2—
Theories of Inequality and an Interactive Approach to Power

In trying to explain the very mundane problem of how tax protesters developed their program of economic redistribution, one immediately runs into issues that have perplexed theologians and philosophers as well as political scientists and sociologists. How free are people to make decisions and act, and how constrained are they by the first causes that operate in the world? Conveniently sidestepping the question of moral absolutes and divine intervention, political sociologists have asked, do the policies that a society pursues stem from the choice of free individuals? Or are policies determined by circumstances and conditions in society?

For some the answers are obvious. In democratic nations like the United States, some would argue, policies stem from the choice of voters. As comforting as this argument is, it still overlooks the fact that even in democracies, inequalities in society set trends and limit the options from which individuals must choose. In the case of the tax revolt, the vote of the citizens, of course, enacted Proposition 13. But the electorate only had the choice of voting yes or no for a particular package of tax reduction. To what extent was that package a product of the constraints of inequality in class, status, and political power?

There are some easy answers to this question, too. Some theorists argue that urban social movements are the product of class interest, the workers' interest in better social services. Other theorists argue for the primacy of status politics; still others argue that a structure of ethnic competition determines the programs of urban social movements. What I argue is that neither theories of class politics, status politics, nor ethnic politics are suitable for describing the structure of interests in American

suburbs that conditioned the development of tax revolt programs. The predominant interest of homeowners is consumerism. But this interest is by no means unitary. Homeowners are further divided by income levels and, in addition, often conflict with businesses in the community whose major desire is economic growth.

The program of the tax revolt was thus cast in the conflicting pattern of suburban economic interests, and it was forged by the crushing power of rationalized administration in government. As bureaucrats methodically matched higher home prices with ever higher tax bills, the result was devastating for homeowners. Neither politicians nor anyone else in the political system responded to the clear plight of the homeowners. Tax protesters faced the immediate problem of finding some way to overcome the unresponsiveness of the government apparatus.

The structures of political and economic inequality, together with the strategies that protesters devised to overcome those structures, shaped the programs of the tax revolt. Political action is best studied through an interactive approach. One must begin by charting basic political and economic inequalities. Then, one must examine how movement activists have a degree of freedom. Activists creatively interpret their confrontations with government and other opposing institutions and interests. In their fight against taxes, protesters developed strategies whereby suburban communities could oppose big city and big county government. As the tax activists invented strategies for gaining power, they shaped and reshaped their redistributive programs, altering the very interests that they pursued. Eventually, the redistributive programs of the tax limitation movement helped to form new patterns of inequality.

In short, social movements make their own redistributive programs, but not just as they please. They make them constrained by the structures of inequality in class, status, and political power inherited from the past. American citizens and political commentators have overlooked this truism because they are convinced that their country is a functioning democracy where the people rule. Sic semper tyrannis .^[1]

The People's Choice?

Neither government officials nor business elites were celebrating on June 7, 1978, the day after Proposition 13 passed. As the airwaves buzzed with the news of Proposition 13—"mad as hell . . . ," "populism . . . "—the story went out: the people had won a great victory. Ordinary citizens, fed up with government, had written their own tax law and had overwhelmingly voted to make a huge tax cut for property owners and businesses part of the California constitution. Eureka!

The people of California had spoken; the voters had decided. Since the public had voted to reduce taxes on property owners and businesses, wasn't this exactly what the public had wanted all along? It had been a free election. Every citizen could have registered and voted; every ballot had been counted, and counted only once; each side had the opportunity to voice its arguments, The pro-13 and anti-13 campaigns had even spent roughly the same amount of money, This was not a rigged election in Mexico, nor a meaningless plebescite in China, but rather government for the people in the United States of America.

The folk wisdom about Proposition 13 matched the conventional wisdom of pluralist political analysis. Pluralists focus on voting and other observable actions that take place within conventional political institutions. Pluralist voting analysis attempts to discover the interests, feelings, and beliefs that lead individuals to vote one way or the other. Political institutions are seen as open to popular influence; in a democracy like the United States, voting is the supreme act of public choice.

Most of the research on the tax revolt has focused on explaining why citizens voted for Proposition 13 and similar measures in Michigan and Massachusetts.^[2] This research has focused on the animus between the taxpayers and the government and has probed into voters' opinions about their tax burden, government spending, and the size and efficiency of government. In focusing on elections and on public opinions about government finance, however, researchers have missed some of the key developments of the past that made Proposition 13 what it is. The tax revolt was not only about how much the government got and how much the taxpayers kept. It was also about which groups in society gained and which lost. Tax policy is the supreme redistributive policy.

The vote for Proposition 13 was merely a plebescite, just the last step in a long journey of policy formation. One needs to look at the earlier quarrels over itinerary, when tax revolt leaders argued about the content of what was to become Proposition 13. At that time, basic redistributional questions of who gets what, and who pays what, were being settled. Proposition 13 and its tax cuts for business and homeowners were a ratification of an earlier rejection of downward redistribution.

Decisions to limit and set the agenda for the tax revolt, made in the decades before Proposition 13, were crucial because they established the general outlines of the program the tax revolt was to pursue. The process of agenda setting was greatly different from the election that ratified Proposition 13. Agendas are set more slowly and less publicly. The dropping of tax equity from the agenda revealed a fundamental inequality in the American political system: that different organized interests have widely differing powers in policy making.^[3]

Establishing the agenda for the tax revolt involved non-decisions,

decisions not to act, not to target benefits to low- and moderate-income earners who could least afford their taxes. Explaining why something did not happen—or as historians term it, counterfactual history—is a task that can go awry. For every one event that did occur, there were many events that did not happen. Which one of these alternatives should the scholar pick to analyze? One should, of course, refrain from using personal preference or ideology to concoct remote possibilities to examine. Any nondecision selected for analysis needs to be an alternative that was in fact supported by some portion of the population. In this way, a nondecision can be treated as an empirical phenomenon in its own right, rather than just a fanciful dream of some outside observer.

It is, of course, more difficult to document possibilities that lost compared to causes that triumphed.^[4] But as chapter 1 has demonstrated, there was a viable, alternative program for property taxes that stemmed from the interests and observable actions of homeowners in California. The owners of single-family homes, rather than businesses, were paying more and more of the property tax burden and could have decided to redistribute benefits downward, to themselves. Downward redistribution was an alternative that many states had adopted, that many activists knew of, and that was quite attractive to residents in working-class and lower-middle-class communities (see chapter 4). Some groups in those localities did in fact call for taxing big oil companies and providing property tax relief to homeowners only.

The possibility of downward redistribution was dropped from the agenda, opening the way for the very different program embodied in Proposition 13. A major reason for this nondecision was the political inequality brought about by economic inequality. Local government did not respond equally to pressures from different groups. The political system was biased against protesting groups from lower- and moderateincome communities, which lack resources—money, professional skills, information, media exposure, and access to government officials—and suffer from the generalized unresponsiveness of government and other institutions (see chaps. 4 and 5). In contrast to Robert Dahl's pluralist arguments that the American polity was a dispersed inequality where each group had some resources and power over some decisions, I argue that activists in middle-income communities were in a position of cumulative inequality and were powerless over a broad range of policies and arenas. When activists advocated downward redistribution, government simply ignored them once again.^[5]

Thus, in order to better explain how the property tax revolt redistributed benefits from one group to another, one needs to examine not only the election of June 6, 1978, but also events in previous decades. In those years of fat government and lean taxpayers, the story of the tax

revolt cannot be told by citing public opinion polls and voting returns. Back then, neither the weight of public opinion nor the votes of the electorate supported the tax revolt. Opinion polls rarely even asked about property taxes; newspapers may have discussed the problem once a year when tax bills were mailed out. Petitions to reduce property taxes failed to gain sufficient signatures to qualify for the ballot; initiatives that made it to the ballot were defeated by the voters.

In the 1950s and 1960s the 4.3 million Californians who would later vote for Proposition 13 were nowhere to be found. In these early decades, the tax revolt only attracted perhaps 15,000 supporters in the best of years. This was the white brigade that had the energy and the commitment to contact neighbors, gather signatures, and attend protest meetings. Although they may have been accustomed to standing on middle ground, they became caught in a redistributive battle and soon were to discover which side they were on.

Class Politics, Status Politics, and Communities of Consumers

Earlier in the tax revolt, many of the activists were homeowners in middle-income communities. Many had blue-collar jobs; many more were from working-class backgrounds. They did not own businesses or supervise others, and had little say over their own work. Their jobs provided only a modest income so that it took perseverance, luck, and overtime to be able to meet the monthly mortgage payments along with the other necessities of life. At their workplaces, trade unions pursued group interests by bargaining for more wages and less dividends and executive compensation. In tax policy, the first instinct of these homeowners was to pursue group interest through redistribution, paying less while business and the wealthy paid more.

In Western Europe and Latin America, unions and working-class political parties took the redistributive instinct and pressed it home. For example, in a deteriorating government housing project for workers in Spain, community organizations demanded well-constructed homes, clean water supplies, health-care facilities, and better schools—activity Manuel Castells calls "collective consumption trade unionism." In Italy, Communists elected to local government sought better government services coordinated with militant trade unionism, a strategy to redistribute to the working class.^[6]

Throughout world history, workers have frequently pursued programs of downward redistribution and class interests, that is, the interests of all those with a similar position in the process of production.^[7] The

United States, of course, has its own history of militant trade unionism and socialist, communist, and workingmen's political parties. Some of the legacy of this radical past can be found among the tax activists in working-class communities (see chap. 5). These activists scorned big business and expressed a faith in democracy and popular protest to win justice from errant elites. But all militancy aside, the tax protest movement became a multiclass coalition whose program was not downward redistribution and was not the class interest of the blue-collar homeowners who had begun the movement. The movement included not only the pizza delivery driver but the pizza-shop owner as well as the accountant who worked for him, thereby cutting across class lines at the workplace, mixing worker, owner, and professional.

The tax revolt may be atypical when compared to the urban social movements in the working-class suburbs of Paris, Turin, or Mexico City. But the tax revolt was similar to many movements in the United States such as the Progressive movement and the Temperance movement, which shunned the class-based politics of Europe and the rest of the world. What groups were involved in these movements in the United States, if not classes? What were their concerns, if not class interests derived from work? Some would argue that the tax revolt's mobilization of a multi-class base is part of a broader pattern of American exceptionalism, reflecting how American society was fundamentally different from those in the Old World.

Status Politics—And a Critique

In the 1950s, political leaders in the United States were confidently proclaiming that in America, unlike Europe, there was and would be no socialism, no proletariat. It was fashionable for the American scholar to claim that advocacy of economic redistribution was being eclipsed by status politics. Americans, for now satisfied with their material prosperity, could use politics to claim prestige and attack scapegoats and symbolic threats.^[8]

American writers, seeing the past in light of their own era, went on to emphasize that throughout American history, many social movements were multiclass alliances that pursued status and not socialism. For example, Lipset and Raab's landmark study of right-wing movements analyzed nativistic organizations in the midnineteenth century.^[9] Protestant craft workers joined groups such as the Know-Nothing American party because they feared losing their jobs from competition with lower-paid immigrants. The depression of 1893 led hundreds of thousands to join another nativist movement, the American Protective Association. At the same time, small businessmen and old-family Protestants in rural

localities felt overtaken by the wealth of large corporations, the glamour of cities, and the power of the federal government. These local losers joined nativistic movements and the Temperance movement to establish their status and uphold their life style in a world that had left them behind. This same combination of the status-displaced with the intolerant working- and lower-middle classes led to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Local leaders threatened by political radicalism allied with a backlash movement against blacks and the looser morals associated with cities.

How do these multiclass movements hold together when, for example, one Klan member (a small farmer) was perpetually in debt to another Klan member (the town banker)? Or in the John Birch Society, when the business owner loudly advocated cutting local taxes while the policeman was a union member bargaining with the city for higher pay? The right wing was an uneasy coalition between the upper-middle class, interested in business and economic conservatism, and the lower-middle and working classes, concerned about race, family, and social issues. The tax revolt was also a combination of similar groups—small-business owners in communities, upper-middle-class homeowners, and middleincome homeowners. Discovering the collective aims, social processes, and bonds that joined different classes together in the past might provide insights as to how the tax revolt managed to cohere.

According to Lipset and Raab, status-oriented movements upheld a common program of restoring lost prestige, thereby providing a refuge from the disorganization of social change. First of all, Lipset and Raab argue that the status-deprived sought to gain prestige, self-image, or a sense of belonging by identifying with groups that had held high esteem in the distant past. Some may have used their ancestry to establish a connection to eminent groups such as the signers of the Mayflower Compact or the colonists who fought in the American Revolution. Through status politics, movement members placed their psychic investments in the past and adopted the "cultural baggage" and beliefs of bygone groups. Some joined the Klan to revel in the outlook of the Southern planters; others the Temperance movement to uphold the values of the old middle class of nineteenth-century towns.

The rise of movements that rhetorically revived group identifications, according to Lipset and Raab, indicates that the United States has become a mass society where individuals lack significant relationships and roots In fact, claim Lipset and Raab, right-wing movements arose at precisely those moments when society was the most disorganized and when the populace felt particularly alienated.^[10]

In short, Lipset and Raab argue that social disorganization and attachments to outworn eras have produced militant, cross-class movements.

Not so in the case of the tax revolt. First of all, tax protesters were not seeking attachments to the bygone past but rather were concerned with present-day problems. The tax protesters who filled the town meeting halls in California voiced an immediate grievance. The taxes on their homes, which had been among the highest in the nation, had sharply increased yet again.

Second, tax protests arose not from the disorganized and isolated individuals described in mass-society theory, but rather from communities that had developed their own organization and leadership.^[11] Tax activists did feel disconnected from big government, which was unresponsive to their plight. But movement activists were not suffering from a general lack of social ties. In fact, the tax revolt spread precisely because it was able to tap into networks and associations at the neighborhood and community level.

Property tax increases affected entire communities at one stroke. Each year, as assessments were increased to match the increasing market value of homes, the assessor would revalue most of the homes in a particular town or community at the same time. The controversies over the property tax pitted communities against the government.^[12]

The social life in communities contributed to the fight against property taxes. A tax protest could begin with a woman speaking to her neighbors and then arranging a meeting at her home. Supermarkets and community shopping malls were ideal locations to gather signatures on petitions. Much of the credit for mobilizing grass-roots support belongs to community-based associations cf homeowners.

Tax protesters were attracted to movements that helped them to understand the concrete problems that touched the immediate world of their families and their communities. In this way, tax protest activists differed from the status-displaced individuals who sought comfort in the abstract ideologies of nationalism, fundamentalism, or anticommunism. The tax revolt cannot be adequately characterized by using theories of status politics, nor its competitor, class politics.

In theories of status politics, then, status is narrowly defined to mean prestige and social honor and, hence, loses its ability to explain the tax revolt. But the concept of status can be made more cogent if status is defined broadly, as Max Weber did, to include ethnic and racial status. The tax revolt was linked to the pursuit of ethnic advantage. Most of the activists were whites who thought that welfare programs for inner-city blacks consumed too much of their property tax dollars. In the United States, with its long history of intolerance, some would see the tax revolt as the latest example of ethnic conflict overshadowing class politics.

Ira Katznelson argues that class interests were indeed eclipsed in American cities of the nineteenth century, as local politics ignored the

class-based issues of wages, conditions of work, and growth. The major institution in urban politics was the political machine, which provided patronage jobs in government and city services in ethnic neighborhoods. Local politics was restricted to deciding which ethnic groups would get the larger shares of jobs and services. By dividing any opponents into a system of competing, ethnic-neighborhood "trenches," urban political machines managed to defuse political challengers and make an anticapitalist redistributive program simply unthinkable. Meaningful solutions to urban problems, which would involve linking government services with broad programs of full employment and growth, were taken off the local political agenda.

Katzneison and other writers such as Paul Peterson conclude that local politics has become trivialized, consigned to the realm of small allocative decisions, disconnected from the major issues of class redistribution. The rise of the tax revolt, however, demonstrates that local politics can indeed decide an important redistributive policy.

Although Katznelson presents a compelling analysis of how the political machine overshadowed class politics, his findings cannot be applied to the case of the tax revolt because tax protests sprung up on a very different terrain, among suburban homeowners rather than urban ethnic voters. In California, weak political parties and a tradition of progressive reform have produced a political system that is the opposite of the political machine with its party boss, loyal aldermen, and patronage jobs. Many California cities, in fact, deliberately adopted measures such as strong city managers, civil-service rules, and nonpartisan elections in order to prevent the development of political machines. As a result, party organization at the precinct level was weak or nonexistent; the Democratic and Republican apparatuses did not have the power to name slates of candidates. Around the time the tax revolt began, although Los Angeles County had the most active Democratic party committee in the state, the committee was nevertheless weak compared to the campaign organizations of candidates for office. Furthermore, the mayor of Los Angeles, in contrast to the mayor of Chicago, had few patronage jobs to dispense and exercised little power over the city council.^[13]

A Republic of Grasses and Suburban Consumers

If the political machine structured group interests in the city, how were group interests defined in the suburbs, in the absence of machines? In the 1950s, writers articulated one answer, that the suburbs fostered the outlook of the small property owner and, hence, political conservatism. As millions bought their look-alike homes in Nassau County, New

York; Cook County, Illinois; or Orange County, California, as the story goes, they found that despite their diverse backgrounds, their common interest was that of property owner. Some would argue that the suburban dwellers' ownership of property decisively shaped the interests that they pursued. Homeownership represented one's life savings; therefore it might have given the homeowner a stake in the capitalist social order and a common interest with other owners, large and small, business as well as consumer's property.^[14] Property owners joined together to call on government to preserve the value of their possessions. Suburbs, so the argument went, turned their residents into Republicans.^[15] Here were a thousand points of light forming one beaming presidential campaign.

The obligation of government to protect property, especially small property—this tradition of the property owners' consensus—has been a fundamental principle in the American republic. The political theorists of the American Revolution had agreed that the individual was entitled to enjoy the fruits of his or her labor. When latter-day big government increased property taxes to the point of confiscation, tax protest activists could recall the Boston Tea Party and the Declaration of Independence to justify their righteous anger.

But the planter's or the merchant's property was not the same as the homesteader's property. And in the twentieth-century American suburbs, there were great differences between different types of possessions, and between real estate of different values in different locations.^[16]

First of all, it is important to recognize that the interests of homeowners center around property used in consumption, not production or investment. The interests of consumers can differ substantially from the interests of businesses. The property tax revolt was a protest against the rising cost of an important purchased good, housing. Tax protesters sought to preserve their standard of living, along with the styles and patterns of life in family and community which are the primary concerns of most people.

Tax protests expressed such fervor because high taxes threatened to curtail these patterns of consumption. For the moderate-income homeowner who could barely afford to pay a mortgage, higher taxes threatened the loss of a home and a move to a less desirable area, with all of the consequent disruptions to the family. For those who could afford to pay, spending two thousand dollars more each year in taxes meant cutting back the advantages of the good life that had motivated years of hard work—family vacations, home improvements, or savings for retirement or the children's education. Thus, taxes became a burning issue because economic losses threatened specific and immediate consumption practices.

The differences between the interests of homeowning consumers and

the interests of businesses in the same community are evident in the political stands that homeowners associations take. Many tax protest leaders gained their political experience by working with these groups on previous issues; community associations provided essential support to tax protests. Some associations fought proposed freeways through their areas; many opposed new construction projects and other forms of urban growth that might crowd their community or overburden its services. In doing so, homeowning consumers found themselves opposing local businesses whose goals were metropolitan growth, more productive investments, and higher sales. As did other consumers, homeowners favored protective regulations, whereas business opposed them (see chap. 3).

In addition to conflicts of interest between homeowners and business owners in the same community, the pleasant suburban landscape concealed another major conflict, between suburbs with different life styles, ethnic and racial populations, and socioeconomic standings. Far from being homogeneous, suburbs are as different as the people who compose them. There were suburbs like Fremont, California, where half of the residents identify themselves as working class and four-fifths as Democrats versus one-tenth Republicans. There were suburban enclaves where black professionals and workers were able to find housing.^[17] The residential segregation of ethnic groups and social classes has produced a hierarchy of communities that has hardened into a "stratification of places."^[18] As I will argue in chapters 4 and 6, there were profound differences between middle-income suburbs and upper-middleclass suburbs, which led each to propose very different programs for tax reduction.

In short, political action in the cities was structured by political machines that rejected an encompassing, class-based interest and instead fostered a multitude of ethnic-based, fragmented interests. In the suburbs, the structure of interests was not a property owners' consensus; rather, business and different groups of homeowners had conflicting interests. Oftentimes, disagreements between the different groups of property holders simmered beneath the surface and were not articulated and resolved directly.

The ultimate outcome of these latent economic conflicts depended upon a political battle, between the different types of property owners on one side—and on the other side, their common enemy, state and local governments that had become unresponsive on the tax issue. Conflicts over economic redistribution, in short, hinged upon conflicts to gain political power. Class conflicts, such as they are in the United States or anywhere else for that matter, are inextricably connected to struggles for political power. Structures of political power can have a decisive effect

on the lives of citizens—an effect that rivals the impact of structures of economic inequality.^[19]

The suburban political landscape was dominated not by the partisan machine but rather by a bureaucratic structure of government, founded with the best intentions of honest and efficient administration. But unbeknownst to progressive reformers, plans for rational administration had turned into a behemoth of unresponsiveness. How groups attempted to restrain this behemoth shaped the redistributional programs that property owners adopted.^[20]

Administrative Capacity and Unresponsive Power

Taxes that are administered inequitably and corruptly certainly provoke popular outrage. Unfortunately for tax collectors, the public can also revolt because of taxes that are rationally and legally administered. In California the property tax was a model of progressive administration. The law required all property to be assessed at the same rate throughout the state. Valuations were calculated by computers and checked by a State Board of Equalization. But all of this administrative efficiency and expertise in government made no sense at all, for when home prices inflated to ridiculous levels, property taxes did so as well (see chap. 1).^[21]

The administrative power of big city and big county government had become unresponsive to the problems of ordinary citizens. This was the tragic flaw of the progressive reformers in California and elsewhere, who sought to do good, better than the political machine. At least the machine precinct captain was always arranging special benefits, trying to respond to the grievances of ordinary citizens. In fact, partisan machines arose not in Europe but in the United States, one of the few nations where many persons (most white men) had political rights early in the nineteenth century. Under the machine system, an alderman could fix a tax bill if a citizen could not afford to pay.

California, however, exemplified the states where progressives had triumphed and made the tax collection system a marvel of impartial administration. Here, inability to pay was simply not grounds for altering the assessment on one's home, which was invariably set at 25 percent of fair market value for all.

Attempting to reduce property taxes back down to affordable levels, homeowners groups and ad hoc protest committees contacted official after official for help—the assessor's office, the assessor himself, Los Angeles City Council members, the mayor of Los Angeles, county supervisors, and their assistants. Top elected officials and bureaucrats were not the least bit interested in a significant reduction in the property tax burden.

These political elites had great power, compared to the communitybased organizations that protested property taxes. Government in the metropolitan areas of California was truly big government in its powers and its scale. The five supervisors of Los Angeles County represented seven million people; each supervisor had a constituency three times larger than a congressional representative from California.^[22] The mayor of Los Angeles represented three million, compared to a typical community composed of perhaps fifty thousand residents. The mayor, assessor, and supervisors could safely ignore the complaints of the five or six communities who were hit the hardest by the yearly round of property tax increases.

The greater power of government leaders, compared to groups of suburban homeowners, does not necessarily mean that high officials are a "power elite"—a well-connected clique who coordinate their actions to pursue common aims. C. Wright Mills, who coined the term, sparked a huge controversy among social scientists. Much of the debate focused on the question of how centralized power actually was, with power elite theorists arguing that local governments were monolithic structures and the pluralists claiming that there was competition among the groups who governed.^[23]

Whether or not top local officials are unified or fragmented among themselves, the fact remains that they are not very responsive to ordinary citizens who lack connections to government. Robert Dahl, a pluralist who vigorously argued that political power is dispersed, nevertheless admitted that the city is in no way ruled by the people. Dahl noted that the citizens he studied in New Haven, Connecticut, had no direct influence and only a moderate amount of indirect influence exercised through voting. Political leaders, regardless of whether they were cohesive or divided, had great powers over citizens, including the power to shape preferences and define the alternatives on the public agenda. Groups bold enough to challenge the system, according to Dahl, were likely to be isolated or defeated by insiders, who possessed superior resources and utilized them efficiently.^[24]

The difficulties of gaining power^[25] are a common problem for movements, which begin without sufficient money, reputations, donated labor, or other resources to work through conventional political channels and achieve victory. Local officials are not likely to bargain or to grant concessions to protest movements when they first appear.

During the civil rights movement in the United States, for example, local officeholders such as police chiefs and mayors, with the support of white merchants, exercised their power to jail and harass civil rights activists and otherwise defeat movement activity. Even movements that can claim a following throughout a nation are usually com-

posed of groups based in a particular community or city, such as union locals, organization chapters, church congregations, party cells, or consciousness-raising groups. The setting for these local actors is the community and its authorities.^[26]

If we are to explain how a social movement develops, we need to examine not only the interests and condition of individual participants when they first join together. We also need to study the process whereby the movement interacts with its local environment, particularly with local officials and other elites that are usually the movement's first opponents. Much about a social movement—the beliefs of the participants, the culture of the movement, its organization, tactics, and even its program for restructuring society—is shaped by interaction with the significant powers in society. A movement constantly attempts to test its environment and itself through action, and revise its beliefs and structures in light of successes and failures.

In short, we cannot understand a movement unless we examine how it has navigated and negotiated through a landscape of specific geographical places at a certain point in history. The social landscape of the California tax revolt was forbidding and sometimes even hostile. We have mapped that landscape, showing how it is contoured by the heights of power and the great plain of everyday life.

Tax protesters showed a determination to shape their urban social landscape. Learning about politics, they creatively responded when they found that normal political channels were ineffective. As they constantly devised original interpretations, reinterpretations, and novel actions, tax protesters managed to achieve a major social change against powerful adversaries. The tax revolt is best understood through an interactive approach to protest movements and social life.

Interaction, Power, and Redistributive Programs

An interactive approach focuses on portraying the activists' interpretations—the meanings that activists attach to situations they experience. As participants in tax revolts tried to comprehend the intricate political conflicts of tax reform, they showed a fundamental human urge to make sense out of the events that affect their lives.

The creation of meaning is an active and continual process. Humans can interpret their world in a range of various ways. People are constantly selecting among alternate interpretations. People check and alter the meanings conveyed to them by the institutions and rituals in a society. To be human is to formulate new meanings in response to changing

situations. As the qualitative tradition in sociology has emphasized, people are constantly engaged in the process of negotiating their social world—reassessing their views as they reflect upon their own actions and the reactions of others.^[27]

In social movements, activists become involved in patterns of interactions with local authorities, thereby devising new beliefs about power that make sense out of their situations.^[28] Although new interpretations are obviously being formed in movements that overtly seek to change culture, new understandings can also be found in movements that deal with economic issues.^[29] This includes even preservationist movements like the tax revolt, whose general tenor is not to herald the new but rather to defend existing styles of life. Even in the most traditional of tax reduction groups, whose meetings begin with the pledge of allegiance, whose leaders meet for golf, and whose wives form ladies auxiliaries—new ideas abounded about what local government does and what it ought to do.^[30]

The changing interactions in social movements make for changing patterns of belief.^[31] Different groups of property owners—homeowners in middle-income communities, homeowners in upper-middle-class communities, and small-business owners—developed different interpretations about their initial failures to get local government to reduce property taxes. Each protest group, because of its different economic standing and political history, formulated different views about big government.

In middle-income communities, protest groups were rebuffed by county government, by big city government (if they were part of the City of Los Angeles), and even by their town governments (if they were an incorporated small municipality), not only on the issue of property taxes, but on most other issues as well. Groups of middle-income tax protesters had limited resources and could find few community institutions to support them. Businesses in the community, for example, usually did not support tax protests. Movement activists interacted with unsympathetic elites and institutions, interpreted their experience of interaction, and concluded that they faced a situation of generalized unresponsiveness . This led to a strident sense of militancy among the activists (see chaps. 4 and 5).

Leading small businesses in a community had a different sense of their own power, since they had considerable influence over zoning and development decisions in their localities. But they too did not succeed when they tried to reduce their own property taxes. Community small business leaders interpreted their situation as one of bounded power . Their power was limited by the higher levels of government, county and state, which had the authority to assess property and collect taxes (chap. 6).

Chapter 7 shows how the same factors—power, interaction, and interpretation, operated in upper-middle-class residential suburbs. There, particularly on the issues of neighborhood zoning and development, homeowners associations had achieved some influence over government officials in towns, cities, and even at the county level.^[32] But government officials did nothing about demands for major cuts in property taxes and increased participation in budget decisions. In this political setting, activists in upper-middle-class communities interpreted their experiences, producing beliefs that expressed their own frustrated advantage.

I use the term frustrated advantage to emphasize that the plight of the contemporary upper-middle class consists of advantages in class, status, and/or political power in some arenas, but relative powerlessness in other arenas. Tax protest activists felt proud to be influential professionals in their work; they were outraged at their comparative lack of power with big government. The activists in tax protests were leaders of homeowners associations. They were respected in their own communities but were powerless to affect decisions about taxing and spending at the metropolitan level of government.

Acting upon their sense of frustrated advantage, tax protest activists in upper-middle-class localities conducted highly professional campaigns in their communities to increase their power in metropolitan politics. In this endeavor, the homeowners allied with community small businesses, who were also trying to leverage and pyramid their standing in the community to influence big government. Both upper-middle-class homeowners and community businesses hit upon the idea of forming an alliance in their community directed against the larger political institutions outside their social horizons.

Alone, neither homeowners nor small businesses could succeed. But when they affiliated, they could pool their resources and use their communities as a base to attack the taxing and spending policies at the county and state level.^[33] This coalition of small property upheld Proposition 13, with its common program of tax reduction for homeowners and businesses.

Thus, interpretations produced the strategies of a social movement. Opinions arose from the interaction between the movement and outside authorities; beliefs were tested and changed as the movement sought allies in its battle to make government more responsive. Just to form an interpretation is an affirmation of human subjectivity. Furthermore, meanings cannot be separated from the actions that they produce. Beliefs create motivations and generate activity that helps to shape the world.^[34]

As I have argued, political action takes place in the confines of local settings structured by the inequalities of class and power. But those

settings do not predetermine political outcomes. Each particular community formed a unique context, where people discovered for themselves the issues of the tax revolt. Countless small meetings and discussions among neighbors formed the ideas that shaped the political direction of the tax revolt. The negotiations at the community level had a cumulative effect. Patterns of local action, dramatized by the success of Proposition 13, and the slogans of that action then had a profound effect on national politics.

The alternative that came to pass, a tax revolt with a probusiness program, was in no way predetermined by the structure of local settings. The setting of suburbia gave the small property owner a host of conflicting interests—a common interest in protecting property, yes, but also divergent interests. Some small property owners were business proprietors, others consumers; some had wealth, others modest means; some were for, others against growth. Local activists needed to do something about their tax bills. The character of what they did was not a mechanical response dictated by the situation, however, but rather an action that affirmed the possibility for humans to transcend and alter their situation.^[35] Even if history makes clear that the inequalities of power and class tend to persist, it also reveals the creativity of generations of activists who have reflected upon and then confronted those harsh realities.

Means and Ends in Movements

My interactive analysis of the formation of social-movement programs differs from the approaches that other writers have advanced in recent years. Others have also been concerned about political inequality—the power of governments and how protest movements can overcome it. But many important studies of social movements have focused not so much on the programs and goals of movements but rather on means—the tactics a movement adopts, the number of actions undertaken, or the mobilization of resources.^[36]

For example, Doug McAdam's insightful analysis of the civil rights movement in the United States examines the power relations between national elites and black communities. Changes in the context of power contributed to the success of innovative protest tactics such as boycotts, sit-ins, and freedom rides. Authorities then succeeded in developing countermeasures that nullified the effectiveness of each new tactic. McAdam elaborates on the political processes of "tactical interaction," whereby insurgents make "tactical innovations" and authorities reply with "tactical adaptation."^[37] McAdam, however, stops short of explaining the interesting succession of goals that the movement adopted from civil rights to black power to affirmati ve action.

Charles Tilly also analyzes social movements in the context of government power. His influential work, From Mobilization to Revolution, constructs strategic models^[38] of movements which assume that participants start out with a certain interest in claiming goods for themselves at the expense of other groups. Tilly then uses a cost-benefit analysis that compares the advantages received for committing resources to win a conflict. He seeks to explain the level of resources a group actually committed and the forms of action that took place. Tilly's analysis begins with a group's interest in redistribution and then attempts to explain the success or failure of tactics ("repertoires") to achieve those given interests.^[39]

This book will argue that political processes affect, and sometimes completely alter, the redistributive program of a movement. The interactions of a movement with the authorities can change much about a movement, not only its tactics, its organization, and its mobilization of resources, but even the program it advances.^[40] Redistributive programs are not the simple product of preexisting group or class interest. Rather, through a process of political interaction, a group creates a sense of its interests that defines the programs the group promotes. What needs explaining is how movement participants continually construct and modify their programs through political interaction.^[41]

Those scholars who have analyzed the changing goals of movements have emphasized a process—the bureaucratization of movements themselves—different from the one highlighted in this book. Roberto Michels described the growing bureaucracy in the European social-democratic parties. According to Michels's "iron law of oligarchy," movements inevitably became hierarchial institutions with leaders remote from ordinary members. Leftist parties began with a working-class base and Marxist doctrines but later developed centralized leadership that steered the parties in a conservative direction. By 1900 once-militant parties and trade unions had become tame members of the polity, the groups whose demands routinely influence government.^[42]

To this day, political parties, labor unions, big business, professional groups, universities, agriculture, and other highly organized interest groups remain influential. In Sweden and France, many speak of the dominance of such a coalition of corporatist and technocratic interests. In this world of large bureaucracies, protest movements feel pressured to become large and bureaucratic themselves in order to exert any influence at all. According to McCarthy and Zald, even leftist social-welfare, civil-rights, and environmental movements of the 1960s have become centralized and professionally managed organizations with an agenda separate from the underprivileged beneficiaries who are supposedly served. Social reformers have become yet another bureaucratic interest

group, whose advertising, marketing, and computer mail techniques rival those of any business.^[43]

The tax revolt movement that succeeded in putting Proposition 13 on the ballot may have adopted more conservative goals, but it managed to escape the iron law of oligarchy. It was not professionally managed. From the early protests in the 1950s to the gathering of a million and a half signatures that placed Proposition 13 on the ballot, none of the leaders of the movement drew a salary. The movement was a shifting coalition of small groups of homeowners and taxpayers. The groups maintained only a tenuous connection to an umbrella group, the United Organizations of Taxpayers, and directed their own community activities to reduce property taxes.^[44]

The decentralized tax protests contrasted sharply to the organized interests that already had a voice in tax policy. In fact, the tax revolt became a battle between community groups versus the corporatist and technocratic interests monopolizing local government, all of which opposed Proposition 13. Large utilities, banks, and other businesses donated large sums of money to fight Prop. 13. Leaders of both political parties denounced the measure; most media outlets editorialized against it. Labor unions, teachers' associations, and school and university administrators joined in the No on 13 campaign. The victory of Proposition 13 was an angry rejection of the entire establishment. It also unravelled the very structure of interest-group politics. Individual firefighters voted for Proposition 13 despite the recommendation of their union; managers in the Bank of America voted for it despite the bank's public stand against. Small businesses worked for it in their communities despite the fact that the State Chamber of Commerce did not favor it.

The tax revolt, then, was a revolt of communities against big government and the bureaucratic interest groups associated with it. This revolt left its mark upon the large patterns of economic inequality between rich and poor, between those who owned businesses and those who did not. With Proposition 13, billions of dollars year after year would not be channeled into local government services; most of the benefits would accrue to business owners rather than homeowners. The formula of Proposition 13 would be repeated in other states and at the national level during the Reagan administration.^[45]

Communities Against the State: The Formation of Class Programs

What the tax revolt demonstrates is that movements advocating major redistributive programs are not only formed at the workplace through conflicts between employers and unions but are also formed

through political activity in communities. It is the community and the group with its own social order which provide resistance to adverse conditions and the vision of the justice to be won.^[46]

The relations of work and production, now structured by far-flung international interdependency, no longer take place within the confines of communities. Communities have become centers of consumption. The issues of consumption sparked protests and organizations which contributed to the mobilization of a powerful tax protest movement.

Throughout history, classes with the power to remake the economy of a nation were first formed in small communities. In the early industrial revolution, the working class took shape in the villages of England and France, where new small-scale industries had to find their place amid local ties and traditions. As social movements arose to protest the conditions of work, the strength of movements and their inspiration stemmed not so much from the new relations of class but from the established relationships of the residential community and the status group. Ongoing communal relations set the goal for the movements: to mitigate the disruptions of social life brought on by the industrial revolution.

Edward P. Thompson traces how English workers began to articulate programs advancing their common interests, in opposition to the interests of their employers. These class-based redistributive programs, grounded in class consciousness, were formed through political activity within communities. As they organized the London Corresponding Society, challenged the state in demonstrations and uprisings, and campaigned to reform Parliament, English workers developed a sense of their own identity and interests.^[47]

In the villages of Yorkshire, a struggle for political rights and power was the making of the English working class and its challenge to industrial capitalism. In the suburbs of California, the small property owner's campaign for lower taxation with representation has been the making of the American middle class and its fascination with business conservatism.