Recent Events at UNC

After a series of baffling and upsetting events at my university, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I was moved to write the following letter to our campus newspaper. I will, doubtless, have more to say on this subject going forward.

What’s Going On?

The University was handed a get out of jail free card by Governor Roy Cooper—and declined to use it. WTF?

Even more baffling is the fact that we requested the card. Spurred by a letter from Chapel Hill mayor Pam Hemminger, someone (I assume it was our Chancellor, Carol Folt, but do not know what transpired behind the scenes) managed a feat of unalloyed diplomatic brilliance: a letter to the governor co-signed by Margaret Spellings, president of the UNC system, Carol Folt, Lou Bissette, chair of the system’s Board of Governors, and Haywood Cochrane, chair of the UNC, Chapel Hill Board of Trustees. That letter, citing safety concerns, asked for a ruling about excepting Silent Sam from the 2015 law forbidding the removal of historical monuments on public land.

The Governor responded swiftly and unambiguously, authorizing Silent Sam’s removal. I fully expected to arrive on campus Tuesday morning and find that UNC, in a move echoing recent actions at the University of Texas, had removed the statue during the night. Instead, the statue was surrounded by a double row of fences and a sign was posted stipulating proper behavior in its presence. And then the university, later in the day, turned its back on the ruling it requested, and stated it didn’t agree with the Governor’s interpretation of the law, even while agreeing that campus would be safer without the Confederate memorial.

The mind reels. The chief Executive officer of the state tells you that a certain action is legitimate and lawful. But you decide he might be wrong. What could motivate such a decision? Clearly, if the Governor gives you the go ahead, you are not going to be prosecuted by his branch’s attorney general if you proceed. The legislature will, doubtless, be unhappy, but they have no prosecutorial powers. True, the university could, I guess, be sued over the matter, and could suffer at the hands of a vindictive legislature somewhere down the line. But should such possible ill effects over-rule immediate safety concerns, not to mention the poisonous message the statue sends every day? I don’t think so.

Meanwhile, the administration is engaged in a petty squabble with the Campus Y over the posting of political banners. The Chancellor’s initial communique in response to events in Charlottesville included an appended statement that declared an absolute right to free speech on this campus. Yet now her administration is relying on invoking bureaucratic minutia to take down the Y’s signs.

Finally, as one last demonstration of a determination to act in mysterious and secretive ways, we get the announcement of a new provost. The move took everyone on campus by surprise. What’s worse: we get a new provost with a complete abrogation of any procedure for his appointment. No naming of an interim, no formation of a search committee, no public meetings with finalists for the position, no consultation with any one on campus.

The Chancellor is acting like a tinpot autocrat. On the one hand, afraid of her own shadow, she can’t act decisively when she is handed a green light by the Governor. On the other hand, she has isolated herself from the university community, interacting with us through statements that it takes a Talmudic scholar or a Kremlinologist to decipher, and embracing non-transparency. What’s going on? Damned if I know.

Here’s my message to Carol Folt. We–the faculty, students, and staff—of this university are your partners in the educational mission of this great university. We are not dangerous, unruly, and unpredictable subjects who need to be managed. Stop being afraid of us and start working with us.

Notes to Self

From Robert Richardson’s “Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind” (University of California Press, 1986), pg. 194: “Whereas the Christian yearns to be redeemed, and the Dionysian to be possessed, the Apollonian yearns to know, to see clearly, to perceive.” It is that urge for redemption and how to step outside of it that interests me. William James is a Christian by this account but one, in fact, fascinated with possession if Varieties is taken into account. I don’t know enough about Thoreau to know if Richardson is right about him and am not even sure that I can wrap my head around this Apollonian alternative. But I definitely want to try to think about these different character types to consider their possibility and figure out how they shift one’s way of being in the world.

On a separate note. Bruce Robbins has a great response to Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2015) in a recent issue of PMLA. I read it on line so don’t have exact info. Robbins talks about how the insistence that questions of “power” be addressed by criticism is most often a way, albeit often a clumsy one, to raise the issue of injustice. To pay heed to power differentials and to “the ruses of power” (to use a favorite phrase of Judith Butler’s) is to attend to what justice demands and how the world falls short of those demands.

Seems to me that this point is relevant to thinking about violence. First, injustice is often sustained by violence. Certainly, the prevalent tendency to expand definitions of violence out beyond direct physical assaults is often motivated by the effort to delineate more subtle forms of coercion that are connected to maintaining various inequalities. Second, however, is the opposite point that violence is used by the state in the name of justice, in the restraint and punishment of criminals. And somewhat analogously, violence is also deployed by the revolutionary in the name of justice. The revolutionary says that the violence that maintains injustice can only be overturned by violence. Anything else is meek submission.

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.