Self-Undermining Rhetoric in the Past and Present
Americans face no shortage of threats to their financial well-being. With regard to such threats, the story of this book is largely one of inaction, not disregard. As I showed in Chapter 2, there is a sizable number of people who consider health care costs and college costs, along with aspects of job and retirement security, as highly important issues. This number is certainly large enough to rival the membership size of some of the leading organizations that mobilize big, geographically diffuse sets of people on other important issues.
But trying to convince a set of people like that to become politically active on insecurity-related issues is extremely difficult. They need to perceive that there is actually an opportunity for political change. They need to have at least some objective resources—discretionary time and money—that can be spent on political action. They need to have a sense of what public policy solutions they would like to see enacted. And they need to have leaders who articulate their concerns and organizational apparatuses that coordinate mobilization around those concerns.
Returning to one of the main questions motivating this book—Is there something about economic insecurity issues that might make it more difficult to mobilize people on them relative to other broad-based issues?—my argument has been that it is necessary to identify heretofore unexamined barriers to collective action. These barriers are distinctly communicative in nature and reflect the fact that rhetoric designed to mobilize people on insecurity issues simultaneously provides a reason why they should not spend scarce resources becoming active. Indeed, even if people consider the issues to be important, I find that they are less willing to spend scarce resources of money and in some cases time becoming politically active on them. This is precisely the moment at which the self-undermining attribute has important political consequences.
PAST MOMENTS OF MOBILIZATION
To some readers, my repeated assertion about heightened barriers to collective action on financial constraint–related issues might stretch the bounds of plausibility. While the evidence presented in this book certainly points in that direction, many readers can no doubt point to particular moments in which collective action arose and was successful. In this section I examine some of these moments. I do not intend this section to exhaust every possible example of collective action on financial constraint–related issues. Nor do I intend it to provide precise tests of the hypotheses from the previous chapters, as I do not have the necessary data to do so. Instead, my goal is to examine a few well-known examples of political mobilization and identify reasons why the communicative barriers to action proposed in this book (and/or the assumptions underlying them) might not have applied.
The New Deal: Pensions and Unemployment
My first two examples come from the New Deal era of the 1930s. Although the United States does not have the same welfare state traditions as other developed democracies,1 the years following the Great Depression marked several instances in which Congress passed and the president signed significant legislation that would collectivize risk at the federal level. My discussion here focuses on two of the most prominent economic insecurity–motivated examples of collective action during this time, one related to pensions and the other related to unemployed workers.
The pension movement focused on broad relief to the severely impoverished and malnourished among America’s seniors (over half of American seniors were estimated to be living in poverty at this time). As with most examples of large-scale collective action, several organizations contributed intellectual capital at various points in its development, including groups such as Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth movement, Father Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice, and Dr. Francis Townsend’s Townsend Plan. The largest and arguably most politically well connected of these was the Townsend Plan, which began after Dr. Townsend published a letter to a local newspaper editor in 1933 calling for the federal government to provide a generous retirement stipend for each American over the age of sixty on the condition that they stop working (to ensure there were jobs for the young) and quickly spend the money (to stimulate the economy). Such a proposal, Townsend argued, was not only good for seniors but also good for the health of the entire economy.2
Initially the Townsend leaders hired “salespeople” to travel around California collecting signatures and donations supporting the plan. By August 1934, this had crystallized into the formation of fan clubs called Townsend Clubs, which maintained both individual interest and organizational revenue via regular face-to-face meetings and events. True believers flocked to the clubs, which generated revenue through membership dues as well as sales of plan-related materials. Townsend even eschewed large contributions from the rich to avoid becoming beholden to wealthy interests.3
By spring 1936, the Townsend model had really caught on. It is estimated that at its peak supporters fueled eight thousand clubs, covering almost all congressional districts in the country. The membership rolls swelled to two million people, nearly one-fifth of all Americans over sixty years old. And in its heyday it was able to raise funds more quickly than even the Democratic Party.4 President Roosevelt, for his part, derided the Townsend Plan as being “unsound” and providing “shortcuts to utopia.”
Although the Townsend Plan itself never became law, many have argued that it had a powerful effect at key moments during the debates leading up to the 1935 Social Security Act as well as its 1939 amendments. This effect largely resided in its agenda-setting influence. At a time when there were many pressing demands on Congress and the Roosevelt administration, such as unemployment and public health insurance, the Townsend Plan helped keep old-age pensions at the top of the political agenda.5
Given all of this, and in particular the existence of a robust and financially flush network of Townsend Clubs, one might wonder if it’s really that difficult to mobilize people to spend money or time on economic insecurity issues that they are personally facing. Although we do not have precise data on the membership rolls, the best available evidence suggests that Townsendites were largely less well-off economically than the average American and that, at least in part, they saw themselves as acting on behalf of their own interests.6 While recruitment appeals leveraged lofty language about rights and how the Townsend Plan would benefit the overall economy, particularly the young who would no longer have to compete with older Americans for jobs, they also stressed how the pension plan would alleviate their own personal suffering. And these recruitment efforts would have done so in the context of asking for money (in terms of club dues and contributions) and time (in terms of attending club meetings and, especially in later years, engaging in action aimed toward influencing national policy). Thus the best available evidence suggests that potential Townsend members were mobilized on retirement security at the same time they were facing severe retirement insecurity.
How does this square with my argument? With respect to money, the answer is that some people simply would not pay dues. Edwin Amenta writes that “a certain amount of free riding with respect to dues was allowed, so long as club members remained active and someone picked up the fiscal slack.”7 Clubs would be collectively responsible for dues, and so the more well-off members would often cover those of people who were unable to pay. With respect to time, the people who participated in the clubs were much older than the average American and, as such, would most likely not have seen themselves as active members of the labor force. Thus the fact that an important issue like retirement income would motivate them to attend meetings, write letters to congresspeople, and attend Townsend-sponsored rallies is consistent with my broader argument about senior citizen participation.
The pension movement was not the only financial constraint–related issue on which individuals organized themelves in the 1930s. Another prominent example was the unemployed workers’ movement. During the early 1930s, groups of unemployed people organized and financed by the Communist Party, Socialist Party, and Conference for Progressive Labor Action staged rallies, demonstrations, and sit-ins around the country.8 Tactics included rent riots, hunger marches at state capitals, and protests at local unemployment relief centers in major cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago.9 In response the Hoover administration resolutely refused to employ national-level solutions for unemployment, which meant that these groups focused their demands on state and local officials. As riots ensued and budgetary pressures mounted, these officials became de facto lobbyists to the federal government on behalf of the unemployed. The unemployed, in other words, ended up leveraging American federalism to create conflict at different levels of government.10 Indeed, the earliest examples of federal unemployment relief and jobs legislation—Roosevelt’s Federal Emergency Relief Act of 1933 and the creation of the Civilian Works Administration—were widely viewed as representing a necessary concession to the unemployed. Although the local protest arms of the movement largely fell away after that legislation was passed and the unemployment rate began to slowly move downward, for a period of time the movement was successful in communicating dire circumstances and pressuring local officials for change.
Because unemployed people are technically in the labor force, I would predict great difficulty in trying to mobilize them around such an important financial constraint. While the exact size of the overall movement participation is difficult to ascertain, the available data suggest that particular groups in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois had anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 members during their heyday.11 To be sure, these numbers represented only a tiny fraction of the unemployed, the ranks of which had swelled to 9 million by the end of 1931.12 But it still worth considering the circumstances that would have led sizable numbers to join organizations and participate in activities, particularly when the issues at the heart of their grievances represented personal financial concerns.
One response is to note that, at least during the movement’s heyday, there were almost no formal dues-paying organizations in which the unemployed were official members.13 Preexisting organizations provided the administrative and financial support, and the unemployed themselves were not (for the most part) paying dues. What they were doing was showing up at meetings, rallies, and other locally organized events. Based on my arguments presented earlier, I would expect that it would be very difficult to mobilize people who are unemployed to spend time on politics. Indeed, this expectation is consistent with what Schlozman and Verba found in their study of the unemployed in the early 1970s. When faced directly with opportunity costs, respondents often said that it would be a better use of their time to look for work rather than engage in collective action. Indeed, a typical response was: “It is better if you want to eat to look for a job.”14
In reflecting upon this example, I believe that this is the exception that proves the rule. At its peak during the Great Depression, the unemployment rate had reached as high as 25% nationally. In certain locales it was even more devastating as large employers like Willys-Overland in Toledo, Ohio, and Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, laid off large majorities of their workforce. Things were so bad for so long in certain locales that it seems reasonable to believe that many unemployed people might have perceived that they had nothing to lose (and possibly something to gain) by spending time engaged in political protest.
This situation dovetails with the argument presented in this book, the heart of which is the idea that self-undermining rhetoric brings to mind opportunity costs that may not automatically be salient. These thoughts diminish subjective perceptions of affordability even though objective resources remain constant. To the extent that unemployed workers took opportunity costs into account, these costs might have seemed quite negligible in the early 1930s, as the prospect of finding a job remained slim. Indeed, this type of thinking was echoed by Schlozman and Verba’s respondents decades later. When asked if he would take part in a march in Washington, one of their respondents said, “Yes, I think I would [march]. But it depends upon where you’re at. If things are hopeless, then I’d go. But if I was waiting for an answer to a resume, I wouldn’t.”15
Contrast that with the economic insecurity that many American households are facing today. While the trends I discussed in Chapter 2 add up to a picture of substantially increased exposure to the risk of income loss along the four dimensions of unemployment, health care costs, retirement insecurity, and college costs, the situation is not as dire as it was in the New Deal–era United States. This comparison is critical for understanding the conditions under which communicative barriers to collective action are likely to be politically consequential. From an objective point of view, the economic situation facing many American households today is one in which most do (financially speaking) have at least something to lose. Moreover, they potentially have discretionary money and time that they could spend on politics (and that they sometimes do spend on politics, especially for noneconomic insecurity–related issues, as we saw in Chapters 5 and 6). Given these circumstances, self-undermining rhetoric helps explain behavioral patterns.
Welfare Rights and ACORN
Recall that in the first chapter I presented several arguments for why I chose to focus on the four aspects of economic insecurity that I did and not other aspects, such as many forms of insecurity that especially affect poor Americans. Central to my argument was the idea that communicative barriers would probably not be very important for explaining inaction in these latter cases, as the objective resource constraints are both more binding and more salient. In light of that argument, it is worth examining two of the most prominent examples of mobilizing low-income Americans during the twentieth century. These include organizing by the National Welfare Rights Organization (and its state and local affiliates) and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). In both cases, the ultimate goal of organization was to increase political power. As Piven and Cloward note, the prevailing argument in the 1960s was, “If large numbers [of poor Americans] could be organized, political influence would result.”16 In both cases organizers also believed it was important to have a dues-paying membership in order to both help sustain the organization’s work and substantiate claims that they represented true grassroots concerns. But achieving this goal was extremely difficult given the severe and salient objective resource constraints this group faced. How did they do it?
First consider the welfare rights movement, which emerged in the 1960s as leaders from the civil rights movement shifted emphasis toward economic problems in northern urban areas. The situation in many of these northern urban areas was especially dire, as unemployment had reached Depression-era levels. Piven and Cloward described it as follows: “It was a period that began to resemble the Great Depression…[in which] many of the poor had apparently come to believe that a society which denied them jobs and adequate wages did at least owe them a survival income.”17 In response, local organizers recruited mothers who were receiving benefits via Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the welfare program that was originally created as part of the Social Security Act in 1935. Many of these local groups later became part of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), which was active starting in 1966.
Recruitment of dues-paying members was primarily focused on grievances. Individual recipients’ grievances included having their benefits cut off without warning or explanation, not receiving the full benefits to which they were entitled, failing to receive checks on time, and being treated in a demeaning way by welfare officials. Group grievances included not receiving special needs grants to which they were entitled. These grants would help pay for items like household appliances, clothing, and furniture. Grievance-focused recruitment was thus focused on the provision of private goods rather than the achievement of broader political goals. In other words, it was less about the provision of public goods like “changing the system” and instead about resolving immediate and important grievances that welfare recipients had with the welfare system. Solving such promised grievances would have a very tangible effect on recipients’ everyday lives that vastly outstripped the modest cost of the dues and any time spent attending organizational meetings prior to presenting the grievance case to the welfare office.
Despite the potentially fruitful focus on resolving grievances, the level of membership generally remained low, rarely exceeding one hundred at one time. Piven and Cloward describe the actual dues-paying base as “modest” and insufficient to “attract a mass base.”18 In addition, membership turnover was very high. Indeed, as Bailis found when he studied welfare rights groups in Massachusetts, “organizing drives almost invariably produced successful first meetings and first confrontations. But few of the local groups created in those drives were able to maintain their momentum—or their membership—for very long.”19 After people had their grievance resolved, and thus no longer needed assistance with private concerns, they would typically stop participating in the organization (only to return when future grievances would crop up). In other words, for most members grievance-based recruitment strategies did not segue into broader political work. To be sure, I am not claiming that welfare recipients never engaged in any political action—for example, there was a nationwide series of relatively small demonstrations in 1966 prior to the establishment of the NWRO—but attempts to sustain large-scale pressure often came into conflict with severe objective resource constraints experienced by AFDC recipients.
Next consider ACORN, which started as an outgrowth of NWRO in the early 1970s. Its goal was to organize low- and moderate-income people in communities around the country with campaigns focused on local concerns along with some coordinated campaigns with the national office. The organization was multi-issue in its approach, focused on a wide range of concerns. Over time, ACORN gained a national reputation for its work in several areas including voter registration, municipal living-wage campaigns, Hurricane Katrina cleanup and recovery, antipredatory lending, and job referral services. Locally, it also provided a vehicle for low-income people to demand neighborhood improvements such as new stop signs, greater police patrols, and improved schools as well as prevent undesirable change such as the closure of public hospitals.
For much of its work ACORN relied upon individuals who were willing to voluntarily spend time and money supporting its issue campaigns. Tactically, it relied upon direct action—organizing local members who were willing to physically march to the mayor’s office or a city council meeting in order to present demands rather than relying on leadership to do so.20 In addition, the national organization as well as the local offices strove to be monetarily self-sufficient. This meant that, as much as possible, they relied upon membership dues and local fund-raisers as opposed to grants from foundations or other sources of outside funding.
In many ways, then, ACORN was able to convince people to become dues-paying members even as it was (in part) working on issues that concerned financial threats they were personally facing. How were they able to be successful? One way was that, in many cases, the initial recruitment to become a dues-paying member might have been completely unrelated to financial constraints. Indeed it was common for ACORN mobilizers to ask potential members to first identify which neighborhood issues were most important to them and then talk about how ACORN could help them resolve those issues.21 If they mentioned issues related to unsafe intersections, insufficient police patrols, potholes, or any number of other concerns, it is entirely possible that financial threats were never part of the conversation. This point is worth underscoring, as the findings in this book would suggest that it is easier to recruit people facing various forms of economic insecurity to spend money and/or time becoming politically active on issues that do not reflect those threats (again, assuming that they have at least some discretionary income).
Although that point covers the initial mobilization, what about the actual direct actions on some of the issues that did reflect financial constraints? As with NWRO, here again the focus was on private benefits as a way to recruit members who were facing severe objective resource constraints. For example, in her analysis of the St. Louis ACORN chapter (one of the chapters with relatively less well-off members), Heidi Swarts observed that recruiters focused heavily on assistance with housing and job seeking as a way to bring potential dues-paying members through the door. In the short term, that could mobilize large numbers of people, but for the most part they would be one-time participants. After all, she noted, “most job seekers and welfare recipients have more pressing priorities than becoming activists, so it was harder to recruit them.”22 The number of longtime regulars was usually quite small.
Summing up, what do we make of the experiences of NWRO and ACORN? As a general matter, I think it is important to highlight how mobilization often centered not on the production of public goods but on more private goods that fulfilled critical, pressing needs. Moreover, and consistent with my discussion in Chapter 1, I think it would be hard to claim that self-undermining rhetoric presented an important barrier to collective action here. From the perspective of both organizers and potential members, objective resource constraints were far more important. Indeed, that is a key reason why organizers often chose to emphasize the private goods that money and/or time spent on the organization could provide.
PROSPECTS FOR CHANGE AND ACTION
Most of this book has focused on reasons why people would not voluntarily become politically active on certain issues, insofar as that political action was oriented toward producing public goods. At this point it is instructive to approach the question from the opposite point of view and consider what the book’s findings say about the types of people who are most likely to become active and then, as a separate question, when we should expect concrete policy change on these issues (perhaps even in the absence of large-scale pressure from many individual citizens).
Before doing so, I want to underscore that even in the realm of barriers to collective action, my results do not imply that those who are personally affected by financial constraints will never be sufficiently motivated to become politically active on them. Rather, to the extent that we observe action by this set of people, my results help shed light on how we should interpret it. The self-undermining nature of the rhetoric around these issues presents an extra-high barrier to mobilization that is not present with other issues. I argued in Chapter 4 how this can heighten the perceived costs of acting (or, alternatively, lower the subjective perception that people can afford to spend money or, in some cases, time on these issues). Thus, to the extent that we do observe some people engaged in action, it is likely the case that there is something else heightening the perceived benefits to a sufficiently large extent. One possibility is the provision of some other selective benefit in addition to the satisfaction of supporting a cause that you consider important. This could include social benefits associated with being part of a group along with one’s friends who also believe in the cause. Or it could result from social pressure stemming from that same group of friends. It could also include material benefits if the organization is able to provide desired goods or services that affect your material well-being that is not available elsewhere.
Beyond this set of people, which I would expect to be relatively small (or, at the very least small relative to the entire set of people that care about the issue), the findings in this book also help shed light on whom we should expect to be most active on these issues. From a theoretical perspective, they fall into three groups.
One set is composed of those who consider the issues to be important but are not personally affected by them. Unfortunately this can turn out to include a relatively narrow range of people. For example, in the health care experiments in Chapter 5, this set was composed only of those who were least likely to be personally facing a health care–related financial threat themselves. This result broadly echoed Health Care for America Now’s experiences I discussed at the very beginning of the book, showing how the set of people who became active was composed of those who likely had the best health insurance and thus were in the best possible situation to withstand cost-related shocks. To be sure, the size of this group is not trivial, but relying on surrogates in this way is not a complete panacea as they may have very different policy preferences than the people who are personally affected. Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 6, the latter group was far more likely to favor government intervention on a host of issues.
The second major group most likely to engage in political action is composed of people who are personally affected by them but not in the labor force. I found that these people would become more involved when doing so meant spending time. A large part of this group is composed of retirees, which can help explain why mass-membership senior organizations have a relatively easy time convincing their members to spend time on economic insecurity issues, like Social Security and Medicare, that personally affect them. Indeed, from the creation of Medicare in the 1960s, to proposals to curtail Social Security and Medicare benefits in the early 1980s, to the establishment of higher premiums as part of the 1988 Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act, to proposals to privatize part of Social Security in the 2000s, senior citizen mass-membership groups have been involved and seniors have repeatedly heeded the call to action.
The final group reflects those involved in the unemployed workers movement in the 1930s. This includes the set of people who are personally affected by a financial threat, and consider the threat to be an important issue, yet at the same time are in such dire circumstances that they do not perceive opportunity costs from spending time on politics. This is an example in which rhetoric that we might expect to be self-undermining turns out not to be, and in theory this group might provide a way to balance out the surrogacy mentioned earlier. Yet except in particularly dire times, such as the Great Depression, this is likely to be a relatively small part of the population.23
Lastly, it is important to note that while mass action can influence the likelihood of policy change related to economic insecurity, it is by no means the only potential influence. Sometimes members of Congress and/or the president (not to mention state- and local-level officeholders) have adopted a strong entrepreneurial stance in favor of legislation that promises to reduce the financial threats that low- and middle-income Americans face. Here are a few examples.
One of the most famous comes from the New Deal. In June 1934, in a window after the heyday of the unemployed workers’ movement but before the Townsend Plan’s zenith, Roosevelt commissioned the Committee on Economic Security (CES). In a message to Congress at this time, Roosevelt stated that he was “looking for a sound means which I can recommend to provide at once security against several of the great disturbing factors in life—especially those which relate to unemployment and old age.”24 Firsthand reports of the committee by people such as Edwin Witte, its executive director, confirmed that Roosevelt was personally committed to enacting both unemployment and old-age insurance.
Eighty-five years later, and in the wake of the worst financial collapse since Roosevelt’s time, President Obama would exhibit the same degree of top-down agenda setting on matters related to economic security. He pushed Congress to expand Pell Grants by ending subsidies to private organizations that make student loans (which ultimately became part of the March 2010 reconciliation bill that marked Congress’s passage of health care reform) and by executive order established new rules for paying back federal student loans (such as lower caps on monthly payments for some borrowers). He also proposed new guidelines for making college affordability information available to prospective college students. Lastly, speaking of health care reform, Obama repeatedly rejected the advice of some top advisors to not make health care a priority and instead chose to press ahead with his plan for comprehensive health care reform.25
Another example concerns an entrepreneurial member of Congress. The law in question was the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) that, among other things, created a federal government insurance program for defined-benefit pensions. This promised to make private pension more secure for millions of American workers through the creation of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, a quasi-governmental insurance program financed by firms in which the full faith and credit of the U.S. government would insure some portion of promised benefits.
As with most significant pieces of legislation, several factors contributed to a political climate that was conducive to increasing regulation of private pensions. One was a catalyzing event ten years earlier. In 1964, eleven thousand workers who were below retirement age lost their pensions when Studebaker, a company that manufactured wagons and automobiles yet had ceased production the previous December, defaulted on its pension promises. The Studebaker workers quickly became a symbol of the need for pension reform.26 This was also at a time in which public opinion had come to favor government intervention on this issue. Americans had grown used to the idea that the federal government would be ultimately responsible for ensuring adequate retirement income, even if it meant fulfilling private expectations.
In addition to all this, and the reason why ERISA is a good example of entrepreneurial action by an influential officeholder, the law was also very much the product of New York Senator Jacob K. Javits. He first introduced comprehensive pension-reform legislation in 1967 over the objections of both business and, in part, organized labor. In the ensuing years, pension reform received “longterm and committed sponsorship from [Senator Javits] … who articulated the interests of the diffuse and unorganized beneficiaries of pension reform and who built support for his bill largely outside of top congressional circles.”27 Indeed Javits is often considered the father of ERISA.
Taken as a whole, the foregoing description of the possibility for political action and change helps underscore why self-undermining rhetoric does not completely forestall policy change that insures against the risk of income loss. It does, however, allow us to be more precise about where we need to look for factors that would drive such change.
SELF-UNDERMINING RHETORIC AND POLITICAL POWER
In July 2010 I had the pleasure of attending an outdoor performance by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra at the picturesque Edsel and Eleanor Ford House. Set on the shores of Lake St. Clair in Southeastern Michigan, the mansion offered a gorgeous backdrop to enjoy a sun-soaked day and listen to delightful classical music. But in addition to being treated to wonderful music performed by one of the country’s finest symphony orchestras, guests were also treated to plenty of unwanted visitors. Indeed, there was what seemed to be a never-ending swarm of bugs attacking the audience members (including myself). Unless you were sitting in the very front row, it was hard to ignore how often audience members were flailing their arms in a vain attempt to prevent bug bites and distance the buzzing.
The bugs were not lost on the evening’s director. When the program was over he thanked guests for coming and wished us a pleasant drive home. He also made a point of apologizing for the bugs, saying how he had hoped we enjoyed the evening despite them. In other words, at precisely the moment in which he would wish to leave us with a positive impression of the night, he unnecessarily reminded people that they had fought with bugs the entire evening.
This is yet another example of self-undermining rhetoric. The orchestra’s director was trying to achieve two goals at once—to apologize for the bugs and to leave the audience with the most favorable impression of the evening as possible. These goals clearly conflict, but in this case it would be reasonable to argue that he could have avoided mentioning the bugs in the first place and still increased the likelihood that the audience went home with a favorable impression. While outside observers might agree that such rhetoric was self-undermining, its use can be easily attributed to non-optimal decisions by the director.
In general, to the degree that self-undermining rhetoric is easily avoidable, any investigation of it would essentially mean focusing on the “mistakes” of those making political speeches. Perhaps the speaker is not as credible as originally believed, or the frames being employed are overly weak, or the audience is not paying as much attention as hoped for. In all of these cases, it is not clear that the investigation would have much to say about the barriers to political action expressed by a broad set of citizens.
But while scholars are used to focusing on the organizational, attitudinal, and resource-based barriers to political action, in this book I hope to have convinced readers that there is good reason to investigate potential communicative barriers as well. There are situations in which rhetoric brings to mind thoughts that turn out to undermine the achievement of one or more goals that speakers hope to achieve. Moreover, avoiding such self-undermining effects is difficult. From a broader perspective, this means that the kinds of communication that might encourage people to hold certain kinds of attitudes might have the opposite effect on their willingness to behave in ways that are consistent with those attitudes. Or, put differently, the kinds of considerations that underlie public opinion (such as what issues are important) might diverge from the kinds of considerations that underlie political behavior.
As it turns out, self-undermining rhetoric has political consequences that extend well beyond issues that remind people of financial threats. For example, when political organizations are trying to recruit new supporters, one common, reasonable starting point is to focus on past successes. This can help achieve two goals: to establish credibility and to convince people to donate scarce resources of money and/or time to the organization. However, a problem arises because this kind of retrospective rhetoric is self-undermining.28 At the same time that it establishes credibility, it also provides a reason not to give, as it suggests that the group can accomplish its goals without their help (because it has done so in the past). In a field experiment with Ithaca Health Alliance (the same group that I partnered with for the field experiment in Chapter 5), Cindy Kam and I find that retrospective information fails to increase people’s willingness to donate money to the organization. Instead it is only prospective information—about what an organization hopes to achieve in the future—that has a mobilizing influence. Our findings do not imply that organizations should never focus on past successes (after all, it may be unavoidable given the need to establish credibility), but it does mean that their power (measured in terms of their ability to attract new members) requires avoiding talking about the past as much as possible. It is precisely the opposite of what we expect in the realm of vote choice.29
Another example relates to one of the biggest issues facing people in metropolitan areas around the country: commuting times. In traffic-laden (and car-centric) metropolitan areas around the country, each weekday can entail greater headaches as people travel to work. This has become a more pressing issue as the suburbs surrounding major downtowns spread out and many people increasingly choose to live in larger homes farther away from their workplace. In order to compete for jobs and attract visitors, major metropolitan areas have an increasing incentive to offer policy solutions to traffic and congestion. But here again there is good reason to suspect that self-undermining rhetoric could present a barrier to collective action. The reason is because attempts to convince people to devote time to a political issue like commuting requires reminding them about one of the largest (and most frustrating) constraints on their time.
Lastly, while in this book I’ve focused on financial threats and self-undermining rhetoric as they apply to citizens living in the United States, the broad argument could apply elsewhere. For instance, recent research has investigated the rise of job insecurity not just in the United States but across Western democracies more generally. Particular attention is paid to the growth of workers facing atypical employment (i.e., anything other than “full-time, stable, fully protected, and insured employment” and who lack many social protections such as unemployment insurance or pension benefits).30 Politically, those in the contingent workforce (i.e., labor market “outsiders”) tend to express stronger-than-average preferences for policies that would help improve their economic situation, such as employment protection and redistribution. They are also less active in politics than those facing more typical employment. Given the logic of self-undermining rhetoric, it is quite possible that attempts to mobilize them to spend time becoming active in politics (e.g., attending rallies, circulating petitions, contacting officials, and becoming active in political organizations) will be especially difficult.
Having noted this possibility, it is worth identifying two possible caveats. One is suggested by my earlier discussion—if the situation were to become so bad, as it did for the unemployed during the Great Depression, that people viewed the opportunity costs of their time to be near zero. Another stems from potentially broad differences between Americans and citizens of other countries. Recall that the theory I presented in Chapter 4 made two assumptions about why rhetoric about economic insecurity issues would be self-undermining. The first is that it could remind people of a financial constraint that they are personally facing. The framing experiment I presented in Chapter 5, along with the retrospective-thinkaloud responses to the ACSCAN experiment, provided some justification for that assumption. The second assumption is that, having been reminded of a personal financial constraint, such a reminder would reduce people’s perception that they could afford to spend money (and in some cases time) on collective political behavior. While the pattern of behavior observed in Chapters 5 and 6 is consistent with this expectation for the American case, it is worth underscoring that it remains an empirical question whether that would be the behavioral response among people who live in other countries. For example, relative to American citizens, those in other Western democracies such as Britain, Germany, France, and Spain tend to express less individualist attitudes.31 Given this, it is possible that strong feelings of societal collective identity might trump the personal affordability concerns that, I argue, are affecting behavior so starkly in the examples in this book. Such differences, to the extent they arise in response to information about financial threats that one personally faces, could produce an important caveat for thinking about political mobilization among those facing atypical employment in other Western democracies.
Overall, my intellectual goals in this book span multiple levels. On one level, I have advanced a new argument about how people facing various financial threats organize to represent themselves in the public square. Understanding the conditions in which this happens is critical given the experiences of many middle- and lower-income Americans over the past few decades. Yet on another level I have proposed a heretofore unexamined source of barriers to collective action that focuses on the rhetoric that organizers use when they attempt to mobilize people. Ultimately, I believe that recognizing the role of self-undermining rhetoric in this and other domains can help shed light on who becomes active in the political process. Indeed, there is a direct line connecting political rhetoric, political participation, and political power.