target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_6a593036-c16e-5efe-b57b-6727772ecc11">40 Guantánamo Review Task Force, Final Report (Washington, DC: 2010), 3; AP, “Graham Doubts Civilian Trials for 911 Suspects,” November 28, 2010. Congress later prohibited the transfers.
41 Charles Levinson and David Rohde, “Special Report: Pentagon Thwarts Obama’s Effort to Close Guantánamo,” Reuters, December 29, 2015.
42 On the military’s significant degree of autonomy see Richard Lachmann and Michael Schwartz, “The Life and Times of ‘Who Rules America’ and the Future of Power Structure Research,” in G. William Domhoff et al., Studying the Power Elite: Fifty Years of Who Rules America (New York: Routledge, 2017), 75–8.
43 For example, generals can look forward to lucrative post-military employment in defense firms, which undoubtedly affects their behavior while in the military. See Bryan Bender, “From the Pentagon to the Private Sector,” Boston Globe, December 26, 2010: A1.
44 In the 2012 election, many business donors’ “best argument” for supporting Obama over Romney “boiled down to the simplest one: Obama was going to win.” Nicholas Confessore, “Obama’s Not-So-Hot Date with Wall Street,” NYT Magazine, May 6, 2012: MM50.
45 Our emphasis on mass disruption is informed by the work of many scholars and organizers. Key studies include Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage, 1971); William A. Gamson, The Strategy of Social Protest, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1990 [1975]); Michael Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure: The Southern Farmers’ Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1880–1890 (New York: Academic Press, 1976); Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: How They Succeed, Why They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1979); Frances Fox Piven, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). The influence of Marxism, anarcho-syndicalism, black freedom struggles, and other theoretical traditions will also be apparent in much of our analysis.
46 We limit our focus to progressive movements because right-wing movements’ paths to influence tend to be different. To a far greater extent than progressives, corporate and right-wing forces can rely on elite actors inside and outside the state to promote the policies they desire. See BW, “Business’ Most Powerful Lobby.”
47 Edwin Amenta, Neil Caren, and Sheera Joy Olasky, “Age for Leisure? Political Mediation and the Impact of the Pension Movement on US Old-Age Policy,” ASR 70, no. 3 (2005): 522.
48 Interviewed by Donald Smith in November 1963, quoted in David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Vintage, 1986), 226.
49 Drew Brown et al., to Russell Pearce, March 14, 2011, nytimes.com; Richard A. Oppel, Jr., “Arizona, Bowing to Business, Softens Stand on Immigration,” NYT, March 19, 2011: A15.
50 Schwartz, Radical Protest, 172–3; Luca Perrone, “Positional Power, Strikes and Wages,” ASR 49, no. 3 (1984): 412–26; Piven, Challenging Authority, 19–35.
51 Our analysis throughout this book recognizes the importance of “state capacity,” a concept long stressed by Theda Skocpol (e.g., Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, “State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal,” Political Science Quarterly 97, no. 2 [1982]: 255–78). However, Skocpol’s work overstates state agencies’ autonomy from class interests, particularly business and social movements. As we show in Chapter 4, the development of the NLRB and the DoJ civil rights division into real enforcers was the result of movement-induced disruption, which compelled economic elites to support or acquiesce to the agencies’ empowerment. Successful enforcement of labor and civil rights laws depended less on the prior existence of “knowledgeable administrative organizations” within the state (ibid., 260) than on the sustained movement disruption that created those organizations, emboldened them, and pushed capitalists to empower them.
52 Our argument here differs from Piven’s theory of “dissensus,” or the rupture of electoral coalitions as a result of mass disruption (Challenging Authority). She views electoral realignments as a key variable in producing policy change. We think that targeting corporations and other non-electoral institutions often leads to changes in government policy with or without altering those alignments, and that, in any case, targeting non-electoral institutions may contribute indirectly to electoral realignments. People who are organized in progressive social movements like the ones analyzed in this book are highly unlikely to vote Republican, given the experience and education they acquire through their participation. We elaborate on the role of elections in the chapters that follow.
53 See for instance Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). For a classic personal account see Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (New York: Knopf, 1974).
54 James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 21–45.
55 Mary L. Dudziak, “Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative,” Stanford Law Review 41, no. 1 (1988): 61–120. Eisenhower was opposed to the decision, but his Assistant Attorney General Lee Rankin did submit a brief urging the Court to overturn school segregation. Earl Warren, The Memoirs of Earl Warren (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1977), 291; Patterson, Brown v. Board, 63.
56 For related conceptions of movement democracy and its strategic importance see Schwartz, Radical Protest; Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Marshall Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Joshua Murray and Michael Schwartz, “Moral Economy, Structural Leverage, and Organizational Efficacy: Class Formation and the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike, 1936–1937,” Critical Historical Studies 2, no. 2 (2015): 219–59.
Where Laws Come From: Schoolhouse Rock! Reconsidered
Some folks
