University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 2019-06 Protest and Democracy University of Calgary Press Arce, M., & Rice, R. (Eds.). (2019). Protest and democracy. Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/110581 book https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca PROTEST AND DEMOCRACY Edited by Moisés Arce and Roberta Rice ISBN 978-1-77385-046-7 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your university purchase a print copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy yourself. If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected] Cover Art: The artwork on the cover of this book is not open access and falls under traditional copyright provisions; it cannot be reproduced in any way without written permission of the artists and their agents. The cover can be displayed as a complete cover image for the purposes of publicizing this work, but the artwork cannot be extracted from the context of the cover of this specific work without breaching the artist’s copyright. COPYRIGHT NOTICE: This open-access work is published under a Creative Commons licence. This means that you are free to copy, distribute, display or perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to its authors and publisher, that you do not use this work for any commercial gain in any form, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build on the work outside of its use in normal academic scholarship without our express permission. If you want to reuse or distribute the work, you must inform its new audience of the licence terms of this work. For more information, see details of the Creative Commons licence at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ UNDER THE CREATIVE UNDER THE CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE YOU COMMONS LICENCE YOU MAY NOT: MAY: • gain financially from the work in any way; • read and store this • sell the work or seek monies in relation to the distribution document free of charge; of the work; • distribute it for personal • use the work in any commercial activity of any kind; use free of charge; • profit a third party indirectly via use or distribution of • print sections of the work the work; for personal use; • distribute in or through a commercial body (with • read or perform parts of the exception of academic usage within educational the work in a context where institutions such as schools and universities); no financial transactions • reproduce, distribute, or store the cover image outside take place. of its function as a cover of this work; • alter or build on the work outside of normal academic scholarship. Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org 8 Protest Cycles in the United States: From the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street to Sanders and Trump Ted Goertzel Protest movements had a major impact on political life in the United States during the protest cycle that was triggered by the economic crisis of 2007–08, peaked in 2011, and shaped the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. The Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements framed the grievances of the key groups, and both had a significant im- pact on electoral politics. Both movements had an antiestablishment, populist cast—one coming from the left and the other from the right. This populism defeated the presidential ambitions of two well-established can- didates for the presidency in 2016: Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. Had the Republican Party establishment and its wealthy supporters been able to control the nomination process, Jeb Bush would have been the party’s nominee in 2016, and perhaps the Bush dynasty would have had a third instatement. Hillary Clinton was primed to be the country’s first woman president. But her feminist credentials, rooted in a protest cycle that peaked in the 1970s, were not enough to defeat Barack Obama in the Democratic Party primary in 2008. After serving as senator from New York and secretary of state, Hillary Clinton almost lost the party’s nomination in 2016 to Bernie Sanders, an eccentric senator from Vermont who labeled himself a democratic socialist. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, 173 a celebrity real estate developer and television personality, defeated a number of very well-funded Republican politicians to win the Republican nomination before defeating Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College, al- though not in the popular vote. It was an era of declining confidence in the American political, eco- nomic, and journalistic establishments, engendered in part by the innov- ative use of social media by social movements and Internet innovators, including some in the Russian government (Weisburd, Watts, and Berger 2017). It was an era in which charisma trumped competence and national- ism trumped globalization. In 2016, the right emerged triumphant, at least in electoral politics, although leftist populism remains ascendant among the generations that will shape political life in the future. The Economic Crisis of 2007–08 After a long period of improving economic conditions, the American people’s expectations were suddenly dashed by the economic crisis of 2007–08. The triggering event was the collapse of a bubble in housing prices that had been stimulated by irresponsible banking practices and government policies. Investment bankers and mortgage brokers had bun- dled large numbers of questionable mortgages into financial packages and sold them to investors on the theory that they could not all go bad at once. But that is exactly what happens when a bubble bursts, and major invest- ment banks and insurance companies were suddenly insolvent. Millions of people had borrowed too much money to invest in homes they really could not afford on the theory that housing prices would keep going up indefinitely. Their expectations were dashed and the economy went into a tailspin. The financial crisis of 2007–08 was an example of what political scien- tist James Davies (1962; 1969) called the “J-curve of rising and declining satisfactions” (see chapter 1 in this volume). Davies’s theory suggests that protest will break out when conditions suddenly worsen because people become angry and seek someone to blame for the disturbing course of events. They also seek a solution. But to do this, they need a theoretical “frame” to articulate their grievances and tell them who is at fault and what should be done about it (also discussed in chapter 2 in this volume). 174 Ted Goertzel Social movements compete to frame the events for their potential follow- ers so they can mobilize them to pressure for change. People’s first reaction is usually to blame the president when the econ- omy goes bad. As former president Harry Truman famously said, “the buck stops here.” This is true even though the American Constitution severely limits the president’s ability to regulate the economy. President George W. Bush was a conservative Republican whose inclination was to let the private sector take care of itself. When the crisis struck in 2007, he went so far as to allow one huge investment bank, Lehman Brothers, to go bankrupt. But his advisors persuaded him he could not let the whole financial structure collapse, so he authorized the government to buy up bad investments from several other huge investment banks and insurance companies. They were considered “too big to fail,” because their failure would bring down the rest of the economy. Protest from progressive activists was largely muted during this per- iod, partly because President Bush was being forced by events to take many of the actions progressives would normally advocate, such as intervening in major financial institutions. In addition, President Bush’s term was close to its end and many progressives put their energy into the campaign that elected Barack Obama in November 2008. President Obama, elected on a vague program of “a future you can believe in,” continued many of the policies Bush had established to stabilize the financial system, and he added spending programs to stimulate economic revival. One of the most controversial was to have the government purchase shares in the Gener- al Motors and Chrysler corporations to keep them from going bankrupt. Many conservatives, including Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and likely presidential candidate, opposed this. The J-curve hypothesis explains the upsurge in discontent following the economic crisis, but framing theory is needed to explain how the dis- content was articulated into grievances that engendered a protest cycle. Unlike other protest cycles where one frame became predominant, this protest cycle was characterized by polarization between two competing frames. These were most clearly exemplified by two social movements: the Tea Party and the Occupy movement. 8 | Protest Cycles in the United States 175 The Tea Party Movement The first major social movement to emerge in this period was not a re- sponse to the crisis from the left, but a protest from the right against President Obama’s anticrisis policies. This became known as the Tea Party movement (Wikipedia 2013a), in reference to the Boston Tea Party of 1773 that helped to spark the American Revolution. The movement’s collective action frame was that the government, not bankers or mortgage brokers, had caused the problem, and that the less the government did about it the better.