What are the prospects for a progressive movement in the US?

It is hard to remember that American politics has experienced times of profound reflection upon and criticism of the premises of modern urban, capitalist, democratic life. Engagement in progressive issues and progressive political movements has a strong history in the U.S. The period of Civil Rights and the Vietnam War was one such time, when institutionalized racism and imperialistic use of military power were the subjects of political debate and activism. An earlier period of profound reflection about our premises was the Progressive era at the beginning of the twentieth century. And the resonance that Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have had with large numbers of younger voters suggests that it is not impossible that we may experience another period of serious progressive thought. It's hard to remember today, in the grips of the most right-wing extremist government our country has seen in a century, that the temper of a time often changes in unpredictable ways.

What would it take for a progressive political movement to become mainstream in the U.S.? For one thing, it seems unlikely to imagine that it will all come from a "youth movement". The sixties anti-war movement did in fact find a very strong base in universities, but those circumstances were probably fairly exceptional and context-specific: for example, the fact that young men faced the Selective Service focused the minds of many young people on the apparent looniness of the war in Southeast Asia. But the social and cohort composition of the Civil Rights movement seems to have been somewhat different -- a broader range of ordinary people were involved, at a variety of levels, and young people played a role that was only part of the activism of the time. There were student-based organizations, of course; but there were also broad-based coalitions of faith-based, occupation-based, and regionally-based individuals who were ready and willing to be mobilized. And the Progressive Movement at the beginning of the twentieth century appears to have involved many hundreds of thousands of ordinary working people, farmers, and professionals. The Pullman Strike of 1894 involved at least 250,000 workers in 27 states, and in the presidential election of 1904 Eugene Debs received some 403,000 votes as candidate for the Socialist Party of America, some 3% of the total vote.

What issues seem to be key for building a strong and impactful progressive movement in the U.S. in the 2020s? Activism about the imperative of addressing climate change is one. The issue of extreme, unjustified, and growing inequalities of wealth and income is another. And the failures of American society in addressing the inequalities associated with race and immigration status constitute another urgent issue of concern for progressives.

If we take as a premise that the issues that are most likely to stimulate activism and sustained political commitment are those that are perceived to be key to the future of one's group, each of these issues has an obvious constituency. Climate change affects everyone, and it affect young people the most. They will live their lives in a world that is in permanent environmental crisis -- intense storms, rising ocean levels, destruction of habitat -- that will create enormous disruption and hardship. Rising inequalities represent a crisis of justice and fairness; how can it possibly be justified that the greatest share of the new wealth created by innovation and economic recovery flowed to the top 1% or the top 10%? And why should the 99% or the 90% tolerate this injustice, decade after decade? And the social harm of racism affects everyone, not just people of color. The Civil Rights movement demonstrated the potency of this issue for mobilizing people across racial groups and across regions to protest and to demand change.

And yet, these issues are not new. The Occupy movement focused on the inequalities issue, but it came and went. There is broad support in the population for policies that will slow down the processes of climate change, but this support does not appear to be easy to turn into activism and effective popular demands against our government. The government continues to push back environmental regulation and to go out of its way to flout the global consensus about CO2 emissions and climate change. And activism about racism arises periodically, often around police shootings and the Black Lives Matter movement; but this activism is sporadic and intermittent, and doesn't seem to have created much meaningful change.

The question of uncovering the factors that lead to a widespread shift of engagement with new politics is one of the key topics in Doug McAdam's account of mobilization during the Civil Rights movement in the introduction to the second edition of Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, 2nd Edition. Consider this diagram of his view of the interactive nature of contention:

Here is McAdam's description of the theory involved here. 

The figure depicts movement emergence as a highly contingent outcome of an ongoing process of interaction involving at least one set of state actors and one challenger. In point of fact, while I focus here on state/challenger interaction, I think this perspective is applicable to episodes of contention that do not involve state actors. (KL 280)

 This implies that new political thinking and a corresponding social movement do not generally emerge on their own, but rather through contention with another group or the state concerning issues that matter to both. It is a dynamic process of contention and mental formulation involving both status-quo power holders and challengers. And it is an interactive process through which each party develops its own interpretations of the current situation and the opportunities and threats that currently exist through interaction with the other group. This process leads to the formation of "organization / collective identity" -- essentially a shared vision of who "we" are, what we believe in and care about, which in turn supports the emergence of a round of "innovative collective action". The crucial part of his theory is that there is interaction between the two groups at every stage -- interpretation, formation of collective identity, and choice of collective actions. Each party influences and shapes the identity and behavior of the other.

So let's say that the "challengers" of the decade of the 2020s care primarily about three things: reducing the enormous economic inequalities that exist in our society, controlling climate change, and increasing the power of dispossessed groups to advocate for the issues they care about (abortion rights, Black Lives Matter, and achieving more favorable treatment of immigrants). And the forces of the status quo want three things as well: a favorable environment for corporate profits, secure control of the Federal court system, and no change in racial equality and immigrant status. How might the dynamic that McAdam describes play out?

Some of the political mechanisms of mobilization that are described in Dynamics of Contention are relevant for thinking about this scenario. Brokerage, coalition formation, and escalation are strategies available to the "new progressives". They can seek to find common ground among a range of groups in society who are poorly served by the reigning conservative government. But it will also emerge that there are serious disagreements about priorities, rankings, and willingness to struggle for a common set of goals. The goal of brokerage and coalition formation is to create broader and more numerous (and therefore potentially more influential) groups who will support a common agenda. But achieving collaboration and consensus is hard, and often not achieved.

And what about the "forces of the status quo"? The strategies available to them are already visible through their actions since 2008 to entrench their blocking powers within state and federal government: retreat on voter rights and voter participation; use the primary process to ensure that extreme versions of the conservative agenda find support in candidates nominated for office; undermine the political power of labor unions; use the ideological power of government to discredit the progressive opposition (disloyal, favorable to terrorists, enemies of business, ...); and, in the extreme case, use the police and surveillance powers of the state to discredit and undermine the organizations of the progressive movement. (Think of the use of agents provocateurs against the Black Panther party in the 1960s and 1970s through infiltration and misdirection as well as the murder of Fred Hampton in Chicago.)

All too often the balance of forces between coalition building on the left and the right seems to favor the right; somehow the groups on the left in the United States in the past several decades seem to have been more insistent on ideological purity than those on the right, with the result that the progressive end of the spectrum seems more fragmented than the right. And somehow the organs of the media that have the greatest influence on political values in voters seem to be in the hands of the far right -- Fox News and its commentators in particular. There is also the common background assumption on the left that only profound structural "revolutionary" change (socialism, rejection of electoral politics) will do; whereas typical voters seem to want change that proceeds through the institutions we currently have. 

Current activism in France over reforms of the pension system has several features that make it more feasible than progressive politics in the U.S. First, it is a focused single issue whose consequences are highly visible to everyone. Second, there is a long tradition in France of using strikes, demonstrations, and street protests to apply pressure on the government. These are the "repertoires of contention" that are so important in Charles Tilly's analysis of French popular politics. Third, the "gilets jaunes" present a very recent and potent example of collective action that was successful in applying a great deal of pressure on the government. It is possible to think of steps that the U.S. government might take that would spark similar levels of national protests (abolition of the Social Security system, for example), but many other provocations by the Trump administration have not sparked ongoing and effective protests (reversal of EPA regulations, withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, legislative attacks on the Voting Rights Act, appointments of hundreds of reactionary  and unqualified hacks to seats on the Federal bench, a "feed the rich" tax reform, massive ICE roundups of immigrants, ...). 

Perhaps the identity that has the greatest potential for success in the U.S. is a movement based on "reasserting the values of democracy and equality" within the context of a market economy and a representative electoral democracy. This movement would demand tax policies that work to reduce wealth inequalities and support a progressive state; environmental policies that align the U.S. with the international scientific consensus on climate change; healthcare policies that ensure adequate universal insurance for everyone; immigration policy that made sensible accommodations to the realities of the current U.S. population and workforce, including humane treatment of Dreamers; and campaign funds restrictions that limit the political influence of corporations. The slogan might be, "Moving us all forward through social justice, economic innovation, and good government." This might be referred to as "centrist progressivism", and perhaps it is too moderate to generate the passion that a political movement needs to survive. Nonetheless, it might be a form of progressivism that aligns well with the basic pragmatism and fair-mindedness of the American public. And who might serve as a standard bearer for this progressive platform? How about someone with the political instincts and commitments of a Carl Levin, a Harris Wofford, or a Sherrod Brown?

Proliferation of hate and intolerance

Paul Brass provides a wealth of ethnographic and historical evidence on the causes of Hindu-Muslim violence in India in The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India. His analysis here centers on the city of Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh, and he believes that his findings have broad relevance in many parts of India. His key conclusion is worth quoting:

It is a principal argument of this book that the whole political order in post-Independence north India and many, if not most of its leading as well as local actors -- more markedly so since the death of Nehru -- have become implicated in the persistence of Hindu-Muslim riots. These riots have had concrete benefits for particular political organizations as well as larger political uses. Hindu-Muslim opposition, tensions, and violence have provided the principal justification and the primary source of strength for the political existence of some local political organizations in many cities and towns in north India linked to a family of militant Hindu nationalist organizations whose core is an organization founded in 1925, known as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Included in this family, generally called the Sangh Parivar, are an array of organizations devoted to different tasks: mass mobilization, political organization, recruitment of students, women, and workers, and paramilitary training. The leading political organization in this family, originally called the Jan Sangh, is now the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), currently (2001) the predominant party in India's governing coalition. All the organizations in the RSS family of militant Hindu organizations adhere to a broader ideology of Hindutva, of Hindu nationalism that theoretically exists independently of Hindu-Muslim antagonisms, but in practice has thrived only when that opposition is explicitly or implicitly present. (6-7)

Brass provides extensive evidence, that is, for the idea that a key cause and stimulant to ethnic and religious conflict derives from the political entrepreneurs and organizations who have a political interest in furthering conflict among groups.

Let's think about the mechanics of the spread of attitudes of intolerance, distrust, and hate throughout a population. What kinds of factors and interactions lead individuals to increase the intensity of their negative beliefs and attitudes towards other groups? What drives the spread of hate and intolerance through a population? (Donatella della Porta, Manuela Caiani and Claudius Wagemann's Mobilizing on the Extreme Right: Germany, Italy, and the United States is a valuable recent effort at formulating a political sociology of right-wing extremism in Italy, Germany, and the United States. Here is an earlier post that also considers this topic; link.)

Here are several mechanisms that recur in many instances of extremist mobilization.

Exposure to inciting media. Since the Rwandan genocide the role of radio, television, and now the internet has been recognized in the proliferation and intensification of hate. The use of fake news, incendiary language, and unfounded conspiracy theories seems to have accelerated the formation of constituencies for the beliefs and attitudes of hate. Breitbart News is a powerful example of a media channel specifically organized around conveying suspicion, mistrust, disrespect, and alienation among groups. ("Propaganda and conflict: Evidence from the Rwandan genocide" is a finegrained study of Rwandan villages that attempts to estimate the impact of a radio station on violent participation by villagers; link.)

Incidents. People who have studied the occurrence of ethnic violence in India have emphasized the role played by various incidents, real or fictitious, that have elevated emotions and antagonisms in one community or another. An assault or a rape, a house or shop being burned, even an auto accident can lead to a cascade of heightened emotions and blame within a community, communicated by news media and word of mouth. These sorts of incidents play an important role in many of the conflicts Brass describes.

Organizations and leaders. Organizations like white supremacist clubs and their leaders make deliberate attempts to persuade outsiders to join their beliefs. Leaders make concerted and intelligent attempts to craft messages that will appeal to potential followers, deliberately cultivating the themes of hate and racism that they advocate. Young people are recruited at the street level into groups and clubs that convey hateful symbols and rhetoric. Political entrepreneurs take advantage of the persuasive power of mobilization efforts based on divisiveness and intolerance. In Brass's account of Hindu-Muslim conflict, that role is played by RSS, BJP, and many local organizations motivated by this ideology.

Music, comics, and video games. Anti-hate organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center have documented the role played by racist and anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim themes in popular music and other forms of entertainment (link). These creations help to create a sense of shared identity among members as they enjoy the music or immerse themselves in the comics and games. Blee and Creasap emphasize the importance of the use of popular culture forms in mobilization strategies of the extreme right in "Conservative and right-wing movements"; link.

The presence of a small number of "hot connectors". It appears to be the case that attitudes of intolerance are infectious to some degree. So the presence of a few outspoken bigots in a small community may spread their attitudes to others, and the density of local social networks appears to be an important factor in the spread of hateful attitudes. The broader the social network of these individuals, the more potent the infective effects of their behavior are likely to be. (Here is a recent post on social-network effects on mobilization; link.)

There is a substantial degree of orchestration in most of these mechanisms -- deliberate efforts by organizations and political entrepreneurs to incite and channel the emotions of fear, hostility, and hate among their followers and potential followers. Strategies of recruitment for extremist and hate-based parties deliberately cultivate the mindset of hate among young people and disaffected older people (link). And the motivations seem to be a mix of ideological commitment to a worldview of hate and more prosaic self-interest -- power, income, resources, publicity, and influence. 

But the hard questions remaining are these: how does intolerance become mainstream? Is this a "tipping point" phenomenon? And what mechanisms and forces exist to act as counter-pressures against these mechanisms, and promulgate attitudes of mutual respect and tolerance as affirmative social values?

*          *          *

Here is a nice graphic from Arcand and Chakraborty, "What Explains Ethnic Violence? Evidence from Hindu-Muslim Riots in India"; link. Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh show the largest concentration of riots over the period 1960-1995. There appears to be no correlation by time in the occurrence of riots in the three states.

And here is a 1996 report on the incidence of religious violence in India by Human Rights Watch; link. 

Public opinion--an example

This posting is a thought experiment that is an effort to probe the underlying components of "public opinion." I've created 8 sample data sets that I have normalized to a 1-5 scale; I've interpreted the scores as a Likert scale (from strongly disagree to strongly agree); I've assumed that each data set represents a distinct sub-population within a mass population; and I've examined the disaggregated and aggregated results in a simple spreadsheet model. This is an effort to push the questions raised in an earlier post a bit further: how do the tools of survey research allow us to answer questions about how a mass population thinks and feels about a given set of issues? The central observation there was that public opinion needs to be disaggregated around groups that have greater homogeneity. Here I am undertaking to illustrate how that disaggregation can shed greater light on the nature of public opinion.

So -- suppose we have a public that consists of eight distinct and mutually exclusive groups, A through H. Suppose we want to evaluate their attitude towards some important issue -- let's say, immigration reform. And suppose we've designed a study with a number of Likert-scaled questions that are combined and reaggregated to a 1-5 scale from "strongly oppose (1) to strongly support (5)". Finally, suppose the population as a whole shows a distribution represented in the large panel above, "SUM". The whole population represented in the top panel is simply the sum of the sub-groups A-H.

The hypothetical study is pretty uninformative up to this point. The average value for the population as a whole is 2.94 -- almost exactly in the middle of the scale. And with a standard deviation of 1.02, there is a substantial spread of opinion around the mean. We can be confident that 95% of the population falls within two standard deviations of the mean -- roughly between 1 and 5. So the aggregate data we have for the population as a whole is almost wholly uninformative -- as suggested in the earlier post. It tells us that the average voter is neutral on the issue and that the population ranges between extremely opposed and extremely favorable.

But now suppose that we are able to break out the data for the eight sub-groups, and we find that their attitudes are described in panels A through H. Here we can sometimes provide more specific answers to the question, what does Group X think about the issue?

Here we find more useful information, in that the groups have very different profiles of response to the issue. Group A is slightly unfavorable to the issue, with a standard deviation of a little more than half a point. Group B is strongly favorable (3.70) but with a significant distribution to the left with a standard deviation of a full point. Group D is the most negative, with an average score of 2.15 and a standard deviation of .74. Groups F and H are the most interesting, in that they are bimodal, with peaks around "strongly disagree" and "strongly agree" and almost no one indifferent. (The mean value for Group H is 2.93, right in the middle of the scale -- but there are no individuals in this range!) Given the bimodal nature of these two populations, we're encouraged to explore the idea that there may be a distinguishing characteristic within the group that accounts for the divided attitudes. Group C looks pretty much like the population as a whole; and Group G is distributed evenly across the whole spectrum of opinion, with no concentration around any particular position.

So this simple thought experiment seems to validate the conclusion proposed in the prior posting: in a population consisting of a number of heterogeneous groups, it is important to attempt to disaggregate the results of opinion research in a way that allows us to examine the sub-groups separately. And the statistics describing the sum of the sub-groups are likely to be uninformative; pooling the data from the eight subgroups creates pretty much of a broad, normal distribution of responses. The real insight comes in when we are able to differentiate the population into a number of sociologically real sub-groups with their own more distinctive profiles of attitudes and responses. And more important, perhaps this experiment illustrates a different way of conceptualizing public opinion: not as a characteristic distributed in a gradient across a population, but rather a composite characteristic reflecting underlying groups with their own distributions of attitudes and feelings.

What do Americans think?

Public opinion research raises many difficult questions. (See an earlier post on this topic.) We would like to know what Americans are thinking about current circumstances and issues; we'd like to know how those attitudes differ across social groups; and we'd like to have a basis for attempting to explain changes in attitudes over time. There is a vast amount of survey research underway at any given time in the United States. For example, the Pew Research Center (link) and the Roper Center (link) provide substantial survey research on social and political attitudes in the United States. But what does it really tell us?

There are, of course, the normal statistical questions about the interpretation of results: what is a representative sample? What is the margin of error? What is the variance of the population around a given topic? But these are the easy questions; there are fairly specific statistical answers to them, no different in kind from analogous questions about quality sampling methods in a manufacturing process.

But the harder questions are conceptual. What is the social fact that is being reported when a study finds that "41 percent of Americans believe that they are better off than their parents"? What are we trying to learn when we sample a population of 250 million people with a survey of a set of topically organized questions about perceptions, values, or beliefs?

Let's start constructively. We can suppose, to begin, that each person has a set of values, beliefs, or attitudes on a range of subjects. And let's say that we are interested in measuring some of these attitudes through a survey using questions based on a Likert scale (discussion); the respondent is asked to rate level of agreement with the statement on a five-point scale. Survey responses will display a distribution of answers for the topics on the survey questionnaire. We can describe this distribution in statistical terms; for example, we might find that the mean value of "trust/mistrust my elected officials" for the population is 3.5 with a standard deviation of .8. And we would probably try to group a set of questions around a single attribute (e.g., "social conservative"), and then examine the profile of individuals and groups according to their responses to these grouped questions.

But here is the hard question: what really do these descriptive statistics tell us about the population? At bottom, they tell us that, if we were to randomly draw an individual subject and ask the question, there is a high likelihood that the respondent's rating will be within the range defined by the mean for the population plus/minus the standard deviation. If the mean for the question is 3.5 and the standard deviation is .8, then this implies a range from 2.7 to 4.3 -- from "slightly disapprove" to "strongly approve". So this hypothetical study doesn't tell us very much, given the underlying variation in attitudes in the general population; the random person may range from negative to strongly positive. This is where we stand for the population as a whole, and it is not very informative because there is so much variation within the population. In other words: in a fairly specific sense, there is no single answer to the question, "what do Americans think?", because there is so much heterogeneity of attitude and opinion across the full population.

We get more information if we are able to discover that there are sub-groups that show significantly less variance around a given attitudinal position. Some groupings that may have a significant association with attitudes might include: region (northeast, south, midwest, west coast); race/ethnicity; gender; occupational status; education level; income level; age; immigration status; and so forth. And when we break down the data by groups, we may find results like these: men and women have different levels of support for capital punishment; blacks, latinos, and whites have different levels of trust in their elected officials; or well-educated and poorly-educated people differ significantly in their attitudes towards immigration policy. The population distribution is simply the sum of the distributions of attitudes in the composite groups of the society.

This differentiation of results by groups tells us that the attitudes are not randomly distributed across the population, but rather are significantly associated with group membership. And this poses a significant sociological problem for research: what explains the differences across sub-groups? How are region, gender, race, religion, age, income, or occupation relevant to the formation of attitudes and beliefs, so that groups defined by these characteristics show greater similarity to each other than does the general population?

Now we can take a stab at answering the question we began with: what do Americans think? Our studies may have allowed us to say that there are a few topics where the full population thinks roughly the same thing: there are no significant differences in the distribution of responses from individuals from sub-groups with respect to these topics. ("It is important for the recession to come to an end as early as possible"; "It is important for our country to invest in the education of children".) Second, and more commonly, there is probably a much wider group of topics where we do not find uniformity across groups; instead, African-Americans may offer one distribution of responses and Arab-Americans may offer a significantly different distribution of responses with respect to many topics. Or midwesterners and southerners may offer different distributions. In this case we can't say "Americans think X," but instead "sub-groups A, B, C, ... have significantly different attitudes with respect to this topic." And maybe this is an important possible direction for future research: how to incorporate the representation of differentiation and variation across a population into the interpretation of public opinion research. Are there better ways of visualizing the population and the modes of variation of attitude and belief that it embodies?