AMANDA TAUB: The power politics of social change

Monday was Martin Luther King Day in the United States, a time when Americans honor his legacy and the civil rights movement that he helped lead.

If you were to sum up his argument in a single word, it would be dependence: In the U.S., the Democratic Party in northern states was highly dependent on the support of unions. And because the great migration had brought huge numbers of Black workers to northern cities to work in factories and industry, Black voters became a powerful constituency within the labor movement. Organizations like the NAACP were able to leverage that power to make civil rights part of the labor movement’s political agenda, and the labor movement was able to leverage its power to force their agenda within the Democratic Party — and eventually the entire country.

Schickler shows that this realignment process began to transform the Democratic Party from the bottom up in the 1930s, decades before the civil rights movement reached mainstream prominence in the 1960s. The senior leadership of the party — eager to placate segregationists in the Southern states — resisted this bottom-up pressure as long as it could. But the union-backed civil rights wing of the party eventually proved more powerful. That’s an important addition to the usual story of civil rights, which has tended to focus on public protests and resistance techniques in the South, such as the Montgomery bus boycott, lunch counter sit-ins, freedom rides and the large-scale marches. To be clear, those actions were extremely important: In particular, the photographs and footage of police brutality during the nonviolent protests became a scandal that helped turn public sentiment against the segregationist system. And leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. provided moral direction that connected civil rights to Americans’ political identity and the country’s core values.

The book shows that it would be a mistake to miss the broader political context and how the civil rights movement used big societal shifts to its advantage.

That message clicked into even sharper relief as I worked to understand the end of the apartheid system in South Africa. There, once again, the most common version of the story is one about public protests, shifting moral sentiment and top-down pressure: that the nonviolent resistance led by Nelson Mandela and others drew attention to the injustice of white rule; the international community ratcheted up pressure through sanctions and ostracism of the white regime; and eventually, justice prevailed.

“Labor mobilization, particularly by miners and metal workers, drove the economic elite to see that their future depended on compromising,” Wood said. “Black labor forced compromise through the economic elites, who then put pressure on the political elites.”

Those stories of change in the United States and South Africa have shifted my lens on the modern-day protest movements I often cover for this column. It is easy to look at public mobilization as a signal of a movement’s strength: how many people turn out to demonstrations, how often they protest and whether they continue in the face of state repression. But it’s just as important to look for evidence that the protests are connecting with a crucial political or economic constituency and whether a movement is organized enough to use that leverage.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that Iran’s protest movement won’t be successful. But it is not yet clear how the protesters will connect their public mobilization to a lever of political power.

“There is a coalition of people who have had this agenda for many years of restraining the courts, and also other forces in society that block the Israeli right from implementing its ideological program,” said Gideon Rahat, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, an independent research center. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used to limit that far-right agenda to maintain a more centrist compromise, Rahat said, but now it is more politically expedient for him to give them a freer rein.

The prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, viewed through this lens, are growing even bleaker. The Israeli economy does not depend heavily on Palestinian labor, and the militarized isolation of the occupied territories means that Israeli cities are relatively insulated from unrest there. The Iron Dome missile defense system and other military assets add a further layer of protection against attacks — and therefore from political pressure as well. The Palestinian leadership is divided and has not been seen as a credible negotiating partner since 2006, when Hamas took over in Gaza, Rahat told me.

And the prospects for international pressure are limited, in part because of Israel’s unique position within domestic politics in the United States, where support for Israel is now a top priority of the American right.

Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University and the co-author of “How Democracies Die,” said he is more pessimistic now than he was a few years ago about the future of Israeli democracy and the prospects for a peace agreement and end to the occupation.

“Eventually, white South Africans did decide that they were losing too much economically from apartheid,” he said. “I don’t know that Israelis will reach that point.”