Leverage, Round Two

To summarize: a movement needs to generate mass disobedience to an objectionable governmental practice or law–and win the approval of non-movement members in the process. For the civil rights movement, that meant refusing to abide by the practices and legal statutes that were segregation de facto and de jure. The mass disobedience found that sweet spot where, finally, the government lost its will to uphold those practices and laws. Yes, it took some time. But, finally, the spectacle of arresting people who were just trying to be treated equally was no longer supportable.

For the anti-war movement, it was draft resistance. Not as clear that public opinion was won over to the side of the resisters, but draft law came close to being unenforceable and the easy way out was to create the “all volunteer” army. That move, of course, was the government’s way of sidestepping the larger issue of the anti-war movement: citizens’ ability to stop the government from waging war. That ability has not been gained, while ending the draft took away a crucial leverage spot and made anti-war movements much more difficult to sustain.

Pretty obviously, protesting–and rectifying–discrimination is harder. In the cases of segregation and the draft there is a law to disobey. But in the case of discrimination, you are trying to get the government to enforce the law against your opponents. Now the government and the legal system needs to be your adversary, and is not your antagonist. That greatly limits the stage, doesn’t provide for dramatic confrontations, or mass disobedience. Prodding the government to action is a tough one–and, I am starting to think, the real source of my perplexity about what forms effective action today could take.

That would seem to go in spades for a constitutional crisis. Since the 2000 election, with the follow-ups of the illegal Iraq War and torture, and now the shenanigans of the Trump administration, we have seemingly discovered that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to call the government to account. If the “system” worked in calling the Nixon administration to account for its crimes, that still suggested that only the government could successfully curb the government. And since 2000 there is no evidence of the government having the wherewithal to call itself to account.

I read the other day someone talking about how the people would take to the streets if Trump fired the special prosecutor or pardoned himself and his family. But it is unclear how taking to the streets would have any impact. The pessimist in me says that as long as daily life was not disrupted, the republic would tolerate massive malfeasance. One, because the issues–the rule of law etc.–are so arcane, and two, because it doesn’t feel like it hits people where they live.

Oddly enough, Trump’s crimes are sort of victimless; they damage our democracy, perhaps irreparably, but they don’t seem to harm anyone in particular. I was wondering about this in terms of “standing.” Could I sue (and who would I sue) for damages because my vote was rendered meaningless through election fraud? Would I be granted “standing” to bring such a suit? And what would be the remedy if I won such a case? It is unimaginable that there would be a “do-over” of the election? And yet, what else could be suitable recompense?

I wish I had something better to offer. A successful movement has to get a large number of people to consider themselves as members of a wronged collective. Post-2008, the unemployed and the defrauded quite conspicuously failed to make that leap. Somehow losing your job or losing your home was experienced as an individual misfortune, not something that tied you to many others with whom you should unite to protest against your lot. And, again, that would have been a case of trying to get the government to do something, rather than protesting against or disobeying a government action.

As long as normal life is mostly left in peace, we seem to be left with the ballot box. But not only have Republicans worked hard to shelter themselves from democracy (through gerrymandering, voter suppression and the like), but politicians have more reasons than ever to listen to the powerful few as opposed to the powerless many.

North Carolina’s Moral Mondays seem to prove this point. They have been sustained over an admirably long time–and seem to have had no impact at all except to harden the hearts of our Scrooge-like state legislators.

All of this might mean that party politics is really the only game in town. Leftists need to engineer a take-over of the Democratic party akin the the take-over of the Republican party by its right-wing. Only the primary threat makes politicians answerable to voters when the general election districts are gerrymandered.

Leverage

Back to Todd May’s Nonviolent Resistance (Polity, 2015) after a long hiatus. And when he gets to a discussion of how nonviolent movements can succeed, I find a good way of thinking about my earlier expression of skepticism about the usefulness of mass marches in DC or elsewhere.

Basically, a social movement’s success (May is drawing on the work of Gene Sharp here; another source identifies Sharp as the leading proponent of the “pragmatic” as opposed to “moral” school of non-violence advocates) depends on its understanding power in its given society. “Leverage refers to the ability of contentious actors to mobilize the withdrawal of support from opponents or invoke pressure against them through the networks upon which opponents depend for their power” (This is Sharp, not May, but taken from page 93 of May’s book).

The premise is that power is something given to certain people or certain institutions by voluntary obedience, by consent. Power, therefore, is dependent on the cooperation of those who we normally think of as subject to power. At least in theory, a government cannot sustain itself in the absence of such consent. Laws against drinking alcohol or having homosexual sex prove unenforceable in the absence of voluntary obedience. (It’s an empirical question as to what the “tipping point” is.)

The non-violent movement, then, is working to promote wide-spread disobedience. It must represent certain laws—or the government tout court—as morally reprehensible, illegitimate, or unacceptably oppressive. It will succeed when it makes a specific policy—or, again, a whole government—unsustainable.

Two things follow from understanding the ultimate goal of the movement this way. Again, quoting Sharp: “Two basic conditions must be met for a challenge to contribute to political transformations: 1) the challenge must be able to withstand repression and 2) the challenge must undermine state power” (92 in May).

How can the movement “sustain itself during the inevitable repression that will result from a challenge to state power” (92)? Sharp’s answer is that the movement’s resilience is tied to “decentralized yet coordinated organizational networks, the ability to implement multiple actions [in multiple modes from persuasion, to noncooperation, to intervention] and the ability to implement methods of dispersion as well as concentration, and tactical innovation” (92). Sharp has a wonderful list of 98 types of non-violent action. Multiple forms of action greatly increases the opportunities for participation by people of varying degrees of commitment (from general sympathy to obsessive commitment). Plus those multiple modes of action keep people involved over time, instead of just getting them into the street for one-off demonstrations. And having acted multiple times increases people’s commitment, so they won’t wilt away at the first sign of push-back from the opponents.

What Sharp and May don’t take up is that protest is not cost-free. It is getting a critical mass of people to the point where they put something real on the line that’s the hard part. Demonstrations are cost free—as, for the most part, is getting arrested one time. But the movement is going to collapse in the face of repression unless a significant number of people are going to accept fairly serious trouble. It’s been a fairly long time (really since the early 1970s) since we have witnessed that kind of commitment on the American scene.

On to point two: leverage. In theory, the contest is played out in the court of public opinion. In a democracy, ideally, you are working to convince a majority that your view, not the opponents’, is the right one. You are soliciting their vote (minimally), but, more substantially, their withdrawal of consent from the policy or practice that is being protested against.

And that is still somewhat the case. But the leverage points in American politics are way more complex than that—and not a reason for optimism. For starters, politicians are very insulated from the popular vote. (I won’t get into this is worse now than it was fifty or a hundred years ago). But between the first need to raise huge amounts of money to run on to the dynamics of primaries and of gerrymandering, it is quite obvious that our elected officials are much more beholden to and frightened of certain power brokers than they are to the public at large. The spectacle of a Republican party nearly passing a health law supported by 20% of the population is just one proof of that point. Our absurd gun laws is another.

So a successful protest movement today has to develop a realistic appraisal of where power resides in our plutocracy and a strategy for leveraging that power. Demonstrations are not going to do the trick. Boycotts seem to me much more likely to be effective—both because they hit power where it hurts and because they are sustained over time (or need to be in order to work). One instance is the fact that corporate pressure and high-profile actions like moving the Super Bowl from one state to another have been much more effective in blocking certain kinds of discriminatory statutes than citizen protests. That’s a lamentable fact, but it’s a fact. So perhaps our protest movements should aim more at corporate power centers than at political ones—and then try to move those corporations to bring pressure to bear on the politicians.

The general point, I assume, is clear. Moving public opinion is a good thing (although I see little evidence that demonstrations do that very often). Building up your fellow travelers is also a good thing—and demonstrations may help with that. But applying pressure at the right places is really, really crucial. And, for now, I don’t see the left as having a good game plan in that regard. Like it or not, our opponents are not going to do the right thing because we convince them that we occupy the moral high ground. Things are only going to change when they are made to pay a price they find unacceptable for keeping things the way they are. Leverage is about finding the ways to make them pay such a price. In the meantime, pushing to get to that point requires our side having a sufficient number of people willing to pay a price for initiating and sustaining a protest against the way things are.

More to say about this in subsequent posts, specifically about counting on the courts for help and about constitutional crises.

Your Trollope for the Day

Two passages from Anthony Trollope (pulled out of Amanda Anderson’s Bleak Liberalism [U of Chicago Press, 2016] which I am reading in order to review).

The first is Trollope’s description of his aim in writing The Way We Live Now; the passage comes from Trollope’s Autobiography.

” A certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable.”

The second is one character in that novel, Mrs. Hurdle (an American and, hence, inevitably morally suspect and drawn to magnificent dishonesty), explaining her admiration for the deceitful banker Melmotte. The crux, of course, is how dishonesty appears as a higher form of honesty.

“Ah,–you mean that he is bold in breaking those precepts of yours about coveting worldly wealth. All men and women break that commandment, but they do so in stealthy fashion, half drawing back the grasping hand, praying to be delivered from temptation while they filch only a little, pretending to despise the only thing that is dear to them in the world. Here is a man who boldly says that he recognizes no such law; that wealth is power, and power is good, and the the more a man has of wealth the greater and stronger and nobler he can be. I love a man who can turn the hobgoblins inside out and burn the wooden bogies he meets.”

Independence and Freedom Not the Same

“It would be wrong to muddle independence with freedom. No one is less independent than a free citizen” (269, footnote 46, in The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution).

No statement in Tocqueville more succinctly captures the difference between his version of conservatism and the hyper-individualistic ideology that passes as conservatism in contemporary America. I sympathize with the Corey Robin point that conservatism is always about protecting privilege, that Burke’s corporate conservatism and Hayek’s individualistic conservatism may look different in various ways, but, au fond, they are both about preserving power and wealth in the hands of thems that already gots.

That’s why republican virtue is perhaps the best tradition to attach Tocqueville to. He is against liberal individualism if that means vigorous pursuit of economic prosperity; but he is all in favor of individual rights, seeing the protected civil liberties are essential—and that they should be extended to all. In that respect, he is not a conservative. He has no truck with privileges being granted to only one class of citizens. He is an egalitarian.

But . . . He also believes that there should be a political class that takes on the responsibility of managing public affairs. It is that class which truly enjoys “freedom,” but which lacks independence precisely because of its great responsibilities. Self-government (which is freedom) is not an exemption from the collective; it is, rather, action within the collective. That’s where he is not liberal—and where he tends to conservatism because he is an elitist about this political class. But it is also where he is most at odds with contemporary American conservatives for whom independence is the essence of freedom—the very mistake that Tocqueville deplores.

Two complications.

1. “The aims recommended by the reformers were many and varied but their methods were the same. They wanted to borrow the strength of central government and use it to smash everything and rebuild it according to a new plan of their own devising. Such a task could, they thought, be accomplished only by the central power” (77). This is the liberalism of fear (Judith Schlar’s term.) Fear the accumulation of power. Build in checks and balances; disperse power so it resides in several locations. Yes, he wants a political class—but he also wants to hem in its power by various institutional safeguards. Revolutionaries are to be feared both because they want to smash everything, want to rebuild according to a plan grounded solely in unrealistic theory, and because they are all about accumulating power into their own hands. They are the quintessential centrailizers.

2. Not completely clear in Tocqueville what he sees as the optimal relation of the legislative to the executive power. He is very clear that local assemblies, the more local the better, should legislate. But he also seems to say in various places that a truly free people executes its own decisions. The doing should be done by the people who are also the beneficiaries of those actions. So he can seem a very radical proponent of direct or participatory democracy at times—even while at other times he relies on a distinct political class to alone be the political actors. So he can write with despair about a situation in which “no one imagined that an important matter could be brought to a successful conclusion without the involvement of the state” (77)—suggesting that his ideal is when the state proves unnecessary because the people take matters into their own hands. But he will show a deep distrust of the people in other places. And, of course, his anti-state bias in favor of a republican mode of citizen involvement has all the classic scale problems that afflict the republican tradition. The emphasis on the local works against any larger political entity—but empire and, subsequently, the nation-state are persistent historical forms that swallow up small-scale city-states and their like.