By Jo Freeman, October 19th, 2013 
The threat of a shut down of the federal government put a crimp in protests planned for DC, but it didn’t shut them down. On Tuesday, October 8, 10,000 people came to demand immigration reform. Backed by major unions, the rally and march had been in the works long before anyone thought a small group of Republican House Members would force the federal government to close in order to compel a delay in the start of the Affordable Care Act.
As the clock ticked on passing a continuing resolution to pay federal bills, permits were in place and everything was set to go. Several hundred people had signed up to be arrested at the foot of Capitol Hill in order to demand that the bill passed by the Senate in June be voted on in the House. Plans were thrown into turmoil when the deadline passed and numerous federal employees were told not to report to work on October 1. Parks all over the country were closed, including the Mall. There is no fence to actually keep people off the Mall, but the shutdown did affect uses requiring a permit, such as the erection of a sound stage. Rally permits were revoked at the last minute. 
The organizing committee didn’t cancel the rally; instead it negotiated with the National Park Service and the US Capitol Police, whose personnel were among those furloughed. At the last minute, it was agreed that events could go on, including the planned civil disobedience at the foot of Capitol Hill, with some adjustments.
For many years civil disobedience in the nation’s capitol has been negotiated and choreographed somewhat like a stage play. Fifty years ago, when large protest resumed in DC after a hiatus of several decades, such actions were spontaneous. Police cracked down to discourage future disruptions. This did not work. It just made the cops look bad. The resulting court cases, both criminal and . . .
Read more: While the Government Shut Down, Immigration Protests Continued
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 8th, 2013 
Last week, I intended to write my reflections on President Obama’s speech at the commemoration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Instead, I offered my ambivalent thoughts on Obama on Syria. Summarized in my opening: “Two Cheers for Obama.” The potentially tragic decisions of the week overshadowed, in my mind, the enduring accomplishments and challenges of decades. Obama is not only threatening Assad. Assad is threatening Obama. A march to war overshadowed a poignant remembrance of this historic march of 1963.
I closed my reflections by expressing my fear that this overshadowing may become emblematic of the Obama presidency: significant work on jobs and freedom challenged by questionable military and national security adventures, including not only the potential attack on Syria, but also drone warfare and heightened domestic and international surveillance. Unlike the President’s full-throated critics on the left and the right, I am not convinced that his positions have been simply wrong. Yet, I too sense that there is a pattern here that is troubling, especially so since the ideals which Barack Obama embodies, symbolizes and has acted to fortify are of such crucial importance to the vigor and health of the American body politic, revealed in his speech commemorating the great civil rights march and its most powerful leader, Martin Luther King Jr.
Obama’s talk, like King’s, is not cheap. His words often act. He is the only man to have been elected President of the United States based on a speech, (William Jennings Bryant was nominated but not elected), and his speeches, in form as well as content, continue to be consequential. This was my hope when I watched and then read the text, despite recent events in Syria, and the possibility of an American attack. Obama’s words on jobs and freedom, and the people who marched on Washington, tell us something about who we are, where we are going, and by what means, and as I see it, even offer interesting insights into the Syrian dilemmas.
The speech revolved . . .
Read more: Obama on Remembering Jobs and Freedom: Three Cheers for Obama?
By Jo Freeman, September 3rd, 2013 
Upwards of 100,00 people came to Washington last week to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But they didn’t all come for the same event. Indeed there were so many things going on that there is no way to count how many people came for something. There were at least two marches and two celebrations at the Lincoln Memorial, as well as several exhibits, numerous conferences and conventions and a few protests. I went to many and took photos at several.
By August it seemed that everyone wanted a piece of the commemoration pie, but first out of the gate was an amateur without an institutional base. Van White is a civil rights attorney in Rochester NY whose late father frequently talked about going to the 1963 march. As much in memory of his father as anything else, early in 2012, White decided to replicate the march on the actual date, August 28, even though it was a Wednesday. That’s a hard day to draw a crowd, but about 10,000 people got up early to march 1.6 miles to the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
He filed for the ideal domain name in June of 2012 and requested the permits two months later. Once his webpage was up, he invited people to comment and get in touch; that’s how he found a couple dozen of the original marchers to lead his legacy walk the morning of August 28. He also ran a civil rights conference the day before, attended by about 150 people and staffed by a couple dozen students from Alabama State University (an HBCU in Montgomery) as a school history project.
White was going to do a presentation at the Lincoln Memorial, but the National Park Service nixed that idea. White eventually found out why; the White House wanted that spot on that day. He did get permits for his march, but only after the King Center did . . .
Read more: Marching on Washington: Controversial in 1963, Celebrated in 2013
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, September 1st, 2013 
Two cheers for President Obama! On his performance leading up to his speech yesterday in the Rose Garden. See video below.
Great that he is going to Congress. I hope this sets a precedent, making it harder in the future for Presidents unilaterally, and contrary to the constitution, to go to war. No guarantee this will be the case, but it is very much worth the effort, notable here because it is far from clear that the President will get the support he seeks.
Cheer two: I am pleased that he is standing against chemical warfare. Too many of my friends on the left are missing this point. In their generalized criticism about American power in the world (thus, for example, America now is “waging war on Syria”), they seem to not understand, even seem to purposively ignore, that the Assad regime in Syria has engaged in a horrific act, one of the few times since WWI that chemical weapons have been used so openly.
I know this is not the only time. I know that the U.S. was silent when Iraq used such weapons against Iran. I know that the U.S. has used chemicals in Vietnam and Iraq, and I know that Israel has used chemicals in Gaza. But Assad used chemical weapons for the sole purpose of indiscriminately killing people, his fellow citizens, actually his subjects. It was state terror, pure and simple. There are those who point to the less than certain evidence, but I think a pretty clear case has been made by the White House, and those who still doubt that Assad is a butcher do so out of willful ignorance, powered by ideology, close to home, a blind anti-Americanism. To the contrary, I believe that sometimes, there is something worse than American power, and sometimes, the U.S. does the right thing. As an expert on East and Central Europe, I especially appreciate this.
. . .
Read more: Obama on Syria
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, July 30th, 2013 
I am on the road this month, now in Paris. For the previous three weeks, I have been teaching a course, “Social Movements, Publics and Politics,” at The New School’s Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland. I also squeezed in, the weekend before last, work in Sofia, Bulgaria, consulting, along with Sandrine Kott, on a European Union research project “Regime and Society in Eastern Europe.” The research was from and on Bulgaria (Ivajlo Znepolski), Germany (Thomas Lindenberger), Hungary (Adam Takacs), and Poland (Dariusz Stola), studying “State and Society in Eastern Europe, 1956 – 1987.” While in Sofia, I had an opportunity to spend a few hours exploring the protests there, a chance to observe an exciting social movement confronting seemingly intractable problems. The protest, the research and the teaching were interestingly related: Here are some preliminary notes on the protest, as illuminated by my seminar and the reports of the European scholars.
I was at the protest on a Sunday, a slow day apparently. The protest routine: daily, people gather in front of the government building at 6:00 PM. There is a human ecology in the gathering. Friends meet each other at agreed upon places in the plaza and then march together to the Parliament building, attempting to disrupt the politics as usual. Informal groups with peer pressure keep the protests going. People come a number of days a week, visible to their friends and colleagues, as well as the nation and beyond: small group social interaction links with and fortifies the large social protest.
During the week, people gather in large numbers after work; on weekends, a smaller group gets together, perhaps a thousand or two on the Sunday I was there. Yet, it still was impressive, enthusiastic chanting and whistling, inventive placards, coupled with interesting discussions. I was there on the thirty seventh day of the demonstration, and it has continued (on day forty, there was violence). Through a few quick exchanges, I felt I had a sense of the general contours and direction of the movement.
The protesters are outraged by Parliamentary machinations, demanding . . .
Read more: Reflections on the Protests in Bulgaria
By Jo Freeman, June 28th, 2013 
Jo Freeman writes: “Most of the press seems to have overlooked this protest in front of the White House. The Supreme Court decisions had been released only two hours previously, so they were elsewhere.” Freeman, though, was there. Here is her report, illuminating a persistent protest against the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in solidarity with the camp’s hunger strikers . -Jeff
Code Pink co-founder Diane Wilson climbed over the White House fence on Wednesday as part of the ongoing campaign to get President Obama to close Guantanamo. Once over, she stood about five feet from the fence as three armed uniformed Secret Service approached with rifles and a snarling dog. Told to GET DOWN, she was handcuffed and hauled off to jail. The audacity of her feat was enhanced by the fact that she is in the 57th day of a fast in solidarity with the Guantanamo hunger strikers. Unlike the 104 men refusing to eat at Guantanamo, Wilson is not being force fed. 
This is not Wilson’s first challenge to White House security. On May 10th she had her neck attached to the White House fence with a special bicycle lock during another Code Pink demonstration. It took the cops two hours to free her neck from the fence. She was arrested, fined $70 and released.
Her latest feat occurred after a noontime rally put together by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture in Pennsylvania Plaza. The backdrop to the speakers featured sympathizers in orange jump suits holding the names of those still being held in Guantanamo.
After the rally, participants and observers congregated on the sidewalk in front of the White House for a street theater re-enactment of an “enteral feeding.” Tighe Barry of CodePink pretended to strap “Shraf Masud” of Yemen into a chair and feed him (actually her). Barry usually gets . . .
Read more: Close Guantanamo Protest 6-26-13
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 11th, 2013 
Today I explore the relationship between Obama’s national security address with his surveillance policies. Many see the distance between his speech and action as proof of their cynicism about Obama and more generally about American politicians. I note that the distance can provide the grounds for the opposite of cynicism, i.e. consequential criticism. But for this to be the case, there has to be public concern, something I fear is lacking.
I am an Obama partisan, as any occasional reader of this blog surely knows. One such reader, in a response to my last post on Obama’s national security address, on Facebook declared: “your endless contortions in support of this non-entity make you look increasingly ridiculous.” He wondered: “Is this really what a ‘public intellectual’ looks like today?” I am not profoundly hurt by this. I am enjoying the one time in my life that I actually support an American political leader in power. I was an early supporter of the State Senator from the south side of Chicago and find good reasons to appreciate his leadership to this day. Through his person and his words, he has changed American identity, to the pleasure of the majority and the great displeasure to a significant minority. Obamacare is his singular accomplishment. He rationally responded to the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression, despite sustained opposition. Perhaps he could have done more, but powerful forces were aligned against him. He has carefully redirected American foreign policy, cooperating with allies and the international organizations, engaging enemies, working to shift the balance between diplomacy and armed force. Obama has worked to move the center left, as I analyze carefully in Reinventing Political Culture, and I applaud his efforts even when he has not succeeded.
That said I have been disappointed on some matters, and I want to be clear about them here. In my judgment, the surge in Afghanistan didn’t make much sense. The escalating use of drones, without clear . . .
Read more: Obama’s Dragnet: Speech versus Action
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 7th, 2013 
I believe that the disclosures concerning the surveillance of phone records and internet communications in the Guardian and The Washington Post underscore the significance of President Obama’s recent speech on national security. His words provide the most cogent means to appraise his responsibilities for his administration’s actions. Today an analysis of the speech and the responses to it: in my next post, I will reflect on its significance in light of recent events. -Jeff
In his address to the National Defense University on May 23, 2013, President Obama set out to transform the common sense about terrorism and the proper American response to it. He continued what I take to be his major goal: the reinvention of American political culture, pushing the center left on a broad range of problems and principles, often meeting great resistance. In this particular instance, the change he sought at NDU, was apparently quite simple, moving from a war on terror to a struggle against terrorists, ending the prospect of total and endless war against an enemy whose power has been greatly and routinely exaggerated. The suggestion of the simple change understandably elicited strong and conflicting reactions. I think these reactions, along with the speech itself, illuminate the significance of Obama’s latest performance as “storyteller-in-chief.”
The editorial board of The New York Times declared:
“President Obama’s speech on Thursday was the most important statement on counterterrorism policy since the 2001 attacks, a momentous turning point in post-9/11 America.”
Over on the op.ed. page a few days later, Ross Douthat presented a cynical alternative:
“President Obama’s speech national security last week was a dense thicket of self-justifying argument, but its central message was perfectly clear: Please don’t worry, liberals. I’m not George W. Bush.”
At The New York Review of Books, David Cole judged:
“President Barack Obama’s speech Thursday . . .
Read more: Obama’s National Security Speech: The Politics of a Big Thing
By Michael Weinman, April 5th, 2013 
In the immediate aftermath of the latest elections in Israel, my (somewhat snide, but really felt) response was “good thing there is a future; there’s surely no present.” Meaning, I suppose, something like: nice to see that folks really made a statement that the current political system is fundamentally broken (by voting in droves for the newly-minted Yesh Atid [i.e., there is a future] party), but that doesn’t mean that anything has actually changed, or can be expected to change, any time soon. I had wanted to try to develop that reaction into a sustained thought, but failed. Then, in the build-up to Obama’s visit and the drama of Netanyahu’s troubled, but ultimately (and predictably) successful, attempt to forge a coalition, I thought that there was a real moment to expand on my initial response. I failed again. Obama’s visit itself would have been a nice occasion to revisit my thesis and see how it was holding up against “facts on the ground.” But, alas, that moment passed as well.
Who would have thought that the “critical mass” would have been reached through a seemingly benign, almost anodyne, gesture by Yair Lapid (head of the afore-mentioned party) in saying that any structural changes to Israeli economic and fiscal policy—and such changes, it is universally agreed (and, seriously, now, how often is universal agreement reached on anything in Israel?)—must first of all resolve the difficulties faced by the “ideal typical” family of “Riki Cohen” who (it so happens) is said to hail from Hadera, the suburban semi-city between Tel Aviv and Haifa where my wife’s parents have lived for 25 years.
So, I am sitting here in their house in Hadera, looking over the pages and pages devoted to “Rikigate” in the thick Friday [think: Sunday] editions of Yediot Ahronot and HaAretz (including prized positions on the front covers thereof), and I realize: this is the evidence that the January version of me would have wanted to rip from the near future and point to in making my comment about the lack of a political present in Israel. . . .
Read more: Is There an Israeli Future? Post-Election Reflections on Minister Lapid, “Riki Cohen from Hadera” and the Pursuit of a Normal Society
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, March 18th, 2013 
This is the second in a three part series “Principle and Practice.” See here for Part 1.
At the New School for Social Research, my intellectual home for just about my entire career, the relationship between principle and practice is counter-intuitive. Principle, in my judgment, has been, since the institution’s founding, at least as important as practice, and, ironically, probably of more practical significance. The New School’s history has been set by its principles, even as sometimes in practice the principles were not fully realized.
I am thinking about this at a turning point in our history: a relatively new university president, David Van Zandt, has just appointed, following faculty review and recommendation, a new dean, Will Milberg. It is a hopeful moment, rich with promise and possibility for our relatively small, financially strapped, unusual institution. How we now act has, potentially, significance well beyond our intellectual community. This is directly related to the founding principles of our place, their historical significance and continued salience.
Founded in 1919, as an academic protest, The New School has represented, and worked to enact, central ideals of the university in democratic society, doing a great deal on relatively little. The New School’s founders were critical of the way economic and political powers interfered with the intellectual and scholarly life of American universities. While they were responding proximately to the firing of two Columbia University faculty members for their disloyalty during WWI, they were, more generally, concerned that those in control of American universities, their trustees, who were (as written in the mission statement) “composed for the most part of men whose views of political, social, religious and moral questions are in no way in advance of those of the average respectable citizen. Their tendency is therefore to defend established thought than to encourage a fundamental reconsideration of long accepted ideals and standards.”
Just a few years after the American Association of University Professors was founded to defend academic freedom and after the association wavered and didn’t . . .
Read more: Between Principle and Practice (Part 2): The New School for Social Research
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