Legendary political scientist & two-time CASBS fellow Sid Tarrow discusses his new book as well as his decades-long exploration of protests, social movements, and contentious politics with 2021-22 CASBS fellow Edward Walker.
"Movements and Parties: Critical Connections in American Political Development" - Cambridge University Press
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.
Today on Human Centered, current fellow and professor of sociology at UCLA, Edward Walker, sits down for a chat with two-time former CASBS fellow, Sid Tarrow. Tarrow has been studying social movements and politics since the early sixties, and his work is foundational in understanding how movements form and interact with political, economic, and social structures. The two discuss his prolific experiences at the Center, his recent work exploring how social movements intersect with political parties, and his thoughts on the current social political moment.
Ed Walker: I’m Ed Walker, current fellow at the Center for Advanced Study and a professor of sociology at UCLA. It's an honor to be here today talking with Sid Tarrow, who is the emeritus Maxwell Upson Professor of Government at Cornell University and a two-time fellow of the Center for Advanced Study, once in 1980 and again in 1997. Sid's work's long been an inspiration to me and my thinking on social movement repertoires and how their institutional targets respond, and his works on social movements and contentious politics have been nothing less than foundational for the field as a whole.
Although I won't list them all here, Sid's major books have all had substantial impacts. This ranges from his work on peasant communism in southern Italy in 1967 through Dynamics of Contention in 2001. That's a book with Doug McAdam and Charles Tilley closely linked to their work together during visits to the Center for Advanced Study.
And now he's covering New Ground in his more recent focus on American politics in his 2021 book, Movements and Parties, Critical Connections in American Political Development. This is a fantastic book that I hope you'll check out. I'm sure we'll discuss some of this today.
Sid's also very well known for his widely influential book, Power in Movement, which has had a vast impact in research circles and is also widely used in undergraduate and graduate teaching on social movements, which I use in my own courses at UCLA. I understand that a new fourth edition of the book is due out later this year. I won't have time to list all of Sid's awards and career recognitions here today.
Trust me, there are many of them. But what I want to acknowledge right away is that Sid's contributions haven't just been in his own research books and articles, but he's also made many wonderful contributions to the collective enterprise of social movements research that have, if you will, grown the pie for everyone. Among these, I'd especially like to highlight his work with the Cambridge University Press series on contentious politics and also his excellent mentoring of scores of junior scholars, a number of whom I'm happy to include as my own close peers and research collaborators today.
Sid, welcome to Human Centered and it's great to have you here with us today.
Sid Tarrow: Thanks a lot, Ed. It's a pleasure to be even virtually back at the Center.
Ed Walker: It’s wonderful to have you. So I'd like to start by asking you about your two visits to the Center for Advanced Study, where you were in your career, what were the animating questions for you, and how that influenced the trajectory of your work in the years after. Given that you had two fellowship visits, I'd hope that you could say a little bit about each of them.
Sid Tarrow: Well, I'll try, Ed, but to explain why the Center was so important, I have to take you back even further. First to Columbia, where I got my MA, and then to Berkeley, where I got my PhD. At Columbia, I was a student of the great pluralist David Truman, and then at Berkeley, I studied with Joe La Palambara, who was a fellow at the Center in that year and was moonlighting at Berkeley.
In the midst of the anti-war movement in Berkeley, I asked myself whether the pluralist approach of Truman and La Palambara, which they used to study interest groups, could be extended to more contentious forms of politics. Was it reasonable, I wanted to know, that the kinds of behaviors and relationships that they had studied within the governmental process could be found among outsiders as well. This idea, of course, was anathema to young progressives of the 1960s, like myself, for whom movements were outside the polity and they were good, while parties and interest groups were inside and were therefore bad.
When I went to Italy in the 1960s, I followed this inclination when I saw that the Communist Party had snuffed out the vigorous energies of the peasants in the name of its national strategy and squandered the peasants' energies. La Palambara encouraged me with my thesis, helped me to get a Ford Foundation Fellowship, and was a kind of moral tutor when the two of us were together in Rome at the same time while I pecked away at my thesis. But something was lacking in my account of how the Communists interacted with the peasants.
What was missing were the politics of the party strategy and how they interacted with the two main regions of the country. The North, where there was a solid working class base, and the South, where they depended on the peasantry. It wasn't the backwardness of the South that affected the party's failure there, but the fact that it was intending to implement a strategy that was constructed for the North in a very different political environment.
Fast forward to 1980-81 when I became a fellow at the Center, and I began to rethink how movements intersect with institutions. About halfway through that year, the late and great social movement theorist, Mayor Zold, the father of us all, came to visit. When I told Mayor how my thinking was going, he quickly recognized a link to the then young sociologist Doug McAdam at Arizona and put the two of us in touch.
Based on McAdam's work on the civil rights movement and my work on movements and parties in Italy, we quickly forged an alliance across disciplinary lines. At that time, there were few political scientists who were thinking about movements as players in the political game. And my year at the center gave me the leisure and the connections to develop what came to be called the political process approach to social movements, together with McAdam and a few others, like Craig Jenkins and David Meyer, who were mainly sociologists.
Meyer also put me in touch with Chuck Tilly, whom I'd first met when he and a group of senior scholars were again at the center planning a book called The Formation of Nation States in Western Europe. When my fellowship year ended, I went out to Ann Arbort, where Chuck and an army of grad students were coding the data for his epical study of contentious gatherings in England between 1754 and 1834. With less ambition, I imitated his data gathering strategy and wrote a book linking movements to politics in Italy between 1965 and 1973, which I called Democracy and Disorder.
Democracy, Parties, Disorder, Social Movements. That book became the linchpin for the rest of my career, which I owe largely to that first year at the Center.
Ed Walker: Well, I had no idea about the connection with Mayers-Alde and how Mayer had helped to broker you with Doug, so that's quite an interesting historical fact that I think helps to understand that moment quite well.
Sid Tarrow: Well, it was quite a connection, and of course, like a lot of these important linkages, I didn't realize at the time how important it was going to turn out to be, and of course, you had your own connection to Mayers-Alde through John McCarthy.
Ed Walker: That’s right, yes, and during my years at Michigan, Mayer was quite an influential figure for me, and I was fortunate to spend a lot of time around him. It was an enormous loss to the discipline when Mayer passed, absolutely. So, I'd love to talk a little bit.
That was really helpful to learn about the first of your visits. I understand the second of your visits was really consequential as well in sort of cementing those ties. I would say the tradition of theory and research on contentious politics owes an enormous amount to your work.
Charles Tilly, your collaborator and another two-time CASBS fellow helped to originate the term in the 1970s. And your work has elaborated this further, both independently and in collaboration with another two-time fellow, in addition to being the former director of the Center Doug McAdam, as well as with Tilly. And this has been especially influential in my own work, shaping the way I think about contentious politics and relationships with particular kinds of institutional targets.
I know that during that year, there was a special project. I think it was actually called the Special Project on Contentious Politics that happened in 1997 and 1998, when the three of you astoundingly were all in the same cohort. So you were there along with McAdam and Tilley together.
And I know that there was a series of conferences and publications. So I'd love to just know more about that year and both the kind of individual and the collective outcomes that came out of that really seemingly fruitful year.
Sid Tarrow: Happily. But first I need to add what Bob Scott called the contentious gang also included four other key members. Two card carrying sociologists, Rana Menzadeh and Jack Goldstone and Bill Sewell whose work bridged sociology, history and political science and Liz Perry who was more a historian than a political scientist of China.
I also need to add that it was the Mellon Foundation that funded the special project and Harriet Zuckerman who was at the center, sorry, at the foundation at the time and had her own ties to sociology both personal and professional who quietly watched over the project from the other side of the country and gave us advice when it was needed. I think that apart from giving Chuck, Doug and I the leisure and the proximity to begin writing our dynamics of contention, it was the chance to serve as outside advisors to the three generations of amazing grad students that left the greatest heritage of the special project. Doug and I are still in touch with many of them, and they collectively contributed to a major product of the program, States, Parties and Social Movements, which Jack graciously agreed to edit.
And many political scientists grew up with that book, out of which they suddenly realized that sociologists were actually capable of talking about politics.
Ed Walker: It’s an interesting history. I mean, from what I understand, a variety of other scholars who were connected to the cohort, who maybe weren't centrally working in contentious politics research, also benefited from this. I mean, I was interested to see, for example, Rob Sampson was involved in one of the discussions of his work and how it ties into some of the projects. So it seems like the reach of this was a lot broader than one might expect.
Sid Tarrow: Yes, again, it was the center that was the... well, the center of the connections that grew out of that year. Rob was a fellow of the center that year, and he and Doug, who I think hadn't known each other well, got together and worked on a project on urban movements using Rob's Chicago data at the time.
It was also a very exciting way to understand that I wasn't the only one, certainly Chuck was ahead of me, I wasn't the only one who was trying to bring together the perspectives of history, sociology and political science. I had been in a very political sciencey, political science department at Yale at the beginning of my career. And when I got to Cornell in, I guess it was 1971, I discovered that the sociology department was going off in a very unpolitical direction, in which there were two major anchors, both of them interesting, but neither of them particularly linked to politics.
One was stratification and the other was rational choice. So I didn't really get any resonance with sociology at my home institution at the time. Going out to the center and finding that there were sociologists who knew more about politics than I did was really very heartening and gave me encouragement that I would not just be talking to my own colleagues in political science.
Ed Walker: I think that's always been something that I've seen as particularly valuable in your work in thinking about the connections between sociology and political science. And also, of course, the connection between political science and history and the triadic connections between the three of those different areas. So I think there's something really valuable about the fact that your work does span those disciplines, and I hope we can talk a little bit more in a moment about the way in which your current work also ties together between sociology, political science and history.
So it seems to me that a big part of the contribution of your work has been to open up new spaces for scholars beyond your own work to think about the connections between those different areas and to get value from bridging between them. So I'd love to know your thoughts on that part.
Sid Tarrow: Well, it was in fact in working with the contentious gang at the center that I began to see ways in which sociology, political science and history could be brought together creatively in what we now call the subfield of contentious politics. And by the way, you pointed out that that was a term that was associated with our group. I once did a Google search for the term contentious politics.
And if you do so, you will find that over time, the term hardly appears at all until the mid-90s when Chuck puts it on the map. But it's only after the special group left the center around the turn of the century that the usage of that term really skyrockets and becomes virtually a synonym for social movements. We had actually not intended it to be a synonym for social movements.
We'd intended it to range well beyond movements as they are traditionally perceived. And that was one of the problems with dynamics of contention. Many of our colleagues, particularly in sociology, had been expecting a book on social movements.
And we actually intended something much broader and much more ambitious. And so there's three chapters on revolution and on democratization and on fascism and communism, all of these things that are not usually in the American social movement canon. And that was one of the reasons why the book took such a long time to be received and met with such volleys of criticism, particularly from our social movement colleagues.
What I tried to do in my textbook, Power and Movement, and in an interim study, Strangers at the Gates, and in movements and parties, was to bring together these three perspectives. But it was working on dynamics of contention with Chuck and Doug that I began to move beyond my chrysalis in Western Europe and branch out into comparative studies of revolution, democratization, non-Western areas like China, thanks to Liz Perry, and to the United States, building as much as I was capable of doing on Doug's work in civil rights. So the year at the Center in 1997-98 was really, you used the term detour, it was really a springboard for the much greater expansion of my work into areas I hadn't known anything about before.
Ed Walker: Well, that's interesting. I mean, this is one of the things that one often experiences. I know I've experienced a version of this in my own time at the Center, where you do end up expanding sometimes beyond what you had originally planned to do.
In fact, this is something that the Center actually formally encouraged us to do during the beginning of our year under Margaret Levy's directorship.
Sid Tarrow: That’s right. In all the work we did on dynamics, political parties were somehow tangential because we focused on what we called transgressive forms of contention, and political parties seemed to us much more conventional. We kind of left it out of what we were doing, but we recognized that this was an important sector of contentious politics, albeit in a more conventional vein. When Chuck passed away in 2008, Doug and I met at a Starbucks in New York where we'd gone for his memorial service.
And Doug proposed that the two of us write something in Chuck's honor on the relations between movements and parties, but of extending the dynamics project towards more conventional forms of contention. Well, writing a book on that gargantuan project seemed beyond our capabilities at that point. But when Doug suggested we try our hand at the smaller topic of movements and elections and limit ourselves to an article, my ears pricked up, especially when he offered to take the lead.
The result was an article that appeared in Perspectives on Politics in 2010 and in Sociology in a chapter that Bert Klendermans organized in a book in 2013 called The Changing Dynamics of Contention. A version of that piece also came out in a reader dedicated to Chuck's contributions edited by a Spanish colleague, Maria Jesus Funes, in 2015. And that was the origin of my recent work on parties and movements.
So once again, via my collaboration with McAdam after our year at the Center, the Center was at the center of the growth and change in my career.
Ed Walker: I think that's a great point to pivot toward talking about your important and valuable new book that came out of that change and that line of work and thinking. The book is called Movements and Parties, Critical Connections in American Political Development. It was published very recently by Cambridge University Press in 2021.
So if you wouldn't mind, I'd just love to hear a little bit about sort of overview of what you see as the central contributions that you're making in the book. It'd be great to hear more about that.
Sid Tarrow: I’d be happy to, but in order to do so, I need to take another detour, I apologize for this, to what was happening in the field of comparative politics. Starting in Latin America, where a group of scholars led by my old friend David Collier and his collaborator Gerardo Munch were working on what they called critical junctures. This new line of work grew out of David's work with Ruth Collier in the 1990s in a book called Shaping the Political Arena, where they developed this concept of critical junctures.
Well, David and Jerry asked me to contribute to a 2017 APSA panel looking at critical junctures comparatively. We did that and it came out in an online publication of a committee of the APSA and then to a much larger set of comparisons in a book that just came out called Critical Junctures and Historical Legacies, which David and Jerry edited. What I contributed to both was a comparison of the 1968 experience in France, Italy and the United States, which found its way into this latest volume.
When I thought about my growing interest in the United States, it seemed to me that movements and parties were most likely to intersect in regime-shaping changes during critical junctures. And that was why I chose to go back to American political development, to episodes like the Civil War, the agrarian conflicts of the late 1800s, the First World War, the Depression, the 1960s, and the current era, which has been marked by Trumpism, the resistance to it, Black Lives Matter, and the pandemic. This gave me the idea of a historical reconstruction of the intersection of movements and parties during key critical junctures in American history.
So when I began to go through these historical junctures, colleagues who read these chapters asked me a very difficult question. They said, are you suggesting that American history is made up of identical cycles in which movements appear, they either turn into or they influence parties, and then we have a regime change? Has it all been the same since the Civil War?
And when I thought about it, I said, no, it hasn't all been the same. Critical junctures have changed over time, and the players in the critical junctures have changed over time. And moreover, things happen much more rapidly today than they did 150 years ago.
So just to put a fine point on it, it took over a decade for the anti-slavery and pro-slavery movements to clash in a civil war, while the appearance of Trumpism and anti-Trumpism happened much more rapidly in the presence of a party system that had changed a great deal over time. So a second theme of the book and one which the critical juncture literature does not help very much with is the changing dynamics of American political development in the sense that we now are in the presence of a party system that's much weaker than it was 150 or even 100 or 50 years ago. We are in the presence of what my friend Danny Schlossman and Sam Rosenfeld called the hollowed out party system.
And that takes me to a number of changes in the last half century in which the party system has indeed become hollowed out, in part as the result of global changes in political participation, but in part as the result of specific institutional changes in the United States, like the direct primary and the changes in the financing of election campaigns. We are now in the presence of a number of hybrid forms of political participation that have inserted themselves into some of the functions that used to be dominated by political parties. And that has meant the critical juncture we're in at the moment is moving much more rapidly and in directions that nobody had anticipated earlier.
Ed Walker: That’s a really valuable way to think about it. And one of the things that I took away from my own reading of the book was that we often think of the way that movements affect parties as being sort of distinct entities, where you've got a movement on the outside and you've got a party that's somewhat more on the inside, a hybrid between connecting the state and society. Yet part of what the book's identifying is that you have not just movements affecting parties, but the movementization of parties, which I think is an interesting historical trend that you identify.
It seems to me that part of this has to do with the very hollowing out process, candidate-centered elections, changes to the way the parties operate. But I'd love to know if you could say a little bit more about this idea of what it means to movementize a party.
Sid Tarrow: Yeah. Well, as Doug McAdam has reminded me, that is a term that I invented, but it grew fundamentally out of his book with Karina Kloos, Deeply Divided. He doesn't use the term, but basically what he's showing is that over the past 50 years, movements have found it much easier and much more profitable to enter parties than they had in the past.
Doug was not alone, however. Danny Schlossman's important book, How Movements Anchor Parties, has been an important landmark. So has the more recent work of my colleague Sid Milkes at University of Virginia and Dan Tichner at Oregon, a book called Rivalry and Reform, in which they analyze the relations between social movements and the presidency over time and show how that has changed and become far more integral to the political process in the growing weakening of the party system.
So there are both political scientists and sociologists who've been working along these lines. And I, in my modest way, try to build on the work of many of these people, rather than claim to be inventing the wheel myself.
Ed Walker: It’s a valuable point about disciplines. And I've always thought that parties is an interesting area, particularly the intersection of movements and parties. For many years, sociologists had ceded the territory of parties to political scientists.
What I think of as the post-Lipset era, there was a lot less sociological work on parties. That's changed. You see really important work happening by people like Stephanie Mudge, Tony Chen and Cedric de Leon and others.
What I think is really interesting here is about the way that we can build from and blend both sociological and political science based ways of seeing parties. Of course, in political science, you see this evolution from the sort of Downs-Aldrich model, which is much more elite oriented, to the more recent UCLA school kind of coalitions of policy demanders framework. So I guess I'd like to know a little bit about how we should think about the intersection of movements and parties
And maybe I can put it even more directly, what does sociologists and political scientists have to learn from each other on this?
Sid Tarrow: I think the easiest way, that's a tough question, but my first point is it's been happening already. Sociologists and political scientists are increasingly learning from each other and collaborating and using one another's concepts and methods. Let me give you one example of a political scientist who came from the study of public administration and who moved into the study of what Tilly has taught us to call repertoires of contention.
Dan Carpenter at Harvard, another former fellow, has been carrying out a series of studies on the use of petitions in the early and mid-19th century, in which he shows that women's way into the political process came by virtue of the use of petitions. That is to say, carrying out petitioning among both men and women gave women abolitionists the experience with the political process, which they then took into the early women's movement. Now that's a classical sociological way of proceeding.
Tilley taught us that if we pay more attention to the actual performances in the repertoire of contention, we can learn a great deal about how social movements evolve and how they intersect with politics. Dan Carpenter, to my knowledge, doesn't directly cite Chuck's work on the repertoire of contention in Great Britain, but he doesn't need to because that language and that conceptualization has now become so much the common coin of historical institutional studies that he didn't need to draw directly on Chuck's work. That's the kind of intersection that I see happening more and more.
Ed Walker: Yeah. Well, you've talked a lot about modular repertoires in your own work. These are modular ideas that spread across disciplines, I think, in an important way.
So what I'd like to move on to is thinking a little bit about your career trajectory and the way that most of your work has been focused around comparative politics, a lot of your hugely important early work on Italy and on France.
And although I've always seen you, and I know you're widely known as a keen observer in the US, your current book on movements and parties is moving more squarely into the American political development or APD space in political science. And I'd love to know, did you find yourself needing to sort of retool a little bit, to shift over from being squarely focused on comparative analysis to shifting over to APD? Of course, this book does have an important comparative chapter, I should mention.
But I'd love to know what kind of retooling and transitions you've found you needed to make to do this more US focused work.
Sid Tarrow: Right. Well, again, Ed, and I apologize for this, let me take you back to Berkeley in the 60s, where I, like a lot of my peers, was a young progressive, heavily influenced by the free speech movement and by the anti-war movement that was budding at Berkeley at the time. And for many of us, American political science was a very boring and even a dangerous area.
We were convinced that behavioralism, which was all the rage at the time, was inherently reactionary and that the people who were doing the really interesting work were in comparative or in political theory, like Sheldon Wolin and Jack Schar with whom I studied at Berkeley. That perception that American political science was boring stayed with me much longer than it should have. I stopped reading American political science because I was convinced it was boring and I missed many of the really interesting developments over the past half century.
I should have known better because Steve Skoronic, who is one of the founders of the APD field, was a student at Cornell and I sat on his committee and never realized at the time how this was launching a whole new direction of institutional and historical studies in American politics. When I turned to this book and I looked at the field of American political science, I was delightfully surprised at how much change there had been. And one of the things I found that I found most refreshing was that there was no longer, or at least there was much less, of the methodological dividing line between quantitative and qualitative work that people in the 60s and 70s felt they had to choose up sides to be on or to be against.
And the other side of that was that I found that I was greeted not as an unwelcome outlander, but as somebody who could bring comparative perspectives to the study of American politics. Many of the chapters in the book profited from advice by specialists like Elizabeth Sanders on the populists, Eric Schickler on the movements of the New Deal, of course, Sid Milkes on the Johnson years, Andy Andrews, Josh Bloom, Megan Francis and Joe Lutters on the Civil Rights Movement, and of course, Chris Parker and Sam Popkin on the Trump Movement in their current work, not to mention the broad advice I received along the way from people like McAdam Meyer and my old Yale friend Steve Hellman. So it was socially a revelation to me that I was not dismissed as an interloper, but was welcomed as someone who would bring new perspectives to the field.
And this was actually also the case at Cornell where a group of colleagues led by Suzanne Metler were organizing a series of conferences in a group called the American Democracy Collective, to which they allowed me to be a fly on the wall and participate in their activities. And that's led to a very important book, Democratic Resilience, that came out at the end of 2021.
Ed Walker: I think it's really valuable the way that the APD community does seem to be going a bit beyond political science at this point, where you do see a good number of sociologists now picking up some of the classic APD ideas like policy feedback effects and building on historical insights like Skowronik's in building a new American state, this idea of the state of court and parties and the way that this predated the building up of the American state. A lot of these ideas are just enormously generative and valuable. I think this is a great way to integrate these ideas.
Sid Tarrow: I would be remiss if I didn't point out that a certain Ed Walker also contributed to this synthesis by really remaking the interest group approach that came out of political science and bringing it together with an organizational sociology approach.
Ed Walker: Thank you. That's very kind of you. I guess if we could zoom out a little bit, I'd love to think a little bit more about the current political moment.
You're writing a book that's just enormously important for how we think about this present moment. Here we've witnessed an insurrection. We've witnessed the rise of a certain kind of nationalist populist movement that's closely intersecting with our party system and pushing us, I would argue, in a very anti-democratic direction.
If I could ask you to zoom out a little bit, how hopeful or pessimistic should we be about the prospects of American democracy for the years ahead?
Sid Tarrow: Yeah, well, I'm pretty pessimistic, particularly after the January 6th insurrection. But it's important to distinguish what was really new about January 6th and the traditions it drew upon. In movements and parties, I argue that the Trumpian moment was really the product of a much longer series of movements, going back to the New Right, which formed following the Goldwater Defeat in 1964, and that the groundwork for Trump's combination of populism and plutocracy really went back to the New Right and to those movements that followed it.
I think that we need to understand where this current moment came from in order to be able to predict with some assurance where it's going. It is more deeply embedded in the Republican Party than anybody would have expected given the extraordinary and unusual way in which Trump appeared on the scene. If it had been simply Trumpism, the country would need to worry a great deal less than we are worrying at the moment.
It's built on a number of different traditions, and I'd like to point out the forthcoming work by Chris Parker and his collaborator, Rachel Bloom, sorry, who are working on the MAGA movement on the basis of in-depth interviews with MAGA activists. Their work, I predict, is going to show that the MAGA movement is much more deeply embedded, both in the Republican Party and in traditional right-wing movements than most people have understood.
Ed Walker: So I want to ask you a little bit of a related question about the, you know, you talk a lot about the movementization of parties, but, you know, it seems in many respects we have the movementization, particularly of the Republican Party. And we do have a movementization of the Democratic Party, but it looks quite a lot different, of course, right? And I see you referencing and building from the Grossman and Hopkins book, which talks a lot about the distinction between the Republican Party being a strongly ideological movement in effect, closely tied to the ideological movement of the Christian right and related constituencies.
But then you've got this sort of loose coalition of interest groups on the Democratic side. So maybe I could just ask you a little bit about what this moment means for the party movement connection on the political left or at least the left side of the spectrum in the US system.
Sid Tarrow: Yeah, I'm glad you cited Grossman and Hopkins, in which I'm a strong believer. But I'm in something of a minority, Ed. Many political scientists do not see this distinction that they make between the Democrats as a collection of interest groups and the Republicans as a fundamentally ideological party.
I see it quite strongly, and I find the data in their book, which is called Asymmetric Politics, if I'm not mistaken. I find the data that they assemble to be very persuasive. And what it means to me is that the Democratic Party is, to some extent, less than the sum of its parts.
There are so many conflicting or at least diverse interest groups at the heart of the party that it's very difficult, as we've seen in the last year of the Biden administration, it's very difficult to put together a coalition. The Republicans, in contrast, are much more than the sum of their parts because they're drawn together by these fundamentally negative ideological ideas. If you look at the alacrity with which they glommed on to the leaked Supreme Court draft and immediately understood how to respond to it, to focus upon the leak itself rather than on the substance of the leak.
That's something that the Republicans are very good at. It's very shallow. It doesn't come to grips with the real policy issues involved.
And that was Trump's secret. Trump's secret was he knew nothing about policy. He didn't care much about policy.
His policy ideas were, if not shallow, at least totally mistaken as we're learning more about almost every day. And yet he managed to bring together a party that has frightened many elected government officials in the Republican Party. And that's part of the strength of the Republicans.
They do not need to go very deep. There are relatively shallow, but relatively unified ideological instincts that hold the party together. To the extent that it's possible for the party to profit from such absurd ideas as that elementary school teachers are grooming children in order to be LGBTQ.
It's an idea with no ideological depth and no truth value, but it's the kind of thing that can bring together an enormous upswelling of negative opinion. And that's the curse of the Republican Party, but it's also the difficulty that the Democrats have to deal with.
Ed Walker: It is really interesting because you start to think a lot about how... It almost seems paradoxical, right? Where you have this outcome of a strong and powerful move in our politics that is in part the result of relatively weak parties.
And so that's where I see your concept of movementization coming in, is helping to resolve that paradox. You actually have a really strong movement that has actually been able to steer the party system in a certain direction. I don't know if you would agree with that, but...
Sid Tarrow: I do agree with that. It's something I wish I had understood more about when I started the book. Writing this book was very much a learning experience for me, in part because I was an outsider, and in part because things were changing literally as I wrote.
I wish I'd understood this better as I began the book, because I think the framing of the book might have been more forward-looking than it is.
Ed Walker: Well, I think the book makes a very forward-looking contribution in my view.
Sid Tarrow: I’m glad to hear you say so.
Ed Walker: Although you have many more years of scholarly, productive work ahead, continuing the many excellent contributions you've made over the year, at this point, what are the things you say you'd hope to be most known for?
Sid Tarrow: Well, I think we've covered a lot of that. I hope I'll be remembered as somebody who had no respect for disciplinary boundaries. I also hope I'll be remembered as somebody who had no patience for what I called in an earlier publication, Paradigm Warfare.
You probably remember that around the turn of the century, there were a group of sociologists who came out of the New York environment who were convinced that there are two kinds of people studying social movements.
Instrumentalists and the good people. It wasn't quite clear what the good people wanted, but what they did know they didn't want was what they called instrumentalism. They launched a full-scale attack on what they thought of as the political process approach. I think they misunderstood it.
Ed Walker: I remember that series of articles in Sociological Forum.
Sid Tarrow: Yes, yes. I wrote a piece in the book that some of them put together in which I talked about paradigm warfare. The term actually came from Howard Aldrich, who was an old friend from Cornell and then at UNC.
Basically, what I'm most impatient with is the inhibition of progress in the social sciences that results from the tendency many of us have to choose upsides, to pick a paradigm, and to direct a lot of our attention to the destruction of what we see as opposite paradigms. I think that's a profoundly destructive and anti-progressive trend that we have in many parts of the social sciences, and I hope my work will be remembered as that of somebody who used approaches from different sectors of the social sciences, not only within one discipline, but across disciplines.
Ed Walker: I think that's a really valuable thing, and I think we've all learned an enormous amount from you having done exactly that. One of the lessons I think we all hope to learn during our time here at the Center for Advanced Study, where it forces us out of our disciplinary boundaries in, I think, a very healthy and productive way. So Sid, before I have a little outro statement here, are there any other topics that we didn't get to that you would hope to be able to talk about before we stop recording?
Sid Tarrow: Well, I pretty much talk out, Ed, and the only other thing I'd like to say is, and I've said it before, but it cannot be said too often, and that is what a wonderful institution the Center is and how myself personally, but many others who I know have had their careers not only furthered, but expanded by their experience at the Center. My first stint there in 1980-81, I went somewhat unhappy because I was the only political scientist there, and I thought they were anthropologists who were a group, sociologists who were a group, psychologists who were a group, and I was all alone. And what I didn't realize at the time was that that was a real advantage because I was forced out of my nest in political science and forced to interact with people from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds.
And so even the one thing I disliked about the Center during my first year there turned out to be a real advantage.
Ed Walker: Sid Tarrow, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me here today on Human Centered. I know I speak for many when I say how grateful we are for your excellent contributions, not only to contentious politics research, but to the social sciences more generally. Please take care and be well.
Sid Tarrow: Thanks a lot, Ed, and thanks for giving so much time and effort.
Narrator: That was Sid Tarrow in conversation with Ed Walker. You can learn more about this episode by checking out the show notes. If you want to learn more about the Center, its people, projects, history and upcoming events, you can head over to our website at casbs.stanford.edu.
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