Jules Boykoff (American University)
Limiting Dissent: the Mechanisms of Suppression in the United States
For the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Portland, Oregon,
March 2004.
1
Despite the longstanding traditions of tolerance, inclusion, and democracy in the United States,
dissident citizens and social movements have historically experienced significant and
sustained—although often subtle and difficult-to-observe—suppression in this country. Using
mechanism-based social-movement theory, this paper explores a number of episodes of
contention in twentieth-century USAmerica, involving such groups as the early-century
anarchists, the Black Panther Party, and the modern-day globalization movement. First I
delineate a typology of actions that the state and mass media engage in to suppress dissent. Then
I shift analytically from these twelve Modes of Suppression to the five dynamic, interactive
Mechanisms of Suppression that animate demobilization: Resource Depletion, Stigmatization,
Divisive Disruption, Intimidation, and Emulation. Drawing from mass-media accounts, FBI
documents, secondary histories, and other data sources, I explain how the state and mass media
have engaged in activity that—operating through social mechanisms—inhibits the preconditions
for collective action, either through raising the costs or minimizing the benefits of mobilization.
Introduction
On 24 May 1990, as Earth First! members Judi Bari and Daryl Cherney drove Bari’s Subaru
station wagon through downtown Oakland, a pipe bomb exploded beneath the driver’s seat,
injuring both environmental activists. Bari, who was driving, had her spine dislocated and her
pelvis shattered, while Cherney, who was riding along in the front passenger seat, received
lacerations on his face and injuries to his eye. As emergency paramedics and fire personnel
worked to assist Bari and Cherney, members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI)
domestic terrorism squad swooped in and, in concert with the local police, took control of the
investigation. As members of Earth First!, a radical environmental organization, Bari and
Cherney were placed under immediate scrutiny and suspicion. The police quickly obtained a
search warrant against the activists by asserting in an affidavit that they were “members of a
violent terrorist group involved in the manufacture and placing of explosive devices.” Upon
being released from the hospital the day of the bombing Cherney was taken into custody and
charged with possession and transportation of explosives. The next day Bari was arrested in her
hospital bed where she lay flitting in and out of consciousness. The mass media picked up the
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