I just had a very fruitful discussion (with some of the McGill poli sci grad students and my colleague @KrzPelc ) of @owasow's much discussed APSR paper, "Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protest Moved Elites, Public Opinion, and Voting."

And I have questions!
1/20

While everyone was impressed (I won't say everyone was convinced, but it was close) by the central causal claim of the paper -- that the riots after MLK's assassination provoked enough whites to vote for Nixon that it swung the 1968 election -- it raised two concerns. 2/20

First: no election is explained by any one cause. If the riots of April 1968 swung the election that is only b/c we are taking all the other causal stories for granted. The election was, in the Althusserian tongue of my people, over-determined. 3/20

And there are lots of determinants! Crime, especially violent crime, rose vertiginously b/w 1964 and 1968 (robberies and aggravated assaults doubled). 4/20 http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

The war in Vietnam escalated, as did the protests against it. The antiwar bloc was split between candidates, one of whom was assassinated, and finally shut out of the Democratic nomination process. Then there was the convention, and the violence that accompanied it. 5/20

And of course there was the ongoing re-alignment of southern whites moving out of the Democratic Party as it became the party of civil rights.

All of these qualify the importance of the April uprisings, but receive no acknowledgement from Wasow. 6/20

Second: Wasow assumes nonviolent and violent protest were equivalently tactical *choices* made by activists within the Black freedom movement. Within his model, "staging an event with violence is predicted to nudge the media toward a focus on 'riots' rather than 'rights.'" 7/20

That is, activists could choose to stage protest events with or without violence, and their choice of staging "control[s] the issue frames adopted by the press."

This premise that activists faced a tactical choice between violence and nonviolence leads to weird places. 8/20

For instance, Wasow implies that the Watts uprising was a case of activists choosing a violent staging. But nothing about the Watts rebellion was chosen ahead of time. Watts was, in the old language of the Left, a spontaneous rebellion. 9/20

So were the riots in the immediate aftermath of MLK's murder. And the events of the "long hot summer" of the previous year.

(And, I'll note, the immediate response to the murders of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks.) 10/20

This is why the framing of the paper seems so odd to me. It's not as if the Black activists of the '60s switched from a successful to an unsuccessful strategy in 1967 or '68. There was never a choice between Birmingham and Watts. 11/20

So, 2 questions to this point:
1. Given the many determinants of Nixon's victory, why attribute it to the agency of Black protesters?
2. Given the spontaneity of almost all the major riots of '65-'68, why frame the tactical choice as between nonviolent and violent protest? 12/20

This brings me to the final issue.

2 weeks ago, @owasow rightly dinged @NathanJRobinson for his very selective use of MLK to criticize Wasow's research. 13/20 https://twitter.com/owasow/status/1273643006327951361?s=20

Wasow's point was that we can't just clip out the parts of the Black tradition that suit our own, preconceived politics in order to enlist that tradition on our side. There's more going on in that history, and we should challenge ourselves by wrestling with all of it. 14/20

I agree wholeheartedly. Which is why this passage from Wasow's article doesn't sit right with me: 15/20

It seems to me that Wasow here enlists King and Rustin in a suspect way.

King said that the "white moderate" was "the greatest stumbling block" for the civil rights movement. I mean, I guess that is emphasizing the critical role of the white moderate, but c'mon! 16/20

And Rustin was outlining a strategy for the civil rights coalition (Blacks, the Left, labor) to take over the Democratic Party as the Dixiecrats exited. That is *not* a median white voter strategy! 17/20 https://www.crmvet.org/docs/rustin65.pdf

I'm sorry, but is that so very different from what Robinson did? Reading that passage, right now, it is hard for me not to think: this is a plea for BLM to take a moderate path, to work within the Democratic Party and to appeal to moderate white voters. 18/20

So, a final question, then:
3. Why appeal to King and Rustin in this way, and what is the political intent of doing so? 19/20

Finally: if I have misread anything in Wasow, I look forward to being set right. I'm not a quant, and I may well have misinterpreted something. Whatever errors there are here are my own -- @KrzPelc bears no blame. /fin