Author: MassCommons

Impeachment is a political act, which means politicians need to make it happen. In 1974, as Jimmy Breslin tells the tale in his entertaining and insightful Watergate book, How The Good Guys Finally Won, that politician was House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill.

“One day in June O’Neill walked onto the House floor armed with a new weapon. The first person he went to was Dan Rostenkowski.

‘Danny, old pal, did you see this poll yet?’

‘What poll?’ Rostenkowski grumbled. He despises polls, but he had to ask about a poll because he is in politics and he is supposed to ask about a poll.

‘It shows here that we could pick up as many as eighty seats the way it’s going now,’ O’Neill said.

‘Whew.’ —[snip]—

‘Here, look. Only 7% of the Democrats will vote for a Congressman who is against impeachment. That means a Republican could beat a Democrat in a city if the Republican is for impeachment and the Democrat is against it. Can you imagine that? Say, that’s right. You represent a city, don’t you, Danny?’

O’Neill began to show the poll around, He told Thaddeus Dulski, who comes from upstate Erie County in New York, that the poll showed all rural votes being lost to a Congressman who is against impeachment. ‘But you don’t have any farms in your district,’ he told Dulski. Dulski grumbled He had a religious belief in the Presidency. He also had a lot of farmers in his district. Out on the House floor, when O’Neill saw Angelo Roncallo, a Long Island Republican, he said, ‘Hey, Angie, old pal. Geez, but you really love it down here, don’t you? Angie, I want you to know something. My door is always open to you, as you know. And to show you how much I think of of you, Angie, my door is still going to be open to you next year when you’re not going to be in the Congress because of this impeachment. O’Neill gave a great, fun laugh, Roncallo laughed with him, but not as much.'” (pp. 143-44)

Donald Trump isn’t Richard Nixon; Steny Hoyer isn’t Tip O’Neill; 2018 isn’t 1974. Republicans, not Democrats, control the House today, and Donald Trump isn’t going to be impeached this year.

All that being said, polling hasn’t changed that much since 1974 and anyone who (looking at you, Mike Allen) who reads a poll showing Trump’s approval rating at a soft (only 27% “strongly approve”) 45% and his disapproval rating at a rock-solid (44% strongly  disapprove) 53%, and concludes the main story is “Huge GOP Majority Backs Trump’s Putin Performance” doesn’t belong in politics, and certainly isn’t running for office.

Any president who’s losing more than 20% of his base is politically toxic to a member of Congress trying to win 51% of the vote in her/his district. That’s the political significance of this Axios/Survey Monkey poll; and it’s why every House Republican running for re-election with less than a 15 point victory margin in his last race is running scared.

P. S. Democrats today could use some more of the joie de vivre that O’Neill and his peers brought to politics. A little confidence and a sense of humor can go a long way…particularly when you’re up against bullying, mean SOBs.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

(One in a series of posts on Mark & Paul Engler’s 2016 book, This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping The Twenty-First Century.)

It’s one thing to organize around symbolic demands and win symbolic victories when there are relatively independent means of communicating with one’s followers and with the public at large. But how do you win symbolic victories under a dictatorship? That was the challenge Otpor faced in Milosevic’s Serbia.

“Otpor came up with a novel approach: campaigners themselves publicly laid out their standards for what would constitute a win, and then they loudly trumpeted it when they met those objectives, using the publicity to generate momentum. For example, activists might announce a goal of launching ten new chapters. Whether it took weeks or months to accomplish this, they could then make a major show of having met their goal once it happened. Or Otpor might announce the objective of holding simultaneous protests in at least a dozen different cities on a national day of action. Because they set this target themselves, they could be confident that it was attainable. And once it was attained, they made certain that everybody knew about it. With each completed goal reported in the alternative media or in the movement’s own communications, the fear barrier became that much weaker.” (p. 135)

If that approach seems too glib or facile, consider the alternative:

“If Otpor members had structured their public relations around making a demand of the regime and allowing the media to judge their success or failure based on the government’s response, they would have put themselves at the mercy of their opponents, setting themselves up for failure. ‘Your adversaries are rarely going to grant full acceptance of your demands,’ says (Otpor activist Ivan) Marovic. If people’s attention is focused on the messy back-and-forth of negotiations, naysayers can always find grounds for complaint and movement supporters rarely emerge inspired. Otpor’s method allowed them to avoid that. For publicity purposes, Otpor sought to accentuate when the movement made a show of strength and to let insiders worry about muddling through the aftermath.

The activists sometimes summed up the approach with a crafty aphorism: ‘declare victory and run.'” (pp. 135-36)

Note that an essential piece of this strategy is deciding in advance what the movement’s goal is for any particular action or campaign. This is no place for wishful thinking or “aspirational” goals. Better, for example, to set a goal of turning out 100 people at a demonstration knowing you can turn out 200, than to proclaim a goal of 250 people and fall short.

What’s more, even symbolic victories must be grounded in reality. The Englers emphasize this point:

“Organizers of civil resistance cannot be content with empty declarations of victory or with merely ‘speaking truth to power.’ They must be hard headed in assessing their progress in winning over advocates and sympathizers from outside their immediate networks, always guarding against tendencies to become insular ‘voices in the wilderness.'” (p. 141)

Among the metrics they suggest activists attend to as means of building their campaigns and keeping themselves honest are: “movement in opinion polls, growing numbers of active participants, the ability to generate resources through grassroots channels, and the responsiveness of different pillars of support to their mobilizations.” (p. 141)

It’s virtually impossible to overemphasize the fact that even when you win your opponents (and much of the media) will not give you credit. The habit of defining and claiming your own victories is an essential practice of momentum-driven organizing.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

(One in a series of posts on Mark & Paul Engler’s 2016 book, This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping The Twenty-First Century.)

For organizers and leaders seeking large-scale, transformative change, a campaign built around symbolic demands and symbolic victories, the Englers argue, can be more powerful and effective than one built around instrumental demands and victories.

To illustrate this point, they examine in detail one of the great nonviolent campaigns of the 20th century, Gandhi’s Salt March.

In 1930, the Indian National Congress had voted 1) to launch a campaign seeking Purna Swaraj (“complete self-rule”) and to 2) to give Mahatma Gandhi complete authority to determine the scope, timing and direction of the campaign.

Many of Gandhi’s closest colleagues in the Congress leadership expected—and wanted—a campaign focused on constitutional questions, such as winning “dominion status”, within the British Empire.

Instead, Gandhi—accompanied by 78 of his most trusted followers walked 240 miles over 3 1/2 weeks to the seaside village of Dandi, went to the beach, picked up a grain of dried salt left behind by the receding tide and ate it.

That initiated the “Salt Satyagraha” in which millions of Indians joined, tens of thousands were jailed, and the British Empire ultimately, after a year of protests, agreed to negotiate as equals with Gandhi and the INC.

Why salt? Because, as Gandhi argued, “Next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life.” (p. 124)

The Englers elaborate: “(Salt) was a simple commodity that everyone was compelled to buy and which the government taxed…. The fact that Indians were not permitted to freely collect salt from natural deposits or to pan for salt from the sea was a clear illustration of how a foreign power was unjustly profiting from the subcontinent’s people and its resources.” (pp. 124-25)

After a year-long struggle, Gandhi emerged from talks with the British Viceroy, Lord Irwin, with an agreement to end the campaign. Under the terms of the Gandhi-Irwin Pact,

   
1. the Salt Act, with minor exceptions for a few coastal areas, remained law;

   

2. the British made no concession on independence;

   

3. the British refused to investigate incidents and allegations of police misconduct;, and

   

4. most, but not all, of the repressive security measures enacted by the Raj during the campaign were repealed.

Congress won only the release of political prisoners, the return of fines collected from tax resisters, and the right to continue its boycott of British cloth.

It was a classic example of Gandhi’s preferred negotiating strategy of the “reduction of demands to a minimum consistent with the truth“. (p. 128)

Instrumentally, the outcome of the Salt Satyagraha was a failure. After all, Great Britain had not conceded a single step towards independence for India, and still retained its monopoly (and tax) over salt.

Symbolically however, it was a huge victory for India, as even the Empire’s staunchest advocates acknowledged:

“In a now-infamous speech, Winston Churchill, a leading defender of the British Empire, proclaimed that it was ‘alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi…striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace…to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.'” (p. 128)

Congress leaders initially were divided about the campaign’s outcome, but the Indian people were not:

“Subhas Chandra Bose, one of the radicals in Gandhi’s organization who was skeptical of the pact with Irwin, had to revise his view when he took in the reaction in the countryside. As (Geoffrey) Ashe recounts, when Bose traveled with Gandhi from Bombay to Delhi, he ‘saw ovations such as he had never witnessed before.’ Bose recognized the vindication. ‘The Mahatma had judged correctly,’ Ashe continues. ‘By all the rules of politics he had been checked. But in the people’s eyes, the plain fact that the Englishman had been brought to negotiate instead of giving orders outweighed any number of details.'” (p. 128)

The Englers recount a similar tale regarding the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s 1963 Birmingham campaign. Launched with the stated goal of desegregating the city’s public facilities, the negotiated settlement Dr. King agreed to desegregated department store fitting rooms…and little else. (Public parks remained segregated; the city would “begin a process” to desegregate lunch counters and take down “Whites Only” signs; “at least one Negro sales person or cashier” would be hired in downtown Birmingham.)

But while the Birmingham campaign was an instrumental failure, it was a massive symbolic victory—swinging public opinion sharply against Jim Crow, smoking out the cautious and calculating President Kennedy, and compelling him to deliver a televised speech announcing a sweeping new civil rights bill, explaining, “The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them.” (p. 131) A year later, President Johnson signed that bill into law as the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Both Gandhi and King would gladly have won the instrumental demands announced at the start of their respective campaigns. But both recognized that they were also, and in some ways more importantly, engaged in a symbolic struggle for justice, freedom and equality. By organizing and leading campaigns that operated effectively on symbolic levels (e.g., claiming access to salt, water fountains, lunch counters), they and their movements were able to win important symbolic victories that ultimately sped up the arrival of victory on their instrumental demands.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

(One in a series of posts on Mark & Paul Engler’s 2016 book, This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping The Twenty-First Century.)

When discussing the importance for momentum-driven organizing of swaying public opinion, the Englers add a fascinating and important tangent on the crucial role played by “active popular support”.

In doing so, they draw upon groundbreaking recent research by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan summarized in their 2011 book, Why Civil Resistance Works. They found that “from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals.“

The Englers focus in particular on one of Chenoweth & Stephans’ findings: the 3.5% rule. “Reviewing the data, Chenoweth found that, in fact, ‘no campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5% of the population—and lots of them succeeded with far less than that.’” (p. 110)

“Active popular support” is defined by the following characteristics:

   
1. Showing Up: for rallies, marches, phonebanking, doorknocking, teach-ins, etc.;

   

2. Voting With The Movement: the movement’s cause (e.g., abortion, climate change, immigration) is the deciding factor in the active supporter’s vote;

   

3. Persuading Others: at school, at family reunions, on social media, at work;

   

4. Acting Independently Within Their Sphere Of Influence: lawyers taking on pro bono cases, preachers using their pulpit, entertainers writing songs, teachers using their classrooms, union members using meetings of their local to advance the cause.

“In the case of Serbia in the late 1990s, it was not hard for Otpor and other resistance groups to get a majority of the population to agree that Milosevic should go. A huge portion of the public already detested the regime. With the economy in shambles and the country reeling from a series of disastrous wars, public opinion had already been won. The problem was that people expressed their dissenting views only in whispers, behind closed doors. Although many Serbians wanted change, few believed that it was actually achievable. It took Otpor’s active supporters to demonstrate the viability of resistance.” (pp. 112 – 13)

The Englers argue that active public supporters have the same kind of decisive impact in campaigns not dedicated to overthrowing dictatorships.

“In the case of same-sex marriage, the work of dedicated activists was likewise essential. It was helpful to have families in Middle America approvingly watch Ellen or Will & Grace in the 1990s. But the vast majority of these people were not going to force the issue in their workplaces or make it their top electoral concern. The few who actually pushed at the pillars—-petitioning their churches to accept their same-sex weddings, calling for their employers to extend health benefits to same-sex partners, attending rallies, filing lawsuits, defending same-sex couples at their schools’ proms, knocking on doors, and demonstrating the electoral muscle of LGBT voters at the polls—were the movement’s active supporters.” (p. 113)

For leaders, organizers and activists interested in creating transformative change, the question isn’t simply to win the hearts and minds of 51% of the population. It’s also to win the hearts, minds and bodies of 3.5% of the population (about 11 million people in today’s USA) to take sustained public action in support of their cause.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

(One in a series of posts on Mark & Paul Engler’s 2016 book, This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping The Twenty-First Century.)

“…(T)oday, the study of nonviolent conflict and civil resistance is a respectable subfield within political science and strategic studies, engaging scholars who would have no interest in a ‘peace studies’ curriculum.” (p. 16)

Nobody was more responsible for that development—and for the spread of nonviolent campaigns of civil resistance around the globe—than Gene Sharp, a soft-spoken political scientist who died earlier this year, and served in many ways as the intellectual godfather of the developments catalogued in This Is An Uprising.

Called the “Machiavelli of nonviolence”, the “dictator slayer”, and the “Clausewitz of unarmed revolution” (p. 2), Sharp started out as a pacifist and draft resister who had what the Englers describe as an “epiphany”:

“…that nonviolence should not be simply a moral code for a small group of true believers to live by… (and) that nonviolent conflict should be understood as a political approach that can be employed strategically, something that social movements can choose because it provides an effective avenue for leveraging change.” (p. 3)

Civil resistance—“devoted to understanding how unarmed social movements are able to stage uprisings of dramatic consequence” is the field of study that has flowed from Sharp’s insights. Sharp, in turn, pointed to Gandhi as the originator, saying “Gandhi was probably the first to consciously formulate over a period of years a major system of resistance based upon the assumption…(that) hierarchical systems can be modified or destroyed by a withdrawal of submission, cooperation, and obedience.” (p. 13)

Over several decades of research, Sharp systematized both a set of theories about how and why civil resistance works, and a catalog of nonviolent tactics and strategies—dating back thousands of years—that people have effectively used against their oppressors. Among Sharp’s key writings are:

   
• The Politics Of Nonviolent Action: published in 1973, 900 pages long, available in a three volume edition (Power & Struggle, The Methods Of Nonviolent Action, The Dynamics Of Nonviolent Action), it “contains his foundational analyses of the nature of political power, and of the methods and dynamics of nonviolent action“;

   

• From Dictatorship To Democracy: “a 93-page distillation of his core teachings and a handbook for overthrowing autocrats, (it) has been translated into more than 30 languages. Originally written in 1993 to help dissidents in Burma use nonviolent action against the ruling military junta, the book became a valued possession of Serbian students seeking to overthrow the regime of Slobodan Milosevic. It circulated among activists during uprisings in Georgia and the Ukraine in 2003 and 2004. And it was downloaded in Arabic amid mass protests in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011.” (p. 2);

   

• “198 Methods Of Nonviolent Action”: distilled from The Politics Of Nonviolent Action, this list represents Sharp’s documentation and classification of nonviolent tactics “that had already been put into practice by others” (p. 14), including 1) protest & persuasion (e.g., public statements, marches, symbolic acts), 2) social, economic & political noncooperation (e.g., stay-at-homes, boycotts, strikes, embargoes), 3) intervention (e.g., hunger strikes, sit-ins, civil disobedience).

The Englers also list some of the recent cases around the world where nonviolent civil resistance has been used against undemocratic regimes:

   
• “the boycotts against apartheid South Africa;

   

• the people power movement in the Philippines;

   

• the ouster of Pinochet in Chile;

   

• the revolutions of 1989 in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany;

   

• the ‘color revolutions’ in Serbia, Georgia, and the Ukraine;

   

• uprisings in Burma in 1988 and 2007, and Iran in 2009;

   

• and the revolts that swept the Arab world in 2011.” (p. 25)

And they emphasize the use of those tactics in the US over the last half century:

“The SCLC’s campaigns—and those of the civil rights movement more broadly—have become touchstones for a modern tradition of direct action in the United States. Young people whose politics were shaped by campaigns in the South went on to play important roles in New Left student organizing and in the movement against the war in Vietnam. Their example would influence antinuclear activists and feminist groups in the 1970s; Central American solidarity, antiapartheid groups, and AIDS campaigners in the 1980s; and grassroots environmentalists in the 1990s. A strain of common experience would run through the historic protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle at the turn of the millennium, the massive demonstrations against the Iraq War under George W. Bush, and the eruption of Occupy Wall Street in the Obama era. Although these efforts had distinctive traits and drew in unique constituencies, they also shared many common characteristics, and it is no accident that they have displayed overlapping vocabularies and tactical repertoires.” (p. 27)

Nearing the end of the second decade of the 21st century, civil resistance is both an established academic discipline and a growing field of practice for people in nations on every continent.

(One in a series of posts on Mark & Paul Engler’s 2016 book, This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping The Twenty-First Century.)

Rising from the ashes of the 1996-97 failed student protests, Otpor (Serbian for “resistance”) arose in 1998 and led a successful two-year nonviolent campaign that removed Slobodan Milosevic from power and installed a democratic government in Serbia.

In This Is An Uprising, the Englers assert that “the model Otpor developed has been studied by movements in dozens of other countries and adapted to local circumstances in widely varied parts of the world. What it represented was perhaps the most compelling example to date of a hybrid between structure and mass protest—a powerful example of what can be called momentum-driven organizing.” (p. 62)

Here are some key points the Englers make about Otpor and its work:

   
1. “Otpor’s most distinctive innovations in fact involve the new type of organization they created: one that was disruptive yet highly strategic, decentralized yet carefully structured.” (pp. 63-64)

   

2. “Otpor developed a type of momentum-driven organizing that is fundamentally based on deploying disruptive power but that takes a deliberate and disciplined approach to mass mobilization. Rather than waiting around for the next ‘Big Bang’ that could send people into the streets, they began building a network with the ability to engineer its own spikes of unrest.” (p. 65)

   

3. “Early on, the organizers decided that Otpor should maintain a firm commitment to using nonviolent tactics. Their reasoning was simple: Milosevic would slaughter them if they took up arms.” (p. 65)

   

4. “Otpor…decided that the movement would have no figureheads that would become media celebrities…. The group constantly rotated its official spokespeople, and it was careful to avoid developing a cult of personality around any individual.” (pp. 68-69)

   

5. Otpor set broad goals that allowed for wide ideological diversity within the movement. As Otpor leader Ivan Marovic put it, “We knew that defeating Milosevic and securing free and fair elections was something we could all agree on, so we agreed to put our other differences aside until Milosevic was gone.” (p. 70)

   

6. Otpor’s networks “were designed to give the greatest amount of autonomy possible to the greatest number of participants. But contrary to the assumption that decentralization means that anything goes, the opposite is arguably true: movements without centralized hierarchies often require even stronger guidelines and more explicit operating procedures if they are to be effective.” (p. 71)

Two key practices Otpor used to create and sustain its decentralized, yet cohesive movement were 1) frontloading, and 2) mass training.

“Frontloading” is the art and practice of creating well-defined norms and behaviors for a movement or organization. In Otpor’s case, “the founders had intentionally created a sort of DNA that was replicated as Otpor chapters spread. They established this DNA in many ways: they had a clear strategy, a brand, and a vision of what they wanted to accomplish. They had a distinct set of tactics that people could pick up and use, as well as well-defined boundaries within which local teams expressed their independence.” (p. 72)

Mass training is just what it sounds like: a commitment to intensive leadership training on a massive scale. In Otpor’s case, “a typical training stretched over the course of a week, in Monday-through-Friday evening sessions. Discussions started in an office or classroom often continued at a bar later the same night. At the end of the week of training, new recruits were asked to plan and execute an action themselves, putting the skills they had just learned to immediate use. Only then were they officially considered members of the movement.

The number of people in a given session might be small—seven or eight participants was typical—but, when repeated hundreds of times, the trainings integrated extraordinary numbers.” (p. 76)

There’s an old organizing axiom: “Meet with a plan, not for a plan.” In other words, don’t waste people’s time by calling them to a meeting to try to figure out what they’re doing next. Instead, do the work of leadership that involves putting together a proposal for action that the group can then debate, amend, and adopt.

Otpor’s goal was to take down Milosevic, and to have free and fair elections. And they had a plan. Their plan was to start with small acts of defiance, then call for elections, then unite the opposition behind one candidate, then get out the vote for that candidate, monitor the election results, and finally (because they knew the regime would not give up power without a fight), be prepared to call for mass noncompliance (up to and including a general strike) to enforce the election’s outcome.

In the end Otpor accomplished its goal. Milosevic lost the election, and the massive nonviolent resistance to the regime’s attempts to hold onto power resulted in a democratic government taking office.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

(One in a series of posts on Mark & Paul Engler’s 2016 book, This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping The Twenty-First Century.)

In the United States, organizing for change has evolved along two largely separate tracks. (This is not true in all countries/cultures.) For example, civil rights historian Charles Payne, in his book I’ve Got The Light Of Freedom, distinguishes between the “community mobilizing” tradition and the “community organizing” tradition that flowed together to create the Mississippi freedom movement of the 1960s.

The Englers use Saul Alinsky and Frances Fox Piven as stand-ins for what they call the “structure” and “mass protest” schools of organizing, and summarize Alinsky’s and Piven’s basic stances as follows:

“Alinsky was a guru in the art of the slow, incremental building of community groups. Like organizers in the labor movement, his approach focused on person-by-person recruitment, careful leadership development, and the creation of stable institutional bodies that could leverage the power of their members over time….”

“Piven, in contrast, has become a leading defender of unruly broad-based disobedience, undertaken outside the confines of any formal organization. She emphasizes the disruptive power of mass mobilizations that coalesce quickly, draw in participants not previously involved in organizing, and leave established elites scrambling to adjust to a new political landscape.” (p. 32)

The Englers summarize Alinsky’s teachings as they’re laid out in his two major works, Reveille For Radicals and Rules For Radicals, and as they’ve been codified by his disciples in the years since his death (in 1972).

“The Alinskyite tradition held that community organizations should be pragmatic, nonpartisan, and ideologically diverse—that they should put pressure on all politicians, not express loyalty to any.” (p. 36)

“Beyond setting expectations for time frame, a dedication to ‘organizations not movements’ is reflected in several other Alinskyite norms….

First, Alinsky believed in identifying local centers of power, particularly churches, and using them as bases for community groups….

Second, instead of picking a galvanizing, morally loaded, and possibly divisive national issue to organize around—as might a mass movement—Alinsky advocated action around narrow local demands….

Throughout his career, Alinsky spoke the language of self-interest. He looked to build democratic power among people seeking to improve the conditions of their own lives. He was suspicious of volunteer activists who were motivated by abstract values or ideology, individuals drawn to high-profile moral crusades. Such suspicion would become a third norm in the Alinskyite tradition related to its distrust of ‘movements’….

The community organizers who took up Alinsky’s mantle were burnt on short-term protest, and they were willing to pursue a less glamorous route to change. What did they want? Lasting, community-based reform. When did they want it? Over the long haul. (pp. 37-39)

Piven, along with her long-time colleague and husband Richard Cloward, laid out her views on social movements and change most famously in Poor People’s Movements, a detailed study of four 20th century cases of mass protest leading to change in the US—-“unemployed workers early in the Great Depression, the industrial strikes that gave rise to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) later in the 1930s, the civil rights movement in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, and the activism of the National Welfare Rights Organization in the 1960s and 1970s”. (p. 45)

From their studies, Piven and Cloward concluded that “poor people could achieve little through the routines of conventional electoral and interest group politics” and that left them with “what we called disruption, the breakdowns that resulted when people defied the rules and institutional routines that ordinarily governed life.” (p. 45)

What’s more, they argued “not only that formal structures failed to produce disruptive outbreaks but also that these structures actually detracted from mass protest when it did occur.” (p. 45)

As the Englers elaborate, “…(A)lthough bureaucratic institutions may have benefits, they also bring constraints.Because organizations have to worry about self-preservation, they become averse to risk taking. Because they enjoy some access to formal avenues of power, they ten to overestimate what they can accomplish from inside the system. As a result, they forget the disruptive energy that propelled them to power to begin with, and so they often end up playing a counterproductive role.” (pp. 46-47)

They also note that Alinsky and Piven, more than many of their followers, recognize the value in each other’s approaches. Piven once stated, “Organizations are not movements. But organizations can institutionalize and legalize the gains won through disruptive mobilization.” (p. 50) Alinsky, for his part, recognized that “using mass mobilization to produce spikes in social unrest is a process that follows a different set of rules than conventional organization…and yet (he) was willing to experiment with their possibilities.” (p. 55)

The Englers point out that both Alinsky and Piven offer tantalizingly (at best) or frustratingly (at worst) vague insights into how large-scale change happens. At the end of Poor People’s Movements for example, Piven & Cloward write, “One can never predict with certainty when the ‘heavings and rumblings of the social foundations’ will force up large-scale defiance, but if organizers and leaders want to help those movements emerge, they must always proceed as if protest were possible. They may fail. The time may not be right. But then, they may sometimes succeed.” (pp. 55-56)

What did they want? Large-scale defiance. When did they want it? Whenever it might possibly emerge. (Not exactly a rousing call to arms.)

“The recognition of structure and mass protest as two distinct forms of action allows for dialogue between different schools of thought—and it ultimately creates the potential for a synthesis,” conclude the Englers. (p. 56) That synthesis, they suggest, is a hybrid model of organizing called civil resistance.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

“(U)prising can be a craft, and this…craft can change the world.” (p. 283)

In their 2016 book, This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping The Twenty-First Century, brothers Mark and Paul Engler are writing to and for people who want to change the world.

Drawing on Gandhi’s Salt March and Dr. King’s Birmingham campaign, as well as dozens of more recent examples, they make a richly documented, carefully argued case for the importance and utility of what they call “momentum-driven organizing”—well-planned, disciplined, intentional organizing campaigns specifically aimed at creating unarmed revolts that overturn longstanding power structures.

This Is An Uprising is filled with inspirational (and cautionary) tales of real-life nonviolent campaigns from around the world (though with a US focus) in the past century, and in particular, during the last 25 years. It’s a book that can be read quickly, but bears (indeed, even cries out for) careful and detailed examination.

In that spirit, this will be just the first in a series of posts on the book; and will conclude with a paragraph from This Is An Uprising that sums up and defines what momentum-driven organizing is:

“Momentum-driven organizing uses the tools of civil resistance to consciously spark, amplify, and harness mass protest. It highlights the importance of hybrid organizations, such as Otpor and SCLC, which can build decentralized networks to sustain protest mobilizations through multiple waves of activity. It goes beyond transactional goals by also advancing a transformational agenda, and it wins by swaying public opinion and pulling pillars of support. It is attentive to the symbolic properties of campaigns, showing how these can sometimes be just as important as instrumental demands, if not more so. It uses disruption, sacrifice, and escalation to build tension and bring overlooked issues into the public spotlight. It aspires, at its peak, to create moments of the whirlwind, when outbreaks of decentralized action extend far beyond the institutional limits of any one organization. It is willing to polarize public opinion and risk controversy with bold protests, but it maintains nonviolent discipline to ensure that it does not undermine broad-based support for its cause. And it is conscious of the need to work with other organizing traditions in order to institutionalize gains and foster alternative communities that can sustain resistance over the long term.” (p. 283)

If that paragraph seems filled with jargon….well, it is. Every field of human knowledge develops and uses its own jargon so that practitioners can have a common vocabulary and understand what they’re talking about. It’s the task of This Is An Uprising—and of subsequent posts in this series—to clarify, define and illustrate what the Englers’ terminology means and how it can be used.

Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com

There’s the world before Lonnie Donegan first recorded and then performed “Rock Island Line” all over Britain and the United States; and there’s the world after Donegan played “Rock Island Line”.

Illuminating those two worlds, how they came to be, and how they are both separated from and linked to each other, is the splendidly accomplished purpose of Billy Bragg’s Roots, Radicals & Rockers: How Skiffle Changed The World.

“It was skiffle that put guitars into the hands of the war babies, and this book aims to place that empowering moment in its proper context in our post-war culture, illuminating the period when British pop music, for so long a jazz- based confection aimed at an adult market, was transformed into the guitar-led music for teens that would go on to conquer the world in the 1960s.” (p. xv)

But first you may be wondering: what is skiffle?

The answer depends on where and when you ask. If you’re asking on the South Side of Chicago in the 1920s, a “skiffle” one of several slang terms (also, a “gouge”, a “percolator” or a “boogie”, among others) for a rent party organized by one of the new migrants from the South trying to make ends meet. “(D)uring the years of prohibition, a tenant looking to rustle up a month’s rent would brew up some moonshine liquor, engage the services of a barrelhouse piano player and charge people twenty-five cents for admission.” (p. 92)

However, if you’re in London in the 1950s and trying to figure out what to call that new music played by the guitarist, bass player and washboard/percussionist during a set break in the middle of a traditional jazz band’s performance, you asked Bill Colyer, a musician and proprietor of London’s finest jazz record shop. Colyer (whose brother Ken is the leading English expert/proponent of both traditional New Orleans jazz and this new sound that’s clearly not “jazz” and clearly not like any other music in the British Isles at the time)  digs deep within his voluminous knowledge of American music and tells you it’s “skiffle”, “in an instant (changing) the meaning of the word, from arcane black American slang for a rent party to a contemporary British term describing guitar-led, roots-based music”. (p. 95)

Pete Townshend saw Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen play one of Britain’s first skiffle gigs. “(W)hat made a lasting impression on him was the sight of the guitarist taking control of the gig by bringing his instrument to the front of the stage. In that moment, he grasped the enormity of what was happening. ‘This instrument was going to change the world. For me, this was absolutely massive because my father was a saxophone player. I could see the end of my father’s world—I was going to get this guitar and it was going to be bye-bye, old-timer, and that’s exactly what happened.‘” (p. 90)

As befits a good leftist, Bragg is keenly attuned to the social, political and economic structures that helped produce skiffle in particular and the British youth culture of the 1950s in general. Among them:

   
• the American Federation of Musicians/Musicians Union mutual ban that kept US and English musicians from performing in each others’ countries from the early 1930s well into the 1950s;

   

• the mandatory 18 month national service conscription that affected every young British man from 1948-60;

   

• the explosion of “skiffle bars” in city neighborhoods (20 in Soho alone by 1957) that catered to the growing number of teenagers with disposable income;

   

• the explosion of skiffle groups (an estimated 30-50,000 active in 1957) and their concomitant demand for cheap guitars (“I estimate that this year over a quarter of a million will be imported into the country, compared with about 6,000 in 1950” said the managing director of one of Britain’s largest musical instrument firms in 1956) (p. 303).

In the closing chapters of Roots, Radicals & Rockers Bragg pays off on the bet made by the book’s subtitle, illustrating how skiffle did, in fact, change the world:

   
• Skifflers were there at the founding of what became the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) (p. 348);

   

• Skifflers and rockers took quick and collective action in response to the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, leading to the creation of the Stars Campaign for Interracial Friendship (SCIF), the first of what has become a commonplace reaction over the past two generations by popular musicians and artists in the wake of social, political, economic and natural disasters (p. 354);

   

• One branch of the skiffle movement explored more deeply into the roots of music like “Rock Island Line”, “Midnight Special” and “Frankie and Johnny” and mutated into the folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s (p. 362);

   

• Another branch, upon discovering that acoustic guitar player and “folk singer” Muddy Waters of Mississippi in the early 1940s had become the Cadillac-driving electric guitar-playing bluesman of Chicago by the late 1950s, poured themselves into rhythm & blues, and produced the British blues revival of the 1960s (p. 376);

   

• And with the end of national service conscription in 1958, skifflers John, Paul and George from Liverpool spent the next four years furiously working on their craft, finding a drummer and becoming <del>the Blackjacks<del&gt, <del>the Quarrymen</del&gt, <del>Johnny & the Moondogs</del&gt, <del>the Beetles</del&gt, <del>the Silver Beetles</del&gt, <del>the Silver Beatles</del&gt, the Beatles (perhaps you’ve heard of them?)…as did untold thousands of other young men who, no longer being forced to form regiments could now form bands. (p. 387)

And it wasn’t just those who were teens in the 1950s who were changed by skiffle. Bragg traces skiffles’ influence into the mid-1970s—when bands with roots in skiffle like the Bee Gees and ABBA finally hit it big, and when young DIY rockers like Dr. Feelgood, the Sex Pistols, Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Clash and the Buzzcocks “with their menacing demeanour and sparse, spiky sound” created their own new sound called punk rock. (p. 391)

Roots, Radicals & Rockers is an act of exploration and gratitude by Billy Bragg to his musical forebears, the people who created the musical atmosphere in which he grew up, found his voice and made his own way. It’s also a lovely example of someone in the last third of his life taking advantage of the opportunities that life has provided him to do something new (write a book), and to do it in a way that pays tribute past generations for the benefit of the generations coming after him.

Crossposted at: https:masscommons.wordpress.com

Josh Marshall is hosting a characteristically thoughtful and multi-faceted intra-party debate/discussion on “The Critical Question Facing Democrats & The Court”. Click over to TPM and read the varied opinions of Marshall, Theda Skocpol and TPM reader “MS” for how Senate Democrats should respond when Trump nominates Justice Anthony Kennedy’s successor; then come back for a broader historical and strategic perspective.

(Pause.)

Welcome back.

This debate exists because Democrats today are in the rare—but not unprecedented—position of enjoying majority popular support but minority governmental power:

   
• They’ve won the popular vote in 6 of the last 7 presidential elections.

   

• They routinely win an overall majority of ballots cast for House seats.

   

• Democratic senators represent a substantial majority of the nation’s population (Republicans represent a substantial majority of the nation’s acreage);

   

• On a broad range of political issues—everything from taxation to immigration to health care to civil rights—Democrats have majority popular support; and,

   

• Their support is growing as a demographic wave of millennials and the following generation slowly and inexorably replaces baby boomers and their parents;

   

• And yet they hold no levers of power in the federal government.

Since this situation is both rare and runs counter to our national myths, Democrats are (understandably) scrambling to make sense of their situation and how to respond to it. Here’s where history can be of some help:

   
1. This has happened before. It happened in the 1850s when the electoral college and the 3/5 rule kept slaveholders in power despite a growing anti-slavery majority (fueled in part by mass immigration from Ireland and Germany). And it happened in the 1920s when a rural, white, Protestant minority desperately clung to power in the face of mass migration from southern and eastern Europe, and the beginnings of the Great Migration by African-Americans out of the South.

   

2. If history is any guide, there’s no way this ends without massive and disruptive change. The conflicts of the1850s resulted in the Civil War and Reconstruction. The 1920s ended with the Great Depression, followed by World War II.

   

3. Again, if history is any guide, the changes wrought by the emerging majority when it takes power will be worth it. Or at least, they’ll be considered worth it by that new majority—e.g., the end of slavery, the New Deal, the defeat of fascism.

When it comes to the tactics of a SCOTUS nomination, Democrats ultimately have no power to control anything about the process. A Republican president will decide who to nominate and when. A Republican Senate will decide what hearings, debates and votes to hold and when. If Republicans unite behind a nominee, Democrats are powerless to stop that person from becoming a Supreme Court justice.

Democrats do have the power to decide on what terms and with which tactics they will engage the fight over this Supreme Court nomination; and by doing so, to make it as costly as possible for Republicans to seat a Trump nominee on the Court.

That’s what Pelosi did when W. Bush tried to end Social Security. She united her side, fought, and thereby made it clear that any weakening of Social Security would belong solely to the Republicans.

A Supreme Court confirmation battle differs from a legislative fight; and there’s every reason to think Trump will eventually fill Justice Kennedy’s seat. The strategic imperative for Democrats is to make that victory as costly as possible for Republicans.

Early in the Civil War, after the Battle of Shiloh and its unprecedented casualties, President Lincoln replied to those who called on him to fire Gen. Grant, “I can’t spare this man; he fights.“

Better than any general of his era, Grant understood the fundamental power dynamics of the Civil War. The Union had at its command more people and more resources. Therefore, its strategy ought to be to unite its forces, and take the fight to the secessionists, fighting on terrain as favorable as possible, but fighting regardless.

Personally, I think fighting this nominee on the grounds that no president being investigated for obstruction of justice and conspiracy with a hostile foreign power to defraud the US of free and fair elections is the way to go. But what I think doesn’t matter. What matters for Democrats is that they unite and fight; and then, like Grant, that they do it again and again and again.

It’s the only way a powerless majority ever takes power.

Crossposted at: masscommons.wordpress.com