Social movements are at the heart of politics right now. Drawing loosely on work by Charles Tilly, Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, Frencesca Polletta, Jennifer Earl, and others, I would define a social movement using five criteria (listed below). Note that this is a value-neutral definition. It could fit a fascist movement as well as a progressive one, and it doesn’t imply that social movements are preferable to other phenomena, such as political parties. It is merely intended to categorize a set of phenomena so that we can study them.

1. A social movement consists of many autonomous groups and individuals

Movements are polycentric rather than hierarchical or centralized. A single organization can adopt the feel and spirit of a movement by empowering separate groups internally, but it is only an actual movement if those groups are autonomous and collaborate voluntarily.

2. It persists over numerous episodes and campaigns

The marches over the Edmund Pettus Bridge were episodes. The struggle for the Voting Rights Act was a campaign. The Civil Rights Movement consisted of thousands of episodes and several campaigns.

3. It makes demands on holders of power

The power-holders may be governments, firms, media entities, universities, or any other institutions. If people make no demands on any institutions, I wouldn’t define them as participants in a social movement. They might form an important grouping, such as a spiritual revival or a self-help network, but it would not be a social movement.

Just as important, a social movement makes demands on holders of power rather than trying to supplant them. A political party seeks offices. A revolutionary cadre strives to overthrow and replace the state. An established labor union negotiates contracts with a firm. None of these meet the definition of a social movement, which stands apart from the institution and makes demands on it. I acknowledge that a broad-based social movement can encompass elements that act like parties, revolutionary cadres, or collective bargainers. The Civil Rights Movement encompassed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), the Black Panther Party, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; but it was a movement because it wasn’t defined by any of those groups.

4. It supports its demands by displaying WUNC

Tilly observes that social movements don’t just express demands; they back them up with four assets that command attention: worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment. For example, the women’s marches after Trump’s Inauguration demonstrated that millions of people cared (numbers), that they were willing to travel to Washington or stand outside in the streets of their hometowns (commitment), that they were unified (pink pussycat hats, marching on the same day), and that they were worthy. Worthiness can mean respectability: for instance, “We are middle-class women (with some men) who are pillars of our communities, not the kinds of people who usually make trouble.” But worthiness need not mean respectability. Sometimes, highly oppressed groups claim the worthiness that comes from suffering.

WUNC serves as a standard for evaluating the credibility of would-be movements. For example, does holding a sign on the Boston Common demonstrate enough commitment?

5. It imposes limits on itself

Social movements often adopt and attempt to enforce limits on themselves: “We will not run for office or endorse any parties.” “We will negotiate with companies but not form our own businesses.” “We denounce terrorism.” “We call for a new nation but will not commit treason against the existing state.”

No particular form of self-limitation is definitive of social movements. For instance, there are violent and even terroristic social movements; thus nonviolence is not a condition. But it is highly characteristic–perhaps even definitive–of social movements that they choose some limitations that they enforce on their own members. I would propose a functional explanation of this tendency. Coordinating the behavior of many autonomous groups and individuals is extraordinarily difficult. Movements are easily destroyed by internal disagreements or by escalation to a point where they lose their support. Successful movements avoid escalation by choosing limits and economize on the topics that are open to discussion. For instance, if the movement eschews electoral politics, then it needn’t decide who should run for which office. If it renounces violence, it needn’t debate which targets to hit with which weapons.

Thus a social movement can say: “We are [a set of groups] who want [demands] from [institutions], who demonstrate WUNC [in particular ways] and who eschew [certain tactics or ends.]”

The last few days have seen several prominent articles about “the Deep State”: by David Remnick in the New Yorker, Marc Ambinder in The Washington Post, Julie Hirschfeld Davis in the New York Times, and Kevin Williamson in The National Review, among others. I’d been thinking of writing myself, and I think we need some definitions:

• The Civil Service: a body of government employees who are protected against political patronage and dismissal without cause in return for embracing norms of nonpartisanship, public service, and professionalism.
• The Administrative State: government agencies that make and enforce rules and regulations (in contrast to statutes enacted by legislatures) and/or directly manage public resources, such as land.
• The National Security Apparatus: military and spy agencies as well as police agencies concerned with terrorism, foreign espionage, and subversion.
• Bureaucracy: any large organization divided into specialized offices, each requiring appropriate training and having defined roles and responsibilities, the whole being organized hierarchically and aimed at achieving some predefined or externally defined end or purpose.
• The Deep State: a group of people within any or all of the above who collude secretly to pursue their own shared agenda, which may reflect their self-interest or an ideological interest contrary to the goals of elected leaders.

Some observations based on those definitions:

Most of the above definitely exist. Whether the (or a) Deep State exists is a matter of conjecture. One reason that the answer is not obvious is that the National Security Apparatus is cloaked in considerable secrecy. But secrecy is necessary for the existence of such an apparatus at all, and is not indefensible. There are many things we would like our government to know yet not publicly disclose. State secrecy is a problem for a democracy but not necessarily an avoidable one.

If there is a Deep State, it would form within one or more bureaucracies yet would subvert them. That is because bureaucracies constrain their employees to carry out defined tasks, but people who collude for their own agendas are evading such constraints.

The Deep State could exist within the National Security Apparatus, the domestic civic service, or both. Americans in a large swath of the center-left and left tend to be critical of US foreign policy but supportive of regulation and the welfare state. Some of them have feared secret agendas in the National Security Apparatus while viewing officials in the domestic welfare and regulatory agencies as dedicated civil servants. Americans in a large swath of the right have been more supportive of foreign policy than of domestic policy, so they have been prone to see soldiers, police officers, and spies as public servants, and other federal employees as uncontrollable bureaucrats. However, the hard right has also been critical of foreign policy, so there have been Deep State narratives on the right at least since the McCarthy Era. Some on the hard left see the domestic policy apparatus as basically a Deep State devoted to disciplining the poor, but I hear less of that than I used to 20 years ago.

To the extent that we have a genuine civil service, it is designed to push back against elected officials and political appointees. That is not sign of a conspiracy but evidence that popular sovereignty conflicts with such values as scientific rigor and legal consistency. The civil service has a checks-and-balances relationship with elected politicians.

Finally, we do have a problem with the Administrative State, but it is not a conspiracy or anything wrong with the people who work in it. Theodore Lowi was a very fine political scientist whose death on Feb. 17 didn’t get enough attention. Lowi argued that liberals built the regulatory and administrative agencies to enact demanding values for which they had received popular support. But the agencies that liberals created do not have legitimacy to make value-judgments themselves. In lieu of making explicit value-judgments, they claim to make their decisions based on science, efficiency, precedent, or stakeholder negotiation. But they actually make value judgments every day. This creates a crisis of legitimacy that threatens the liberal project.

Another way to make Lowi’s argument is to note that the Administrative State is not envisioned in our Constitution (nor is a permanent National Security Apparatus). Agencies are widely understood as parts of the executive branch or as arms of Congress. (They even employ their own judges, which makes them resemble the judicial branch.) I think a better interpretation is that they represent a fourth branch altogether, which has developed since 1900. It should embody certain norms, such as impartiality, rigor, and predictability, and it should be designed to push and pull with the branches that reflect popular will (Congress and the presidency), deliberation (Congress), discretion and flexibility (the presidency), and law (the judiciary). We should expect tension between the president and the administrative agencies and improve our means of resolving those tensions.

As long as we do not regard the Administrative State as a branch with its own norms and standing, we should expect constant crises of legitimacy, because the existence of this branch has never been recognized by the American people. This is not to defend or rationalize Stephen K. Bannon’s attack on the administrative state. But there is a deeper and longer-term problem that will require attention sooner or later.

See also:  the Citizens United decision and the inadequate sociology of the US Constitution; the public interest and why it matters;  problems with “stakeholders”; and on government versus governance, or the rule of law versus pragmatism.