In an outbreak of levelheadedness, Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner recently dropped charges against Republican National Convention activists for conspiracy to commit riot “in furtherance of terrorism.”
Yet the defendants from the “RNC Welcoming Committee” — now known as the RNC 8 — still face felony charges of conspiracy to commit riot and conspiracy to commit criminal damage to property. Meanwhile, the just-ditched “terrorism” label ghosts in the background.
This is an important legal case with implications that extend beyond the borders of Minnesota. And it doesn’t matter if you’re liberal, conservative or a political animal beyond or between.
As tempting as it is to get caught up in the day-to-day machinations of this case, we’d do ourselves a favor if we also stepped back and viewed it as part of the bigger historical picture.
A thick thread of dissent wends forward through U.S. history, from the American Revolutionaries to slavery abolitionists to woman suffragists to civil rights proponents and Moral Majoritarians all the way to the present-day global justice movement.
Since the days of Samuel Adams and his fellow dissidents who challenged the British colonists, there has also been an ever-present back-and-forth between activist resistance and governmental restriction.
During the Cold War any activist with left-of-center politics could be dubbed a “communist.” Recall Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s foam-flecked attacks on those he deemed communist subversives.
Or think of then-president of the Hollywood Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan, who railed against communists in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, saying, “I detest their philosophy, but I detest more than that their tactics, which are those of the fifth column, and are dishonest.”
Then there was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who in 1962 penned a memo stating that Martin Luther King Jr. should be “tabbed communist” and placed on a shortlist of influential dissidents who would be detained during a national emergency, since they were, according to the FBI, “likely to furnish material financial aid to subversive elements due to their subversive associations and ideology.”
Or, in 1994 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that abortion protesters could be sued under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a law originally designed to prosecute the Mafia.
The message is clear: The U.S. has a long history of pulling out the stops to suppress dissent. Sometimes those who are dubbed political subversives are later hailed as American heroes, while others are everyday people from all sides of the political spectrum standing up for what they believe in.
Now that the “commie” label has become passé, the slur du jour for someone with radical politics is “terrorist.”
All too often “terrorism” and the expression of constitutionally protected political dissent are falsely equated.
When someone slings the notoriously muddy term “terrorist” at political activists, it often says more about the person doing the slinging than the dissident citizen who’s being smothered in mud.
For instance, the RNC 8 were arrested in part for possessing the sorts of items — PVC piping, nails, spray paint, wire cutters, cement blocks — you could find in almost any garage in suburban Edina. The key difference is that the activists were involved in political resistance, openly planning to challenge power using unconventional tactics.
Police targeted the social movement’s infrastructure. Street medics were arrested en masse. More than 40 members of the media were cuffed and stuffed. The RNC Welcoming Committee was infiltrated by paid informants and intensively shadowed through other forms of surveillance.
When it comes to the political repression, Dem-ocrats and Republicans have historically been equal opportunity dissent squelchers.
President George W. Bush may have jumpstarted the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program, but President Barack Obama has continued it, expanding Bush’s shockingly broad “state secrets” privilege into an even wider claim of “sovereign immunity.”
Such extreme executive secrecy and privilege should make activists of all stripes shudder.
Democracy can be messy, especially when people are exercising their constitutional right to express political dissent. Yet such dissent, as anarchic and disruptive as it can sometimes be, is one of our country’s core values.
Like anyone charged with a crime, the RNC 8 deserve a fair trial. But as we follow this critical case, we ought to remember the bigger picture. History matters, or at least it should.
Jules Boykoff, who grew up in Wisconsin and who once played professional soccer for the Minnesota Thunder, is an assistant professor in politics and government at Pacific University in Oregon. He’s the author of several books about dissent. At 1 p.m. today, he’ll be among the speakers at a forum on dissent and American democracy in the Cowles Auditorium at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute.