> This is just illustrated by history. The 1964 Voting
> Rights Act was apporved only after decades of illegal,
> militant struggle by the civil rights movement.
The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964; the Voting Rights Act came in 1965. Chronology aside, though, Chuck's view of this is more correct than Wojtek's. Black leaders sought allies in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and were more successful with the latter than the former, but anyone who checks out the empirical history of those times knows that these were very "vacillating" allies indeed. They were embarrassed and caught off guard by "disruption" -- the Kennedy brothers especially -- and yet would not have done a blessed thing on their own without the impetus of that creatively-orchestrated disruption. There is simply no credible history of the times that could refute this view -- none.
That said, this disruption was effective precisley because it was that -- disruption. The movement directly confronted segregation in a way that challenged the power of the segregationists; civil disobedience in these cases was not merely symbolic or flashy, but a direct threat to the established order. And it also was calculated to win maximum sympathy from bystanders (who were the majority even among Southern Blacks) and those far from the scene. If elites today feel that they can ignore social movements -- or more accurately, radicals who attempt to organize social movements -- it is not because elites are so free of division that they can afford to ignore them. It is because the movements -- even or perhaps especially when they use superficially militant tactics like breaking a few windows -- are not sufficiently disruptive in the first place, because the movements have not yet found the "weak spot" in the ruling class around which they can mobilize enough people for creatively disruptive tactics. The ruling class is more than capable of absorbing a few small blows like this, dealing with malcontents through standard police procedure.
Short of full-scale social revolution -- and I agree that those are extremely rare, and only happen in times of massive, generalized social crisis -- social movements do need to find allies (however vacillating) within the ruling class. But social movements do not just respond to divisions within the ruling class; they CREATE them by causing the kind of disruption that needs to be dealt with. Politicians and other elite figures then feel bound to follow the on the movement's coattails, and not the other way around.
- - - - - - - - - - John Lacny http://www.johnlacny.com
Tell no lies, claim no easy victories