O NE OF the leading political scientists, Martin Gilens, has done important studies of the relationship between public attitudes and public policy, based on polling data. It’s a pretty straightforward thing to study—policy you can see, and public opinion you know from extensive polling. In one study, together with another fine political scientist, Benjamin Page, Gilens took about 1,700 policy decisions, and compared them with public attitudes and business interests. What they show, I think convincingly, is that policy is uncorrelated with public attitudes, and closely correlated with corporate interests. Elsewhere he showed that about 70 percent of the population has no influence on policy—they might as well be in some other country. And as you go up the income and wealth level, the impact on public policy is greater—the rich essentially get what they want.
Polling data is not refined enough for him to look beyond the top 10 percent, which is kind of misleading because the real concentration of power is in a fraction of 1 percent. But if the study was carried up to there, it’s pretty clear what you’d find: they get exactly what they want, because they’re basically running the place.
The fact that policy doesn’t correspond to public interest shouldn’t come as a big surprise. This has been going on for a long time. Government policy is designed to implement state power and the power of dominant elements within the society. Here, it means mainly the corporate sector. The welfare of the population is secondary, and often not cared for at all. And the population knows it. That’s why you have this tremendous antagonism toward institutions—all institutions. So, support of Congress is often in the single digits; the presidency is disliked; corporations are disliked; banks are hated—it extends all over. Even science is disliked—“why should we believe them?”
There’s popular mobilization and activism, but in very self-destructive directions. It’s taking the form of unfocused anger—hatred, attacks on one another and on vulnerable targets. Really irrational attitudes—people mobilizing against their own interests, literally against their own interests. Supporting political figures whose goal is to harm them as much as possible. We’re seeing this right in front of us—you look at the television and the Internet, you see it every day. That’s what happens in cases like this. It is corrosive of social relations, but that’s the point. The point is to make people hate and fear each other, look out only for themselves, and not do anything for anyone else.
So take Donald Trump. For many years, I have been writing and speaking about the danger of the rise of an honest and charismatic ideologue in the United States, someone who could exploit the fear and anger that has long been boiling in much of the society, and who could direct it away from the actual agents of malaise to vulnerable targets. The dangers, however, have been real for many years, perhaps even more so in the light of the forces that Trump has unleashed, even though Trump himself does not fit the image of honest ideologue. He seems to have very little of a considered ideology apart from me and my friends.
He got huge support from people who are angry at everything. Every time Trump makes a nasty comment about whoever, his popularity goes up. Because it is based on hate and fear. The phenomenon that we are seeing here is “generalized rage.” Mostly white, working class, lower-middle-class people, who have been cast by the wayside during the neoliberalism period. They've lived through a generation of stagnation and decline. And a decline in the functioning of democracy. Even their own elected representatives barely reflect their interests and concerns. Everything has been taken away from them. There is no economic growth for them, there is for other people. The institutions are all against them. They have serious contempt for institutions, especially Congress. They have a deep concern that they are losing their country because a “generalized they” are taking it away from them. That kind of scapegoating of those who are even more vulnerable and oppressed, along with illusions about how they are being coddled by the “liberal elites,” is all too familar, along with the often bitter outcomes. And it’s important to bear in mind that the genuine fears and concerns can be addressed by serious and constructive policies. Many of the Trump supporters voted for Obama in 2008, believing the message of “hope and change.” They saw little of either, and now in their disillusionment they are seduced by a con man offering a different message of hope and change—which could lead to a very ugly reaction when the imagery collapses. But the outcomes could be far more hopeful if there is a real and meaningful program that genuinely inspires hope and does promise seriously to bring about badly needed change. The response instead is generalized anger at everything.
One place you see it strikingly is on April 15. April 15 is kind of a measure—the day you pay your taxes—of how democratic the society is. If a society is really democratic, April 15 should be a day of celebration. It’s a day when the population gets together to decide to fund the programs and activities that they have formulated and agreed upon. What could be better than that? You should celebrate it.
It’s not the way it is in the United States. It’s a day of mourning. It’s a day in which some alien power that has nothing to do with you is coming down to steal your hard-earned money—and you do everything you can to keep them from doing it. That’s a measure of the extent to which, at least in popular consciousness, democracy is actually functioning. Not a very attractive picture.
The tendencies that we’ve been describing within American society, unless reversed, will create an extremely ugly society. A society that’s based on Adam Smith’s vile maxim, “All for ourselves, nothing for anyone else,” the New Spirit of the Age, “gain wealth, forgetting all but self,” a society in which normal human instincts and emotions of sympathy, solidarity, mutual support, in which they’re driven out. That’s a society so ugly I don’t even know who’d want to live in it. I wouldn’t want my children to.
If a society is based on control by private wealth, it will reflect those values—values of greed and the desire to maximize personal gain at the expense of others. Now, a small society based on that principle is ugly, but it can survive. A global society based on that principle is headed for massive destruction.
I think the future looks pretty grim. I mean, we are facing really serious problems. There’s one thing that shouldn’t be ignored—we’re in a stage of history for the first time ever where we’re facing literal questions of species survival. Can the species survive, at least in any decent form? That’s a real problem.
On November 8, 2016, the most powerful country in world history, which will set its stamp on what comes next, had an election. The outcome placed total control of the government—executive, Congress, the Supreme Court—in the hands of the Republican Party, which has become the most dangerous organization in world history.
Apart from the last phrase, all of this is uncontroversial. The last phrase may seem outlandish, even outrageous. But is it? The facts suggest otherwise. The party is dedicated to racing as rapidly as possible to destruction of organized human life. There is no historical precedent for such a stand.
Is this an exaggeration? Consider what we have just been witnessing. The winning candidate calls for rapid increase in use of fossil fuels, including coal; dismantling of regulations; rejection of help to developing countries that are seeking to move to sustainable energy; and in general, racing to the cliff as fast as possible.
And there have already been direct consequences. The COP21 Paris negotiations on climate change aimed for a verifiable treaty, but had to settle for verbal commitments because the Republican Congress would not accept any binding commitments. The follow-up COP22 Marrakech conference aimed to fill in the gaps. It opened on November 7, 2016. On November 8, election day, the World Meteorological Organization presented a dire and ominous report on the current state of environmental destruction. As the results of the election came in, the conference turned to the question of whether the whole process could continue with the most powerful country withdrawing from it and seeking to undermine it. The conference ended with no issue—and an astonishing spectacle. The leader in upholding the hopes for decent survival was China! And the leading wrecker, in virtual isolation, was “the leader of the Free World.” One can, again, hardly find words to capture this spectacle.
It is no less difficult to find words to capture the utterly astonishing fact that in all the massive coverage of the electoral extravaganza, none of this receives more than passing mention. At least I am at a loss to find appropriate words.
We are heading, eyes open, toward a world in which our grandchildren may not even be able to survive. We’re heading toward environmental disaster, and not just heading toward it, but rushing toward it. The US is in the lead of accelerating these dangers under the pressure of business for in large part institutional reasons. Just take a look at the headlines. There was a report on the front page of the New York Times, a revealing report on the measurements of the Arctic ice cap. Well, it turns out the melting was far beyond anything that had been predicted by sophisticated computer models, and the melting of the Arctic ice cap has very substantial effects on the climate altogether.
It’s an escalating process because as the ice cap melts, less of the sun’s energy is reflected, and more comes into the atmosphere, creating an escalating, nonlinear process that gets out of control. The article also reported the reactions of governments and corporations. Their reaction is enthusiasm. We can now accelerate the process because new areas are open for digging and extraction of fossil fuels, so we can make it worse. That’s great.
This is a death sentence for our descendants. Fine, let’s accelerate it—hundreds of millions of people in Bangladesh are gonna be driven from their homes by rising sea level in the not-distant future, with consequences for the rest of us too. This demonstrates either a remarkable lack of concern for our own grandchildren and others like them, or else an equally remarkable inability to see what’s before our own eyes.
There’s another major threat to survival that’s been hanging over human life for more than seventy years—and that’s nuclear war. And that’s increasing. Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, around 1955, issued a passionate plea to the people of the world to recognize that they have a choice that is stark and unavoidable: they must decide—all of mankind must decide—to renounce war, or to self-destruct. And we have come very close to self-destruction a number of times. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has what it calls a “Doomsday Clock.” It started in 1947, right after the atom bomb was used. The clock measures the distance that we are from midnight—midnight means termination. Just two years ago the clock was moved two minutes closer to midnight—to three minutes before midnight. The reason is that the threat of nuclear war and the threat of environmental catastrophe are increasing. Policy makers are amplifying them, that’s the future that we’re not only creating but accelerating.
I don’t think we’re smart enough to design in any detail what a perfectly just and free society would be like. I think we can give some guidelines and, more significantly, we can ask how we can progress in that direction. John Dewey, the leading social philosopher in the late twentieth century, argued that until all institutions—production, commerce, media—are under participatory democratic control, we will not have a functioning democratic society. As he put it, “Policy will be the shadow cast by business over society.” Well, it’s essentially true.
Where there are structures of authority, domination, and hierarchy—somebody gives the orders and somebody takes them—they are not self-justifying. They have to justify themselves. They have a burden of proof to meet. If you take a close look, usually you find they can’t justify themselves. If they can’t, we ought to be dismantling them—trying to expand the domain of freedom and justice by dismantling that form of illegitimate authority. That’s another task for an organized, committed, dedicated population: not just to regulate them, but to ask why they’re there. This comes straight out of the libertarian element of the Enlightenment and classical liberal thought. It’s also the core principle of anarchism, but that’s democracy as well. I don’t think they’re in opposition in any respect. They’re just different ways of looking at the same kind of problem—popular decision making in the hands of people who are concerned with the decisions and their impact. And, in fact, progress over the years—what we all thankfully recognized as progress—has been just that.
To a nontrivial extent, I’ve also spent a lot of my life in activism. That doesn’t show up publicly. I’m not terribly good at it . . . I’m not the greatest organizer. But the reason things change is because lots of people are working all the time. They’re working in their communities, in their workplace, or wherever they happen to be—and they’re building up the basis for popular movements, which are going to make changes. That’s the way everything has ever happened in history.
See Brandenburg v. Ohio, Supreme Court of the United States, June 9, 1969
See Edwards v. South Carolina, Supreme Court of the United States, February 25, 1963
See Times v. Sullivan, Supreme Court of the United States, March 9, 1964
Take, say, freedom of speech, one of the real achievements of American society—we’re first in the world in that. It’s not truly guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, in the Constitution. Freedom of speech issues began to come to the Supreme Court in the early twentieth century. The major contributions came in the 1960s. One of the leading ones was a case in the civil rights movement. By then you had a mass popular movement, which was demanding rights, refusing to back down. In that context, the Supreme Court did establish a pretty high standard for freedom of speech. Or take, say, women’s rights. Women also began identifying oppressive structures, refusing to accept them, bringing other people to join with them. That’s how rights are won.
There is no general remedy. There are particular remedies for particular problems, but there’s no general remedy—at least that I know of—for everything. The activists are the people who have created the rights that we enjoy. They’re not only carrying out policies based on information that they’re receiving, but also contributing to the understanding. Remember, it’s a reciprocal process. You try to do things. You learn. You learn about what the world is like. That feeds back to the understanding of how to go on.
The way people learn is by interaction. That’s even true of the advanced sciences. If you go to a research lab in the sciences, people are talking to each other, they’re challenging each other, they’re presenting ideas, getting reactions from colleagues, students, and so on. If you’re isolated, you might be an individual genius who can figure things out, but it’s not likely. You don’t have the resources, or the support, or the encouragement to try to find out who you are, what’s happening in the world, where you should be looking, and so on.
So in societies with functioning, significant organizations like labor unions—which were a very educational force, not just fighting for workers’ rights, but where workers’ education was a major phenomenon—you can learn where to look. You can encourage each other. You can inform each other. You can have your views challenged, refine them, and so on. Then, you can overcome the very natural efforts of elite institutions to protect you from what they don’t want you to know. So it’s like everything else, a constant struggle against power.
During the Arab Spring, in the early days of the Tahrir Square demonstrations, government pressures were very significant. A lot of the organizing was done through social media, and President Mubarak made the decision to shut down the Internet to block the activism through social media. What was the effect? Activism increased because people returned to what really matters, which is face-to-face contact. People began to talk to one another. We have plenty of evidence that direct personal interchange—organizing with people directly, talking to them, listening to them, and so on—has a major effect. Social media are useful, and all organizers and activists use them, but it’s not like really entering into a discussion with people directly. We’re human beings, we’re not robots, and I think that can’t be forgotten.
So, to the question “what can we do?” Just about anything we choose to do. The fact of the matter is, by comparative standards, we live in quite a free society. It wasn’t a gift from heaven. The freedoms that we have were won by hard, painful, courageous popular struggle, but they’re there. We have that legacy—a legacy granted to us by the struggles of others. There are huge opportunities—it’s still the freest society in the world in many ways. Government has very limited capacity to coerce. Corporate business may try to coerce, but they don’t have the mechanisms. There’s a lot that can be done if people organize—struggle for their rights as they’ve done in the past—and we can win many victories.
I think that we can see quite clearly some very, very serious defects and flaws in our society, our level of culture, our institutions—which are going to have to be corrected by operating outside of the framework that is commonly accepted. I think we’re going to have to find new ways of political action. There is a change going on, mainly among young people, but that is where change usually starts. Where’s it gonna go? That’s really up to you. It goes where people like you will direct it.
My close friend for many years, the late Howard Zinn, to put it in his words, said that “what matters is the countless small deeds of unknown people, who lay the basis for the significant events that enter history.” They’re the ones who’ve done things in the past. They’re the ones who’ll have to do it in the future.
A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism . . .
A final point: Even in a bivariate, descriptive sense, our evidence indicates that the responsiveness of the U.S. political system when the general public wants government action is severely limited. Because of the impediments to majority rule that were deliberately built into the U.S. political system—federalism, separation of powers, bicameralism—together with further impediments due to anti-majoritarian congressional rules and procedures, the system has a substantial status quo bias. Thus when popular majorities favor the status quo, opposing a given policy change, they are likely to get their way; but when a majority—even a very large majority—of the public favors change, it is not likely to get what it wants. In our 1,779 policy cases, narrow pro-change majorities of the public got the policy changes they wanted only about 30 percent of the time. More strikingly, even overwhelmingly large pro-change majorities, with 80 percent of the public favoring a policy change, got that change only about 43 percent of the time.
In any case, normative advocates of populistic democracy may not be enthusiastic about democracy by coincidence, in which ordinary citizens get what they want from government only when they happen to agree with elites or interest groups that are really calling the shots. When push comes to shove, actual influence matters.
I have ventured to quote scattered statements at considerable length because the picture of the immediate situation in Washington is typical. The condition at Washington reflects accurately the condition of politics throughout the country. The former has nothing to do with the realities of American life because the latter is completely out of connection. The situation explains the discontent and disgust of the people with the old parties and it constitutes the opportunity for a new party. We have long been told that politics is unimportant, that government is merely a drag and an interference; that the captains of industry and finance are the wise ones, the leaders in whose hands the fortunes of the country are safely entrusted.
The persons who keep reiterating such sayings forget, or they try to conceal from view, that the confusion, the perplexity, the triviality, the irrelevance, of politics at Washington merely reflect the bankruptcy of industrial “leadership,” just as politics in general is an echo, except when it is an accomplice, of the interests of big business. The deadlocks and the impotence of Congress are definitely the mirror of the demonstrated incapacity of the captains of industry and finance to conduct the affairs of the country prosperously as an incident to the process of feathering their own nests. It would be ludicrous, were it not tragic, to believe that an appeal to the unregulated activities of those who have got us into the present crisis will get us out of it, provided they are relieved from the incubus of political action. The magic of eating a hair of the dog which bit you in order to cure hydrophobia is as nothing to the magic involved in the belief that those who have privilege and power will remedy the breakdown they have created. As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance. The only remedy is new political action based on social interests and realities.
Appellant, a Ku Klux Klan leader, was convicted under the Ohio Criminal Syndicalism statute for “advocat[ing] . . . the duty, necessity, or propriety of crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform” and for “voluntarily assembl[ing] with any society, group or assemblage of persons formed to teach or advocate the doctrines of criminal syndicalism.”
Neither the indictment nor the trial judge’s instructions refined the statute’s definition of the crime in terms of mere advocacy not distinguished from incitement to imminent lawless action.
Held: Since the statute, by its words and as applied, purports to punish mere advocacy and to forbid, on pain of criminal punishment, assembly with others merely to advocate the described type of action, it falls within the condemnation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Freedoms of speech and press do not permit a State to forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action. Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, overruled.
[A] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions, and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea. That is why freedom of speech . . . is . . . protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest . . . There is no room under our Constitution for a more restrictive view. For the alternative would lead to standardization of ideas either by legislatures, courts, or dominant political or community groups.
Respondent, an elected official in Montgomery, Alabama, brought suit in a state court alleging that he had been libeled by an advertisement in corporate petitioner’s newspaper, the text of which appeared over the names of the four individual petitioners and many others. The advertisement included statements, some of which were false, about police action allegedly directed against students who participated in a civil rights demonstration and against a leader of the civil rights movement; respondent claimed the statements referred to him because his duties included supervision of the police department. The trial judge instructed the jury that such statements were “libelous per se,” legal injury being implied without proof of actual damages, and that, for the purpose of compensatory damages, malice was presumed, so that such damages could be awarded against petitioners if the statements were found to have been published by them and to have related to respondent. As to punitive damages, the judge instructed that mere negligence was not evidence of actual malice, and would not justify an award of punitive damages; he refused to instruct that actual intent to harm or recklessness had to be found before punitive damages could be awarded, or that a verdict for respondent should differentiate between compensatory and punitive damages. The jury found for respondent, and the State Supreme Court affirmed.
Held: A State cannot, under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, award damages to a public official for defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves “actual malice”—that the statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or false.
The history of social movements often confines itself to the large events, the pivotal moments. Typically, a survey of the history of the civil rights movement will deal with the Supreme Court decision in the Brown case, the Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the Birmingham demonstrations, the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the March from Selma to Montgomery, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Missing from such histories are the countless small actions of unknown people that led up to those great moments. When we understand this, we can see that the tiniest acts of protest in which we engage may become the invisible roots of social change.