ALEC and DC Voting Rights

In recent weeks, one of the strongest (and yet least known about) pillars of the conservative business lobby infrastructure, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has suddenly been thrust into the light. In the wake of the Trayvon Martin murder and the subsequent scrutiny of the "Stand Your Ground" law under which George Zimmerman claims to have acted, progressive activists turned their attentions to ALEC, which has played a key role in pushing such legislation nationwide. In taking on ALEC, groups such as Colorofchange (an online civil rights group that has spearheaded this work) began targeting corporations who pay dues as part of a membership to ALEC. The effort continues to move forward, having succeeded in winning the exit from ALEC of major companies such as Pepsi, Coca Cola, Kraft and McDonalds.

This is not the first time progressives have turned their eyes towards ALEC. During the fight in Wisconsin in early 2011 activists raised ALEC's profile and were joined in this effort by eminent UW-Madison historian William Cronon who wrote an excellent piece - and one that got him into a fair bit of trouble - that included some historical background on ALEC. Yet, there remains very little about the organization's past compared with other mainstays of the conservative movement such as the Heritage Foundation.

In investigating this, I went through the Washington Post's archives, along with a long historical paper from DC Vote and found that, at least in their pages, ALEC first major national foray came in the late 1970s, when it took the lead in fighting to prevent Washington, D.C. from gaining national legislative representation. In 1978 the U.S. House and Senate (flush with Democrats at the time) passed overwhelmingly an amendment to the constitution, the D.C. Voting Rights Amendment, which would have given D.C. the status of a state with two senators and one house member.

The rising conservative movement of the 1970s soon sprang into action, with ALEC at the head. ALEC quickly produced a fourteen page report for state legislators outlining its opposition and then spent roughly $30,000 (in 1978 dollars) to mail the booklet to every state legislator in the country. In late 1978 ALEC expended another $15,000 to bring fifty state legislators to D.C. to strategize on defeating the amendment.

The right-wing critique of the D.C. Voting Rights Amendment rode along two main thrusts. Some of the critique came wrapped in traditional constitutional arguments, stating that the law simply countermanded the intention of the Constitution that D.C. not possess the same political rights as a state. At the same time, ALEC and conservatives responded to the strong civil rights messaging of the pro-amendment side (who argued that lack of voting rights for D.C. was a civil rights issue, considering the city was majority African-American). Using rhetoric that has increasingly become a mainstay for conservatives (including famously used by figures such as George Wallace), opponents of D.C. voting rights accused supporters of employing reverse racism. ALEC head and Arizona state representative Donna Carlson stated that amendment backers were employing "the basest, indeed racist, tactics in order to railroad the amendment," further adding that critics of the amendment were "being branded as redneck racists and enemies of black Americans."

ALEC members also devised a key aspect of the legislative strategy for defeating the amendment. It called upon conservative legislators in states that did not ratify the amendment to send to the federal government "formal resolutions of disapproval" which ALEC stated "could not be rescinded, and thus would bind a state permanently against the amendment." ALEC's plan was put into motion first in Arizona (where its head was a state representative). In doing so, ALEC also took a firm stance in the ongoing conflict between moderates and the right within the Republican Party. Many Republicans backed D.C. voting rights, including Senators Robert Dole and Barry Goldwater. Meanwhile, New Right figures such as Senator Orrin Hatch and conservative intellectual Michael Novack, along with the Heritage Foundation and ALEC actively opposed.

It is important to note ALEC alone did not kill D.C. voting rights. The campaign in favor was often poorly run and the civil rights messaging proved less powerful in the states than the national level. The racial politics cut in varying ways, with United Latin American Citizens, the main Mexican-American civil rights group opposing based on fears the new (almost certainly) black representatives would "give blacks a disproportionate in lobbying for federal jobs and programs over Hispanics." Still, much of the general opposition was turned into actionable steps in good part by ALEC's efforts. By 1985 the amendment had only passed in sixteen states and the time frame for its passage had expired.

As the campaign against ALEC moves forward, it is helpful to illuminate how, for decades, the new conservative infrastructure built particularly in the 1970s has and continues to profoundly shape our politics.

SCOTUS and Progressives: The Civil Rights Act of 1875

The Civil Rights Act of 1875: Signed by President Grant (whose reputation is thankfully receiving a positive revision based on his admirable record of trying to continue Reconstruction policies aiding freed slaves), this legislation stated that "all persons regardless of race or color . . . shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement." In its original form, schools were also included, but taken out at the last moment. At the same time, that this legislation was proposed and enacted is impressive, in good part because its provisions challenged racism in the North, not just the legacies of slavery in the South.

Although enacted, the Civil Rights Act of 1875's enforcement was weak at best. That is, until it reached the Supreme Court in 1883 in a series of cases dubbed the "Civil Rights Cases." This suite of suits eventually came down to an 8-1 vote which overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The basis for it being declared unconstitutional was the Act's scope, which applied not only to state government actions, but those of private actors. Writing for the majority, Justice Joseph Bradley wrote that, "the wrongful act of an individuals . . . is simply a private wrong."

The overturning of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 helped facilitate the creation of Jim Crow policies in the Southern states by allowing for segregationist policies to be created in the private sphere. Furthermore, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was the last federal civil rights legislation passed until the Civil Rights Act of 1957. While the great triumph of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 contained numerous sections expanding far beyond the 1875 law (such as sections on employment and the inclusion of women), if one examines the language on access to accommodations, the victory of 1964 essentially restored what was achieved almost a century prior.

To be blunt, the Court's ruling in this case was an important piece of thrusting back the fight for legal equality for all citizens by almost one hundred years.

The Open Veins of Panem

A Note: If you haven't read The Hunger Games, parts of this post won't make much sense. Also, you should read The Hunger Games - they're quite good.

There are many interpretations and analogies one can pull from Suzanne Collins' rich chronicles of a young woman named Katniss Everdeen and her struggles in a dystopian United States (now called Panem) against its repressive government. However, one plausible metaphor throughout is that The Hunger Games actually serves as a sustained look at a left-wing set of ideas about the workings of the global economy known as dependency theory - a set of ideas which had tangible and significant policy implications for Global North-South relations in the 1970s.

Let us start with the basic concept of dependency theory: that the world is separated into three types of countries. The first are the "core" countries, the rich nations of the U.S. and Western Europe. The second are those in the semi-periphery, countries relatively better off than many, but still poor. The majority of nations in this understanding are those of the periphery, countries like a Bolivia or most anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. In The Hunger Games there are fairly direct parallels: the Capitol represents the core, District 1 is semi-periphery and Districts such as Katniss' District 12 are the periphery.

The central argument of dependency theory holds that European colonialism fundamentally altered the economies of nations on the periphery to service the interests of the core - as the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galleano put it in his now infamous book, The Open Veins of Latin America, "our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison." While aspects of this analysis were quite old, it became a formalized set of academic writings beginning in the mid-1960s and then popularized by figures including Andre Gunder Frank, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Norman Girvan.

For these and other authors, dependency is created by the core nations through a wide array of methods. Core nations, in this understanding, derived great wealth primarily from mining and agriculture conducted in peripheral nations - think of silver mines in Bolivia or the giant sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean. In doing this, core countries transformed the entire economies of peripheral lands towards benefiting the core; the richest agricultural land was geared towards export crops rather than food, the wealth of gold and silver sent abroad rather than providing benefits domestically. Dependency theorists, especially the more sophisticated ones understood that Europeans did not do this alone - they took advantage of existing divisions in these societies and forged alliances with (or helped build up) local elites who benefited from the overall system. This allowed for some development in the periphery, but always one closely watched by the core (for example, by controlling access to advanced technologies).

The number and depth of parallels to Collins' description of the Districts is striking. In The Hunger Games each of the twelve district has a product which it produces for export to the Capitol, seeing little of the benefits at home. The district that Katniss Everdeen comes from, District 12, produces coal - yet at the beginning of the first novel she remarks that the district is "lucky if we get two or three hours of electricity a day." Similarly, Collins captures some of the nuances in the better dependency theory pieces differentiating social conditions within the "periphery." District 12 itself is broken into several areas, with two of the most important being the Seam (where Katniss is from and the poorest sector) and the Merchant section, which has some level of material prosperity and whose residents (such as the mayor) maintain a certain social distance from the rest of the population.

Furthermore, the Capitol's rules for the districts on issues such as hunting (which is forbidden) nicely fit into the broad model of dependency theory positing the core will take active steps to reduce the autonomy of the periphery (in the U.S. for example, many mining communities in the late 19th/early 20th century did not pay workers in regular dollars, but "company scrip" redeemable only at company owned stores).

Who knew a popular young adult series would be a leading educator in radical economic theories?

Mike Daisey's English Abolitionist Predecessor

The controversy over the fabrications storyteller Mike Daisey incorporated in his tale of abuses in factories in China making Apple products has exploded over the past few days. While nothing fundamental about the criticisms of Apple is affected by Daisey's lies, it is still a surprising and tough revelation to grapple with. My fear is that his stories will become like the "Climategate e-mails"; a rhetorical foil that opponents to improving labor conditions at Apple's suppliers will use against all opponents, essentially saying "well, Mike Daisey told some lies so how can we believe anything we hear about Apple?"

Figures such as Daisey, great storytellers who have (or may have in the case of our subject for today) lied about parts of their stories to make them more impactful in a social justice fight have precedents. One of them is the man above, Olaudah Equiano, one of the great heroes of the anti-slavery movement in the United Kingdom which spanned roughly from the 1780s to the 1830s. Equiano appeared relatively early, a freed slave living in London who connected with white anti-slavery figures to aid the cause. This he did primarily through the release in 1789 of his autobiography, the Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, which quickly became a bestseller among the English public. The book told of Equiano's youth, his capture by an opposing African nation and then his sale to European slave traders, followed by the horrors of the Middle Passage and slavery in North America.

The book galvanized the public and was a key piece of the larger organizing efforts made by anti-slavery activists in these years. Equiano himself was a brilliant organizer; among other tactics he offered discounts to anyone who bought more than six copies and he placed model petitions at the start of each copy.

Part of the success of the book emerged from how Equiano framed it; while stories of slavery’s horrors were prominent, much of the book detailed Equiano's life as the personal servant of a British naval captain through a series of Horatio Hornblower/Master and Commander-type adventures. As one example: Equiano recounts the story of how he went on an expedition surveying near the North Pole. While on land, he became separated from the rest of the crew and ran into a polar bear who he fought to the death, killing it with his own bare hands. His story also emphasized his conversion to Christianity, his education, and his love of England to build sympathy among his predominately white English readership.

Both at the time and since, questions have been raised about the veracity of Equiano's story. In particular, historian Vincent Carretta has argued based on baptism records that Equiano was born in South Carolina (here is a handy chart detailing both sides of the debate). Carretta has argued that Equiano likely relied on stories he heard from other slaves to fill-in the first part of the book to make himself and the case of African slaves more compelling. While we will likely never know for sure, Equiano's Narrative is still taught in many a college and he remains firmly in the pantheon of abolitionist icons. That is not to argue that he was right or that Mike Daisey's fabrications (which of course are proven) are unimportant. But to not grapple with the clear effectiveness of an Olauduh Equiano or Mike Daisey is to ignore tough, but needed conversations over the mechanics of social change.

Actually, Rutherford Hayes IS Important

Rutherford B. Hayes is getting a lot of attention these days thanks to President Obama, who in a recent speech, related an anecdote about our nineteenth president to make a point about openness to new technologies. The story tells how Hayes, upon being shown an early model of the telephone; remarked: "It's a great invention but who would ever want to use one?" Obama then added his quip: "That's why he's not on Mt. Rushmore."

Apparently this is not accurate - Hayes welcomed new technologies and there is no proof he ever said that. However, all snark and needed corrections aside, having Rutherford B. Hayes enter the modern conversation is still useful. While the popular imagination essentially views the string of presidents from Lincoln to Roosevelt as a somewhat indistinguishable mush, this is not accurate. Hayes in particular played an important role in solidifying conservatism in the United States. This was not because he was a strong ideologue, but someone who acted with great expediency and in a difficult political environment. However one apportions his exact role, it's impossible to question he presided over two major moments that helped set the course for U.S. politics: the end of federal Reconstruction and the great railroad strike of 1877.

Hayes of course came to the presidency after an incredibly close election and the "corrupt bargain" that followed. In the aftermath, Hayes put to a final close federal Reconstruction, pulling the last federal soldiers out of the South. To blame Hayes for "ending" Reconstruction is an overstatement - the program of aiding the former slaves and bringing democracy and modernization to the South had been suffering for some time. Some of this had to due with economic downturns, some with the desire of white northerners and southerners to put the war behind them, and also from the continued terrorist violence of white paramilitary groups in the South (if you want to find something anathema to U.S. ideals in the 1876 election, look less to Hayes and more to the White Line and other terrorists who suppressed the black vote with violence).

That said, by ending federal Reconstruction, Hayes signaled to the nation the essential abandonment by the federal government of any role in aiding the freed slaves to make a fairer society, thus paving the path for Jim Crow governance to overtake the whole south and entrench itself for almost a century. I would argue few events more dramatically altered the course of this nation's politics - by allowing a white reactionary elite to reclaim power in the South, a deep conservatism took hold, one which radical Reconstruction had begun to challenge. The South became a national filibuster of sorts on all manner of progressive change, from helping to undermine the late 19th century Populists to Southern Democrats constricting the New Deal's horizons to the South halting the spread of mass unionization in the 1930s and 1940s.

Hayes was also the first president to employ the full power of the U.S. federal government in strike-breaking - specifically by deploying troops to end the epic Great Railroad Strike of 1877. While Hayes was not a mustache-twirling villain in this case (he expressed real respect and sympathy for the strikers as individuals), he showed, at most, a patronizing sympathy to the workers' demands or to the very idea of collective action or industrial democracy. Writing in his diary shortly after the strike, Hayes remarked that "Every man has a right to decide for himself the question of wages, but no man has a right to decide that question for other men." His actions set a precedent for massive government interventionism in the workings of the free market through the regular dispatch of troops (federal and state) to crush strikes and other worker protests and the constant use of court injunctions and other legal mechanisms to undermine labor organizing.

These sentiments provide insight into the larger trend within the GOP of this time in which classic liberalism and laissez-faire ideology were gaining prominence. Not that the Republican Party's more progressive strand, represented in the 1860s and 1870s by figures such as Benjamin Wade and Thaddeus Stevens and in the early twentieth century by politicians like Robert La Follette, had disappeared from the party. However, such perspectives were being pushed into the minority and would suffer a major blow in 1912 when Taft's candidacy helped cement the conservatives as the leaders of the party.

Rutherford B. Hayes is an important figure for understanding how U.S. politics have been shaped - let's not get caught up on whether he liked the telephone.

International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day, which appears an especially needed moment to reflect and recommit to women's equality in the face of (in the United States) of the recent attacks on women, particularly around reproductive health. Of note about March 8 is the strikingly similar history it shares with another international holiday, May Day or International Workers' Day. Both started in the United States by radicals on the left, in the case of International Women's Day it was the idea of women involved with the Socialist Party. Both became globally-recognized days when leftists in Europe and elsewhere looked to commemorate tragedies occurring in the U.S. (the Haymarket massacre in the case of May Day, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in the case of International Women's Day). Then, particularly with the claiming of the holiday by the Bolshevik revolution, the holiday quickly lost cache in the United States.

Remembering this history is important for a few reasons. First, much as the conservative right tries to label everything liberals do as radicalism, progressives should recognize that part of the proud history of the left (broadly speaking) has been radical forces pushing the big visions and often pointing to injustices before anyone else. Second, the origins of International Women's Day remind us that to concentrate too much on specific issue silos (labor, feminism, GLBTQ, etc.) makes us miss the interconnections among them.

This is not to say that one must devote oneself to all issues equally, but to at least acknowledge the relationships is vital. Certainly on the conservative right such relations are recognized; one can see this in the fact that many of the same GOP governors who have flexed their legislative muscles in attacks on labor rights have also targeted women's health. At the same time, it is important not to become carried away by the overlaps, as with those who attempt to create a model where one core issue sits as a sun, with other issues as mere orbiting planets, miss the point. For example, the marginalization of women has strong economic components - that does not mean it is a mere function of our economic system (newsflash: the oppression of women is a much older feature of society than capitalism). And it is only natural that personal interests and experiences will direct people to specific causes. We should instead always endeavor, whether it is in how we frame a public address or how a coalition is constructed, to at least be aware of how interdependent all of these causes are.

Conservatives believe in conservative ideas

For many liberals in the U.S., one of the great recurring hopes is that a moment will come when social conservatives lay down the culture wars and realize that their real interests lie with supporting progressive economic policies. Such a hope grows from a view, most famously expressed in Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas, that predominately white working-class voters are being suckered by "culture war" issues into voting GOP. More fundamentally, it lies in an analysis of the right-wing in the U.S. that sees a distinct "social conservative" base as opposed to the "economic conservatives," who are portrayed as small in numbers, rich in dollars.

Such views are overly simplistic and misunderstand a basic point: conservative activists believe in conservative ideas and such notions for many are based in a worldview that easily encompasses "economic" and "social" concerns. As Seth Ackerman points out in a terrific piece at Jacobin on Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson's new book on the Tea Party, "liberals have spent too long condescending to conservatives as if they were the perpetual victims of a bait-and-switch scam." For the thing is, the "social conservative" wing of the party which came roaring to the fore of GOP politics in the late 1970s did not focus on "cultural" issues in distinction to economics, but saw them as wrapped together in an ideological whole. As Michael Sean Winter's argues in his new biography of Jerry Falwell, many on the religious right always viewed laissez-faire capitalist ideas and social conservatism as deeply intertwined, with important origins in mutual hatred of communism.

While the story of the interconnections between the Christian right and free-market ideology has many facets, one piece of it involves conservative Protestants' reaction to the leftward shift of many white mainline Protestant churches in the 1970s on economics, and particularly their challenge to multinational corporations. Starting in the mid and late 1960s, particularly in response to the black freedom struggle, many Protestant churches began looking institutionally, financially, and morally, at their place in the larger economy. The role of church endowments became of special interest and by the early 1970s, many churches were seeing church investments as a tool for fighting for justice.

One prime manifestation of this came in 1974 when National Council of Churches merged two existing projects to create the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. ICCR helped church groups and denominations use shareholder resolutions and other means to challenge corporate policies domestically and overseas. Most prominently, ICCR and the churches took on U.S. multinational corporations over investments made in South Africa under apartheid. Furthermore, it was ICCR that helped to launch the Nestle boycott in the late 1970s, which many corporations (as well as conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation) viewed as a major front in what was seen as a national and global "war" on the free market in these years.

In response, in the late 1970s and through the 1980s, a number of conservative religious thinkers connected to the larger "religious right" began actively formulating arguments tying Christianity to pro-market values. This was an important part of creating the overall ideological message of the Religious Right. For example, in 1982, Catholic conservative thinker (an important part of Falwell's legacy being the uniting of Catholic and Protestant conservatives), released his book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, constructing a theologically-based argument for capitalism. Jerry Falwell's newsletter the Journal-Champion in its early years carried numerous articles defending corporations from government regulators such as OSHA, tying into the sense within the U.S. corporate community that they were under attack at home by a combination of government regulators and leftist activist groups, such as ICCR. Such trends continue to this day; while the Tea Party at first was seen as an economics-focused libertarian uprising, with more careful research and with time the deep ideological and social links between much of the Tea Party base and the religious right have become apparent.

For political activists of all stripes, moving beyond easy cliches towards understanding your opponents is important, whether that is to create a more humanistic and understanding politics or to better crush them in future fights. Whatever the case, progressives should recognize that conservative ideas, as contradictory as one might think they seem, are their actual beliefs.

Thoughts on #OccupyWallStreet

I. Occupy Wall Street

In Warren Beatty's epic film Reds, there is a scene where journalist and communist activist John Reed debates the course of the still infant Bolshevik revolution with the anarchist Emma Goldman. While Reed has plunged into the work of aiding the Soviets, Goldman already recoils at the horrors being perpetrated by the Bolsheviks. Pensive and tired, Reed eventually answers her critiques by saying:

"It's just the beginning E.G. It's not happening the way we thought it would, it's not happening the way we wanted it to, but it's happening."

While Reed was dramatically wrong about the Soviet Union, his sentiments have something to say about responses to the ongoing mobilization known as #OccupyWallStreet. For progressives who have been hoping for some kind of public mass uprising against our financial overlords since the onset of the Great Recession, a couple hundred young, "activist-y" types camping out on Wall Street may seem far from the dream of a mass uprising by everyday people. Yet, this is what is actually happening, and it appears to be gaining momentum as local unions and other activist groups join in. As Mark Engler details in a very thoughtful piece at Dissent magazine, the protestors have done a number of things "right" - especially on point I would say is how protestors have made their general youth into an advantage. Rather than seeming like spoiled kids, they are pointing to how the finance-led, deregulated economy and the Great Recession are betraying the implicit notion in the U.S. that the nation's society and economy will build opportunities for subsequent generations.

A lively debate continues to rage over the protests, particularly over what their demands are and should be. This is a vital dialogue to have and I appreciate the urgency of those demanding more concreteness from the protests. That said, looking historically, often more important than demands has been momentum. Such mobilizations have long been a target of frustration and scorn from sympathetic observers and activists. In the lead up to the American Revolution, street protests became commonplace, but members of the Revolutionary elite typically viewed with apprehension such actions. Similarly, the first major street actions after the crash of 1929 were not run by wholesome grassroots activists, but were organized by cadres of the Communist and Socialist Parties. While it would have been preferable to have marches not organized by people (in the CPUSA case) looking to Stalin as their model, it was the communists who had the energy to get out and so something. If progressives want to shape the protests, they should do it directly - after all, this is an action emphasizing its internally democratic character!

II. A Modest Protest and History Suggestion

Given the Tea Party loves to reference history, it couldn't hurt for our side as well. One off the top of my head that is completely unoriginal, but counterintuitively might make a splash, is to have protests dress like the Tea Party. After all, why should conservatives have a monopoly on the Revolution? The American Revolution is all our inheritance - it is an event distant and distinct enough from today that for anyone to claim a direct political lineage is rather silly. Certainly, progressives and radicals have as much claim to the American Revolution and its ideals as anyone.

This is especially the case with the actual event of the Boston Tea Party. For one, the original action in Boston was essentially a demonstration against the collusion of government and high finance - the acts being protested were designed by the British crown to prop up the faltering British East India Company. Furthermore, the first post-Tea Party protest in U.S. history to explicitly reference that event came with demonstrations in the 1840s against foreclosures of New York farmers by banks - a slightly relevant historical dynamic for today.

The Fight for Reaction: Reconstruction and the Franchise

A new front in the modern Republican Party's effort to depress voter turnout has emerged from Pennsylvania, where the party seeks to alter the way the electoral college vote is counted to strengthen their hand. This comes along with a concentrated effort to restrict voting in a number of other key battleground states through restrictive voter ID bills (among other measures).

Such measures certainly fly in the face of the (generally agreed) U.S. consensus, built over our history, that democracy means people have easy access to the ballot. It also points to the way that reactionary forces in the nation's history have worked diligently to limit the vote to promote their agenda. No more dramatic example of this exists than the massive disenfranchisement of African-American voters that came as a core element of the rollback of Reconstruction in the 1870s and onward.

When discussing the fight and justice of African-American voting rights, we tend to disassociate access to the franchise from the political implications of its use. Civil rights leaders in the 1960s did not make partisan advantage a mainstay of their case; they rightly emphasized the basic immorality of denying people the right to vote in a nation which sees that power as core to its national identity. Yet, in pondering the implications of African-American men winning the right to vote in the late 1860s, and then losing it over the course of the next several decades, we should not only emphasize the basic civic and moral outrage, but the way these transformations affected the shape of American politics.

Put succinctly, it is certainly plausible, and I would say likely, that African-Americans' loss of the ballot box helped ensure an enduring and powerful conservatism at the heart of our politics. Counterfactuals are of course riddled with challenges. However, in the case of Reconstruction, we do not have to rely on pure speculation. After all, for several years in the late 1860s through the 1870s we can see how, particularly at the state level, politics would develop with the franchise available to African-American men. What one finds is a starkly different and certainly more progressive United States. Consider some of the programs and policies implemented by Reconstruction governments which included substantial African-American representation (this is all taken from pages 156 of Eric Foner's A Short History of Reconstruction):

• Public schools, hospitals, enitentiaries, and asylums for orphans and the insane were either established for the first time or whose funding was increased
  
• South Carolina funded medical care for poor citizens
• Alabama provided free legal counsel for indigent defendants
• Laws were changed expanding divorce rights, property rights for married women
• State legislatures excluded all manner of small farmers and workers from having their basic livelihoods upended by debt collectors
• Progressive taxation, primarily of large land holding implemented
  

Of course, not all policies passed by the Reconstruction governments were progressive or as extensive as one could hope. Republican governments in the South often did much to encourage big business investment through massive subsidies and cases of corruption were rampant. However, compared with the white-dominant governments that came after Reconstruction, it seems hard to argue that the trajectory of state politics in the South would have been as conservative with continued African-American enfranchisement. Remember the strength African-Americans as a voting bloc had in the South at this time; where they represented either major minorities or majorities in most of the former Confederacy (South Carolina during part of Reconstruction had a majority African-American state legislature, reflecting the state's demographics). At the national level, Reconstruction saw the election of a number of African-American congressman, as well as one Senator.

The massive step forward Reconstruction represented would never be fully reversed and to push affairs backward required a multifaceted effort. Examinations of the Civil War sometimes raise the question of why the Confederates did not adopt a guerrilla warfare approach near the conflict's end. Yet, in the late 1860s they did, only targeted specifically at African-Americans. The Ku Klux Klan was a domestic insurgent group, in some ways like a U.S. version of al-Qaeda in Iraq. KKK violence was often quite targeted, for example intensifying around election time to scare African-American voters from the polls. As reactionary elements in the South started to regain power, they moved to more "legal" means such as literacy tests and poll taxes. And thus, to this day, we still live in the shadow of a bright shining moment in our history, followed by a horrendous descent into darkness, one which took decades of struggle and blood to overcome.

FDR and Obama, Pt. III: Rhetoric

Drew Westin’s New York Times article on “Obama’s passion” marks one of the more recent in a long litany of pieces taking Obama to task for not employing the bully pulpit more sharply or constantly. Progressives have obvious reason to believe that Obama could wield real power by going out and giving more speeches. After all, Obama on the presidential campaign trail proved a remarkably powerful communicator; what other candidate has ever inspired a music video based solely on one of his speeches?

Here we find another area where Obama finds himself constantly compared with Franklin Roosevelt and deemed to fall short; particularly with regards to the strength of his speeches. Over and over one can find progressives bemoaning that Obama does not call out the Republicans by name or does not hit the banker class with more robust language. In many cases, Obama's timidity finds itself contrasted with Roosevelt's fire. Almost invariably, this leads to quotations from FDR’s “welcome their hatred” speech. This was the last address he gave during the 1936 campaign, delivered to a raucous crowd at Madison Square Garden. The key portion all progressives love to cite is this:

Fiery words for sure, some of the most radical rhetoric we’ve ever heard from a U.S. president. Here is the issue: Roosevelt did not go around giving speeches like this constantly. The context in which Roosevelt felt comfortable speaking such words is vital. He knew that he would win the 1936 election and by a wide margin. The audience for this speech almost certainly included much of his critical base in 1936: the rapidly expanding union movement, particularly the militantly progressive unions of the CIO.

Writers such as Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein have started to dub the idea that Obama could change everything through speeches the "magic bully pulpit." Their response is that presidential rhetoric rarely moves voters and can often prove counterproductive. There is a lot to this criticism. I would add that, in comparing Roosevelt and Obama, one should examine the media environment and technologies each worked within. Roosevelt literally had the ear of the nation through his constant fireside chats – he did not have to compete with hundreds of channels, Twitter, etc.

That said, one place where Obama seems noticeably weaker than Roosevelt is framing. Here I am not referring to one speech, but putting together a thematic narrative across many speeches and fireside chats (a number of which can be read here). Roosevelt as president pursued a wide range of policies, but wrapping them under the idea of a "new deal" gave some manner of coherence. In explaining why the U.S. needed a such a program, Roosevelt also acted like the college professor Obama actually was, and repeatedly explained the crisis, in terms which advanced a progressive vision of economic fairness and wariness towards the power of the corporate class. As his presidency advanced, Roosevelt managed to give all his actions a coherent framework: security. Whether old age pensions or national defense, the idea of security explained Roosevelt's vision for the United States. My friend Andrew Slack once suggested that, with his emphasis on health care, Obama should have used health as a frame: bringing health care, healing a sick economy and environment, etc. As with almost any recommendation, it is doubtful this would have transformed everything, but considering the small margins elections are decided often, every little strength can help.

On Abstraction and Social Movements

Dave Roberts of Grist recently wrote a column decrying the manner which climate activists have tackled global warming, criticizing the movement as "extremely intellectualized, top-down sort of undertaking." Roberts' piece inspired a response from Ezra Klein, who inquires whether there exists

[A] good example of the sort of social movement Roberts is talking about on an issue like climate change? Have we ever gotten people into the streets in order to reduce future risks that would fall hardest on poorer countries? Or even anything more abstract than a better life, right now?

Klein seems somewhat skeptical that one can mobilize a mass social movement of non-elites around such abstract issues. However, several historical episodes exist in which movements emerged that targeted problems that did not directly (or at least viscerally) impact the lives of those demonstrating. The most successful of such episodes have seen alliances (albeit often somewhat tenuous ones) emerge between elites and non-elites. Here are a few examples:

1. The Abolitionists: Both in England and the United States, significant numbers of whites organized and fought for emancipation, despite not being slaves themselves or even living with the possibility they might become slaves. Furthermore, for these activists, slavery existed as a rather abstract issue. Consider the English anti-slavery movement, which mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to sign petitions, organize boycotts, and work to elect anti-slavery politicians. Almost all English people had no actual contact with the “peculiar institution”: the vast majority of the thousands upon thousands of English people who signed petitions or otherwise never went to the English colonies in the Caribbean or even saw a slave ship docked in an English harbor. However, activists still mobilized, based on abstract moral concerns (closely tied with religion) that saw slavery as wrong. Furthermore, through the creation of all manner of art and mass advertising, the English anti-slavery activists managed to make slavery a more “real” issue and bring ever more people into their fold. English abolitionism had its many faults, and emancipation did not usher an era of total social justice for Africans. Still, one must give credit to the movement for playing a huge role in ending slavery throughout the English empire, a proposition that incidentally, did not come without its financial and strategic harms to the English empire.

One must be careful however in describing English anti-slavery to avoid making it seem only the work of white elites. Revolts in Haiti, Jamaica, and elsewhere, as well as less dramatic examples of slave resistance, put great pressure on the system and helped move towards emancipation. In England itself, a number of former slaves became activists who moved the problem from abstraction to reality. Most notable among these individuals was a man named Olaudah Equiano, whose autobiography became a bestseller in England and whose multi-year book tours served as a crucial venue for grassroots organizing.

2. Environmentalism: It can be hard to forget that, particularly in the early 1970s, environmentalism was a mass social movement in the United States. An estimated twenty-two million U.S. citizens participated in one way or the other on the first Earth Day in 1970. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw an explosion in activism on the environment, with the creation of all manner of new organizations, ranging from D.C. based public interest law groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council to all manner of local, grassroots community organizations. Such groups waged successful efforts to help create the EPA and win the passage and enforcement of all manner of environmental legislation. While sometimes they targeted direct environmental issues whose impacts were quite immediate (smog for example), other campaigns, such as that aimed at halting the use of chlorofluorocarbons, represented an effort to tackle future problems or at least ones whose worst effects lay in the future.

3. The Global Justice Movement: Klein's specific question about whether activists have "gone into the streets in order to reduce future risks that would fall hardest on poorer countries" is perhaps the most easily answerable. After all, that perfectly describes the intense period of street protests, including those in the U.S., from the Seattle march in 1999 to Genoa in 2001 that took aim at institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or negotiations over specific agreements, such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

Now, you might disagree with the activists' analysis, but those protests focused not only on current problems faced in the Global South, but the threat those issues would worsen if global institutions and policies continued as they had. The goal of the Seattle demonstrations, for example, was to disrupt the WTO negotiations because activists viewed those talks as leading to new agreements which would further constrain Global South nations' to retain some ability to choose from a range of policies and development models. While the U.S. press obviously gave marches in this country the most attention, marches in Seattle, Quebec, and elsewhere represented only one part of a global movement, which included affected citizens in nations ranging from Bolivia to South Africa to Thailand. One could argue that the global justice movement’s brief moment of mass street demonstrations indicates weakness; however it is a hard case to make considering the impacts of the September 11^th attacks. Remember that right before 9/11, activists were mobilizing to protest the annual IMF-World Bank meetings, with police predicting that over 100,000 people would attend.

Now, for all these movements, I have not particularly addressed Klein’s point that climate change activism seeks to prevent future problems, not solve current ones. After all, while English activists were not themselves slaves, slavery certainly existed at that moment. The sad answer to this challenge for activists however would seem to be time; as scientists and activists continue to point out, climate change is here. Many people in this world, particularly in the Global South, are already experiencing as sea levels rise, weather patterns are becoming more severe, etc.

One need not travel to Tuvalu to find visceral examples of the damages of climate change or resistance to it, as West Virginia will suffice. Just as the abolitionists needed an Oladuh Equiano to make slavery’s horrors visceral, climate activists are increasingly targeting concrete pieces of the climate change monster to tackle. Most notable is the growing anti-coal activism in the U.S., whether seen in the growing movement to stop mountaintop removal mining, Mayor Bloomberg’s fifty million dollar donation to the Sierra Club or the current mass protests against the Keystone pipeline are only but a few of the most recent examples. Climate change might be abstract, but the damage done to mountains and to the air by the burning of coal is no more abstract than smog was for 1970s environmentalists or IMF structural adjustment programs for the demonstrators in 2001. In these cases, activists who live far from the coal fields have still become involved, working in coordination with locals who both recognize the larger dangers of climate change and the more immediate problems the industry causes. We cannot say for certain a mass and sustained social movement will arise to stop climate change, but there certainly exists historical examples offering hope for those seeking to challenge global warming.

FDR and Obama, Pt. II: Advisers

One area where Roosevelt’s presidency appears a better model than Obama’s lies in the realm of their economic advisers. Put simply, Roosevelt brought in a team of economic consultants from a diverse set of ideological beliefs and he took them all quite seriously. This meant that, just as with Obama, Roosevelt listened to a number of fairly conservative, Wall Street confidants. Most prominent was his Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, who among other acts, played the key role in convincing Roosevelt in 1937 to push for a balanced budget, leading to an economic downslide which cost the New Deal significant support.

However, Roosevelt also had individuals such as Harold Ickes and Frances Perkins in his administration who pushed more left-wing economic notions. For example, it may come as a surprise that Roosevelt was not particularly keen to push for the creation of Social Security. It was his Secretary of Labor and long-time friend and ally Frances Perkins who provided the tireless voice, as well as a creative organizer, that eventually put the president fully behind creating the cornerstone of the U.S. safety net.

Turning to Obama, one is hard pressed to find comparable people. While I have seen some smart liberal bloggers make the case for Laurence Summers, even if he is not the devil some progressives believe, the man who championed financial deregulation so ardently cannot really be considered a standard bearer for U.S. social democracy. There certainly have been some progressive appointees working on economic issues: Craig Becker at the NLRB, Elizabeth Warren’s at the CFPB, and Hilda Solis at the Department of Labor for example. Yet, none of these people have ever really made up Obama’s core economic team – the people he most listens to in making policy decisions. Instead, from the start, Obama has relied on a circle of advisers such as Geithner, Summers, Gene Sperling, etc., who all essentially come from the same moderate wing of the Democratic Party.

Now, it can certainly be argued that a different set of advisers would have made no difference – all of the structural barriers remain. Certainly there is truth to that, but unless one believes the president is completely powerless before the whims of history, it is not hard to imagine how a wider spectrum of voices could have affected policy making. Take the stimulus bill for example. If, for example, a Joseph Stiglitz or Robert Reich had been a core part of that team*, it is easy to see a world where the initial proposed stimulus bill showcased more ambition – spending more money overall and concentrating those expenditures on more stimulative (and progressive) spending programs, instead of the significant percentage devoted to tax cuts. Of course, it is unlikely that such a stimulus would have passed as first offered, but in the inevitable whittling down that negotiations with Republicans would have produced, the end product could still have been larger and more impactful. Such advisers might also have pushed for more expansive programs to help struggling homeowners or tougher financial regulation.

In my next post, I will explore rhetoric as an issue uniting and dividing the two.

*Yes, Reich was a member of the economic transition team, but that is far different from being a member of the administration and being a constant counsel as the president makes decisions.

Comparing Franklin and Barack: Some Structural Differences

With President Obama recently signing legislation that (essentially) takes the Herbert Hoover approach to economic recovery, it seemed an opportune moment to delve more into every liberals' favorite presidential comparison game: Franklin Roosevelt vs. Barack Obama.

When Obama was elected, it seemed within the realm of possibility that the U.S. was about to witness a period comparable to the New Deal. Suffering from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, with large Democratic majorities in Congress, and an inspired and activated grassroots, Obama seemed to have all the pieces in place. Today, however, U.S. economic policy remains as trapped as ever within the right-wing paradigms bequeathed to us by Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement.

Why has this happened? Could U.S. progressives have expected more from this president? I will attempt to explore these issues by further interrogating the historical analogy always present in such conversations: that Obama could have been the twenty-first century FDR. In this post, I will note some factors weighing against an Obama presidency being as transformational on progressive economic grounds as Roosevelt's was. In subsequent posts I will delve into details of specific political actions and strategies differentiating the two and try to make some judgments as to what progressives could have reasonably expected from Obama, matched against how Roosevelt tackled similar challenges.

1. Worst Economic State, Fewer Filibusters

First, it is crucial to understand just how devastating the Great Depression was, even in comparison to the current Great Recession. The Great Depression saw national unemployment levels soaring to 25%, while the Great Recession has peaked (so far) at around 10%. By the time Roosevelt came to power, the nation was desperate for solutions that would turn the ship of state away from sinking further into disaster.

Along with majorities often larger than Obama's, Roosevelt also faced a Congress where the filibuster was a rarity (and most invoked on issues threatening white supremacy in the South). Take the Glass-Steagall Act, one of the cornerstones of 1930s financial regulation (and whose dismantling in the late 1990s became emblematic of our new Gilded Age). Glass-Steagall passed the Senate in 1934 without one vote cast against! Victories such as this proved much more plausible while the filibuster lay as a mostly dormant instrument. Obama’s first two years would certainly have witnessed more progressive legislation without the stunning growth in historical terms of the filibuster’s use by Republicans and conservative Democrats. Examining bills passed by the House of Representatives from early 2009 to late 2010 (health care with a public option, cap and trade) one can get a glimpse of the more progressive legacy the presidency could have left (and this ignores legislation such as EFCA which would have had a better chance in a filibuster-less world).

2. A Weak Business Lobby

As incomprehensible as progressives may find this, the business community's ability to influence policy became much diminished in the 1930s. In a rare incident in which the elite classes found themselves strongly divided, business leaders divided between those who wanted to accommodate (or even profit) from the New Deal order and those who hoped to combat and reverse it. Conservative business interests that wished to actively fight the New Deal found themselves a fairly marginalized part of the U.S. political dialogue.

Certainly opposition existed. A number of the most prominent businessmen in the country, including the du Ponts and CEOs at General Motors looked with shock at the reforms of the New Deal. By 1934 they began to organize, creating the American Liberty League. However, it was a mark of the changed times that the New York Times could declare that "nowhere in the country has the lack of any organization of conservative interests been more acutely felt than in the financial community." Despite representing monied interests, the Liberty League proved unable to exert much influence in a nation where, as historian Kim Phillips-Fein notes, "the contrast between the lives of its [the Liberty League's] members and those of the working population of the United States had simply grown too vast." This relative lack of corporate organization and politicization would persist until the early 1970s when a swell of organizing took place that led to everything from the founding of right-wing think tanks to the emergence of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as a mainstay of right-wing free market organizing.

Thus, Obama faces a much different political atmsophere. Business did not take nearly as hard a hit, either financially or in its reputation, as it did after the Depression. Furthermore, corporations already have a well-established political infrastructure and a commitment to using it that did not exist to near the same extent.

3. Timing

When Franklin Roosevelt started his presidency, the U.S. was entering its third year of Depression. Although Herbert Hoover’s response to the Depression included government stimulus efforts (such as road construction), his attempts to explain the crisis and offer solutions always maintained a strong conservative strain. For example, in a 1931 speech, Hoover described government programs to help the unemployed, while cautioning that, “We must avoid burdens upon the government which will create more unemployment in private industry than can be gained by further expansion of employment by the Federal Government. We can now stimulate employment and agriculture more effectually and speedily through the voluntary measures in progress.”

By 1932 Americans were ready for something sharply different and Roosevelt offered that, both rhetorically and pro grammatically. While his 1932 campaign sounded some conservative themes, Roosevelt also stressed that he would govern to serve “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid” and his promises of “bold, persistent experimentation” rang the loudest. Roosevelt also served as a sort of “professor-in-chief” during his campaigns and presidency, telling a clear story of who caused the Depression and who was going to solve it. Americans were as open as they ever have been to such messages as this from his 1932 nomination speech:

“There are two ways of viewing the government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776.

But it is not and never will be the theory of the Democratic Party.”

Conversely, Obama’s came into office mere months after the onset of the Great Recession. In attempting to comprehend what was happening, the American public found themselves bombarded by a jumble of messages as to the causes and solutions. While the greed of Wall Street seemed a clear culprit, the bipartisan nature of the bank bailouts (whatever one thinks of them as policy), confused the ability of many voters to ascertain who was at fault. Furthermore, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “Stimulus”) came not long after and, in many Americans’ minds, the bailouts and stimulus morphed into one nebulous massive government expenditure. Thus, the stimulus, both as policy and as a metaphor for a progressive solution to the crisis became confused with a pragmatic government move that saved the financial class from their own disaster. As the nation's economy sputtered, this jumble allowed the right-wing, through the vehicle of the Tea Party, to introduce a powerful counter-narrative of why the nation remained (and remains) in the doldrums.