decades of individual resistance to the Jim Crow system, punctuated by innumerable local protests in cities and even in the most violently oppressive cotton plantations, accompanied by growing denunciations of segregation and terror in the black press.53 The nationally visible part of this rising protest was the thirty-year legal campaign by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), built on the high-risk action taken by hundreds of courageous black plaintiffs. These lawsuits challenged first the unequal conditions of segregation and, by the early 1950s, segregation itself.54 Though often unsuccessful in the short run, the lawsuits and the broader black resistance to segregation helped to cultivate sympathizers within parts of the US judiciary. The lawsuits were not directly disruptive in the same way that boycotts and sit-ins were, but they created a latent division within the elite power structure. Portions of the judiciary slowly lined up against local governments and even against the executive branch of the federal government. At key moments they would become an important resource for civil rights activists, especially by constraining Southern law enforcement’s freedom to impose draconian punishments on protesters.
A complementary source of pressure came from outside the United States. Widespread international condemnation of US racism worried postwar politicians, who feared that the nonwhite peoples of the “Third World” would not only reject US racism but also embrace socialist revolution. In 1952, this concern led the Truman administration to urge the Supreme Court to rule against school segregation.55 The domestic and global challenges to segregation were mutually reinforcing: each inspired the other, and together they pushed some government officials to confront segregationists in the interest of preserving domestic stability and US global dominance. In turn, the Brown decision helped energize the more overt black disruption of the early 1960s that would be necessary for the ruling’s implementation.
Social movements are most successful when they can find ways to exploit these tensions within the ruling class, by unleashing disruption that targets the right pressure points. Getting some elites to intervene on behalf of the movement does not mean that organizers need to politely request their help—indeed, that approach is usually a dismal failure. Confrontation and disruption are more likely to “pull around” elites, who then intervene to stop the disruption by urging other corporate and state elites to concede to the movement. Disruption can take diverse forms, from workers shutting down a workplace to lawsuits. Different categories of elites may be susceptible to different forms of movement pressures, as these examples suggest.
Figuring out whom to target, and with what tactics, can be difficult. The most successful movements have exhibited a strategic flexibility that allows them to try new things when the old methods are not working. The degree of flexibility depends a great deal on how the movement is structured: do organizations allow for both strategizing and direct action by the rank-and-file, or are strategizing and decision-making reserved for the top leaders? Do organizations regularly engage their members in reflection on the successes or failures of current strategies? Greater internal democracy facilitates learning and adaptation. Democracy may involve contested elections or formal factions within a movement, but it must also be embodied in other organizational structures that allow for autonomy and experimentation by the membership.56 The boycott campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s were often initiated by local black organizers, not national leaders, and would have been impossible without the active participation of rank-and-file black supporters. The boycotts also show that democracy and differences of opinion within a movement need not stop a movement from uniting around a particular strategy. The Southern black movement was quite decentralized and ideologically diverse, but it was able to unify at many critical moments.
Disruption, Reform, and Beyond
In the rest of the book we analyze the forces at work in the various steps of the policymaking process, from the election and appointment of officials, through the crafting of legislation, to the implementation period in which laws are interpreted and enforced (or not enforced, as the case may be). Our examination of this process is not comprehensive. Some types of policies are ignored, and some parts of the process are treated in more depth than others. We focus most attention on aspects that receive insufficient attention in other accounts. But we do assert that our conclusions are valid beyond just the cases we examine. By focusing on some of the most important policy changes of the past century, we have tried to avoid cherry-picking examples that fit our argument.
In analyzing the origins and shaping of legislation, we focus primarily on Obama-era initiatives. We consider a variety of legislative proposals, including both progressive reform initiatives and pro-business ones. The dominant forces in the legislative phase tend to be the elite institutions that are “most affected by the proposed change” (in Al Gore’s words). We stress the role of disruption, real or potential, in influencing this process. At times mass pressure plays an important role, particularly in the initiation of legislation. That pressure is usually most effective when social movements threaten the stability of the “most affected.”
In the second part of the book we examine the often-neglected but crucial phase of policy implementation. Policy is determined not just by the laws themselves, but by how the executive branch with its myriad departments and agencies decides to apply them. We trace the roles of the “most affected” elite institutions in shaping implementation, and then turn to instances in which mass disruption has played a determining role in how laws are implemented. We discuss the workers’ movement of the 1930s, black struggles for civil rights and economic justice in the 1960s, and the US withdrawal from Vietnam. In each case, progressive changes in policy implementation resulted from disruption directed at the “most affected” institutions. This chapter may be of particular interest to readers involved in social movements.
In the Conclusion we offer some further reflections on social movement strategy. Here we highlight the inadequacy of reforms alone. While this book focuses on the prospects for winning reforms, reforms are inherently tenuous since they leave intact the basic institutions of elite power: corporations and conservative state agencies. Progressive government laws and institutions that arise as a result of mass disruption will endure for a time after the disruption ends, but over the long run they will be subject to erosion, as the weakening of the NLRB, EPA, and 1960s civil rights legislation demonstrates. Furthermore, reforms by definition do not address the root of the problem. Forcing a business to recognize a union, desegregate, or allow some holes in the glass ceiling is a major accomplishment, but changes of this type do not eliminate the power of private business owners to make decisions that affect everyone else. We may compel the government to end its occupation of a foreign country, but how can we prevent it from invading another in the future? To address these problems, we need to do away with the private and public institutions that are structured to allocate power and wealth to the richest 1% in society. We need to replace them with institutions that answer to the needs and desires of the 99%.
This revolutionary change is not on the immediate horizon. Many more people must first come to believe that achieving a truly humane and democratic society requires a new set of economic and political institutions, not just a new set of politicians—a fundamentally different substance, not just a different shadow. We propose that targeting powerful institutions directly is not only a good way to win reforms, but is also conducive to building the mass movements that can achieve that revolutionary transformation.
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1 John Dewey, “The Need for a New Party,” in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 6, 1931–1932, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 163.
2 Martin Gilens, Affluence
