business and state elites, but popular forces also possess tremendous power of disruption.45 That power often lies dormant, but the potential is always there. The presence, intensity, and duration of popular disruption is often the most decisive factor in shaping policy. When mass resistance is disruptive and sustained, it greatly expands the potential for progressive reform, often forcing new policy options onto the table. It can compel politicians to pursue legislation they dislike, and can shape how that legislation is implemented. When mass resistance is absent or merely episodic, business and state elites will call the shots. Non-elites may get a few crumbs as a byproduct of intra-elite conflicts or elections, but any progressive reform will be much weaker and more subject to reversal. A major reason why Obamaera progressive reforms were so tepid is that the Obama years lacked the sustained mass disruption present in other eras of US history. There were some notable examples of mobilization like Occupy Wall Street and black resistance to police violence, but they were not nearly as disruptive as the movements of the 1930s and the 1960s. In the chapters that follow, we draw from both the Obama era and from twentieth-century examples to indicate when and how progressive movements have had the greatest impact on government policy.46
A Counter-Intuitive Strategy for Social Movements
Our central argument in this regard is that mass resistance is most effective when it directly targets corporations and state agencies. By threatening the profits or the functioning of those institutions, popular disruption can compel their leaders to accept progressive changes in government policy. Since these elites are usually the key roadblocks to change, and since they possess enormous power over what the government does, it makes more sense to target them than to focus on elected politicians. Their responsiveness to movement demands doesn’t spring from their goodwill, but from a rational cost-benefit analysis of their interests. If subjected to mass pressures that disrupt their profit-making or their institutional functioning, these leaders will naturally seek to cut their losses. Conceding to movement demands often becomes the lesser-evil option. If movements can force a change in these elites’ cost-benefit calculations, progressive government action then becomes much more likely.
This argument is counter-intuitive. The conventional wisdom among scholars and activists is that “collective action will be most productive if it focuses on elected officials,” either by pressuring them or trying to elect new ones.47 After all, modern corporations, militaries, and law enforcement agencies were consciously designed not to be accountable to the public, so how could they be more subject to public influence than elected officials are?
Nonetheless, some of the most successful progressive movements in US history have focused their energies mainly on non-electoral targets. Auto companies in the 1930s grudgingly accepted the unionization of their workers because they faced unprecedented strikes and disruptions on the shop floor. Most labor organizers spent far less time trying to get Democrats elected than on organizing their fellow workers to bring their workplaces to a halt. Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932 and reelected in 1936, but workers only succeeded in winning effective unionization rights when they completely disrupted industry and forced the bosses to concede those rights. We examine this process in Chapters 1 and 4.
Similarly, racially segregated businesses in the South opted to integrate because a mass movement directly threatened their profits. Many organizers consciously sought to change politicians’ behavior by disrupting business. Martin Luther King Jr. himself concluded that protests should target Southern businesses, since “the political power structure listens to the economic power structure.” If the movement could threaten business leaders enough to “pull them around,” they would in turn “pull” the political leaders in the South.48 As in the 1930s, mass pressure catalyzed changes in the calculations of institutional elites, leading in turn to progressive changes in government policy. We analyze the strategy and impact of the civil rights movement in detail in Chapter 4.
The immigrant rights struggle offers a more recent example of this dynamic. In 2010 the state of Arizona became infamous for passing legislation, SB 1070, that legalized racial profiling against Latinos. In response, national organizations began promoting a boycott of the state’s businesses, and numerous individual consumers joined in. In March 2011, dozens of corporate executives wrote a letter to Arizona state legislators asking that they refrain from passing additional anti-immigrant bills. The problem, they explained, was that the boycotts were so “harmful to our image” that “Arizona-based businesses saw contracts cancelled or were turned away from bidding,” and “sales outside of the state declined.” The threat to their profits led them to insist on a change in public policy. Within a week of receiving the letter, the Republican-controlled legislature rejected five bills designed to further criminalize immigrants.49 As this example suggests, targeting corporations can be a fruitful political strategy even when those corporations are not the main culprits. Arizona-based companies were not the driving force behind the racist policy, but they had the power to stop it.
In each of these instances, ordinary people took advantage of the levers of power that are available in all systems dependent on human participation. People whose cooperation is essential to an institution have the ability to stop the institution from functioning, and can thus wield tremendous leverage by collectively withdrawing their cooperation. This form of power has been given various names: structural power, positional power, or interdependent power.50 Perhaps the two clearest examples are workers going on strike and consumers boycotting a company. In both cases, the small fish take advantage of the shark’s dependence on them, frustrating the shark’s goals. In so doing, the disruptive small fish can alter the shark’s behavior toward them as well as the shark’s stance on government policies.
Another key to success for the movements we have mentioned was their ability to exploit, or even create, divisions among elites. After US autoworkers forced General Motors and Chrysler to allow unionization in the late 1930s, the notoriously anti-union Henry Ford and leaders in other industries soon followed suit. Black protesters in the 1960s disrupted business, which then confronted the more militant racists in the Southern political establishment. Immigrant rights activists responded to Arizona’s SB 1070 with a similar strategy, forcing business leaders to rein in the white supremacists in the state government. In each case disruption gave rise to counter-coalitions of elites that neutralized the influence of the elites responsible for oppressive policies. In the 1930s and 1960s these intra-elite divisions also left a meaningful long-term residue in the structure of the government. They allowed for the formation or strengthening of state agencies dedicated to restricting the power of elites: the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the civil rights enforcement apparatus of the Department of Justice.51 In both cases, the agencies imposed significant limits on the freedom of other elites, including the president. Election outcomes and electoral coalitions were of secondary importance in determining policy.52
Explosive disruptive behavior is not the only way to foster these divisions. Intra-elite conflicts are often the result of years or decades of low-grade disruption that eventually convinces one or more elite sectors to favor concessions to the movement. The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision did not result primarily from the initiative of antiracist Supreme Court justices, but from two converging sources of pressure that impelled judges and politicians to concede to black demands. One source was the long history of black resistance, which reached a tipping point in the years following World War II. The juggernaut that
