Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman recently introduced the “Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2011” (PDF). This legislation would allow the executive branch to name any person (citizen or non-citizen, whether in the US or overseas) as a “high-value detainee” who can be held in military custody and interrogated without appeal and without Miranda rights. The act applies to anyone who “is suspected of engaging in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners through an act of terrorism, or by other means in violation of the laws of war, or of purposely and materially supporting such hostilities …” Criteria to be considered in deciding whether to throw someone in the brig include “potential threat,” “potential intelligence value,” and “such other matters as the President considers appropriate.” The Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General make the ultimate decision– except when they disagree, in which case the President decides.

I hope it goes without saying that this is execrable legislation, monarchical or even dictatorial in its essence, and an insult to the core principles of the United States Constitution. But what interests me is the politics.

Until 2008, only civil libertarians would have been alarmed by such a bill. They were a subset of the Democratic base, and their party did not control the executive branch. Right-wing anti-government libertarians were terrified of terrorists and highly trusting of the Bush administration; thus many (not all) of them would have supported the bill. And the mainstream voter didn’t care much about civil liberties. The political alignment favored legislation like this, although nothing as bad actually passed under George W. Bush.

Now we have a Tea Party movement composed of libertarian-leaning conservatives who are almost as afraid of the president as they are of terrorists. I think it would be easy to line them up against this bill. I’d use this line: “When President Obama and his Attorney General get really fed up with Glenn Beck, under this law, they can throw him in jail and there’s no appeal.” I know that President Obama would do no such thing. (And I know, just to be clear, that Glenn Beck is no terrorist.) But the Tea Partiers’ fear is real, and in this situation, it should create a majority coalition against arbitrary executive power.

(Phoenix, AZ) I’m here for the final stages of administering a federal educational test. That’s an immensely complicated business, with more steps and people involved than I would ever have imagined. To mention just one glimpse into the whole operation: students complete short essays that must be scored by human beings. The scorers must be hired (which requires giving them standardized tests) and then trained. The training requires a detailed scoring guide for each test item, with many examples of real students’ work. The training also requires trainers, who must be selected and trained. The trainers of the trainers, in turn, must be selected and trained. They all need guides and materials. As each group does its work, their performance is monitored by computers, and discrepancies are identified and rectified.

The guiding principles are consistency, standardization, reliability, and transparency. This is all very Weberian–it is a highly refined bureaucracy. And so it must be: test-takers and the public deserve consistency and transparency, and therefore everything must be recorded, disclosed, standardized, and tracked. Fittingly, we meet in a windowless room off a highway in suburban Arizona, surrounded by vast banks of computers. (More than 1 million individual essays will soon be scored at this center.)

The contemporary philosopher Jürgen Habermas distinguishes “system” from “lifeworld.” The system must be organized and structured along Weberian principles. The lifeworld is authentic and human, but disorganized. As my colleagues and I review real samples of student work for the purpose of creating general “system” policies, the lifeworld emerges. The scanned copies of handwritten essays contain idiosyncratic outbursts, cute misunderstandings, and wild misspellings–evidence of life that it’s our job to codify.

Habermas argues that system and lifeworld should be mediated by the “public sphere,” by open and fair discussion of values. The design and implementation of federal tests involves countless value-judgments–for example, whether and how to define students’ race. We on the federal advisory panel discuss such issues, but we have limited discretion, because legitimate decision-making power lies with the Congress and the public, not with any so-called experts. To the greatest extent possible, I would like to see educational standards, assessments, and statistics be topics of public inquiry and debate. None of it is secret, but the public debate is frustrated by an excessive deference to experts, superficial media, and a narrow focus on a few hot-button issues.

(Phoenix, AZ) In my forays into social science (I am trained as a philosopher), I tend to read and write about variables that can be attributed to individual human beings. Individuals vote or don’t, they graduate from high school or drop out, they live in Massachusetts or Texas, they support or oppose health care reform. I am interested in the distribution of these variables across populations, how they interrelate, and what causes them to change.

Reading Dynamics of Contention by Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly (2001) helpfully reminds me that there is more to life than that. These authors are concerned with the causes and courses of “contentious politics”: social movements, revolutions and revolts, secession, communal violence, and waves of strikes.

They analyze mechanisms, processes, and episodes. Episodes are large historical events like the collapse of the Soviet Union or the achievement of political rights by African Americans. Mechanisms are specific phenomena that occur during episodes, such as competition among factions, repression by authorities, radicalization, or the diffusion of unrest from one community to another. A specific example (as an illustration) would be “cultural appropriation.” When the French revolutionaries beheaded aristocrats and displayed their heads on pikes, they were appropriating the ancient ritual of execution used for treasonous nobles. When African American pastors began calling volunteers to the front of the church for civil disobedience, they were appropriating the traditional “invitation” period at the end of a revival meeting. These acts of appropriation were mechanisms within episodes.

In between mechanisms and episodes are processes, which are concatanations of mechanisms. For example, the Civil Rights struggle in the American South between 1955 and 1964 was a complex process that included many mechanisms (diffusion, violent repression, recruitment, brokering among groups, etc.). McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly emphasize that mechanisms combine in various unpredictable ways to create processes, whose outcomes are also unpredictable. There is no general pattern, such as rise-and-fall or radicalization-followed-by-collapse. But the mechanisms have general properties and logics.

For students of social change, the lesson is to look not only at individual attributes but also at group-level phenomena. A survey might never identify a historically momentous process, because only a small number of people may be involved, and even they may not know what they are doing until it is all over. The Patriots at Lexington and Concord knew they were defending some weapons; they had no idea they were creating a new nation. A survey taken in 1775 would have missed the process entirely.

For activists who want to change the world, the lesson is not only to promote changes in populations or in members of specific groups and programs. We must also use the best available and practicable mechanisms in the best combinations to achieve good outcomes. Learning to identify appropriate recipes seems an essential task for both research and practice.