Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11 (Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics)
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Last annotated on November 21, 2016
Only a few months earlier, on November 7, 2006, the Democratic Party had won a decisive victory in the congressional midtermRead more at location 207
voters' dissatisfaction with President George W. Bush and the Iraq WarRead more at location 213
United for Peace and Justice, the nation's largest and broadest antiwar coalitionRead more at location 218
U.S. Representatives Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Maxine Waters (D-CA), and Lynn Woolsey (D-CA); movement leaders, such as the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Medea Benjamin; and celebrities, such as Jane Fonda and Danny Glover, all of whom echoed the view that the 2006 elections were a mandate for peace.Read more at location 223
Lynn Woolsey exclaimed in her remarks, “We have an antidote to this insanity.… It is what you sent us to do last November.Read more at location 227
Organizers followed up on the rally with a Capitol Hill lobby day.Read more at location 231
After receiving a day of basic lobbying training on Sunday, activists swarmed into House and Senate office buildings on Monday, January 29, ready to press their representatives to support a laundry list of pending resolutions and to join the congressional Out of Iraq Caucus.Read more at location 233
activists attempt to keep one foot inside political institutions and one foot outside them (Selfa 2008, pp. 160–2).Read more at location 237
public spoke loudly [and] told Democrats, ‘we want you to be the majority because you will change that policy in Iraq and bring our troops home’”Read more at location 245
For Woolsey and her allies, the elections, rally, and lobby day were the culmination of many years of hard work.Read more at location 251
potential for synergy between social movements and political parties.Read more at location 253
leaders of a social movement identified an issue, framed it for political discourse, and helped to mobilize supporters from the rank and file of a political party. Leaders of a political party adopted the movement's issue and frames. They promised to address the issue if elected. Mobilization by the movement's supporters boosted the party's success in the election. After the election, party leaders worked together with movement activists to implement the movement's agenda.Read more at location 254
The antiwar movement became a mass movement from 2001 to 2006, as Democratic Party loyalty and anti-Bush sentiment provided fuelRead more at location 259
At exactly the time when antiwar voices were most well poised to exert pressure on Congress, movement leaders stopped sponsoring lobby days. The size of antiwar protests declined. From 2007 to 2009, the largest antiwar rallies shrank from hundreds of thousands of people to thousands, and then to only hundreds.Read more at location 261
Congress considered antiwar legislation, but mostly failed to pass it.Read more at location 264
In 2008, the Democrats nominated an antiwar presidential candidate in U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL). But once Obama became president, his policies on war and national security resembled those of his Republican predecessor, President George W. Bush.Read more at location 264
These observations lead us to question the nature of the antiwar-Democratic alliance.Read more at location 279
For example, Anthony Downs (1972) points to the importance of issue-attention cycles among the public. Albert Hirschman (1982) emphasizes temporal change in subjective assessments of benefits and costs of activism, which can lead to both engagement and burnout among activists. David Meyer (1990) stresses the opening and closing of political opportunities available to movements. Dennis Chong (1991) highlights the mass psychology of movements, particularly how policy successes can have a demobilizing function for movements (see also Bernstein 2005; Jenkins and Eckert 1986; McAdam 1982; Meyer 2008; Rupp and Taylor 1990; Tarrow 1993).Read more at location 281
none of these explanations accounts for why the rise to powerRead more at location 296
We observe demobilization not in response to a policy victory, but in response to a party victory.Read more at location 299
The rising power of the Democratic Party may have convinced many antiwar activists that the war issue would be dealt with satisfactorily, even if they did not keep applying grassroots pressure through an organized social movement (in contrast to what many scholars predict; see, for example, Ganz 2009; McAdam 1982; Skocpol, Liazos, and Ganz 2006).Read more at location 300
after 2006, it was no longer “necessary” to have an antiwar movementRead more at location 305
the movement started to decline in the midst of President Bush's escalationRead more at location 313
decline started before the Democrats made good on promises to enact legislation to reviseRead more at location 317
why did so few of them actively pressure President Obama to do soRead more at location 321
Why did the movement not grow during the surge in Afghanistan in 2009?Read more at location 322
we inquire into the dual identifications that many political actors had with the Democratic Party and the antiwar movement.Read more at location 325
We argue that when the Democrats were out of office and the Republicans were in power, these intersecting identities promoted synergy between the party and the movement.Read more at location 327
More generally, we argue that social movement mobilization is driven to a significant degree by the dynamic interrelationship between social movements and political parties. We posit that the direct identification of political actors (such as grassroots activists, nonprofit organizations, and members of Congress) with political parties and social movements is a critical (though, not the only) factor that drives both mobilization success and failure.Read more at location 333
partisan identification tends to be stronger and longer-lasting than movement identification,Read more at location 342
Partisan identities are consistently reinforced by periodic elections in a way that movement identities are not, a tendency that often makes partisans an advantaged subgroup within movements and movement activists a disadvantaged subgroup within parties.Read more at location 349
as the Democrats regained control of government, actors' party identifications tended to trump their movement identifications.Read more at location 351
Rather than staying focused on their position on a single issue – such as their opposition to war – many partisans gave greater attention to other callings from the Democratic Party. As a result, many Democratic activists and war opponents withdrew from the antiwar movement as they felt less threatened by the Bush administration and shifted their attention to other party priorities, such as health care.Read more at location 352
decline of the antiwar movement was not the result of a centralized decision by movement leadersRead more at location 357
antiwar movement itself ultimately suffered organizationally from its ties to the Democratic Party.Read more at location 362
relationship between political parties and the mobilization of social movements is linked to the identities of individual political actors.Read more at location 363
the interplay of partisan and movement identities can provide an account for the dynamics of social movementRead more at location 365
We argue that the consequences of intersecting movement-party identities can be observed not only in the case of the antiwar movement, but also in movements as diverse as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, both of which exhibited fluctuating overlap between movement supporters and party supporters.Read more at location 374
after the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States, the threat perceived by conservative activists upon Obama's election quickly translated into Tea Party protests in 2009Read more at location 377
Tea Party rallies dissipated once the Republican Party regained control of the U.S. HouseRead more at location 380
consequences of party-movement overlap may be amplified when American politics is highly polarizedRead more at location 385
Antiwar protests after 9/11 were organized by many of the same individuals and organizations that had been active in peace struggles from the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s through the confrontations with Iraq in the 1990s (Woehrle, Coy, and Maney 2008Read more at location 396
People opposed war for a mix of reasons, such as concerns about the potential geopolitical implications of U.S. military intervention, general opposition to the policies of the Bush administration, and religiously motivated pacifism.Read more at location 399
these protests were able to reach an unprecedented scale – including the largest internationally coordinated protest in all of human history on February 15, 2003 – largely due to the new information environment created by the Internet (Gillan, Pickerill, and Webster 2008Read more at location 401
antiwar movements tend to be less successful in achieving their policy goals than other social movementsRead more at location 412
the antiwar movement had few financial resources and ran on a shoestring budget (Cortright 2004Read more at location 425
Rather than focusing on the policy success or failure of a movement, this book tells the story of the interaction between political parties and social movements in a social space that we call the party in the street.Read more at location 427
Among those who study American politics, there is often a division of labor by those who study parties and movements,Read more at location 436
However, we explain that parties and movements, in fact, are overlappingRead more at location 439
We are careful to compare the movement after 9/11 to the Vietnam antiwar movement,Read more at location 447
polarization during the Vietnam War era was not as partisan in nature.Read more at location 449
mapping the relationships among parties, foreign policies, and the movement.Read more at location 451
Exit poll data reveal that politicians in the Democratic Party benefited during electoral contests from the support of antiwar constituencies.Read more at location 456
However, when we look at the evolution of actual war policies from the Bush to the Obama administrations, we find more continuity than change. The Obama administration shifted emphasis from Iraq to Afghanistan, but these shifts were still only a slight redirection of the trajectory set forth by the Bush administration.Read more at location 457
The findings show that antiwar activists with identities linked to the Democratic Party tended to depart from the antiwar movement earlier than did activists without Democratic identities.Read more at location 483
although Democratic Party members generally held an antiwar point of view, their mobilization for the antiwar cause usually assumed a lower priority than mobilization on many other issues, such as health care.Read more at location 485
identification with the Democratic Party drew activists away from the antiwar movementRead more at location 487
Partisan identities were more likely to trump movement identities than vice versa,Read more at location 488
We find that organizations with Democratic identifications gained more central positions within the network of antiwar organizations as the Democratic Party rose to power, but then tended to lose those positions once Obama became president.Read more at location 497
three organizations that illustrate the contours of our account: United for Peace and Justice, MoveOn, and Black Is Back.Read more at location 503
Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), James McGovern (D-MA), John Murtha (D-PA), Barbara Lee (D-CA), and Maxine Waters (D-CA) worked closely with antiwar lobbyistsRead more at location 507
we show how their efforts rose and fell with the fortunes of the Democratic Party.Read more at location 512
Once Barack Obama became president, the antiwar movement within Congress almost vanished.Read more at location 512
We argue that polarization amplifies challenges for the mobilization of social movements.Read more at location 530
