Rallying point

by David Forbes August 6, 2014

A year later Moral Monday returns to Asheville, tries to expand local organization and hopes for momentum at the polls.

Above: the crowd at the Aug. 4 Moral Monday rally, viewed from behind the podium while Rev. William Barber speaks. Photo by David Oppenheimer – Performance Impressions.

Once again, Rev. William Barber was in an Asheville church talking to press, this time at the Hopkins AME Zion Chapel in downtown Asheville yesterday morning.

“Lawmakers in the general assembly made things bad last year; and they made it even worse this year,” he said. The issues were a long list, from the refusal to expand Medicaid, voting restrictions, tax cuts for the wealthy, the coal ash spill, the end of the earned income tax credit and its latest budget. “We’re supposed to be a state where the weak grow strong and the strong grow great. That’s not happening.”

A year before Barber, head of the state NAACP and the major public leader of the Moral Monday movement opposing the actions of the state legislature, hosted a similar press conference a few blocks down, touting the need for a new “fusion politics,” referring to the political alliances that had fought segregation in the 1890s and during the Civil Rights movement. According to him, Moral Mondays were bringing a similar approach against an “extremist” state legislature.

“I think how far the people who have taken over the Republican Party would seem to the Lincoln Republicans of 1868,” Barber said yesterday, before asserting that he was actually conservative because “I want to conserve equal protection under the law, I want to conserve public education. The reason I want to conserve it is so it can be liberally shared with everybody.”

“These issues are not liberal or conservative; this is about the moral center of our society.”

Last year, Asheville’s Aug. 5 Moral Monday protest proved a rallying point for opponents of the right-wing state legislature. By the highest estimates, about 10,000 people showed up. Growing out of an earlier movement, HkonJ, that’s pushed for a 14-point platform since 2006, the movement turned out thousands around the state in an effort to “shift the center of political gravity,” as Barber put it.

A year later, Moral Mondays have continued with protests at the general assembly during its short session, Barber’s gained a national profile and the movement returned to Asheville. Its focus, in an election year, has turned to the polls. Its representatives are careful not to endorse particular candidates, but condemn the legislature’s actions and call for people to vote accordingly.

“Sometimes change comes in changing who’s elected, and sometimes change comes by changing the context in which those who are elected have to work in.” He cited the example of Lyndon Johnson, once a segregationist, pushing the Civil Rights Act into law as the movement gained momentum.

Barber also, similar to last year, emphasized local activists.

This time, one who spoke before the press and the crowds that evening, was local activist Heather Rayburn. She blasted the general assembly for its tax policy “as squeezing blood out of a turnip” for ending the earned-income tax credit for lower-income workers. She also had issues with state attempts to seize the local water system, refusal to expand Medicaid and allow fracking. For all those reasons, she said, she decided to get arrested during the protests, despite the fact “that I’m a chicken,” because she was angered by a dismissive tone from Sen. Tom Apodaca.

She encouraged people to get out and vote, because “not all politicians are like; you’ve got your good ones and your bad ones.” Joy Booth, a Yancey County resident who followed her, blasted the legislature and referred to its cuts to education and allowing fracking as “unifying issues” for the opposition in her area.

After his own remarks, Barber fielded questions from reporters. Asked about expected turnout, he replied “you can’t ever predict mountain folk; they can organize up here.”

“We love numbers, but we don’t live and die by numbers,” he continued. Asked about seats turning in the Senate, he said he wasn’t telling people who to vote for, but predicted that the movement would effect the election.

“I’m a neophyte political activist and I know better than to make everybody mad. That’s exactly what they have done.”

How is the attempt at reviving “fusion politics” going?

“We’ve done exactly what we set out to do,” he said, citing decreasing approval ratings for the state legislature and the governor while Moral Monday’s organizing efforts increased. “The legislation isn’t trying to appear kinder and gentler because they’re kinder and gentler. It’s because of the protest.”

Over a year

A lot’s happened since 10,000 (or eight thousand, depending on the estimate) filled the park last August.

The turnout and enthusiasm didn’t go unnoticed in the country’s media, with left-leaning outlets particularly enthusiastic. The Asheville rally got a “most valuable protest” nod from The Nation late last year and touted as a model for Southern activism in a longer article this February. Barber made appearances on MSNBC and Real Time with Bill Maher.

In the meantime, support for Gov. Pat McCrory and the state legislature have dropped. The most recent Elon University polls have the legislature at 28 percent approval and McCrory at 35 percent.

In January the Mountain People’s Assembly, an outgrowth of Moral Monday, started meeting, with sponsors from a range of local non-profits, political groups and local officials.

When the legislature started meeting again for its short session this year, the protests resumed, fighting new, harsher rules and engaging in more civil disobedience.

Back on Pack Square

Yesterday even, thousands again showed up, but turnout was down from a year ago. Crowd counting’s a notoriously difficult feat when it involves thousands of people in the middle of a city, but last year estimates ranged from 8,000 to 10,000. The Asheville Citizen-Times, citing a police estimate, put the crowd at 3,500 around 5 p.m., yesterday “far fewer” than the previous year. Local activist Carmen Ramos-Kennedy, one of the leaders of the Mountain People’s Assembly, put it at over 5,000 by an hour later.

At the rally, local NAACP officers Marvin Chambers and Isaac Coleman touted the organization’s growing strength, with five branches forming in the area in the past year.

Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer showed up and Democratic congressional and general assembly candidates had volunteers out roaming the crowd, while organizers from Moral Monday registered people to vote. The crowd waved signs condemning GOP officials (“Thom Tillis has a Koch problem” and McCrory as Frankenstein) or calling for a stop to fracking or more funds for education.

“As a public school teacher, I never expected to use my Medicaid card to pay for my children’s check-ups,” local teacher Lindsay Furst told the crowd, and said the latest budget wouldn’t actually improve conditions for teachers, while the legislature’s actions made things worse for educators and their students.

Retired Watauga County teacher Cinda McGuine told me she was out because “I’m supporting the fight against the cuts to education.”

Asheville resident Sean Illgen was also out because of education, “I know a lot of teachers and I’m always in support of teachers in general.”

A former adjunct instructor, Asheville resident Ike Whelles said he had to leave his adjunct teaching job because with cuts to gas allowance and pay. “I had to quit, it wasn’t worth the time.”

“This is a fight for the future the soul of our state,” Barber proclaimed during his remarks, swearing that the participants came from all walks of life, different groups and across the political spectrum. “We are America. This is what democracy looks like.”

An analysis

So why does Moral Monday draw large crowds in Asheville in particular? Why might turnout have changed over a year? What’s going on with this movement and what might its next phases look like?

It’s worth understanding recent political history. For a long, long time, Democrats ran the state legislature, even in the days when NC was more reliably conservative at the national level.

The Democrats in this state were a classic “big tent” governing party. That’s a description, by the way, not an endorsement. For example, it was Democrats who often got the votes of unions, and some legislators supported them. At the same time, Democratic legislatures enacted and defended “right to work” laws that help keep union membership the lowest in the country.

Nonetheless overall organization, the power of long-time incumbency, the shifting range of ideologies inside their coalition and gerrymandering kept them in power for awhile. Even when Republicans might increase their margin or take the governorship, the party was deeply entrenched and still exercised a major influence over policy.

Big tents are appealing in theory. But like any set-up, they also have their drawbacks. Factional strife is one of them, because plenty of groups that don’t necessarily agree on what should be done or have widely differing constituencies are vying in the same party organizations. The longer incumbents are entrenched, the more likely people are — rightly or not — to blame them for their area’s problems.

Seeing the clash between the progressive and conservative wings locally (as in the recent Democratic primaries) is a good reminder of how heated fights within the Democrats can get, as are the fights in the state party over the past few years. The ouster of Rep. Bruce Goforth, who once represented a district that included much of Asheville, is also an instructive example. After his primary ouster by progressive Patsy Keever, he switched to the GOP and became an advisor to House Speaker Thom Tillis.

In 2010 the combination of a down economy, a statewide Democratic party with its own share of scandal, extensive organizing and Art Pope’s resources combined to sweep Republicans into power for the first time in over a century, just in time to pull off some gerrymandering of their own and try to overhaul the state according to their wishes. They extended their hold in 2012 by taking the governor’s mansion. Throughout, the new general assembly proceeded to take an aggressively conservative tack on issues ranging from abortion to gay marriage to education.

At the same time, the state itself had changed. While it had always been substantially more moderate than many other Southern states, especially on issues of infrastructure and institution-building, North Carolina’s now a swing state due to changing demographics and societal attitudes. Obama won by a razor-thin margin here in 2008, and while Romney’s victory four years later had a larger margin, it was still far from a rout. A conservative legislature opting for a sweeping overhaul doesn’t face as friendly a turf here as they would in say, for example, Mississippi.

Which brings us to Asheville’s place in all this.

Friendly terrain

If the state as a whole is politically divided Asheville is, broadly, one of least conservative in North Carolina. Republicans only represent about 17 percent of Asheville’s voters. Within city politics and activism the spectrum, with a few notable exceptions, ranges roughly from moderate Democrat to radical leftists.

Locally, it’s also important to understand that while Asheville’s a very political city, it’s also an incredibly fragmented one. This is the sort of place where politics is a frequent topic of conversation and protests a common sight but local election turnout is incredibly anemic.

Locals are often active, but usually along certain lines, in certain causes. Political activists here tend to have their lot in with environmentalism, LGBT rights, social justice, local politics, etc. They may certainly care about and occasionally assist other causes, but generally the energies are directed in one particular area. This is why we have a large array of nonprofits but why local protests (usually around a particular cause) have rarely matched the numbers of Moral Monday last year or, for that matter, this year.

Even when some of these causes have rallied under a single banner, such as the local Occupy protests, it’s not been without considerable internal argument and strife.

Over a relatively short time the legislature in Raleigh managed to piss just about all of them off.

Environmentalists hated the overhaul of the state’s environmental watch dogs, the denial of climate change and the push for fracking. Pro-choicers fought against abortion restrictions, particularly the one they dubbed the Motorcycle Vagina bill. LGBT rights advocates organized against Amendment One. Voting restrictions, unemployment cuts and refusal to expand Medicare angered a wide swath of advocacy organizations and their constituents. Teachers rallied against the sudden end of tenure, their pay rates, and a proposed voucher program. Local political types resented the attempt to seize the water system. This list is by no means comprehensive.

This wasn’t the only place in the state where people objected to the general assembly’s actions, of course (see above about N.C. becoming a swing state) and Moral Mondays drew crowds in other places, but Asheville provided particularly friendly terrain.

Moral Monday gave Asheville’s political groups a banner to rally around at a time when almost all its political groups were ready for one. The relative proximity to Raleigh helped, allowing the city’s activists to go down, engage in civic disobedience, make contacts and come back to further rally locals in their own backyards. The cultural bubbles I’ve heard activists for a variety of different causes here talk about for years didn’t cap turnout the way they usually do.

Despite Barber’s repeated emphasis on local efforts and a collective movement, a charismatic leader helps said rallying; there’s a reason a good chunk of the crowd in both years started leaving the park after he’d finished speaking.

So last year, Moral Monday saw a massive turnout, bigger even than its largest showing in Raleigh up to that point. This year, while the shorter session had plenty the Moral Monday crowd were angry about, it didn’t quite have the barrage last year’s long session did, and that offers one possible reason for the dip: immediate anger fuels numbers.

What’s happening here

As for the movement and how it relates to the cut-and-thrust of politics in an election year, that’s a more complicated case. The fusion politics era Barber repeatedly evoke, for example, is hardly the most comfortable example for the state Democratic Party. While party alignments have changed repeatedly in the ensuing century-plus, up until 2011 the Democratic Party had a Vance-Aycock fundraising dinner named, respectively, after the Confederate governor and the one that fashioned a violent crackdown on the fusion movement as well as the segregationist policies imposed in its wake.

Moral Monday leaders take pains to point out Republicans who support some of their movement’s goals and that HKonJ was pressing for its goals back when Democrats were in office too.

True enough, but there’s more here. Moral Monday’s core is advocacy organizations and whatever their cause, those organizations want to see certain things done, whoever’s in power.

At the same time, these organizations and the coalitions they hope to rally require friendly politicians — or at least ones they can persuade or arm-twist — to get legislation accomplished. Barber even directly alluded to this with his LBJ example that morning.

Invocations of Lincoln Republicans aside, in this political clime it’s hard to see a scenario where Moral Monday gets its goals accomplished without a major shift towards the Democrats. Barber even mentioned at the rally that while HKonJ had leaned on plenty of Democrats in their day, “at least they would listen to us.” It wasn’t a coincidence that Democratic candidates, especially those running against incumbents, had their volunteers out. Additionally, despite myths about unaffiliated voters, independents overwhelmingly favor one side or another when they do vote.

None of this is new in the political realm, though that doesn’t decrease the importance. Changes in politics and power always matter.

Typically big shifts (and plenty of failed shifts) run some part of this course. Political leadership upsets a bunch of different groups. Often, because people care about more than one thing, they upset them for a bunch of overlapping reasons. Then, people who want to see a different political direction band together and provide a focus for those groups to rally around. This is more doable if, like the HkonJ coalition, they had existing organizations and networks to help. Movements will portray themselves as harkening back to the best parts of a country or state’s legacy and standing up for its ideals against a current government that has betrayed them.

If the movement has enough momentum politicians, for reasons of both ambition and belief, then feel the need to at least seem to address some of their points. If the coalition continues to gain strength, you might even see a split in an existing party as members decide their futures are better off under a new alignment.

At the more extreme end, you see what poli-sci types call wave elections, indicating not just a change in party but a realignment of the existing political system in another direction.

Where things get tricky, on any part of the political spectrum, is how those coalitions hold together. They need to do so long enough to win (and not just once) and then (often even trickier) govern for long enough to effect the changes they want to see and prevent them from being swept away in a backlash. The same politicians that may enable a coalition to take some power can feel less beholden when they’ve been in office for awhile, and mobilized populations can lose momentum without a clear enemy or goal to focus their energies on. Furthermore the broader the coalition, the better chance it will take power; and the higher the chance it will fracture upon doing so.

These things are important, but never simple. A lot of Moral Monday’s long-term staying power, if it shifts the “political center of gravity” as its supporters hope, will depend on how efforts like the local Mountain People’s Assembly pull together and keep united the bevy of local causes and groups over the long haul. It will also depend on if the thousands in Pack Square bring others to the polls, not just this year but in 2016, 2018 and beyond.

History shows that coalitions can be both politically formidable and still face considerable obstacles over the long haul. The Civil Rights movement saw many victories and reshaped a major part of the nation’s politics, but also found progress on some of its major goals — equality in housing, education and law enforcement, for example – a challenge.

Over on the right-wing, a mobilization of fundamentalist Christians played a major role in the ’80s realignment that strengthened conservative power for decades. They still remain a major facet of politics here, as the fights over abortion and Amendment One have shown. At the same time, many evangelicals have complained that the Republican Party often used them as a prop and has largely failed to enact the sweeping changes they wished, while many of their goals have seen support steadily erode in society at large.

True victory in politics isn’t winning an election; it’s when a set of ideas become a core assumption of society, something most people don’t even seriously question. That’s what Moral Mondays are shooting towards, but it’s going to be a long, complicated road to get there, even in friendly terrain like Asheville.

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