We had a pretty clear sense of what our role in the effort needed to be, at least for the time-being: Demand Progress was substantially under-resourced, and certainly wouldn’t win this fight on its own, or as party to the small coalition that was responsible for organizing the bulk of the anti-COICA and PIPA work to date. We’d have to fend off the bill’s backers long enough to build a more robust coalition, or for somebody to intervene from the heavens.
It seemed obvious that the libertarian-right should be opposed to this legislation: after all, it was a robust new regulatory regime being foisted upon Americans by one of conservatives’ very favorite boogeymen: Hollywood.
We got incredibly lucky during the spring, when Mark Meckler—then the co-coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots—agreed to co-host a conference I was organizing with Lawrence Lessig. I hounded him over the next couple of months, begging him to take a deep look at PIPA and start to muster conservatives in opposition to it. Patrick pestered him as well.
I’ve had a bit of a fetish for alliances between the Left and Right for a while now. Not the pissant yearning for middling agreement somewhere in that supposedly vast chasm that separates the tendencies of the corporatist wings of the two major parties—striving for a Grand Bargain around fiscal policy, for instance. The notion that there’s insufficient bipartisanship in Washington is transparently absurd. Please see the following counterexamples: foreign policy writ large, subservience to the banks, bipartisan deficit-hawking, an ongoing multi-presidency assault on civil liberties, and, of course, support for SOPA and PIPA. No, what gets me going is those moments where there’s actually true-to-God agreement among left- and right-ideologues
Opposition to the bank bailouts, auditing the Federal Reserve, ending the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, even votes against wars and defense spending will all draw a not-insignificant amount of cross-partisan support, from people on both sides of the aisle who straight-up agree about things. Our political systems haven’t completely accommodated to those alliances, so they still offer the occasional chance to throw a wrench into machinations of the powers-that-be, relative to those issues where such solidarity can be achieved.
There are of course substantial, critical differences between the left and the right which should not be downplayed, but opportunities for this sort of cross-partisan organizing are often overlooked because of undue presumptions of utter, complete polarization between the two major parties and the rank-and-file Americans who affiliate with one or the other of them. The standard single-axis left-right ideological paradigm is fraying—if it ever truly held to begin with—and the dynamic quickly degenerates into even greater confusion when one strives to map ideological tendencies onto the mainstream political parties.
Fighting PIPA seemed like an opportunity to build a powerful Left-Right alliance and shock the establishment into recognizing the broad base of (still largely latent) opposition to the bill. The conference, to be attended by a mix of activists of all stripes, presented the perfect backdrop upon which to start to pull such a coalition together. Its purpose was to convene people from across the political spectrum to examine the advisability and feasibility of starting to organize towards an Article V Constitutional Convention, at which amendments to the Constitution would be offered through a process outlined in said Constitution.
In practice, successful Constitutional Amendments have always been offered by Congress, but the framers left open the possibility of states compelling a convention to offer amendments as, essentially, a way of hacking around an inert, institutionally corrupt Congress. It’s never happened, but the transition to elected U.S. senators followed from pro-convention organizing: the Senate’s self-interest was in preserving the status quo, via which they were appointed by state legislatures (though some states had popular referenda which guided the legislatures’ choices). Senators didn’t want to have to face the voters, but they’d much rather take that risk than let the rabble have their experiment in a deeper democracy. So we got the 17th Amendment, and now, in their wisdom, the people may exercise their hexennial right to elect solons like Joe Lieberman to the Senate.
Mark is conservative, but the kind of guy who’s willing to go on fringe left-wing TV or radio and have a real dialogue with the “enemy.” So we got along. The conference took place in September, before SOPA was introduced, but after Wyden had put his hold on PIPA. Mark was on our side on the issue, but in high demand, so I’d had trouble pinning him down. But during one session in which neither of us was a participant I cornered him and convinced him to join me in the Green Room, where we co-authored this snippet of righteous propaganda:
“Have your own Web site?” the group wrote, “Maybe the government will shut it down tomorrow … without any notice to you. Republicans are going to introduce this (bill) in the House, Democrats in the Senate. What? Big labor, Hollywood, U.S. Chamber of Commerce all in this together … against you.”
We linked it back to an article that Patrick Ruffini and I had written for the Portland Oregonian in support of Wyden’s hold (we should acknowledge Demand Progress’s Charlie Turner, who penned the first draft), and sent it to eight hundred thousand members of the Tea Party—via Facebook. And then I looked over Mark’s shoulder as he reloaded the page about one hundred times—in a fit of juvenile delight that’s all too familiar to me as somebody who also works in online activism—as he watched hundreds of people “like” the post.
The Tea Party Patriots posted a message on Facebook calling PIPA “severe government overreach.” This became an early signal for Republican politicians that grassroots conservatives’ opposition to PIPA was growing. The screenshot above shows the Tea Party Patriots call to action on the issue on September 24, 2011.
We made sure that Capitol Hill newspapers got wind of the message, and within a few days it seemed like there was a veritable anti-PIPA Tea Party rebellion. It was exactly the break we needed, and, to be honest, we were giddy and felt a bit like alchemists: the political establishment was reacting to an article we’d planted about a Facebook post that we’d helped author, about an op-ed that we’d co-written. Working with our right-wing allies a couple of left wingers—formerly of the Green Party, for chrissakes—had helped foment an (apparent) intervention of the scariest sort that the political establishment could imagine: an uprising by the Far Right.
But nothing of it felt false, as when it came to PIPA, our ideals and those of the Tea Party Patriots were genuinely aligned. It was indeed nauseating to watch Hollywood, the Chamber of Commerce, organized labor, and the leadership of both parties cavorting, so ready to line up against the interests of ordinary Americans. So it made perfect sense that we should cry out against it in harmony.
Shortly thereafter Tea Party Caucus chair Michelle Bachmann came out against the bill—first reported via a response she sent to a constituent who’d emailed her using one of Demand Progress’s petition pages. As Politico noted at the time:
Bachmann’s stance is a victory for critics of the bill, who have previously been mostly civil liberties groups, liberal lawmakers and trade associations that represent Web companies. Advocacy groups have been lobbying to get more tea party members and conservatives on board to speak out against the legislation and, so far, it seems to be working. The Tea Party Patriots recently lambasted the legislation on its Facebook page …
Demand Progress, which describes itself as a left-leaning civil liberties group, has been working with Republican political consultant Patrick Ruffini to launch a bipartisan assault against the bill.
Bachmann’s email responded to a message from a Demand Progress member who raised concerns over the PROTECT IP Act. The group hopes the 2012 presidential contender’s concern about the bill will lead more conservatives to question its potential implications on innovation and First Amendment rights.
Around the same time as the Bachmann letter, we were delighted to see a story published by CNET under the headline: “Is Google lining up Republicans against antipiracy bill?”
People were really starting to take notice. It was a pseudo-investigative piece that tried to, as they say, follow the money. It connected dots, stumbling from point-to-point as spurred forward by the paranoid inklings of Content Industry operatives—who still couldn’t fathom that they were up against something that was growing much broader and more powerful than Google alone.
It was sub-headed “Google has some interesting links to a right-wing political group called the Tea Party Patriots, which recently began criticizing the Protect IP Act, the bill that would make it easier for authorities to shut down pirate sites. Google opposes the legislation.”
According to the article, “What supporters of Pro IP suspect is that Google is somehow responsible for the Tea Party Patriots’ new found interest in copyright.”
Said supposed links largely reduced to the fact that Meckler had cosponsored that conference at Harvard.
Then there’s Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard University professor who is one of the most notable proponents of free content and less restrictive copyright laws. Last week, he co-hosted a gathering called the Conference on the Constitutional Convention. The conference doesn’t appear to have had much to do with copyright, but Lessig’s fellow co-host was Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots.
This Lessig-Meckler connection triggered warning bells among Pro IP supporters.
For any number of policy and political impetuses, and because of the work of several advocates and hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file Americans, Republicans were starting to run away from SOPA and PIPA, and were posturing for political support from Internet users and Silicon Valley. Just a few months later during a live debate on national television Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and the whole gang of presidential contenders would be tripping over each other to be the most adamantly opposed to SOPA.