) “Tea Party Express” when conservative activism under the Tea Party label promised better fundraising.  It worked.  If his Tea Party group sometimes made different choices about candidates and issues than other Tea Party groups, well, that’s just movement politics.

Of course, Sharron Angle has as much right to claim the Tea Party brand as anyone else, including Christine O’Donnell, who is also starting a PAC.  It’s not only a vehicle for employment and raising money, but also a way to cultivate political ties that could help in future campaigns.  Joe Miller is going to need something to do when the Alaska Senate race is finally declared as well.

More PACs under the Tea Party brand creates competition for defining the movement and its efforts.  If the new PACs track their sponsor, they need to find new sources of funding, or else undermine the  older Tea Party groups.  And each will offer its own definition of what it means to be a Tea Partier.  They’ll distinguish themselves on the basis of prioritizing particular issues: taxes or immigration or abortion or the deficit.  Every priority carries strong supporters and opponents.  In effect, there is a looming battle over defining just what the Tea Party is.

The battle for definition is recurrent in movement politics, and the populist elements in the Tea Party make it particularly likely to be messy and contested.

And opponents will point to the craziest people and ideas to define the Tea Party.  The latest news suggests there will be plenty of  them.

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Strong Tea

Posted on December 14, 2010 by David S. Meyer

Rep. Michele Bachmann, founder of the Tea Party Caucus in the House of Representatives, promised that she would provide classes on the Constitution for her colleagues, particularly her newest colleagues.  And there are plenty of them in the next Congress.  Bachmann is one Tea Partier who aims to deliver on her promises, and apparently, she’s positioned to deliver in a big way:

Justice Antonin Scalia has agreed to deliver the first lecture, ironically on the topic of the separation of powers.

This development is odd and interesting for all kinds of reasons.

First, there is this whole SEPARATION OF POWERS THING.  The Court and the other branches aren’t supposed to coordinate behind the scenes or lobby each other.

Chief Justice Earl Warren reported, years later, that he was invited to dinner at the White House when Brown v. Board of Education was on the docket, and resented being lobbied, ever so gently by contemporary standards, to consider the well-being of the white children in the South.  President Johnson worked to keep his consultations with Justice Abe Fortas secret, expecting (correctly) controversy if the meetings were ever public.  Much more recently, Justice Alito, taken to task for muttering “not true” during President Obama’s State of the Union address, announced that he thought it inappropriate for the President to chastise the Court at the occasion, particularly when protocol demanded that the Justices sit on their hands and take it all stoically.

It’s hard to imagine Justice Scalia coaching one faction in Congress on arguments or policies that would pass his Constitutional muster.  It’s also hard to imagine Justice Scalia refusing to allow members of Congress who weren’t members of the Tea Party to benefit from his Constitutional lessons.

Second, there is the matter of maintaining an appearance of objectivity.  In addition to wearing those basic black robes, sitting Justices generally refrain from explicit political activity.  Virginia Thomas’s recent announcement that she was curtailing her Tea Party activities seems much less likely to be about her loss of political faith or energy than about maintaining some appearance of propriety for her husband, Justice Clarence Thomas.

Third, it’s kind of amazing that Michele Bachmann has that kind of pull.  The other instructors mentioned for the course are renowned for their seriousness and expertise only among the true believers, not among professional historians or legal scholars.  Justice Scalia is a major get.

Question: Does all of this undermine any notion of a legal system in which rulings are based on law rather than exclusively political orientation?  (By the way, other recent decisions play into this vision.  It’s been widely observed that a Bush appointee to a Federal Court has invalidated the insurance mandate provision of President Obama’s health care reform, while two Clinton appointees have rejected that argument. ) Our textbooks, judicial nominees’ testimony before Congress, and our Constitution would have us believe that at least some of these judges think about the law and the Constitution in making such decisions.

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Phelps Family Flop? Not quite.

Posted on December 12, 2010 by David S. Meyer

Elizabeth Edwards’s funeral in Raleigh, North Carolina, was another occasion for the Westboro Church (read: Fred Phelps and family) to get attention.

As discussed here, the tiny hyperconservative church has succeeded in gaining national attention by picketing military funerals and displaying provocative and hateful placards about gays.   Reverend Fred Phelps’s story is simple: soldiers are dying because of the moral degradation of the United States.  It’s not the war, however, that represents the slippery slope toward sin so much as tolerance of homosexuality.

Elizabeth Edwards’s funeral provided another opportunity for the Westboro Church.  The Phelps family announced a planned picket, and locals responded by organizing a counterprotest–a Line of Love–outside the funeral.  Coordinated by a Facebook group, the Line of Love drew an estimated 300 people–countering a Westboro presence estimated at five stalwarts.

Surely, just the presence of the counterprotesters, in large numbers and holding signs indicating admiration of Elizabeth Edwards and sympathy for her family, must have provided some comfort to the mourners, to the citizens of Raleigh, and to everyone who takes offense at Westboro’s views and/or tactics.

The flip side, however, is that it once again draws national attention to a group that virtually defines the lunatic fringe.

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The Royal Treatment

Posted on December 10, 2010 by David S. Meyer

If you’re upset about the tripling of university tuition in Britain, why destroy Prince Charles’s car?  He didn’t raise tuition, can’t lower it, and will be able to find other ways to get to work–or whatever he does.

But activists found an opportune moment last night, when they caught the Prince and his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, on their way to the theater.  According to the New York Times:

The confrontation occurred when a group of about 50 protesters, some in full-face balaclavas, broke through a cordon of motorcycle police flanking the car as it approached London’s theater district in slow-speed traffic. Some of the demonstrators shouted “off with their heads!” and others “Tory scum!”

A photograph of the couple, in formal evening dress, showed them registering shock as protesters beat on the side of their armored, chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce with sticks and bottles, smashing a side window, denting a rear panel and splashing the car with white paint. A Jaguar tailing the car and carrying a palace security detail was so battered that the police ended up using its doors as shields.

Shocked, indeed.

Prime Minister David Cameron called the attack on the royal couple’s car “shocking and regrettable.”

Shocking indeed!

The British royal family has, for more than 200 years, more often been subject to snarky comments than political protest.  With the establishment of parliamentary supremacy in the United Kingdom, a struggle that stretched over several hundred years after signing of the Magna Carta, but was pretty well established by the start of the 19th century, people who wanted something from the British government knew to target Parliament rather than the King.  Putting Parliament in charge of running the state surely saved the life of at least one king somewhere down the line, and created a vestigial role for a royal family that seems to exist pretty much to unify and entertain the British people–and others.

If the monarchy can’t deliver anything, then it makes sense to target protest at those who can.

But if you’re protesting in the streets after Parliament has just passed the tuition hike and a limousine holding the heir to the throne happens to come by…..

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Protest against Tuition Hikes: A Teaching Moment

Posted on December 9, 2010 by David S. Meyer

“They say ‘Cut Back.’  We Say ‘Fight Back.'”  The chants are the same across the Atlantic, even if the politics are somewhat different.  Students and other young people in the UK have taken to the streets to protest the Cameron government’s decision to triple tuition.

It’s still cheaper than a comparable education in the US, British Conservatives say; oddly, this hasn’t calmed the British students who have to come up with the money.

Student protests have been coordinated and aggressive.  Across the country, students have occupied buildings on campuses and staged marches through town centres (what Americans call “centers”).  But the focal point has been Parliament in London.  A series of demonstrations have seen unusual levels of disruption for Britain, featuring fires, arrests, and clashes with the police. According to the BBC:

The BBC’s Ben Brown, outside Parliament, said protesters shouted “shame on you” as news of the result filtered out to the crowd.

In violent scenes earlier, the BBC’s Mark Georgiou said there had been injuries to both police and protesters near to Westminster Abbey.

The Metropolitan Police say there have been attacks using “flares, sticks, snooker balls and paint balls”.

The political unrest has exacerbated rifts in a Conservative/Liberal Democratic coalition government that has seemed tenuous from the start, with 21 Liberal Democrats and 6 Conservative MPs voting against the policy.  Three ministerial aides resigned in protest.

American university students are also facing tuition hikes and education cuts, but have thus far been unable to create a campaign nearly as well coordinated.  Part of the problem in the US is that American universities are funded by diverse sources, including state and federal governments, and have depended more on tuition and fees for a long time.

By imposing a nation-wide policy, British Prime Minister David Cameron has made it easier for students to decide who to target and when.  American politics diffuses responsibility more broadly, and thus makes it harder for activists to hold anyone accountable.

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Is the Tea Party Over (part III)

Posted on December 8, 2010 by David S. Meyer

Only the left went on the attack against President Obama’s compromise on extending the Bush-era tax cuts.  Faced with intransigence from the Republicans in the Senate, Obama cut a deal.  He endorsed a two year extension of historically low tax rates for the wealthiest Americans in exchange for Republican support to continue the Bush-era rates for middle-class Americans, and extend unemployment insurance.  Liberals are now extending their anger at Republicans to include a president they had once claimed as one of their own.

What’s much more surprising is the silence from the Tea Party movement.  The Tea Party’s rhetoric during the last two years emphasized the perils of deficit spending.  It’s not surprising that Republican leaders would backburner their concerns about the deficit in order to secure low tax rates for their core constituents.  Spending on unemployment and the Earned Income Tax Credit, financed through deficit spending, is a small price for them to pay–largely because they don’t have to pay it.  (There is a strong Keynesian argument to make for these programs, which will translate into increased consumer spending and stimulate the economy; it’s not, however, an argument Republican leaders will make.)

But the populist anger that animated the Tea Party appeared to be more anti-government and anti-spending than pro-rich.  The election dramatically strengthened the position of the Republican Party, but this is a clear instance in which the Tea Party identity promised something clearly different.  Recall that they also expressed an anger at the deficit spending at the core of the George W. Bush program.

You would think that the deficit hawks at the grassroots would try to hold their Republican allies’ feet to the fire, forcing them to honor the (admittedly diverse and often contradictory) demands of the Tea Party.  The silence here is another piece of evidence that the election has taken the wind out of the Tea Party’s sails.

And the Republicans elected to Congress have, for the most part, been quite eager to defer their concern with the deficit in favor of preferred programs, like tax cuts for the wealthy.  Alaskans preferred independent patronage Republican Lisa Murkowski to a (perhaps) authentic Tea Partier, who might actually refuse Federal spending in Alaska.  Even Rand Paul, the new Senator from Kentucky, has emphasized the need to keep Medicare payments to doctors at competitive rates.

The Tea Party was a coalition between well-funded organizations sponsored by large business interests and populist anger about government spending, immigration, the deficit, health care reform–and scores of other issues.  How long can such a coalition hold together when Republicans actually participate in governance and make choices?

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