It's easy to make it almost a punchline: The boogeyman Glenn Beck is waving in front of his viewers, ranting about as a threat to America, is "a female widowed lefty academic now approaching eighty." That's the person who Beck has whipped his followers into an ammunition-and-explosives-obsessed frenzy about. Which, I guess, goes to show the power of ideas. Because Frances Fox Piven is in fact an important writer and activist, one whose career has been dedicated to understanding when and how poor people can gain power in our society, and helping make that understanding a reality.
Which has made her one of Glenn Beck's consistent targets going back at least to 2009.
His attacks on her have increased since, in December, she wrote in The Nation about mobilizing the jobless, asking why we were not seeing a mass movement of unemployed workers disrupting business as usual and exerting real pressure on policymakers:
The problem of how to bring people together is sometimes made easier by government service centers, as when in the 1960s poor mothers gathered in crowded welfare centers or when the jobless congregated in unemployment centers. But administrators also understand that services create sites for collective action; if they sense trouble brewing, they exert themselves to avoid the long lines and crowded waiting areas that can facilitate organizing, or they simply shift the service nexus to the Internet. Organizers can try to compensate by offering help and advocacy off-site, and at least some small groups of the unemployed have been formed on this basis.
Second, before people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant. (Welfare moms in the 1960s did this by naming themselves "mothers" instead of "recipients," although they were unlucky in doing so at a time when motherhood was losing prestige.) Losing a job is bruising; even when many other people are out of work, most people are still working. So, a kind of psychological transformation has to take place; the out-of-work have to stop blaming themselves for their hard times and turn their anger on the bosses, the bureaucrats or the politicians who are in fact responsible.
Third, protesters need targets, preferably local and accessible ones capable of making some kind of response to angry demands. This is, I think, the most difficult of the strategy problems that have to be resolved if a movement of the unemployed is to arise. Protests among the unemployed will inevitably be local, just because that's where people are and where they construct solidarities. But local and state governments are strapped for funds and are laying off workers. The initiatives that would be responsive to the needs of the unemployed will require federal action. Local protests have to accumulate and spread—and become more disruptive—to create serious pressures on national politicians. An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees.
Pay attention to that last bit. Beck surely did. Unlike Beck, Piven does not see the history and future of social movements as necessarily bound up in violence. As Barbara Ehrenreich writes,
Americans were not always so myopic that they saw the world through the cross-hairs of their rifle sights. During the depression of 1892 to 1896, unemployed workers marched to Washington by the thousands in what was then the largest mass protest this country had seen. In 1932, even more jobless people -- 25,000 -- staged what was, at that time, the largest march on Washington, demanding public works jobs and a hike in the inheritance tax. From the '60s to the '80s, Americans marched again and again -- peacefully, nonviolently and by the hundreds of thousands -- for civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, economic justice and against wars.
That is Frances Fox Piven's tradition of protest. But violent rhetoric -- his own and his attempts to pin it on the left -- is Beck's business, and his business has led to threats against Piven's life. And she's not exaggerating what counts as a death threat, either. Nancy Goldstein writes that Piven:
carefully parsed the distinction between genuine death threats and people who write her notes saying, “I hope you fucking die you fucking bitch.” The latter, she explained, “Are just people wishing death on me.”
Beck himself, of course, is hiding behind a "I never said I wanted her dead, nor did I tell people to kill her" posture even as he continues to claim that she wants to destroy America, that her ideas have laid the groundwork to destroy America, that every policy he inveighs against comes out of her work. In other words, Beck is more interested in ending Piven's ideas than in ending her life. He wants to poison the well against the ideas of genuine economic populism, to point people away from focusing on how to level the playing field and arrive at a more balanced economy. If his fans' threats can scare Piven or those who share her ideas into shutting up, well, he's not going to argue.
Piven's not shutting up. Goldstein concludes:
“They’re trying to shut the left up and make them hide,” she says, “So I think that every bit of public outrage we can muster against them is useful.” When I press her to explain, she mentions that she appreciates the protests against Fox and Beck, but quickly moves from there to the bigger picture. “I’d like more and more re-assertion of the politics being attacked—more focus on the economic and political rights of working and poor people, such as welfare rights and voter registration. These are the victories that have suffered the biggest reversals. We need to stop letting the right peel us off.”
That's why I started with Piven's ideas. Because we have to make sure Glenn Beck's lies and his fans' threats elevate the politics of mass mobilization and economic justice rather than silencing it.