Rick Perlstein | The Nation

On March 27, Chicago Teachers Union members protest a plan to close fifty-four public schools. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast.)

One thousand Chicago Public School teachers and their supporters, including this correspondent, packed Daley Plaza in forty-degree temperatures on Wednesday for a rally protesting the city’s announced plans to close 54 kindergarten-through-eighth-grade schools next year. One-tenth of the protesters were detained and ticketed (though police originally said they had been “arrested”) at a sit-in in front of school board headquarters a few blocks to the south. What they are protesting is genuine shock-doctrine stuff—an announcement utterly rewiring a major urban institution via public rationales swaddled in utter bad faith, handed down in a blinding flash, absent any reasonable due process. Though Mayor Emanuel is learning that the forces of grassroots democracy can shock back too. And boy, does he have it coming.

The story went down like this. Immediately following Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s defeat in the historic Chicago Teachers Union strike this past fall, the district, claiming massive underutilization of school facilities in light of an announced $1 billion budget deficit, began talking about closing perhaps 129 schools. The district CEO Jean-Claude Brizard—sacked soon after as a “distraction” to “school reform”—had once said he could only imagine closing perhaps three schools, given the paucity of schools performing better than the ones they would have shut down. Knowledgeable observers thought perhaps a dozen or two would end up getting the axe. (You can hear those details in this panel discussion from February of this year).

It took a petition signed by an overwhelming majority of the city’s fifty alderman to even win hearings on the issue. But those hearings were a disaster—“cannibalism,” as one alderman described them, “Good people pitted against each other because each one was trying to save their individual school.” A war of all against all: just the kind of atomization any self-respecting shock doctrineer wants to see among his constituency. Karen Lewis, the Chicago Teachers Union president, called them a “sham” for all the effect she thinks they actually had on decision-making.

Then came Thursday, March 21, and the bombshell: the all-at-once announcement of the fifty-four schools to be shuttered. Even the aldermen who’d be responsible for managing the fallout in their wards weren’t informed in advance. And the announcement was made not by the mayor but current school CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett; Rahm, that brave, brave man, had scheduled the most important announcements of his term on a day when he was off on a Utah ski vacation with his family. “It’s a slap in the face of the citizens,” Alderman Bob Fioretti said. “He’s not here to answer any questions or stand by his head of the school system. He knows the publicity realm. He’s nowhere to be found when he needs to respond to the people.” One sign at the rally had a cartoon of Rahm in ski togs, and a mayoral quote: “I did not run for office to shirk my responsibility.” Another addressed Byrd-Bennett: “Your Conscience Is Underutilized.”

Why is this a matter of conscience? Isn’t it reasonable to assume that declining enrollment figures mean some schools should close? Some schools, perhaps—but consider this school-closing plan in its sordid specifics. When Rahm finally showed his face, sunburned from the ski trip, for a Saturday press conference (to brag about the opening of a new Walmart), he admitted, “there is a lot of anguish and I understand that and appreciate it.… But the anguish and the pain…pales compared to the anguish that comes by trapping children in schools that are not succeeding.” Which makes no sense, when you consider that many of the schools receiving new students perform at or below the levels of the schools that are being closed.

One of those closing schools is called George Manierre Elementary. Located within the boundaries of the former Cabrini-Green housing project, its students are to be sent to another Cabrini-Green school seven blocks away, Jenner Elementary, that has lower test scores. So Rahm is lying; no surprise.

He is also, cry parents at the affected schools, putting their children in far greater danger for violent crime—which perhaps is surprising, given how escalating youth violence has become his political albatross. Chicago’s public radio station WBEZ, whose education reporter Linda Lutton has done outstanding work on the story, profiled one of those parents, a woman named Karlyn Harris who volunteers at Manierre every day. They recorded her anguish after they broke the news to her: “Oh, my God, I knew it was on the list but I didn’t know it was gonna be the—bam, in my face today. Oh, wow.” A reason for her horror: gang turf. Between Manierre and Jenner, “it’s like a boundary. You step over this line, the cowboys get you, over here, it’s the Indians.” The ward’s alderman, Walter Burnett, notes the two schools have been “fighting since I was a kid.… These are lifelong grudges.” He worries that it will keep kids from going to school altogether. Which appears to be a problem district headquarters never much considered: according to a speaker at the rally, there was originally no safety plan, and the bureaucrat in charge of making it didn’t even know the names of the closing schools “until the media got to him.”

Here’s another issue of which the city has proven shockingly heedless: community. There is more to maximizing the utility of limited educational resources than measuring the capacity of school buildings and discerning whether they are 50, 75, or 100 percent full. There is also the fact that each school is an individual human institution, with its own human ecology. Keeping that community together—or at least thinking about whether each individual school is working or not working qua community—has value in itself: for the students, for the teachers (God forbid we think about their human needs), and for the larger community within which the school operates. When you close a school, you kill something: a network of trust (or distrust), a web of relationships (which might or might not be functional relationships), an environment. It is in this way that, when you listen to and read the coverage here, the school-closers and the would-be school savers talk past each other. You hear parents, teachers, and students literally moved to tears at the thought of the places they love closing. Then you hear the CPS people talking statistics.

Isn’t it possible to consider that shuttering even a school at 50 percent classroom capacity can do more harm than good? That shuttering a school at 100 percent capacity might do more good than harm? And that this good or harm might sometimes be hard to measure, but yet still valuable for all that? Beyond learning outcomes, isn’t experiencing a rich community, and having a role in building and maintaining that community, and watching adult role models build and maintain that community, a useful outcome for a young person? (See this piece for the testimony of a college-bound high school senior named Lavell Short on how his “low-performing” elementary school, which is closing, profoundly contributed to his moral development.)

Community: Manierre is across the street from the massive Marshall Field Garden Apartments complex (a privately financed experiment in moderate-income history), one reason why so many parents feel safe sending there kids there. And proximity provides another value. Here’s Harris, the volunteer at Manierre: “It’s like, when you step out of your house you’re right into this school. So it’s like you’re stepping out of your bed and you’re going into a dining room…It’s gonna tear the community down. Not only the students. It’s gonna be the parents. It’s like a mother’s kids being taken from her, that’s how I feel.”

But even this argument is granting city governments too much—because it presumes the utilitarian statistical arguments they claim to be making are intellectually legitimate. Are they? The brass have made that challenging to answer. The whole issue of measuring the capacity of school buildings, for example: it took an investigation from the Chicago Tribune to discover that the city had been pegging arguments about which schools to close on an “ideal” class size of thirty students. That ghastly vision, “little mentioned despite months of public debate,” the Trib observed, all but accusing deliberate subterfuge—that a school full of classrooms with twenty-nine kids is too “empty” to be “efficient”—“allows the mayor and school officials to drive the public debate with attention-grabbing statistics. It has enabled the Emanuel administration to declare nearly half of all elementary and high schools underused, leaving 100,000 desks empty.”

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From that, however, two further statistical subterfuges emerge. A large part of what school activist here spend their energy on is “data liberation,” prying forth information locked into PDF files—to compose data sets that, once the numbers are crunched, tell stories radically different from those issued by school headquarters on LaSalle Street. Just that sort of careful statistical work from the advocacy group Apples to Apples has discovered that, in fact, that it would be more accurate to say the school closings aim at an average capacity of thirty-six students per class. A second node of statistical propaganda: note how the Trib cites “100,000 desks empty” in Chicago Public Schools. That means the Trib has effectively been conned—not to be too hard on the city’s marquee daily, because the Emanuel administration is such a skilled gang of con men. Spokesman frequently use that 100,000 figure, though sometimes they use the number 145,000. For instance, in this discussion—pay attention at at about 6:38, for this is a smoking gun—Chicago Board of Education vice president Jesse Ruiz, baldly states “we actually lost 145,000 students.”

Stunning, stunning, stunning: As even the district’s official school closing documents acknowledge, the number “145,000” refers to the number of Chicagoans between the ages of 0 and 19 the city has lost, a large number of which are not even school age, many of those who are school-aged not being CPS students. So Apples to Apples ran the numbers of students CPS has actually lost: only about 30,000, about a fifth of their mendacious claim. It’s enough to make an honest person want to scream.

Here, meanwhile, are other statistics—accurate statistics. Five schools, almost a fifth of the total, are in the Carbrini-Green ward, the 27th—a prime area for gentrification over which real estate developers salivate. (Here’s Mrs. Harris: “I think the reason they really wanna close this school here is because of the land. I don’t know how much these homes cost, over here, or condos—$200,000?”) The area is dotted with high-performing magnet schools; but of course none of the Manierre kids are being reassigned to those—they’re being assigned to a school that’s 98 percent black. Eighty percent of students affected by school closings, in fact, are black; but only 40 percent of students as a whole in the system are black. (Signs hoisted on the dais of the rally on Daley Plaza starred the faces of African-American heroes whose names adorn some of the schools being closed: writer Henry Dumas. Singer Mahalia Jackson. Eighteenth-century scientist Benjamin Banneker.)

“Everybody on the board did not look at this decision as numbers on a spreadsheet,” said Rahm at his sunburned Saturday press conference. “We looked at it and viewed it as what can we do to have every child have a high-quality education regardless of their neighborhood, regardless of their circumstances, regardless of where they live.” Yeah, right. There is a reasonable suspicion that a lot of these shuttered schools are going to be turned over to charter operators. In 2012, belying every “underutilization” claim, the school board announced plans to open 100 new charter, “turnaround” and “contract” schools over the next five years. Considering that fact, here are some other accurate statistics concerning the United Neighborhood Organization, or UNO, the city’s most prominent charter company, whose CEO, Juan Rangel, is a major supporter of Mayor Emanuel. $1.5 million: the amount a company owned by the brother of a top UNO executive, Miguel d’Escoto, got for work as the “owner’s representative” for UNO school construction. $10 million: the amount another d’Escoto brother stands to make installing windows in UNO schools. $98 million: the amount of the state grant to UNO for school construction from which this beneficence derives.

it’s about real people vs. really rich people, read another of the Daley Plaza placards—rich people like school board president David Vitale, the former CEO of the Chicago Board of Trade, vice chairman fo the DNP Select Income Fund, board member for United Continental Holdings, for which he was paid $216,688 in 2011. And Juan Rangel, about whom I stumbled across a puff piece in Hispanic Executive with the unintentionally hilarious headline “Revolutionary Chicago-based Group Refuses to ‘Act Like a Nonprofit’,” with the following unintentionally hilarious quote: “Rangel also works to combat the misconceptions surrounding nonprofits. The CEO says many young people believe nonprofits are well-intentioned, but offer little room for advancement and require taking a ‘vow of poverty.’”

You see why Chicago teachers are angry. And why they’re not going away. And why they promise more civil disobedience. “So lemme tell you what you’re gonna do,” shouted Karen Lewis at the rally. “On the first day of school, you show up at your real school! You show up at your real school! Don’t let these people take your schools.” They just might. They’ve beat Rahm before. They could beat him again.

For more on the uproar over education, read Allison Kilkenny on Chicago teachers' tactics.

The presidency of George W. Bush did not usher in a new Republican era, contrary to some predictions. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds.)

Quick show of hands: who remembers the Summer of the Shark? The reference is to those muggy months in 2001 when the news was so slow and the media was so craven that the third-most-covered news story was a supposed epidemic of shark attacks that weren’t even an epidemic (there were 76 shark attacks in 2001 and 85 in 2000). The (media) feeding frenzy ended, naturally, on September 11. And so did something else: the general sense that George Bush was a do-nothing president that drove his approval ratings into the low fifties. As if overnight, they rose to 90 percent.

Then, cunningly, cravenly, the neoconservatives in and around the White House exploited the terrorist attacks to work their political will. The Project for the New American Century 2000 report “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,’ after all, had almost longingly observed that “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor,” the kind of hyper-militarization of which they dreamed would be hard to achieve. They bank-shot the paralyzing fear into a made-up casus belli in Iraq—and then rode the electorate’s security fears all the way to Bush’s re-election. (Then, the day after that re-election, Bush called it a mandate to privatize Social Security.) Karl Rove’s predictions of a conservative Republican century seemed as reasonable as today’s arguments for Democratic demographically inevitability. Fear worked—in a way that could not possibly have been predicted by electoral prognosticators. Fear has a special way of confounding political predictions.

The Summer of the Shark illustrates something else: American culture is largely an ecology of fears, political culture included. And though it may flatter our liberal amour propre, conservatives don’t have a monopoly on exploiting fear for political advantage. Fear can be progressive—when Democratic politicians speak constructively to ordinary people’s fear of being manipulated and exploited by their bosses, of losing their way in a winner-take-all economy, of the consequences of a state without a safety net. It’s almost a very rough rule of thumb: when Democrats are able to successfully frame the meaning of an election season around middle-class fears, Democrats win the election; when Republicans are able to successfully frame the meaning of an election season around cultural fears, Republicans win the election.

Alas, many of Democrats’ political problems come when they forget that rule of thumb. And given that, it has to be said: when conservatives do fear—when they work to make elections referenda on cultural fears—they really do leave it all out on the floor.

Recent research supports it: “Using a large sample of related individuals, including twins, siblings, and parents and children,” according to a summary from the Associated Press, researchers led by Rose McDermott of Brown “first assessed individuals for their propensity for fear using standardized clinically administered interviews.” They then “surveyed the sample for their attitudes toward out-groups—immigrants in this case—as well as toward segregation. Participants were also ranked on a liberal-conservative partisanship scale depending on how they self-reported their political attitudes.” They found “a strong correlation between social fear and anti-immigration, pro-segregation attitudes. While those individuals with higher levels of social fear exhibited the strongest negative out-group attitudes, even the lowest amount of social phobia was related to substantially less positive out-group attitudes.”

The AP then quoted the scholars’ useful conclusion: “It’s not that conservative people are more fearful, it’s that fearful people are more conservative.” 9/11 showed that was so. Fear of “the Other” became endemic, epidemic, among people who at other times and in other circumstances have shown evidence of a healthy pluralism, tolerance for complexity and salutary fellow feeling. Andrew Sullivan, for example, the sometimes-conservative pundit, has never been my favorite political writer (his specialty seems to be serially getting things wrong, then narcissistically claiming moral credit for the courage to change his mind, long after it really matters), but he doesn’t seem all that bad a guy. After 9/11, however, he lost it, calling you, me, and everyone else skeptical of the rush to war in Afghanistan, “[t]he decadent Left,” who “[m]ay well mount what amounts to a fifth column.” Now (too late!) he diagnoses what drove his own hysteria: “crippling fear.”

But at that, at times, haven’t all of us been sort of conservative like that? Unexpected things happen, unmoor us, and we lose ourselves. We lash out, indulge bad instincts, think with bad faith, grow cranky, irritable, stupid—act like stereotypical right-wingers. Maybe even, temporarily, indulge right-wing political behavior.

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Thus the political corollary: make people more scared, and you may make them more conservative. When that happens on a big enough scale, conservatives are electorally advantaged. Which is why, historically, conservatives have been such avid entrepreneurs of political fear. Scare people about something, anything, and you might get them voting “right”; you get power; and once you get power, you needn’t actually address the fear (stoking it further, not addressing it, is the more useful political play). You instead may use the newfound, fortuitous grant of power for something entirely unrelated—say, trying to privatize Social Security.

Once-in-several-generation tragedies like 9/11 being unreliable foundations for political strategy, the process is typically more sedulous. And that which will scare us most being unpredictable, the process demands an experimental temper—throwing things against the wall, seeing what sticks. The pioneers of the New Right in the 1970s were quite explicit about it. “The New Right is looking for issues that people care about,” Richard Viguerie said. “Social issues, at least for the present, fit the bill.” And so, in the 1970s when families were collapsing left and right, they zeroed in on issues that spoke to those fears: federal bureaucrats undermining family authority in the classroom. Gay rights ordinances. The Equal Rights Amendment. Abortion. “I organize discontent,” as Viguerie said.

In 2004, I watched the process happen. Early in the year, as I’ve written, “I attended of hundreds of ‘Parties for the President’ organized nationwide for grassroots volunteers who wanted to help re-elect George W. Bush, at a modest middle-class home in Portland, Oregon. At one point, a nice old lady politely pressed into my hand a grubby little self-published pamphlet she had come upon, purporting to prove that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry had faked the heroics that had won him three purple hearts in Vietnam. I added it to my mental store of the night’s absurdities that I expected to hear rattling across the wingnutosphere the entire fall: ‘I still believe there are weapons of mass destruction’; ‘There is an agenda—to get rid of God in this country’; ‘John Kerry attended a party in which there was bad language!’” All were equally absurd. One of them, however—the notion that Kerry was a military shirker in Vietnam, symbolically implying that a President Kerry would shirk his executive obligations to protect the nation now—for some reason took off. It was all over CNN that fall, not just Fox; so it was that a crazy right-wing fear-meme insinuated into the mass lizard brain by Election Day.

“Death panels” did pretty well in 2010—no one could have predicted that. The “war on religion,” “Sharia law,” “Obama wasn’t born in America”: Three strikes and the Republicans were out in 2012. You win some, you lose some. But here, at base, is the biggest problem with the confident predictions that demography will drive Democratic inevitability in the coming decades: No one can predict fears before they come; that’s why they call them fears. Fear of rioting “Negroes” from 1966 on: no one saw that coming to upset the Democratic inevitability of 1964. Extremist Iranian students seizing innocent American hostages in 1979: no one saw that coming to help upset the Democratic inevitability of the late 1970s. (Political scientist Everett Carll Ladd in 1978: The “GOP is in a weaker position than any major party of the U.S. since the Civil War.”)

As long as human beings are wired like this—and barring robot brain transplants, human beings will always be wired like this—predictions about permanent conservative retreat cannot be reliable. People are more tolerant of homosexuality? So what. The things people are afraid of change; that’s life. Fear still remains. They surely will figure out something else. What will it be? We cannot know. That is why they call it fear.

Read Rick Perlstein on Anthony Lewis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist known for his coverage of the Supreme Court who died today.

It was only after the ascension of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that the Democratic party began to be regarded as fundamentally liberal (AP Photo.)

Here’s a pet peeve of mine. It’s when people refer to the “democratic wing of the Democratic Party.” Or who say of a Democrat who makes consistent moves to the right, “Why doesn’t he just join the Republicans?” It’s not the underlying sentiment; I want Democrats to stop doing right-wing stuff as badly as anyone. The problem is descriptive—and, ultimately, strategic. The fact is that the Democratic Party in modern times has always had a conservative wing, one frequently as strong or stronger than its liberal wing, and as such, when progressives speak of the party as a vehicle that naturally belongs to them, as if by right—until conservatives stole it from them—they weaken progressivism. The fact is, the history of the Democratic Party has always been one of ideological civil war. And if you don’t realize you’re in a war, how can you win it?

Let’s review the game tape. Take it all the way back to 1924—when both parties had both left- and right-wing factions (before that year, the great progressive reformer Robert “Fighting Bob” Lafollette of Wisconsin was a Republican), when there was no reason to believe the Democrats would be the ones to become the nation’s established left-of-center party, and when at the presidential nominating convention the civil war came down to 103 ballots (and gubernatorial fistfights on the convention floor) over issues like Prohibition and whether the party should be for the Ku Klux Klan or against it.

It was of course with the ascension of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and after that the idea of the Democrats as an institutionally liberal party became credible, though many delegates who voted for him at the convention didn’t necessary think or know they were voting for a liberal. Many voters didn’t think so, either, but just marked the ballot for him because he had a “D” beside his name: They were Southerners, and saw the Democrats as the only political bulwark against the racial mongrelization of America. The progress of the New Deal, we now understand, rested on a fragile and complicated coalition joining visionary progressives and the most fearful reactionaries—and when an overconfident Roosevelt overreached to try to put the reactionaries in their place, in 1938, he almost lost control of the whole thing.

With the coming of the civil rights era, the war played out against that precise template: Northern progressives asserting themselves, Southern reactionaries threatening to pack up their votes and go elsewhere—a melodrama that began with a bang in 1948 when Strom Thurmond led Dixiecrats out of the convention and into his own segregationist presidential run, and reached its apotheosis in 1964 when five Southern states went for Goldwater. That, of course, truly began the slow steady transition to ideological realignment, with more and more Southern Democrats voting Republican in each election.

But, wouldn’t you know it, a new issue immediately arose to muddy anew what it meant to be a Democrat. In 1968 the floor of the convention once more split right down the middle, fistfights included, this time over the question over whether the Vietnam War was a good thing or a bad thing. But the end of the war didn’t bring ideological unity, either. In fact, the fist post-Vietnam election, post-Watergate, in 1974, inaugurated today’s order of battle between the right- and left-leaning wings of the party. Democrats gained forty-nine seats in the House and three in the Senate, giving the party of Jefferson and Jackson an approximate two-to-one advantage over the Republicans. People assumed a liberal deluge was in the offing, Congressional Quarterly noted predictions that the 94th Congress would become “a labor-orchestrated puppet show.” Ronald Reagan said, “The small fires that at first threatened free enterprise are growing daily into full-scale four-alarm blazes,” predicting, “We’re going to see a flood of expensive, spectacular, and ill-conceived legislation which can’t be derailed or even tempered by the voices of moderation.”

In fact, something like the opposite happened—as could have been predicted by the language of the “Watergate Babies” on the campaign trail.

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Thirty-six-year-old Gary Hart was more or less the ideologist of the bunch. His memoir of the McGovern presidential campaign, which he had managed two years earlier, called liberalism “near bankruptcy.”Time called him a “liberal.” “Traditional ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ slogans,” he wrote back in an angry letter to the editor, “are simply not adequate to cope.” He said the best way out of the energy crisis was “to work together. There will be a lot more cooperative ventures between the environmentalists and the energy developers.” His stock speech, “The End of the New Deal,” argued that his party was hamstrung by the very ideology that was supposed to be its glory—that “if there is a problem, create an agency and throw money at the problem.” It included lines that could have come from Commentary, the neoconservative magazine Jerry Brown, who was friends with Hart, liked to read and quote. Like: “The ballyhooed War on Poverty succeeded only in raising the expectations, but not the living conditions, of the poor.” (That was false: the poverty rate was 17.3 percent when LBJ’s Economic Opportunity Act was enacted in 1964 and 11.2 percent as Gary Hart spoke.) He called those who “clung to the Roosevelt model long after it had ceased to relate to reality,” who still thought the workers, farmers and blacks of the New Deal coalition were where the votes were, “Eleanor Roosevelt Democrats.” He held them in open contempt. His outmaneuvered opponent, a once-popular two-term conservative incumbent, said Hart seemed to be “trying to get to the right of Attila the Hun.” A 32-year-old congressman-elect from Michigan, James Blanchard, said “I’m not entirely sure what my political philosophy is.”

There was a political reason for this. These new Democrats, seeds for Bill Clinton’s capital-n New Democrats, were replacing Republicans in predominantly suburban districts. They spoke to the desires of a white-collar constituency—and not that of the fading urban proleteriat (“We’re not a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys,” Hart famously said). And though many of them, including Hart, frequently did yeoman’s work to reimagine progressivism for a new generation (for instance, in the field of environmentalism), some of them, and their immediate successors, also did yeoman’s work selling off great chunks of the old Democratic agenda to corporate bidders—like Tony Coelho, the California congressman elected in 1978 who became head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 1980. Exulted a Dallas venture capitalist about this new/old breed of Democrat in a 1986 profile of Coelho, “I’m one of the biggest contributors to the Governor of Texas, but can I get him on the telephone? Hell, no. Sometimes it takes a week. I call Tony any hour fo the day or night and he gets back to me immediately. Some days he just calls to ask how I’m doing. That pleases me tremendously.”

This battle goes way back. It’s written into the Democratic Party’s DNA. Acknowledge the other side, study them—take them seriously. Don’t let them play the underdog; that just advantages them, too. We’re in a fight here—always have been. They think they are the party—just as confidently as we believe we’re the party. The only way to make our vision of this party a reality is to work for it—and not to act surprised when their side works for it, too.

Educate yourself about the contracts you sign, or you could easily fall victim to small print, Rick Perlstein writes.

Fair contract activist Theresa Amato. (Courtesy of Citizens in Charge Foundation.)

Imagine you’ve clicked on your computer screen to accept a contract to purchase a good or service—a contract, you only realize later, that’s straight out of Kafka. The widget you’ve bought turns out to be a nightmare. You take to Yelp.com to complain about your experience—but lo, according to the contract you have given up your free speech rights to criticize the product. Let’s also say, in a fit of responsibility, (a bit fantastic, I know) you happened to have printed out this contract before you “signed” it, though you certainly hadn’t read through the thing, which is written, literally, on a “twenty-seventh grade” reading level. Well, you read it now (perhaps with the help of a friend who’s completed the twenty-seventh grade). And you see that there was nothing in the contract limiting your right to free speech at the moment you signed it. That part was added later. Your friend with the twenty-seventh-grade education points to the clause in the contract in which you’ve granted this vendor-from-hell the right to modify the terms of the contract, unilaterally, at any time into the vast limitless future.

Others, you realize, must have had the same problem with this lemon of a product. You begin canvassing the possibility of a class action suit. But you guessed it: the contract you agreed to waived your right to class action as well.

You study this gorgon of a text to figure out what other monstrosities lie within—and discover this: you’ve waived away your right to the privacy of certain information, too. Shocked, you resolve: never again. You realize that when you buy a product or service, you’re also buying the contract that goes with it. So you’ll comparison shop. You think about how, when you rent a car, you have to sign and initial all that contract language you have no time to read with eight people behind you in line at the airport. So you call all the big rental car companies to get copies of their standard boilerplate contracts to read at your leisure—but not one would e-mail you the contract. You’re told it just isn’t done.

The upshot of this horror story? Maybe you’ve figured it out by now. The “you” above is actually you. You, dear reader, have almost certainly signed a contract exactly like this. You may even have done so today.

“Fine print,” or “boilerplate,” contracts have been interwoven into the fabric of our modern commercial society for decades. In recent years, however, they become more and more deliberately obfuscating—and, thanks to business-friendly court decisions more and more aggressive in their intent to deprive customers of all sorts of rights of redress. Recently I sat down to talk to an activist who’s doing something about it. When Theresa Amato of Faircontracts.org, who sat with me recently for an interview, told me about this business of companies reserving—and exercising—the right to change contracts after their customers have signed them, and courts upholding that right, I paused a bit. I said I was speechless. “Yes,” she replied. “You should be speechless. And so should everyone.” She laughs—in a laughing-to-keep-from-crying kind of way: “To call this fine print ‘contracts’ is almost a misnomer.” She corrects herself: “It is a misnomer, according to contract theory, because there’s no mutual consent there.”

The Chicago-based Amato has had a busy career in twenty years as a public interest lawyer working on some of the most dramatic and important issues of our time: first at the Public Citizen Litigation Group, formed by Ralph Nader; then as director of the Freedom of Information Clearing House, fighting for access to secret government documents; forming her own nonprofit, the Citizen Advocacy Center, pioneering democracy-building “community lawyering” in the burgeoning “edge cities” of the Chicago area; managing Ralph Nader’s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns (she wrote a definitive book from the experience on the legal structure of the two-party duopoly). Now that she’s thrown herself into this “boilerplate” issue, I ask whether the apparently eye-glazing issue of fine print it really as significant as all that.

More so, she says. “I believe this is one of the most pressing issues today. If you take a look at all the economic problems we have, from the mortgage foreclosure crisis, to student loan debt, to credit card debt—pretty much pick your crisis—underneath everything you’re going to find a fine-print contract. That most likely people didn’t read or didn’t understand. So this is a hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars problem that faces us as a country.”

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One of the biggest issues, she’s convinced, is the acquiescence of the courts. Again and again, judges admit that there’s some kind of problem—the legendary Chicago federal judge and author Richard Posner admitted he hadn’t read the fine print when he signed his own mortgage—but claim their hands are tied, and sign off on the contracts nonetheless. Amato points to a Florida appeals court opinion, not yet finalized, in which the family of an elderly woman, now deceased, felt ripped off by her nursing home and challenged the legitimacy of the fine-print contract she had signed. I read the opinion. Acknowledged the judge, “At the time, she was 92 years old and had a fourth-grade education. She could not spell well and often had to sound out words while reading. She had memory problems and was increasingly confused.” He said, “As a practical matter, a significant percentage of the people who enter nursing homes and rehabilitation centers have mental or physical limitations that make it difficult for them to understand the agreements. The same is probably true for most of the contracts that we sign for many consumer services.”

This judge continued on to make a general theoretical point: “There was a time when most contracts were individually negotiated and handwritten. In that period, perhaps the law could adequately describe a mutual agreement as a ‘meeting of the minds’ between the parties”; but not any more.

When I read that, I nodded my head. I thought he was making a sympathetic point, the same one Amato has been pressing home to me: that when our entire system of consumer commerce is based on a vast, structural imbalance of power between sellers empowered to dictate terms, and buyers all but helpless to do anything but accept them just to participate in the economy, something is badly broken—in fact, the free market, which any right-wing economist says relies on adequate information to function efficiently, is badly broken. Even though I knew how this story ended—a decision unfavorable to the family of the deceased—I figured he at least was making one of those “regrettably, my hands are tied” points.

He wasn’t. He was saying the opposite: that there was no problem with inscrutable contracts at all. “Our modern economy,” he concluded, “simply could not function if a ‘meeting of the minds’ required individualized understanding of all aspects of the typical standardized contract that is now signed without any expectation that the terms will actually be negotiated between the parties.”

Well, as has recently been pointed out, in the case of the contract to download a song for ninety-nine cents on iTunes, you have to click on a contract longer than Shakespeare’s Macbeth—and when they change a single clause in the contract, instead of showing you the individual change you’re forced to locate it within the entire fifty pages of fine print—the defeatist notion that nothing can be done to right the balance between buyer and seller becomes an absurdity. Says Amato: “These contracts have evolved into a category you cannot understand. I mean, some of them are written for a twenty-seventh grade level. And most people don’t have postdoctoral degrees, or law degrees—and even lawyers who read them don’t understand them! They’re not meant to be understood.”

Push has come to shove. Next time, I’ll describe to you what Amato thinks can be done—and how you can join her fight.

Read Rick Perlstein on Reagan-appointed surgeon general C. Everett Koop, who held principle over any party line.