HA Journal, Volume VI by Bard College

The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College hac.bard.edu ÂŠ2018 Bard College Published by The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College Roger Berkowitz, Editor Samantha Rose Hill, Managing Editor Editorial Board Jerome Kohn Patchen Markell Wyatt Mason Thomas Wild Produced by Bard College Publications Office Mary Smith, Director Barbara Ross, Copy Editor Karen Walker Spencer, Designer All rights reserved. Except in reviews and critical articles, no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the Hannah Arendt Center. Cover: ÂŠEstate of Fred Stein, fredstein.com ISSN: 2168-6572 ISBN: 978-1-936192-60-1 Bard College PO Box 5000 Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000 bard.edu

Foreword This issue of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center includes a series of talks from our 2017 conference “Crises of Democracy.” The conference was planned before the 2016 U.S. elections in which Donald Trump was elected president. We imagined the conference as a way of thinking about a worldwide rebellion against liberal democracy. As also happened in the 1930s across Europe, we are witnessing liberal democracies lose faith in liberal democratic institutions. In Hungary, Russia, Turkey, and other countries across Europe, right- and left-wing parties are democratically choosing authoritarian rule, embracing what Hungarian President Victor Orban calls “illiberal democracy.” The election of President Trump—as well as the strong showing of right-wing parties in Germany, Poland, Slovenia, and Italy—suggests that liberal democracy is suffering a crisis of confidence. The conference speeches edited and reproduced in this volume illuminate the sources of our democratic crisis. A crisis is, as Hannah Arendt understood, an opportunity. In a crisis, the prejudices that in normal times are unquestionably accepted suddenly appear one-sided and, for many, unjust. In our current liberal democratic crisis, fundamental elements of liberalism—as it has developed over the last fifty years—suddenly appear to be questionable to millions of people around the world. This crisis is, in part, a result of the financial crisis and the Great Recession revealed the precarity of so many people’s lives. Much of the support for the globalizing project of liberalism was predicated on the promise and reality of economic growth and democratic stability. The recession brought to the fore both the lack of economic growth over the last two decades and, more to the point, the stratification between an increasingly cosmopolitan global elite and increasingly nativist national populations. As long as economic growth promised that all would benefit, lower- and middle-class citizens accepted the global economic project of liberal democracy. But once they saw themselves being left behind, they began to rebel. The rebellion against liberal democracy is also being driven by a crisis in national identity. The rise of “illiberal democracy” around the world is a revolt against globalization, cosmopolitanism, and immigration. There is a deep human need to belong; being part of a religion, an ethnic group, a nation, and a family offers us mortal humans a sense of meaning and purpose. And for a great part of human history, people found their identities in clans, tribes, and nations. One of the challenges posed by our global economic and cosmopolitan era is: where and how will people find a sense of belonging? Those who are succeeding in this global world can embrace fluid identities across borders; but for millions of people who are left behind economically and culturally, there is a loss of community. There is a crisis of identity.

For liberals, the rebellion against cosmopolitanism and the renewed embrace of national identity is seen to be both dangerous and at times racist. It is, at the very least, illiberal. What the crisis of liberal democracy requires of liberals is that we come to evaluate, argue for, and potentially reevaluate our liberal prejudices. We must, therefore, hear and take seriously the arguments of those who see our prejudices in favor of globalization, cosmopolitanism, and liberalism to be unjust or wrong. And that is why we at the Hannah Arendt Center sought to bring a few speakers to the conference who question or even dissent from the liberal project. Our invitation of one speaker in particular, Marc Jongen, caused an international controversy. Mr. Jongen is a philosopher and a member of the German Parliament representing the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland party. He has written extensively, both publicly and academically, about the need for humans to find membership in a nation. And he has sought to develop a nuanced argument for German nationalism, one that echoes rightwing and Tea Party members in the United States. We actually invited Mr. Jongen because he has proven himself a serious political thinker. After the conference, a number of prominent academics signed an open letter demanding that we admit we were wrong to invite Mr. Jongen and that we apologize. We refused to do so. In this edition of the journal we publish Mr. Jongen’s speech along with the formal response by Ian Buruma and the open letter demanding our apology, with responses to that letter published in various venues. The controversy over our decision to invite Mr. Jongen is, in an unexpected sense, an example of the crisis of liberal democracy today. A rebellion against the very tenets of liberalism, like free and vigorous discussion, to which we remain strongly committed. We also include three essays from our spring 2017 conference “Is the Private Political?” Growing out of our 2016 “Why Privacy Matters” conference, these essays explore the intersection of privacy and feminism through the work of Hannah Arendt. One early and powerful claim of the feminist movement was that the personal and the private are political. For many, Arendt’s defense of privacy sits uneasily within the feminist demand to interrogate power relations in the private realm. These essays by Drucilla Cornell, Lori Jo Marso, and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek explore the difficult boundaries between privacy, politics, and feminism. —Roger Berkowitz

About the Hannah Arendt Center The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College is an expansive home for thinking in the spirit of Hannah Arendt. The Arendt Centerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s double mission is first, to sponsor and support the highest quality scholarship on Hannah Arendt and her work, and second, to be an intellectual incubator for engaged humanities thinking at Bard College and beyond, thinking that elevates and deepens the public argument that is the bedrock of our democracy. The Arendt Center cares for and makes available the Hannah Arendt Library, with nearly 5,000 books from Hannah Arendtâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s personal library, many with marginalia and notes. Visit hac.bard.edu for more information.

VOLUME 6

Crises of Democracy

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

HA Democracy and Public Space Leon Botstein

The Four Prejudices Underlying Our Crises of Democracy Roger Berkowitz

Is Protest Political? Micah White

Protest and Politics Zephyr Teachout

Q&A: Is Protest Political? Micah White and Zephyr Teachout

Is Liberal Democracy Our Future? Yascha Mounk

Jacksonian and Arendtian Critiques of Liberal Democracy Linda Zerilli

Jacksonian and Arendtian Critiques of Liberal Democracy Walter Russell Mead

Introduction 56 Roger Berkowitz Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist? Marc Jongen Response to Marc Jongen Ian Buruma An Open Letter to the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College

Against the Tyranny of Intellectual Mobs Roger Berkowitz

Bard President Responds to Critics of Far-Right Figureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Talk Leon Botstein

Is the Private Political?

Essays

The Academic Mobbing of the Arendt Center Peter Baehr

Addressing the Inclusion of Marc Jongen Wilmot James

My students heard a far-right politician on campus. Here’s what they learned. Francine Prose

Learning to Live Together in Our Political Reality Donna F. Johnson

Faith in Open Discourse Matt Harris

The Fragility of Persons and the Need for the Imaginary Domain Drucilla Cornell

Birthing Feminist Freedom Lori Jo Marso

Beyond the Private/Public Distinction: Phenomenological and Political Dimensions of Birth in Arendt’s Thought Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

107

When Common Decency Prevails: Rescuers during the Holocaust and Disobedient Subjects in the Milgram Obedience Experiment François Rochat

118

A Party in the Desert or a Polis on the Playa? Ron H. Feldman

127

Hannah Arendt, Charlottesville, and the Crises of Democracy Roger Berkowitz and Samantha Hill

135

Contributors

150

Crises of Democracy

Democracy and Public Space Leon Botstein

As the president of the College, it is my pleasure to welcome you to this tenth anniversary conference of the Hannah Arendt Center. My role is ceremonial. For those of you who are new here, I want to note that this is the largest conference we’ve had so far. And I’m pleased that here are many students here from our early colleges in New York City, primarily Manhattan. The Bard High School Early Colleges are one of the things that Bard is proudest of. I hope that these two days fulfill your expectations. I also want to say for those of you who are new that Bard didn’t actually steal the name of Hannah Arendt just because she was a distinguished intellectual and a rarity as a woman in her generation. The creation of the Hannah Arendt Center was not simply an act of fashion. There is a real connection between Hannah Arendt and the College. Her husband taught here, philosophy, from 1951 to his retirement. She is buried here, and she left her library to the College. She also helped me become Bard’s president. Hannah Arendt was a teacher of mine and she conspired behind the scenes to persuade a very reluctant faculty to accept a 27-year-old as president of the College. As a teacher she was incredibly nice to me. For those of you who are Bard students, she helped me with my Senior Project, my senior thesis, and she stayed in touch with me, and I with her. And one of my disappointments was that she promised that she was going to retire from the New School at the end of the 1975–1976 academic year and start teaching at Bard part-time to help out in the project of building the College intellectually and as a public space. So the presence of a Hannah Arendt Center is not an arbitrary act of the pursuit of fame. I actually think she would be amazed at the reputation and the currency of her work, and the existence of a Hannah Arendt Center. Even a coffee mug with her name would have actually astounded her. When she died, she was a subject of dismissive criticism. Isaiah Berlin was quoted as saying that she was the most overrated intellectual of her generation; but she will have the last laugh on Isaiah Berlin. So few people who knew her anticipated the presence Hannah Arendt’s work has in today’s world, or the immense number of written works on her, both in English and in German; that is a very pleasing aspect in an otherwise discouraging environment. I also want to say a few words about the individual whose creation the Hannah Arendt Center is. When we recruited Roger Berkowitz as a political theorist, he had written a fine book on Leibniz. He had the idea of creating this Hannah Arendt Center. I would have to say I was slightly skeptical to begin with, but I was proven wrong. The center is eleven years in the making, and it has played Democracy and Public Space

Leon Botstein

an extraordinary role here on the campus and beyond the campus. Roger is the ideal person to lead the center—a genuine person of ideas, someone who thinks for himself and is not scared of controversy. The center is one of the few institutions that have made good use of the internet. I think that the center’s newsletter, Amor Mundi—an Arendtian phrase meaning “love of the world”—is consistently worth reading; and he has organized an incredible number of events. And, unlike many people, he also—this I particularly admire—not only has good ideas. Good ideas are never short in supply, but people who have the capacity to make them happen are, which includes the otherwise unpleasant business of raising money—which an institution like this, which is honestly poor, requires, unlike Harvard University. Harvard wouldn’t really suffer by not raising money for quite a long time. Here it is essential and takes effort and commitment. Roger really believes in the plurality of ideas, which is rare. He has his own firm beliefs, but they do not crowd out others. And he has a genuine affection for the world with all its difficulties; he is not tied to selective affinities. And he really does believe that thinking and writing about what we care about is important. One of our Bard colleagues here today characterized Roger’s contribution to the College best. Ann Lauterbach, the distinguished poet, said, “Roger Berkowitz has been determined to activate and preserve Arendt’s thinking and writing as relevant to the pressing questions of contemporary life and politics. He has brought together persons and ideas in conversation, unafraid of controversy, in the hopes that Arendt’s profound engagement with the most difficult, contradictory, irresolute questions of our times can help us to better understand each other and our world.” So please join me in congratulating Roger on his achievement. I would like to seize the opportunity to say a few words about a subject I know nothing expert about, but as a citizen I have the obligation to comment on. Politics is not my field, but I participate in it in the ways that are required of me, both as a public and a private person. And my experience is not only in this country, but also in Hungary, where I serve as chairman of the Central European University’s Board of Trustees. Hannah Arendt wrote about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and clearly it was a country she thought about, not only in ’56 but also when writing The Origins, and also Eichmann in Jerusalem. So my reflections come at a time when the Central European University is in the midst of trying to find a resolution to the problem of existing as a free and open university in an authoritarian regime that actually has now developed a very strong, highly personalized, and unabashedly anti-Semitic attack on George Soros, the American and Hungarian-Jewish philanthropist, an attack reminiscent of Hungarian fascist and Nazi ideology and rhetoric. On the question of democracy and its crisis, Victor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, is an extremely articulate exponent of the theory of illiberal

Crises of Democracy

democracy. This is the notion that democracy is a process by which we elect by large majoritarian margins a political system, government or party whose purpose is to undo the traditional protections of what we might call liberal democracy: namely, the rule of law, the protection of minorities, the openness of borders, the freedom of speech, the freedom of the media, and the independence of the judiciary. An explicit part of the agenda of popularly elected illiberal regimes—regimes not imposed through violent revolution, or a seizure of power, a coup d’état, but actually voluntarily introduced—is the intent to reverse a pluralistic democracy and secularism. Illiberalism seeks to counteract the supposed absence of a moral center with myths of national and religious tradition and unity. It trades on the anger of a disaffected people who have found the promises, particularly from the bureaucracies of liberal democracy, to have been broken. The entrance into the European Union wasn’t what it was supposed to be. Economic decline, stagnation, and above all migration from outside Europe occurred. Some of the support for illiberalism is generationally older, but not all of it is. Much of it comes from the young. The Hungarian government’s attack, very cleverly veiled, on the presence of a free university, a nongovernmental private university, is part of the effort to counteract the supposed damage inflicted by liberalism. The Hungarian government has done its homework and acts cleverly and politely, using legalisms. And so any discussion today of the crisis of democracy, or the promise of democracy, has to be prefaced by the fact that democracy, traditionally understood, is deeply in trouble in many parts of the world. Hungary is not alone. The United States is a case in point. Nonetheless, it is tiresome to have to read all of the extremely impassioned but not always enlightening rage that comes off the pages of the New York Times. It is a little too much, a little too late in the game. But here we are in the United States with a president and a government that is as frightening as could be imagined. It was not imagined. It remains unimaginable, even though we are forced to confront it on a daily basis. We are witnessing the substitution of charisma for politics. Whatever one says about our president, he is a genius at self-promotion. No one has ever dominated so consistently on a daily basis nearly all our public attention. And by so doing he has reduced all discussion of politics and policies to being dry and boring. He has distracted by outrage and translated politics into entertainment. And the entertainment, of course, is at our expense. But we are to blame. The absence of political participation in this country is astonishing. Nonvoting—as, let’s say, in the Catalan independence vote—may be an act, but it is a dangerous one. The majority of our citizens don’t vote. They certainly won’t vote in off-term elections. And what are the nonparticipant citizens saying to us? They are reminding us of the perils of a mass democracy that have been well known for a long time. But the fact remains that the adage that we have the president we deserve may actually be right. What other president could one expect after the Citizens United case? What other president can we

Democracy and Public Space

Leon Botstein

expect when we actually, on a state level, tolerate the level of gerrymandering that we have? And as the population continues to separate between urban centers and rural areas that share power in our constitutional arrangement, not according to numbers of citizens, how is democracy going to be fixed? It is not going to fix itself in a sudden spurt of enthusiasm in 2018 or 2020. The good news, of course, is that as a result of the 2016 election there is a growth of interest in local politics. The turnout in the Philadelphia mayoral election—since we want to look at optimistic signs, and I’m prepared to be optimistic—is a positive sign. After all, no one should be a college president who is a pessimist. If I had to identify one way to remain optimistic about how the crisis of democracy will be resolved, I would turn to Arendt’s concept of the public realm or Jürgen Habermas’s quasi-historical notion of public space. The central question that we face in this regard is whether technology—social networks and the internet—provide a new and invigorating, extremely powerful and potentially progressive version of public space. Is the optimism about that justified? To be critical of social media and technology is awkward, especially for someone who is over the age of 30, because to criticize technological advances in terms of their political implication is to look as if one might be Luddite. And one hates to be behind the times. Having been always behind the times my entire life—I was considered old when I was young—I have no sense of loss in this regard. But I am skeptical. My skepticism stems from an analogy between politics and education. People want to tell us that you can teach, in a sense, long-distance, in virtual spaces, without direct real-time human contact. No doubt, in some cases, that is possible. The nineteenth-century composer Anton Bruckner learned counterpoint by sending in the mail his exercises to his teacher Simon Sechter in Vienna. Distance learning is not a new idea. Online education, however, will not work on a mass scale as a replacement for the traditional university. Some think teaching in real time in real space can be replaced by some kind of distance learning. But our new technology has its best use as enhancing the classroom and teaching face to face. The university has absorbed and appropriated technology, with ease, since the twelfth century if not earlier—everything from the book, to the telephone, to the video. Technology should be welcomed and embraced. All of us use it, and everyone is attached to it. However, teaching cannot be replaced by distance learning. And if you permit me to say somewhat provocatively (it’s not politically correct, but at a Hannah Arendt conference I feel comfortable in doing so) that teaching is like sex: technology can improve it at the margins. The basic transaction, however, remains utterly the same, and so it is with teaching. Yet I don’t know how I could live without it. I wouldn’t criticize an undergraduate for her or his attachment to a cell phone, given my own attachment to my own cell phone. But there is the danger of irrelevant addiction. I find

Crises of Democracy

myself falling into the same trap that everybody else does, spending a lot of time saying nothing, things I never said before, constantly, and awaiting a quick response, the same commonplace response, from a family member or a loved one. But is this traffic necessary? Is our attachment actually at the expense of a real public space and true political discourse? Perhaps since we have become attached to contemporary rituals of communication we don’t have to remember anything anymore; I can just look it up. But since I do realize that I need to know ahead of time what to look up—I need to pose questions—the erosion of memory poses a problem. The loss of memory and the emphasis on the immediate present are dangerous in politics, even though technology has become useful in teaching and in learning. When turning to politics I want to suggest that resolving the crisis of democracy depends to some extent on having to come to realize that public space may need to remain physical, and not virtual; that the virtual use of politics will not result in a notion of democracy that bears a resemblance to what we would like to cherish, one that includes the notion of individual rights, the freedom of speech, concern for the truth, the ability to adjudicate the truth, and for people to believe in evidence and reasoned argument, for people to compromise, sit in a room as in a negotiation and come to decisions. How else, except in a public space, can we learn to say: I didn’t get 100 percent of what I wanted, but you didn’t get 100 percent either, but we both got enough that we can live with one another, despite our differences. You can’t negotiate a bill in a legislature or a union contract over the internet. And you shouldn’t be able to. We must learn to look the other in the eye with empathy and a sense of our shared human condition. The actual negotiation and discourse and action that is required of politics demands a public space that breaks the isolation of the screen, the microphone, the virtual. I’m not sure that the best of our natures, our positive self-censorship, and our capacity for sympathy is nurtured by technology. The internet is a place where we can now say transitory, hostile things we used to think but then thought better of, particularly about people different from ourselves. Before the internet replaced conversation we were better able to forget. When I insulted somebody on the telephone, I could say later, “You really misunderstood, I really didn’t say that.” Barring a tape recording, which is illegal except for here in this state, the mistakes we make could be corrected through the human engagement of compromise. The necessary exit from error has been closed. Everything is preserved and is left to haunt us. Change and forgiveness are at risk. But having everything capable of retrieval, in my email, in my text, we are thrown back to the very first hour of insult, disagreement, distortion, and anger continually. We have lost the space required in politics for change, compromise, and reconciliation. So our relationship to virtual space requires some adjustment and some change; we need to recapture what Max Weber called “the ethics of responsibil-

Democracy and Public Space

Leon Botstein

ity.â&#x20AC;? This means the ability to take oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s place in a gray world with ambiguities and partial victories and to actually take responsibility for acting on behalf of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fellow citizens, both as a representative, or a member of government or a bureaucracy, or as a citizen in discussion, without having everything one wants or believes in exactly in place. The biggest challenge is to reverse our neglect in keeping our public spaces alive. One of the positive things about the Charlottesville catastrophe was that it was a conflict about a physical space, about monuments that are in our presence and about the common ground we occupy. What physical monuments to our history do we want? How about memorials to the victims of racism, of lynchings? Might that change the way we realize a desire to wipe the embarrassing record of our past conceits? Above all, the shared concern for the environment reminds us that we live in one physical world. I think both our politics and our genuine capacity for intimacy are at stake when we neglect and sacrifice a public space and we permit no place, no physical place, in which we can participate in the adjudication of ideas and witness the ability to distinguish fact from fiction, lies from truth, no matter how well dressed up those lies are. We live in a very dangerous time, in which the instrument of restoration of a rational discourse about everything from science and particularly about politics is extremely difficult; and in which the coming to agreement, and the making of intelligent decisions, and cultivating leadership are undermined by the very advances we have so eagerly and sometimes thoughtlessly embraced.

Crises of Democracy

The Four Prejudices Underlying Our Crises of Democracy Roger Berkowitz

In the United States, we have a president so boorish, nihilist, and impulsive that he is called a moron by his own secretary of state and likened to a mafia boss by the director of the FBI. President Trump lies so obviously that his constant prevarications have torn asunder our common reality. His tweets and insults assault the sanity of our daily lives. The president is unwilling to unambiguously denounce fascists, anti-Semites, and racists. His abuse of women is notorious. Although President Trump was democratically elected, his victory—alongside the democratic success of illiberal democrats in Hungary, Turkey, and Russia—raises the specter of the return of violent, nationalist, and racist dictatorships around the world. For decades, many of us living in Western liberal representative democracies had thought such worries relics of a past age. We were, we now know, naive to believe in the stability of modern liberal representative democracies. We looked away as skyscrapers built by migrant laborers sprouted for cosmopolitan elites in Dubai. We turned a blind eye to resentment against illegal immigration and applauded as the European Union created a new constitution without a vote. All the while we ignored how the working classes around the world were hollowed out, squeezed, disenfranchised, and abandoned; financial markets soared, CEOs paid themselves 370 times the salary of their average employee, and global cities became our playgrounds. And while this was happening, we elected Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, three of the least politically experienced presidents in our nation’s history. Our confidence in the stability of representative democracy now seems like a dangerous nostalgia for a “golden age of security” that lasted from the 1950s through to the first decades of the twenty-first century. Our faith in representative democracy during the last fifty years could go on only because nobody cared. In retrospect, it may be possible to mark the beginning of our democratic crisis. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave the commencement address at Yale University. The president told the graduates they were entering a very different world. Past graduates had found themselves in a world beset by great questions. When John C. Calhoun graduated in 1804, the nation was divided over the questions of a national bank and slavery. When William Howard Taft graduated Yale in 1878, the nation was grappling with questions of reconstruction, the “cross of gold,” and the progressive movement. In the 1930s, at the end of Taft’s career, the United States was again buffeted by forces of political and economic division surrounding economic liberalism

The Four Prejudices Underlying Our Crises of Democracy

Roger Berkowitz

and the New Deal. For nearly 200 years, politics in the United States had been riven by dramatic disagreements “on which the Nation was sharply and emotionally divided.” Such ideological and political divisions, Kennedy optimistically proclaimed in 1962, were specters of a distant past. He announced: Today these old sweeping issues very largely have disappeared.  The central domestic issues of our time are more subtle and less simple. They relate not to basic clashes of philosophy or ideology but to ways and means of reaching common goals—to research for sophisticated solutions to complex and obstinate issues.1 This was one of the worst-timed speeches in political history. Kennedy’s confidence that major political questions were behind us—that political problems had transformed into “administrative or executive problem[s]”—quickly ran into the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the ’60s counterculture, and the civil rights revolution; the 1980s brought the Reagan revolution; the twenty-first century saw the rise of the Tea Party and the outbreak of Occupy Wall Street. And then there is Donald Trump. In spite of being so completely wrong, Kennedy’s technocratic faith—his belief that “the kinds of problems” we face today are those “for which technical answers, not political answers, must be provided”—sounds eerily familiar. The idea that expert analysis should and would replace political contestation is bipartisan boilerplate. Tony Blair offered a new free-market Labor Party. Immanuel Macron, a former investment banker and founder of the centrist En Marche, and Angela Merkel of the conservative Christian Democrats are beloved by educated elites because they elevate competence over ideology. Bill and Hillary Clinton built the former’s presidency and the latter’s campaigns on the promise of a third way that melded Blue Dog Democratic centrism with technocratic competence. George W. Bush, in the midst of a war, depoliticized major decisions in Iraq by saying that our commanders on the ground would determine the size of the troop levels. And President Barack Obama was deeply deferential to the “expertise of conventional authorities: generals and national security professionals, political operatives like Rahm Emanuel, and, above all, mainstream economists and bankers such as Larry Summers and Tim Geithner.”2 Relying on administrators, Obama regularly bypassed Congress and governed to an unprecedented extent through the administrative state. Jedediah Purdy writes that President Obama personifies the technocratic style of our antipolitical times.3 ••• It is my thesis that our crisis of democracy is deeply entwined with the rise of the technocratic and antipolitical approach to politics. In a 2016 column,

Crises of Democracy

David Brooks sought to defend politics against what he called the antipolitics of populism. Brooks argued that politics is about the engagements among plural people who hold different opinions in a common public sphere. Politics is an activity in which you recognize the simultaneous existence of different groups, interests and opinions. . . . The downside of politics is that people never really get everything they want. It’s messy, limited and no issue is ever really settled. . . . But that’s sort of the beauty of politics, too. It involves an endless conversation in which we learn about other people and see things from their vantage point and try to balance their needs against our own. Plus, it’s better than the alternative: rule by some authoritarian tyrant who tries to govern by clobbering everyone in his way.4 Brooks’s defense of the messiness of a pluralist politics gets something right. Politics is based upon what Arendt in The Human Condition calls the “fact of human plurality.” Politics is that centripetal force, a magnetic or charismatic center, around which a diverse and chaotic multitude gathers and is held together. And the politician is that person who speaks or acts in such a way as to enable the people to say what they share in common in spite of their differences. But even as he praises the messiness of politics, Brooks recoils from the tumultuous nature of populist politics. The problem with populists, he writes, is that they refuse to recognize expertise. They don’t like the social scientists and technocrats that Brooks believes are most qualified to govern our democracy. He dislikes the Tea Party and also the Bernie Sanders contingent of the left for the same reason: they want to elect people who are immature political actors, people who “don’t recognize restraints.” The populists Brooks demeans are political precisely in the way that Kennedy thought was a thing of the past. They are pugilistic rather than bureaucratic. They have ideologies and they want total victories for themselves. They are not inclined to listen to experts. They prefer “soaring promises and raise ridiculous expectations.”5 Brooks is right that populism can be crude, coarse, and dangerous. Rightand also left-wing populisms threaten the stability of a liberal democratic consensus around technocratic governance of stable, liberal representative democracies. With the rise of populist politics in the United States, Russia, Turkey, and Hungary, traditional liberal democracies are experiencing a crisis. The weakening of that democratic consensus is scary and dangerous. This is especially so because it was the weakness of Western democracies in the 1930s that led to the rise of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes across Europe. Driven by real fears, it is only natural to seek to defend the institutions and norms of liberal representative democracies that are currently under attack. We should and must do so. But so much reflection on democratic crisis today

The Four Prejudices Underlying Our Crises of Democracy

Roger Berkowitz

assumes only the defensive posture of protecting our crises-riddled democracies; it is my hope that we can take advantage of this crisis to make democracy stronger. ••• A crisis, writes Hannah Arendt, “tears away façades and obliterates prejudices.” The opportunity provided by the very fact of crisis—which tears away façades and obliterates prejudices—[is] to explore and inquire into whatever has been laid bare of the essence of the matter. . . . A crisis forces us back to the questions themselves and requires from us either new or old answers, but in any case direct judgments. A crisis becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgments, that is, with prejudices.6 Populist and authoritarian movements have exposed the fantasy of peaceful, stable, and just liberal representative democracies. The forgotten middle class has risen up and said enough; black Americans subject to police violence are insisting that black lives matter. Around the world, millions of citizens of these democratic regimes are rebelling; they are raising fundamental questions about previously taken-for-granted assumptions concerning political inclusion and exclusion, ethnic and racial prejudice, and economic and social inequality. If Arendt is right and a crisis only becomes a disaster when we respond to it with prejudices, we need to look upon our prejudices with open eyes. ••• In what follows, I suggest four prejudices that have been exposed by our democratic crises. Four prejudices that we must obliterate; at the very least, we must open ourselves to revisiting these questions. First, populist movements have revealed the prejudice widely held by many in this room that democracy by its very nature is liberal. By liberal, I don’t mean left-wing or progressive. The liberal tradition has its source in the freedom from oppression, whether it be the oppression of tyrants, aristocrats, oligarchs, or the democratic majority. Liberalism speaks the language of civil and human rights. The nobility of the liberal tradition is that it recognizes that human beings and political citizens possess certain natural and political rights that are crucial to the thriving of human dignity. Against the liberal tradition of plurality and individual rights, the democratic tradition has its foundation in the power and equality of the people. As Tocqueville understood, democracy is about the “equality of conditions.”7 No one has the traditional, political, or God-given right to rule over me.

Crises of Democracy

What is too often overlooked is that the liberal and democratic traditions are generally opposed to each other.8 Liberalism opposes and suppresses the coarser elements of democratic freedom. As Tocqueville observed, A very civilized society tolerates only with difficulty the trials of freedom in a township. The civilized community is disgusted at the township’s numerous blunders, and is apt to despair of success before the experiment is completed.9 Tocqueville saw the spirit of the United States in townships governed by farmers, teachers, and shop owners. The township includes “coarser elements” who resist the educated opinion of the experts and politicians. Which is why township freedom is usually sacrificed to enlightened government. A government by elites and experts risks actively disempowering the people. When liberalism triumphs over democracy, the people no longer feel they have a meaningful opportunity for participation concerning important decisions. The very idea of democracy as “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” is too often opposed by elites who in the name of pluralism and civilization foreclose democratic possibilities and alternative ways of free peoples choosing to live in their own way. Once we understand the contradictions between liberalism and democracy we can understand how the victory of a particularly liberal idea of democracy carries with it a democratic deficit that can contribute to right-wing and also left-wing antiestablishment populist parties.10 ••• A second prejudice exposed by our crises of democracy is that modern representative democracy should be individualist and cosmopolitan and is endangered by collectivist nationalism. Politics, Arendt reminds us, is the gathering of a group of diverse persons around certain common experiences and shared beliefs. Insofar as political elites—especially those political elites on the social-democratic left—have defined politics as the pursuit of individual interests, they either ignore or reject the political need to “mobilise passions and create collective forms of identifications.”11 Elite and technocratic democratic politicians recoil from arguments about rootedness, belonging, and fundamental questions about how to organize our common world and shared existence. Technocratic democracy forgets that politics must not only feed the people bread but also inspire and give them meaning. It is the rootlessness and homeless of modern life, Arendt argues in The Origins of Totalitarianism, that leaves people susceptible to totalitarian movements that satisfy their deep human need for belonging. Human beings need stories they can tell about themselves that give purpose and significance to their individual existences;

The Four Prejudices Underlying Our Crises of Democracy

Roger Berkowitz

only when our lives are understood to serve some higher purpose can we bear the pain of our insignificant human lives. Especially in the modern age, when religious and traditional explanations of collective purpose have lost their public impact, it is natural that large numbers of people seek to justify the tribulations of their lives with artificial but coherent collective narratives. It is because of their prejudice against collective religions, traditional, and national identities that liberal democrats cede the terrain of defining what it means to be an American, a German, or a Turk to right-wing populists who are often the only ones eager to define a national vision of a people. ••• A third prejudice made evident by our worldwide democratic crises is that we imagine our political antagonists to be evil. Instead of understanding political opponents as people with different opinions and different interests, the moralists of the antipolitical elite imagine the populists as violent outsiders who threaten the postpolitical consensus. So confident in their access to the truth, liberal, centrist, and even conservative elites refuse to engage in debate with those populists who disagree; instead, elites present both right- and left-wing populists as moral enemies to be destroyed and eradicated; they are deplorables and anarchists. The moralization of the political opposition as evil is much easier than having to consider them as political adversaries.12 What is more, the moralization of democratic politics makes democracy impossible insofar as democracy requires that we agree to share a common world with those who in their plurality are fundamentally different from ourselves. When our opponents are evil, no common democratic world is possible. On all sides, we can retreat into our comfortable bubbles of affirmation; we live content in the echo chambers of our superiority. But we recoil from the hard work of democracy, of listening to, and learning to find commonalities with, those with whom we disagree. ••• Taken together, these three prejudices—that democracy is liberal, that democracy is individualist, and that democracy moralizes our opponents as evil and undeserving of sharing in a liberal democracy—reveal a fourth and overriding prejudice underlying our democratic crisis: democracy today is prejudiced against politics by its distinct preference for security over freedom. The prejudice against politics is governed by a profound fear: the fear that humanity could destroy itself through politics and through the means of force now at its disposal. Having lived through totalitarianism, and having witnessed the dropping of nuclear bombs, we today are deeply aware that politics may well destroy the political and economic worlds we have built; it may also destroy the earth itself.

Crises of Democracy

From out of the fear of politics comes, as Arendt writes, a horrible hope: Underlying our prejudices against politics today are hope and fear: the fear that humanity could destroy itself through politics and through the means of force now at its disposal, and linked with this fear, the hope that humanity will come to its senses and rid the world, not of humankind, but of politics. It could do so through a world government that transforms the state into an administrative machine, resolves political conflicts bureaucratically, and replaces armies with police forces.13 It is all too likely that democracies, terrified by the danger of politics in an age of horrifying technical power, will seek to replace politics with technocratic and bureaucratic administration. But such a hope, Arendt argues, will more likely lead to “a despotism of massive proportions in which the abyss separating the rulers from the world would be so gigantic that any sort of rebellion would no longer be possible, not to mention any form of control of the rulers by the ruled.”14 We will, in other words, trade our political and democratic freedom for the security of expert rule. Hannah Arendt knew that democratic freedom is tenuous. She famously wrote in 1970, Representative government itself is in a crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens’ actual participation, and partly because it is now gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties’ tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.15 Arendt saw the weakness of representative democracy to be its basic idea, that citizens should turn over the time-consuming work of self-government to professional politicians. This fundamental antipolitical prejudice of representative democracy is magnified in an age where technology brings the terror of massive political abuses. Most liberal-minded people today are fearful of public power. We say power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, but the insufficiency of this formula is lately all too apparent. We are scared of the power that emerges when people act together. So we prefer a government of experts, not least because it frees us to spend our time on private pursuits like consumption and family. The disempowerment of the people in representative democracy embraces our bourgeois preference to be freed to pursue our individual interests, to be relieved of the duty of politics and public virtue. Much easier to leave governing to the experts.

The Four Prejudices Underlying Our Crises of Democracy

Roger Berkowitz

For Arendt, the rise of massive technocratic bureaucracies leads to what she calls “the rule of nobody.” The fact that politics is apolitical and governed by technocratic departments does not mean that it is less tyrannical or less despotic. On the contrary, “the fact that no world government — no despot, per se — could be identified within this world government would in no way change its despotic character.” Such a bureaucratic government “is more fearsome still, because no one can speak with or petition this ‘nobody.’”16 Bureaucracy is antipolitical because “any sort of rebellion would no longer be possible.”

1. John F. Kennedy, commencement address, Yale University, June 11, 1962. 2. Jedediah Purdy, “America’s Rejection of the Politics of Barack Obama,” The Atlantic, July 25, 2016. 3. Ibid. 4. David Brooks, “The Governing Cancer of Our Time,” New York Times, February 26, 2016. 5. Ibid. 6. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1977), 171. 7. A lexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004), 6. 8. Chantal Mouffe, “The End of Politics and the Challenge of Right-Wing Populism,” in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza (London: Verso, 2005), 53. 9. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 67. 10. Mouffe, “The End of Politics,” 53. 11. Ibid., 55. 12. Ibid., 58. 13. Hannah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” in The Promise of Politics, edited and with an introduction by Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 97. 14. Ibid. 15. Hannah Arendt, “Civil Disobedience” (1970), in Crises of the Republic (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1972), 89. 16. Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 97.

Crises of Democracy

Is Protest Political? Micah White

Thank you for the introduction. It’s a real honor and a privilege to be here, so thank you so much to Roger and Tina for organizing. When I heard the president of Bard give that talk—I went to Swarthmore—I was like, wow! I wish I had gone to Bard, because that was an extremely sophisticated and interesting analysis of the situation that didn’t just fall into the liberal and progressive paradigms, or into conservatism. It was beautiful. So it’s actually a real great honor to be here. I think all of us in this room understand the importance of this topic that we’re discussing, the crises in democracy, and I think that we understand also the severity of this topic. We are talking about a situation where, if things go the wrong way, it’s like nuclear Armageddon or something. This is a serious topic that we’re discussing. I think at the same time, if we’re going to find a way forward, then we do need to break out of our comfort zones, and I really appreciated Leon’s talk for starting to do that. So I’m going to preface my brief introduction—I’m going to give a very brief introduction, and then we’re going to go on to a conversation—by saying that I’m going to say some things that are going to make you uncomfortable. You know, it just happens inevitably that I do this, and so I’ve started to give all my talks first, and I say this because to me it’s very important that when you hear something that makes you uncomfortable, don’t run from it. Mark it down, write it down, because the best ideas are often the things that make us uncomfortable. I’m going to say things that are going to make different people uncomfortable for different reasons. So just take a note of it. All right, let’s get into it. So the topic of this conversation is “Is protest political?” I’ve been an activist my entire life. I’ve been protesting since the age of 13. I’ve always been an independent activist, an outside activist. When I was 28 I came up with the idea for Occupy Wall Street in collaboration with Kalle Lasn, the founder and editor of Adbusters. I was working at Adbusters magazine at the time. So the two of us came up with the idea. We released it into the world. Ultimately, it spread to eighty-two countries. So my entire life has been activism. I have a 2-year-old son now, and I’m dreaming about, oh, wouldn’t it be so beautiful if he becomes an activist even greater than I. And so I’ve started to teach him the basic concepts of activism. He’s two. He’s born with an innate sense of activism, as all toddlers are, because they cry and they protest and they get things. But I’ve started to talk to him about these concepts. What are these words, what are these words that we use?

Is Protest Political?

Micah White

So the first word we learned together was activism. And if you talk to him and you say to him—first, if you say, “Are you an activist?” he says yes. And then if you say, “What does an activist do?” he says, “Change the world.” That’s beautiful, right? I think it’s really great. The first time he did that it really brought tears to my eyes. But today, as I was preparing to come to this conference, I said to him, “What is protest?” And he looked at me kind of quizzically. And if he doesn’t know what something is, if you say, “What is protest?” and he doesn’t know what it is, he just says, “What is?” So he said to me, “What is? What is protest, Dad?” And then all of a sudden I realized, well, that’s very complicated to explain right now, because I think—and this is one of the arguments that I want to make—I don’t think protest actually exists right now; and this gets at the question, is protest political? I think that protest either doesn’t exist or is fundamentally broken. And I want to say that because I think that authentic protest, which would be protest that’s actually aimed at political goals such as capturing sovereignty, doesn’t exist. What do we do when we protest? Let’s take a step back. What are activists doing when we protest? Well, one thing that we’re doing is, I think that we’re acting out a story about democracy. What we’re doing is we’re trying to manifest some sort of collective will. You know, if you look at the Declaration of Independence, or even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it contains within there the central core myth of democracy, which is that the authority of the government rests upon the consent of the governed. Okay? So from an activist’s perspective, what we’re doing when we do largescale marches or occupations is we’re saying, look, we’re showing you our discontent. We’re manifesting a sovereignty that’s higher than our elected representatives. We are a democratic force, a force of democracy, or the manifestation of true democracy. And my argument would be that, actually, that doesn’t work anymore. And that trying to manifest that particular form of sovereignty, the popular sovereignty of the streets, doesn’t work. It doesn’t exist. And so, that protest is broken is connected to this question of the crisis in democracy. I think that there’s a second aspect to this, which is that—I just want to say, historically, sometimes I start to think about, well, when did this happen, this transition moment? I think one of the key moments in the kind of death of popular sovereignty, or the breakage of protest, was really the February 15, 2003, global antiwar march. If people remember that day—I was there, I almost got trampled by a police horse, I was in New York City. The entire world—it was amazing—the entire world protested together on one day, saying no to the war. We had one demand. If you look at the pictures of London, it was like 100,000 people with one sign that just said no to the war. And George Bush got on television, and he said, “I don’t listen to focus groups.” I don’t listen to focus groups. He called all of the global protest a focus group.

Crises of Democracy

And one month later he went to war. I think this was the defining moment when Western democracy basically said no: the people cannot manifest a sovereignty greater than us outside of elections through street protest. And I think activists don’t want to believe that form of sovereignty is dead. That’s the essential myth of activism. Why would we want to accept that, you know? The second thing I want to say about protest is that I actually think that one of the fundamental problems is that activists may be unconsciously sensing that sovereignty is broken somehow, or protest is broken; that activists, especially on the left, are not actually revolutionaries anymore. They’re actually not political. They actually don’t believe in taking sovereignty and governing. And this always blows my mind, because I say this, and then people are like, no, no, that’s not true! But then I say, well, do you actually want to overthrow Trump and then govern? And they’re like, nooooo. And if you actually talk to most activists, they don’t, either out of some naïve anarchism or some sort of fear—like, if we did that, then we would become like Stalin. The left has so much trauma around the revolutions of the twentieth century that I think that we just don’t really believe in that anymore. So I think that protest has become—like you’ve all heard this phrase—we changed the discourse, right? We’ve changed the discourse. So what is that? It is not revolution; that’s social marketing. And so protest has become social marketing, a very effective form of social marketing. Occupy Wall Street—this is amazing. We launched Occupy Wall Street with no money. Within about a month 50 percent of Americans had heard of the movement. That’s amazing. The same thing happened with Black Lives Matter. With almost no money at all you can create something, an idea, that 100 million people can hear about. So from a social marketing perspective protest, is extremely valuable and amazing and great, and you can spread memes, you can change the discourse, you can raise awareness. But you cannot take political power. So what does that mean for activists moving forward? And then I’m going to go into this conversation. It means that there are only two ways left to capture sovereignty, okay? You can win wars, or you can win elections. That’s it. Those are the only two ways remaining for people to capture sovereignty in our world. Donald Trump demonstrated that winning elections is possible. Groups like ISIS have shown to a limited extent that maybe you can do some sort of war route. So I think you can use protest to win elections, or you can use protest to win wars; but you cannot use protest alone to capture sovereignty. And I believe in the elections route. I think strategically, morally, I think there are countless reasons why elections should be the way that we should go. I ran for mayor in a tiny rural town; we can talk about that experience. But the main takeaway that I want to get across is that I think that the concept that we need to be really thinking about now is, where does the sovereignty

Is Protest Political?

Micah White

of the people derive from? Where does it come from? And if it is true that we live in a situation where the basic myth of democracy—that the authority of the government derives from the consent of the people—is no longer true, then I think we’re in a very dark situation. And I think as activists we have to acknowledge that situation and then fight back by trying to capture sovereignty as quickly as we can, and that means building a social movement that can win elections. Thank you very much.

Crises of Democracy

Protest and Politics Zephyr Teachout

Thank you! I look forward to the conversation. Thank you for that introduction and for that introductory talk. So some of you know me because you voted against me. Some of you know me because you voted for me. And just before I talk about the question of protest, I should say that my own experience is not just those two campaigns, that I’ve been involved in politics, local politics, for a long time. I’ve also been very fascinated with protest and power, and been to many Tea Party events, as well as spent time at Occupy Wall Street on the legal team. We can talk about some of the really interesting lessons that came out of that as well. But thinking about this question about protest and politics, I want to introduce a somewhat cheap dichotomy; and those Thoreau scholars can beat me up later. There’s basically two—I think at least two—major strands from which civil disobedience and protest come in this country. One strand I would largely identify with Thoreau, and the other with King, Martin Luther King, who of course also learned directly and indirectly from Thoreau. Thoreau’s essay on “Civil Disobedience” and King’s essay “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” being these two very different models. The thing that is so striking about King’s letter— First of all, the important thing about King’s letter is that he does not start with protest, but starts actually in the four-step process that he almost talks about as a time-tested process for protest. He starts with, first we collect the facts. Then we negotiate. Then we self-purify, and by self-purify he means prepare for the inevitable attacks. And then we take direct action. Negotiation is a central part of his story in “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” in fact what he talks about in “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” and then taking this very radical action. One of the things he talks about in “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” is the importance of dialogue as opposed to monologue. In King’s letter, he speaks from a place of profound morality, profound love, and the desire to create tension, which then creates the possibility for power. Thoreau was protesting slavery. And Thoreau’s civil disobedience is very much about himself and his discomfort with the fact of government and the fact of law itself. It’s a long letter, so I’m not going to go through all of it; but it’s mostly about how can he live with himself given what his government is doing. He asks himself, well, why don’t I engage in what Micah would want him to engage in, the laws, the electoral system? And he says—and this is the only part I’m going to quote—“As for adopting the ways which the state has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too

Protest and Politics

Zephyr Teachout

much time, and a man’s life will be gone.” Then he elaborates on this, saying, I don’t really want to be involved in this. So, I see the sort of fundamental difference here is that one form and tradition of protest is profoundly political, in that it is creating tension, it is collective, its goal is change; and the other form—and I say this with great admiration for Thoreau—the other form has more to do with himself and who he is and whether or not he can live with himself. In the past several decades I believe a lot of protest—and by no means all, but a lot of protest in this country—has taken up a kind of lazy reading of King and then the spirit of Thoreau, to make protest be about the self, what I can live with. And you hear this all the time. Just listen to your radio station, the story of somebody who’s newly involved in Indivisible. The story is, I could not live with it. I could not sit with it myself. It’s about people’s own need to resolve the tension between what the government is doing and what they are doing, which is very different from starting with a purpose—not with the self. One of the things that this does—there’s a lot of things this does—is that the Thoreau strain fits also very well with the modern kind of consumer politics. I’m sure many of you have been in a room—how many of you are involved in the Indivisible or a local group?—where people will say to you, you’ve gotta find the thing you’re passionate about and work on it. Right? It sounds so good! Well, that sounds great. It’s just like picking my favorite ice cream, right? But the truth is, the idea of starting with what you are most passionate about—I’m not saying there’s something wrong with that if it happens to align with the good; but as opposed to asking where do you see the wrong and what long-term strategic way you can engage in that—those are totally different kinds of questions. And there’s sort of consumer activism, consumer language that has infected a lot of protest, so it’s about ourselves, or about our expression, or about our own sense of passion or meaning, and not actually about taking on very serious people with incredible amounts of power— incredible amounts of power, both military and monetary power, charismatic power—and trying to actually change the way they behave so that people can live better. Those are real, real differences. The cheap answer to the question, having given sort of this cheap dichotomy, is that protest can be political, but not all protest is political; and that protest is political when it recognizes that it is not about the self, it is not about self-actualization but about achieving some very real change in the material well-being and structures of society. One of the great weaknesses of the consumer, self-oriented way of thinking about protest is that it’s not too hard to get you off track if you have that kind of approach. So in politics we have a phrase that we call murder-suicide. I worked on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2003, and Dick Gephardt performed a murder-suicide. He attacked Howard Dean so strongly, because

Crises of Democracy

he was coming up on him, that both Gephardt and Dean fell to the bottom of the polls, and this guy John Edwards, and John Kerry floated above them. When I was at Occupy Wall Street I saw Mayor Bloomberg engage in a murder-suicide. Bloomberg wiped out Occupy in a totally irresponsible way, trashing people’s property. Bloomberg didn’t look good, but the effect was, he changed the structure and the way that Occupy Wall Street was working, from a debate about taking on the banks to taking on police practices in New York City. And part of the reason that was possible for him to do is that people in that moment said, “What the police are doing is wrong. I can’t live with myself. I must protest this. I have to engage,” instead of staying on the . . . fundamental protest, which is the protest against concentrated financial power—or at least as I saw it. There was a radical shift. Right now I believe we are in the middle of a major national murder-suicide with Trump, who repeatedly, repeatedly engages in a way that is so offensive and so profoundly disturbing that we feel like we must respond; otherwise we cannot live with ourselves. And in fact it’s not just that. It’s like, “I must, I must tweet. I am not a good person, I am not a good person, I am not a good citizen if I have not tweeted out my outrage about Trump’s response to the NFL.” And you feel it, even in your little circle of friends. Like, “Oh my gosh, I haven’t gone on Twitter today. What if I want to say something about the whales?” But it’s even worse now. We actually demand of our leaders that they themselves do the same thing. We demand that they go offtrack. We demand that they respond to outrages; because if they are not responding to outrage, they are not in some ways expressing who they are, as opposed to actually rebuilding society and rebuilding another model besides the Trump model. And I very much fear that if all we do is build a series of blocks against the incredibly cruel and careless and incompetent and bigoted president that we now have, if all we do is protect against that at the same time we are actually not rebuilding a politics that we can live by, we’ll have another kind of Trump character coming in. So, a few last things, and then we can talk. I want to have more of a conversation. I want to acknowledge—I feel like I’m Bill McKibben, saying, “It’s even worse than you think.” And I think Micah might say the same thing. But the depth of the problem we face is not something that can be fixed by doing— as much as I have strong feelings about protest and the way that we can do protest far more strategically with the goal of winning as opposed to expressing. But the societal problems are deeper than just a slightly better activism or better protest. We actually have—and the president referred to some of these—but we have a society that is so profoundly disconnected that politics is very hard to do, politics in the sense of engaging and building power. Sixty years ago in this country 20 percent of Americans from any class were presidents of their local volunteer association—presidents. In fact, one of the

Protest and Politics

Zephyr Teachout

sayings was, “We have a nation of presidents. Why do we need a president?” If you go to the gravestones, cross-class, cross-race, you will see mention of Mom, daughter, member of this local volunteer association. It was so deep, people were so profoundly involved in a kind of politics—whether it’s the Elks Club, or the Moose Club—involved in politics that one out of five people had taken on a leadership role in organizing people on a regular basis. So I know a handful of you raised your hands saying you’re involved in Indivisible or other local groups. They can be annoying, right? People are strange, and there are real battles to be won, won and fought, and you lose them, and there are strategy sessions, and you disagree. If one in five people in this country are engaging at that level, not in some kind of pure way but in the annoying part of local politics, that’s a way I can imagine our country getting transformed. But that’s going to take a lot more than mere thinking about this as the resistance. It’s actually going to take long-term work. So, because I am an organizer I do have to give you a hard time first. How many of you live in Dutchess County? How many of you have done any work for the 2018 congressional race? How many of you worked on the 2017 county legislature race? Okay! I got some hands! Right now in this county there are county legislator races in a county that voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton—sorry, take away the overwhelmingly: barely for Hillary Clinton—and the county legislature has almost three-quarters Republicans on it. The county executive is Republican. If we think about how we’re—not as expression—but how we’re creating, you’re going to be involved in your county legislature race, and that means really changing the way that we think. This isn’t about expression; this is about long-term, highly local, sometimes annoying, very social work. And to Roger’s point, that means going door to door, or meeting with people and confronting them; and meeting somebody says, I think you should have a voter ID for every person who’s voting, and engaging with that person, not turning them away. When I was thinking about this question about what is political and what is not political, what is not political is when the goal of allegedly political action is the self; and what is political is when there’s a willingness to engage, there’s a willingness to create tension, there’s a willingness to live in that tension, and the goal is actually change, not merely feeling like the soul is consistent with one’s ideals. Thank you.

Crises of Democracy

Q&A: Is Protest Political? Micah White and Zephyr Teachout

Uday Mehta: Thank you both. I’ll open the floor to questions. But perhaps I can start with one of my own: I was being half serious when I said that I thought failing in an election could nevertheless be taken as a form of success. But now I realize that maybe the two of you, even though you lost elections, perhaps don’t take it as a form of success, because I guess, Micah, one of the things that I’m struck by is that you end your talk by saying, look, if you want sovereignty you’ve either got to win wars or you’ve got to win elections. What I find puzzling about that is that one could have said, look, the mistake was in wanting sovereignty in the first place. And if the mistake was in wanting sovereignty in the first place, then you wouldn’t be left with just two options. I guess when I was in college I was also part of various forms of protest, and part of what for me was interesting about the protests was that one wasn’t just trying to get power; one was trying to bring about a different vision of how to live. But I’m surprised by what you say because you seem to be saying, look, the whole game is power, so forget this talk about a different vision. Let’s just try and win elections. Micah White: That’s a really excellent question, and there’s a lot of— What happens is, now that we’re getting into this there’s a lot of nuance that I think I want to bring out in terms of this question. First of all, I do want to say yes, I think that there’s been this game that we’ve been playing on the left, which is, I’m not losing; I’m just winning at a different game. And no, you’re literally losing. We are not the president. You know, we have lost. Occupy was a constructive failure; Black Lives Matter failed; the Women’s March failed. The inability of the left to see that these things are failures and that we can learn from them keeps us not progressing. So I absolutely do believe that what happened is that basically the traumas of the twentieth century, the Stalins, the Maos, etc., have really forced us into this situation where we’re scared of actually trying to take power, actually trying to achieve a literal political revolution. And so I think that there’s a lot of interesting and beautiful thinking done around taking power without taking power, and maybe we don’t need sovereignty; but I think it’s mental gymnastics that I don’t believe in. I think that with Occupy Wall Street we tried that. That’s what we were doing in the square. We were trying to say, look, we’re going to manifest a pure form of democracy literally in the squares, consensus-based, anyone can come. It was beautiful, it was totally beautiful; but on the day when the police came to evict us, they listened to the mayor, not to a random assemblage of well-meaning people who were manifesting some pure form of democracy.

Q&A: Is Protest Political?

Micah White and Zephyr Teachout

So, what I’m trying to say is that I really do believe that we need to get back on track with saying that we might not like how the Russian Revolution turned out, or the Chinese Revolution, but they were right about the idea that the only real solution is fundamentally taking power and transforming how decisions are made. But that gets to your second question: well, what kind of taking power are you talking about? Am I talking about becoming a Donald Trump? No! And that’s not how I ran my campaign in Oregon. I really believe that we do need to transform how decisions are made, we need to transform how power functions; but that the only way to do that is to take power. So in my imagination I imagine something where someone becomes, some movement becomes, president, and that movement makes decisions collectively as a movement; but that the movement is really the president—not the fake president, the shadow president, or whatever, but the literal president. Uday: Zephyr, I take it that on this last point you’re in complete agreement with Micah. Zephyr Teachout: Which last point? Uday: The last point being that, look, in the distinction you make, you have Thoreau on the one hand becoming—and, you know, I don’t think the way you made the distinction was crude or unsophisticated at all; I thought it was very well done—but Thoreau becomes a stand-in for a certain kind of moralistic narcissism, right? Zephyr: Well said. Uday: And on the other hand, you have politics. And where I take you to be agreeing with Micah is in saying yeah, look, protest is about getting power. Is that right? Zephyr: I think that’s right. I think there might be a slight disagreement, and there might not. I guess I would put it slightly differently, which is, I think that there has been a putting down of the most essential tools for social change, which are elections; that there’s been an incredible anxiety and fear and disdain and disgust for a long time on the left about that. Unlike Micah, I would not say it’s all about that therefore. I think the danger at any point is to say— There are certain kinds of tools that I think are immoral to use, absolutely immoral, but that electoral politics is an essential and moral tool along with protest, along with other ways of gaining power. So I would not actually rush to the other extreme and say therefore everything has to be about electoral politics. I do think it matters who is elected, not just

Crises of Democracy

whom they listen to. But politicians can change because of protest. And for those of you involved in the fracking movement in New York State, nobody was—very few people were—elected on an antifracking basis, but repeat protests truly changed a pretty serious fundamental policy in this state, and that made a difference. So I think there are lots of examples of protest working and not working. I totally agree with Micah that there’s this fantasy that all protests always work. So I believe my race for governor was a successful failure. I believe my race for Congress—there are a few things I’m proud of about it, but on the whole it was a failure. I lost. There are a few things that I did in that campaign, the way in which we communicated ideas that I brought up, that I feel good about; so I think that one can distinguish between failing in electoral campaigns in a way that is successful, and failing in a way that is unsuccessful, instead of a default of patting each other on the back, like everything we did worked. And I think that lazy thinking—I think that’s what you’re saying, that we’ve got to not just say everything works, and to be able to distinguish between what works and what doesn’t work. Uday: I guess, Micah, I thought you to be saying more than that. I thought you to be saying— You just said Occupy failed, Black Lives Matter failed. And I happen to disagree with you, because I myself think that in the forty years that I’ve lived in America nothing has put the issue of inequality on the table as conspicuously as Occupy did. For me that’s a huge success. It’s not a failure. And it does make me think that the conception of failure that you have in mind—would you have said that if the Civil Rights Act of ’64 had not been passed, the civil rights movement was a failure? Micah: What happens inevitably is, after Occupy—I don’t know who started this language but I heard it everywhere, and you just said it, which is basically, Occupy was a success because all of a sudden we were talking about something that we had never been talking about. Okay. Now, as someone who was there in the very beginning when we created this idea, the goal was not to get people to talk about something that was not talked about, okay? That was not the goal. And I will tell you as an activist that that’s like a by-product. You have to remember, it’s been a while. I’ll remind everyone, Occupy spread to eightytwo countries and a thousand different cities. The entire world basically was involved in Occupy. If you create anything like that, people will start talking about something. So the talking about income inequality is just a by-product; it’s a symptom. A lot of activists have now turned that into, well, that’s our metric of success. And what I’m saying is, if you do that, we will never win. If you create a movement that spreads to eighty-two countries, it will always result in people talking about something; but if your goal is to make people talk about something, then you will never have revolutionary change.

Q&A: Is Protest Political?

Micah White and Zephyr Teachout

Getting back to this question of failure—what is failure, what is success—I call Occupy Wall Street not a total failure, I call it a constructive failure; so maybe this gets a little bit to this question of a successful failure. And what I mean by “constructive failure” is that it taught us something about activism. It taught us that we don’t have to do it again. We don’t have to repeat Occupy Wall Street. I think this was the lesson that was lost on Black Lives Matter, that basically they came out of Occupy Wall Street and they said we need to do it again, but more militant and more blocking of the streets. And they spread to two countries. It was beautiful, and it was great, and as a black man I agree with the sentiment; but on the other hand, if you want to stop police killing, become the police, or at least become the force that appoints the police. And this is what was completely lost. So I think what I’m trying to say is that I believe in revolution, and a revolution is a change in legal regime. It’s a change in who actually decides the laws. I think that what we have to really address here is that I don’t think that activists believe in revolution anymore; I think we believe in other things. And I think that’s fine. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but I think we should just be honest with ourselves. And I think some of the stuff you’re saying is indicative of that, and I think that it’s quite common. Maybe I’m wrong to believe in revolution, but I just want us to get that out there and say, hey, we don’t believe in this thing anymore, and so we’re moving on into other things. Uday: Let’s take some questions. Q: Mike Diederich. I was in Iraq for years, an Army lawyer, and I saw tribes there, and it was interesting, because I came back here and people said, oh, they’re tribal there. And I said, well, it’s like the tribe of Democrats in Queens and the tribal Republicans in upstate counties. We’re all tribal. So my question regarding this whole topic, is protest political, I think the better question is, is protest useful for liberal democracy? And my suggestion is that protest is tribal, and when we protest, we’re trying to get our tribe up in arms and politically active. And if we get enough tribes behind us, we win elections. So I think protest is a tool to mobilize one or more tribes, but that to win in politics you have to look at humans as being tribal. And I think we do. I think Democrats think in general of tribe as being America. I think Republicans [tend] to be more [about] tribe being the Republican Party. But I think if we forget the tribal nature of human beings, we’re missing something. I think for democracy to work we have to realize that people are tribal, that we have to address getting the tribes behind us, and that that is the aspect where protest is useful. If we get the tribes supporting sound liberal democracy. Any comments? Zephyr: Thank you for the comment. I think that is sometimes quite true. When you talk to people who have been at a protest, the language they use

Crises of Democracy

is very much about a feeling of us-ness, implying or expressly talking about them, one or the other. It’s about an emotional feeling. The first protest I went to, I pretended I had to go make a phone call. I happen to not be very comfortable with that feeling, but I know that feeling you’re talking about, about being in a large group, concert-like. I do not think all protest is that way. I think that some protest is very particular, so I would separate the tactic— It’s sometimes that way, and I think it’s a really, really important thing to recognize. But sometimes it is very much about leveraging a very important power source, which I would not dismiss as much as you do, but the ability to reach fifteen thousand people if you’re in a small area, or millions of people. It’s leveraging the press, and that is an incredibly essential part of a lot of protest actions: explicitly engaging with the press. I’m not a Tea Party fan, as you can probably guess, but—not but, and I watched them very explicitly leverage and sophisticatedly use the press to seem bigger than they were. There’s often a sting. If you guys haven’t seen The Sting, those of you who are under 40, a lot of great protest, successful protest, is based on the same sort of theory as The Sting—seeming bigger than you are, . . . basically lots of mirrors to make it seem like you’re larger than you are. A sense of protest can, in the example of fracking, make elected officials feel like there are more [supporters] than there are. This is where, as you rightly pointed out, George Bush punctured that and said, “Numbers aren’t enough for me.” . . . Protests used to symbolize the numbers of people who supported [a cause], but because of social media, now it’s not that hard to organize a lot of people. Therefore it’s not actually a sign of organizing power to bring a lot of people together, but we still sentimentally recall times when it was. So I think you’re right that that is sometimes an essential part of it, and I think that I’d be wary of that tribal component. Micah: I just want to respond briefly to this question of tribal. I think that social movements actually erupt when you cut across demographics, and this is what one of the powers of Occupy Wall Street was, that, quite frankly, there were End-the-Fed Rand Paul people there on the very first day of Occupy Wall Street. There were Tea Party people. And at a certain point Occupy— right now we’re all attuned to people bringing guns to protests—there were militia people who brought guns to protect Occupy Wall Street protesters in Arizona. I remember this. So for me Occupy was not firmly—it got labeled as a left-wing movement, but its power came from being neither left nor right. One of the things that I think we need to do as Democrats—I’m not a Democrat, but as leftists—is to get out of this tribalism. After I lost my election in Oregon, I came to New York to study the presidential campaign of Dr. Lenora Fulani, who, in 1988, became the first woman and the first black person to get on the ballot in all fifty states of America, which is something that the Green Party could not do in 2016. And what’s amazing about this campaign is that I had never heard of it before because the left strongly dislikes this

Q&A: Is Protest Political?

Micah White and Zephyr Teachout

initiative, because [it was] neither left nor right, and so it’s been excluded from our knowledge. So I really think that it’s very important to push the envelope. The edge leads the pack, and I think that we need to get out of our tribes. Q: . . . Zephyr, you talked about this idea of the depth of the problem and how we need a better form of activism or protest. And Micah, you ended your speech saying we need to build a social movement that can win elections. So my question is loosely, like quickly, what is the ground game for that? What do we need to do logistically to build a ground game that can win elections? Micah: Very quick answer would be that Occupy Wall Street—that what you do as an activist is, you search for tactics that are being used elsewhere, and you import them into a new environment. So Occupy Wall Street was literally, if you read the first briefing that we sent out, it was the merger of what was going on in Spain at that time, which was public, consensus-based assemblies—which is what was going on in Egypt, which was going to someplace of symbolic importance. So right now in Europe, oh my gosh, how lucky we are, there is a model for what I’m talking about. There’s Podemos in Spain; there’s the Five Star Movement in Italy; and there’s the Pirate Party in Iceland, all three of which are social movements that have won elections. None of them are perfect, obviously, but they are a concrete example of the fact that— The Five Star Movement is my favorite example, because it’s neither left nor right, and I used to get a lot of attacks—I went to Italy to meet with them, and I got attacked: oh, you’re meeting with them. Okay. They’re neither left nor right. They call themselves a movement yet they’re the third-largest political party in Italy. They just won the mayorship in Rome. They’ve only been around five years and are constantly winning elections and moving forward, at the same time as they give decision-making power to their members. So literally my answer would be, study what’s going on in Europe and ignore the negative press that it gets, and instead say, how is it that these movements—Podemos, for example, within six months of its launch, became the third-largest political party. It’s insane, the growth. They’re electoral social movements. They’re social movements that protest by winning elections. It’s amazing. So we need to import that into America. Q: Could you give examples of—I’ll put these in quotes—“successful” or “good” protests that are for what I’ll call groups that you find reprehensible, say, on the other side of what you personally believe in or would strive to make happen? Does that question make sense? Micah: Looking abroad again in terms of protests that I think are effective but reprehensible at the same time: Russia has a lot of good examples. There are these Russian activists who use shaming via video extremely effectively

Crises of Democracy

against—they did some attacks on LGBT, but there was a whole campaign about people driving on sidewalks and stuff, and they would stop them and plaster signs across their windows and get into these fights, and then film the whole thing and release it. So, extremely edgy, physical confrontation around various issues that we might find reprehensible would be the first thing that comes to mind for me. I don’t know if you’d call it a success, but it was definitely provocative. Zephyr: I’ve spent more time studying in person the Tea Party, so I’m going to use an example from the Tea Party. So the Tea Party starts, and people start reading in groups around the country, and there are actually fairly regular meetings for the first six months. Then the meetings drop off, but you wouldn’t know that from the media. There are a few different groups. Actually, there are five different Tea Party groups. Imagine Indivisible. You have lots of meetings that chose to fund people to go around and talk with those groups, educate them in both an ideology—by the way, they were just mad at the banks. Not just mad at the banks; there are a lot of different sources of Tea Party Movement. But at the beginning was the bailout of the banks; that was sort of the lead. So, Americans for Prosperity—again, with a lot of money, I just want to be clear—spent a lot of money sending trainers to events. They read Martin Luther King, they read Gandhi, they shared an ideology, sort of introduced an ideology to groups that were newly political but not deeply political, didn’t necessarily have a deep politics or a view about tax policy, and then had a profound relationship with the mainstream press—I think in this country press is incredibly important. So in most stories you would then hear the Republican view, the Tea Party view, and the Democratic view. There wasn’t just the Republican, the Democratic, the Occupy; there wasn’t a mirroring. So there was two-thirds space which then changed—there was a lot of pressure to create it as a party within a party, incredibly effective use of the media at events. They would really cater to the media, give them food, put them up front, make sure that they were well loved at events. . . . I think about this a lot in this Indivisible moment, because I think there are a lot of newly political people and a real opportunity to create connections between these newly politicized groups. Q: Again, going back a couple of generations to Hannah Arendt—I come from a generation that immigrated in World War II, and it was a different issue. Well, not a different issue, but that’s what we’re talking about, in a certain way. The concept of what you’re talking about is power, power—as she brought up in a concept—as political space. And again, it struck me just recently, anyone who’s read H. G. Adler . . . , there was conflict there with Hannah Arendt on a number of issues, but what he was talking about, the concept that got me, that really, we’ve been skirting, is the concept of a coerced

Q&A: Is Protest Political?

Micah White and Zephyr Teachout

community. There’s a difference in this, and it really has to do somewhat with tribalism, but how coerced a particular community is and how it responds visà-vis power and powerlessness. For instance, just recently I was at a conference where they were talking about what’s going on in Chicago with the gangs, and the murderers, and something of that sort; and there you have the ability of a coercion in a community to cause the community to self-destruct in a certain way. And there’s another way in which you have the Thoreau effect of saying, well, you were coerced in a certain way but I can still get out of it without getting harmed. That’s power and powerlessness looked at from a sort of different angle. I think it’s more that when you’re talking about power, that you don’t want to let a community get to the point that it’s so coerced that it has to turn on itself. Micah: I think that’s an interesting point. It’s a new concept to me, so I’d have to honestly think about it. I think—I don’t know. The whole thing about Chicago, I think a lot of it really is the destruction of public housing, which is the kind of issue that I’m focused on. So I’ll give you a tangential, completely unrelated answer, which is that if I were to predict right now what the next big social movement protest will be, I tell you, it’s going to be poor people, public housing. If you start looking into this issue, it’s global, it’s playing out in New York very strongly, New York City, and in other countries, and it connects to this question of what’s going on in Chicago. But in terms of coerced communities, I’d have to think about that. Q: So, this is a student question. It’s a student from the ’60s, though. I want to take issue with your notion that protest is ineffective. Looking at the protest from 2003 on No to War, or whether it’s Occupy Wall Street or it’s Black Lives Matter, I don’t think George Bush was any more resolved or committed to principle than Lyndon Johnson in 1968; in fact, I doubt he is as strong an individual as Johnson. The problem isn’t that the dynamic has changed; the problem is that protests are not at the level where they’re going to have any impact in the United States. We have very strong processes and institutions here. If you want to see the type of protest that works, you look at Ken Burns’s documentary [The Vietnam War] and what was going on between 1965 and 1968. We haven’t seen anything like that. And with all due regard to poor people and housing in New York, that’s not going to generate the type of multicommunity collective action that we saw in the ’60s that crossed a whole political spectrum, that crossed all sorts of identity politics. Mark Lilla has a take on this issue here. But if we just stay with protests based on an identity politics rather than generating protests for a core issue that goes across the whole area—I don’t know if we have that issue today in America the way we did with civil rights and Vietnam in the ’60s—but unless we have that type of dynamic, protest is going to be limited to very local issues, like fracking in

Crises of Democracy

upstate New York. There you can have some type of impact. But outside of that you need to build a protest structure and a movement that is massively greater than anything we’ve seen over the last thirty years. Micah: No, no. I disagree with you entirely. No, I really do. And I think that what you’ve just said is so indicative of a way of thinking. It’s like the same script. It’s like, “Listen, everybody, you’re just not doing it like we did in ’60s. You’re not big enough.” It’s not true. It’s not true. And as someone who has been an activist since the age of 13, I have been listening, and I trusted you up until 2012, when Occupy was defeated. I spent my life trying to realize, oh, if only we could create something as big as the protests in the ’60s. We did with Occupy. We were bigger than you. We were bigger. I’m sorry. We spread to more countries and we were active more intensely for a more concentrated period of time. So I completely disagree with what you just said. I think that in activism we all have to follow our revolutionary intuition, and let people follow your advice to their peril. Meanwhile, I think that it is beholden on us to look . . . and say there is something fundamentally broken about that paradigm, because even if the protests were as large as you are saying they need to be, there is no constitutional requirement, there is no requirement at all, that the government has to listen to it. That’s what’s broken. This is why I brought up the question of sovereignty. What is broken is that back then there was some sort of assumption that if you grew to a certain size you had to be listened to or else, because people believed in revolution back then. But today it is not true. So just frankly, I disagree with you. The second thing I want to say with your quick dismissal about the poor people and the public housing: I remember the days before Occupy Wall Street, and I would tell everyone about this movement, “That’s going to happen, that’s going to blow up, it’s going to be amazing, I gotta tell you about it.” No one believed me. That is my experience of activism. The best ideas are precisely the ones that seem to make no sense. But my revolutionary intuition tells me that the poor and public housing is an issue that will galvanize across demographics because it affects affordable housing. Listen, 400 thousand people in New York City live in public housing—one out of fourteen New Yorkers. Forty-four percent of people in Hong Kong live in public housing. Public housing has become this hidden thing. So I don’t want to [try to] convince you about it because I believe it to be true; just mark my words. What I find in your quick dismissal is actually evidence, because you would have said the same thing to me about that before Occupy Wall Street. So I really just want to caution the younger and older activists: stop chasing that paradigm of the ’60s. Just let it go. It was great. You guys were awesome. But just let it go. Let it go.

Q&A: Is Protest Political?

Micah White and Zephyr Teachout

Is Liberal Democracy Our Future?* Yascha Mounk

That’s a tough act to follow. In fact, this conference has been a series of tough acts to follow. It’s really been a pleasure, sitting here all day and listening to great speakers, from Leon Botstein and Roger Berkowitz, to Masha Gessen and John Jeremiah Sullivan and Zephyr Teachout. And it’s been a pleasure, but it’s been a pleasure of moral seriousness and earnestness. I think that one of the things that is right about this conference is that so many of the speakers who are here today have a sense of mission and of moral earnestness, and that’s something that, despite the times we’re living in, is still missing in many of the events I go to. We sort of look at Twitter and are horrified by what the president says and does, and then we very quickly retreat back into our ordinary lives. But it’s a moment in which we actually have to find out and understand what the stakes of this political situation are and think carefully and seriously about what we can do about it. So, the question that this panel poses is whether liberal democracy is the future. A few years ago that question would have seemed bizarre. The answer would obviously have been yes. That’s how we as a general public thought. We assumed that democracy, at least in countries like the United States or France or Germany or Sweden, was safe; that it was there to stay. But it’s also how political scientists thought about it. In the 1990s, a leading political scientist by the name of Adam Przeworski ran the numbers. He looked at all of the countries that had changed governments through free and fair elections at least twice, and had a GDP per capita *One of the dangerous things about populism is that it often parades as democratic or pretends to stand up for liberal principles. Germany’s AfD, for example, holds two inconsistent positions at the same time. On the one hand, it minimizes the role of the Holocaust in German history, with one of its chairmen recently calling it a “piece of birdshit,” and another leading member, Marc Jongen, blaming the “specter of Hitler” for the country’s contemporary problems. On the other hand, it pretends to stand up for Jews, for example by using the recent murder of a 14-year-old girl by an Iraqi refugee as the occasion for an unscheduled—and deeply insincere—minute of silence in the Bundestag. This is also why I am deeply uncomfortable with the decision by the Hannah Arendt Center to grant Marc Jongen a platform. As I have stated elsewhere, I passionately oppose both forms of state censorship and practices that allow the “heckler’s veto” to flourish. But this doesn’t absolve organizations from the moral responsibility to consider the consequences of their actions. That responsibility should weigh heavily indeed when it comes to granting a German politician who is intent on downplaying the importance of the Holocaust with the moral authority that Hannah Arendt’s name carries—especially when the quality of his work and his academic stature strongly suggest that his extremism was the principal reason why he was invited in the first place. We disagree with the claim that Jongen lacks “serious academic credentials.” Our decision to publish the transcript of his talk is based on our judgment that the text contributes to a collective understanding of our crises of democracy. We leave it to our readers to judge for themselves. —Eds.

Crises of Democracy

of more than about $14,000 in present terms, and he found that none of them had lost their democracies. If you counted each year in which an affluent democracy remained stable, there were thousands of observations, and not one of them showed a democracy collapsing. So, Przeworski concluded, once a country has changed its government through free and fair elections a couple of times, and once it is relatively affluent, its political system is safe. In the terms of a lot of the political science literature, this was a process of democratic consolidation—and democratic consolidation was a one-way street. It was difficult to get there. But once you had become a consolidated democracy, you didn’t have to worry. So yes, of course democracy was going to be our future. Well, I think there are reasons to doubt that now. One is that a new crop of populists has emerged around the world. In countries where we never thought that possible, politicians who challenge the most basic rules and norms of the democratic system have gained considerable power and, in some places, the highest office in the land. We now have a president who promised to leave people in suspense about whether he would accept the outcome of the 2016 election, who threatened to jail his main political adversary, and who may yet follow through with some of those promises in 2020. We have seen populists gaining a greater and greater share of the vote in countries from Austria to Germany to Italy to France to Sweden. I just returned from Prague. I was at a conference there earlier this week, and I realized that after they elect their own billionaire who has promised to shake up the system a few days from now, you will have a populist belt in Central and Southern Europe. You will be able to go all of the way from Stettin in the Baltic Sea to Athens in Greece without ever leaving a country that is ruled by authoritarian populists. There are deep reasons for this development. As I show in some of my own research, people are less invested in democracy than they once were. They’re deeply disappointed with it. When you ask Americans how important it is to them to live in a democracy, among older Americans born in the 1930s and 1940s, over two-thirds say it’s absolutely important to them to live in a democracy. Among millennials, less than one-third ascribe that same importance to living in a democracy. Even when you ask people about extreme alternatives to democracy, the numbers are really shocking. The number of Americans who believe that a strongman leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament and elections is a good thing has gone up. Twenty years ago, one in sixteen Americans thought that army rule was a good system of government; now one in six do. Among young and affluent Americans, that figure has increased from 6 percent twenty years ago to 35 percent now; that’s nearly a sixfold increase in twenty years. So, why are these things happening? What is going on here? Why are people voting for authoritarian populists like Donald Trump? Why are they telling pollsters that they don’t care about democracy so much anymore?

Is Liberal Democracy Our Future?

Yascha Mounk

Well, I’m trying to figure this out. I’m trying to think about how we can do the very difficult task of predicting the future as people who are not trained to do that and who probably aren’t able to do it, but who, to some extent, now need to try and do it because we desperately need to understand what’s going on. Bertrand Russell tells an illuminating tale about a chicken on a farm. Every day the other animals on the farm tell the chicken to be very careful. They tell the chicken not to trust the farmer. “One day he’ll kill you,” they say. And the chicken says, “What are you talking about? What are you going on about? Every day the farmer comes to feed me. Every day he mutters some encouraging words. He’s a nice guy. Why should he suddenly come to kill me?” Well, one day, as Russell puts it in his wry and beautiful writing style, the farmer does come to wring the chicken’s neck, demonstrating that “more sophisticated views as to the uniformity of causation would have been to the chicken’s benefit.” What does he mean by that? Well, what he means by that is that there are conditions that drove how the farmer acted. As long as the chicken weighed 4 pounds, he was too light to be taken to the market. He wouldn’t fetch a good price. But once he had grown to 5 pounds, the farmer’s incentives changed. He could now get a good price, and so his behavior changed as well. Now, if we want to understand why democracy was so stable in the past and why it seems so unstable in the present, we need to ask the chicken question: What conditions made for the stability of democracy in the past that may no longer hold? And how do we deal with that change? In my new book, The People vs. Democracy, I analyze at least three of those changes, and I want to just briefly say something about what we can do about each of them. The first is the stagnation of living standards for ordinary people. All through the history of democratic stability, we’ve had very rapid increases in living standards from one generation to the next. From 1935 to 1960, the living standard of the average American doubled. From 1960 to 1985, it doubled again. Since 1985, it’s been flat. And that makes a real difference to how people think about the political system. They never loved politicians. They never completely trusted them. They said, “Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. They seem to be sticking to their end of the deal.” Now people are saying: “I’ve worked really hard all of my life, and I don’t have anything to show for it. My kids are probably going to do worse than me. So, let’s try something new. How bad could things possibly get?” The second transformation is about identity. In nearly every stable democracy countries had a monoethnic understanding of what the nation was. This is certainly true of all of Western Europe, where I grew up. In Germany, in Sweden, in Italy, people thought that somebody who really belongs to the nation comes from the same ethnic stock and has ancestors who’ve lived there for many generations. But over the last fifty years there’s been a lot of immigration, and that’s led to a real change in that. Now, a part of the population

Crises of Democracy

has embraced and even welcomed that change, as have I. But there are also parts of the population that haven’t accepted it, that are angry and resentful about it. So we haven’t yet managed to create an inclusive notion of nationhood that is widely accepted in society. Now, the United States has of course always been a multiethnic country in many ways. But it has also been a country with a very steep racial hierarchy. Part of that hierarchy unfortunately still persists. A lot of injustices still persist. But if you compare today to what this country looked like fifty or thirty or twenty years ago, we have actually come a very long way in overcoming that hierarchy. Now, some people celebrate and embrace that, as do I; but there are also a lot of people who rebel against it, who are resentful because of it. And that, too, is a driver of these attacks on liberal democracy, of the rise of the populists. The third reason has to do with technology. There used to be a political-financial elite that had a real advantage over everybody else in setting the terms of a political discourse that limited debate. It limited the challenges that people could make to the status quo in ways that were often problematic. But it also kept out some of the most extreme voices that spread fake news, that spread racial hatred. The rise of the internet and of social media has reduced the gap between those elites and everybody else. If you make a video of a particularly cute kitten—or if you are on a United Airlines plane and film somebody being “reaccommodated”—it can now reach millions of people. Even if you only have fifty followers, if a sufficiently high percentage of your followers decides to share it with their followers, it can spread incredibly quickly to an incredibly large audience. That fundamentally changes the ability of political elites to control what is said, to control what becomes part of mainstream political discourse. Especially in autocratic countries, this actually creates a lot of opportunities for admirable political activism. But it also has dangers, as the mainstreaming of extreme voices that don’t actually have that broad support in the whole of the population shows. That is the third reason for the rise of populism. So, what do we do about these things? Well, we’ve got to do at least three things. First, we have to create an economic policy that embraces some of the benefits of globalization, that embraces some of the opportunities that the future holds, that makes sure that those gains are actually distributed to ordinary people. It’s no longer enough to see that we’re an affluent country. At this point redistributing isn’t just a matter of economic justice; it’s a matter of political stability. And we need to make sure that people once again have hope for a better economic future. The second thing we have to do is cultural; it’s about identity. It’s to challenge the white nationalism of the right, it’s to work really hard to protect people against discrimination and overcome remaining injustices; but it’s also to find a way to emphasize what unites us. I think a danger in this political moment is for us to emphasize what divides us. But if we are to build a country in which we persuade people not to reelect Donald Trump, not to let

Is Liberal Democracy Our Future?

Yascha Mounk

white nationalists rule this country, we need to find a political language that transforms what it is to be an American in such a way that it becomes truly inclusive—in such a way that as many of us as possible embraces what it is that unites us across racial and religious lines. And finally, we have to think about how to deal with the rise of social media; and that’s not just a matter of changing how some of the social media platforms work. It’s not just a matter of persuading Facebook and Twitter to change their algorithms to make it more difficult for fake news to spread, to make it easier to flag those things. It’s also a matter of changing how people receive some of that content. Because we’re never going to be able to censor Facebook and Twitter completely; nor should we. So we have to work on how people respond when they’re told lies about our political institutions, or when they’re told hateful things about people who have a different religion or skin color. And in order to do that, we also have to take seriously again something that we as academics have shamefully neglected, and that’s to make the case for our political system. There are many things wrong with the status quo, and there are many reforms that we need to push for. There are many injustices that we still have to overcome. But there is something worth preserving about liberal democracy, and that means that our task is not just to be critical, not just to point out the bad things here and there; it’s also to say why it is that we want to live in a democratic society, why it is that we want to defend liberal values like individual rights, like minority rights, like the freedom of speech. Because unless we actually fight for those things, they are now in danger. In my mind, there are three different scenarios of what might happen now. In the first scenario, a Donald Trump manages to single-handedly destroy liberal democracy in this country. I don’t doubt that he would happily let his instincts take him there. When you see the tweets in the last days about revoking the broadcasting license for NBC, that is the definition of authoritarian populism. That is exactly how Recep Tayyip Erdoğan talked in Turkey, how Viktor Orban talked in Hungary; and those countries are formally democracies today, but they’re not democracies in a real sense anymore. Now, Trump hasn’t carried out a lot of those actions yet, and that’s in part because a lot of people have been standing up to resist them. Because there is a lot of public pushback, a lot of public protest. Because some of our institutions— especially the free media and the judiciary—are standing up to the president. I don’t want to underestimate the possibility that Trump himself can pose a threat to the survival of the democratic system. People underestimated the damage done by Orban in Hungary and Erdoğan in Turkey in the first years of their rule. But because of the widespread resistance to Trump, and because he seems to be a lot less strategic than Orban and Erdoğan, I don’t think it’s likely that he will single-handedly destroy democracy. This leads me to a second, much more optimistic scenario. Perhaps Americans will stand up as one and rebel against Donald Trump. Perhaps they

Crises of Democracy

will manage to get him impeached, or defeat him in the 2020 elections in a landslide. And perhaps, at that time, America will manage to come together across its many divides. Perhaps people who hadn’t given importance to democracy anymore will then realize how important it is to preserve democracy. That’s possible. But I don’t think it’s that likely, either. I don’t think we should assume that Trump will be defeated in 2020. And I certainly don’t think we should assume that if he is defeated in 2020, the divisions in our society will miraculously heal. We need to make real changes and real transformations, give people real hope, show them that the system can deliver for them in order to heal the anger in our politics. Otherwise, after four or eight years of a sensible president being back in power we might get another wave of this authoritarian populism—one that is even more dangerous. So, in my mind the most likely scenario may be the third one—and that’s the Roman scenario. In the second century b.c., Tiberius Gracchus came to power. Responding to the population’s deep frustrations about poverty and a lack of economic opportunity, he tried to institute land reforms—but did so in a way that violated the constitution. Instead of compromising with him, the Patricians drove him out of office and killed many of his supporters. After that, things went back to normal for a few years. Relatively ordinary politicians were reelected; things seemed to be going fine; but because the underlying problem wasn’t solved, because the anger still kept rising, wave after wave of similar populists was elected. And over the span of a century, Romans lost their republic. So that is the scenario that haunts me. The future is not just the next ten years; it’s the next fifty years. And saving our liberal democracy is a task for the next fifty years. Now, I can’t promise you that we can win that fight. I can’t promise you that we can save our liberal democracies. It may be that the historical forces that have led to this deep discontent with liberal democracy, and to the rise of authoritarian populism, are so deep and so broad that we can’t save the system. It may be that even if the chicken had decided to make a run for it, the farmer would have caught it. But we better try. I’m sorry to do this to you, but I’m going to end on a tritely inspirational note. A few weeks ago, I heard a talk by the great writer Amos Oz, and he put the point better than I could. He said: “There’s a big fire raging, and all that each of us has is a little spoon filled with water. It seems pointless to do anything. How can I do anything about that fire with my little spoon of water?” The answer is that if all of us take the little spoon and carry it to the fire, we might have a chance to extinguish it. And I think even without being able to guarantee a happy end, that’s the task that each of us now has. Thank you.

Is Liberal Democracy Our Future?

Yascha Mounk

Jacksonian and Arendtian Critiques of Liberal Democracy Linda Zerilli

Thanks to everyone who’s been involved in organizing this conference. It’s been a pleasure to be here and very educational for me, too, because normally I am around a group of people like myself, not only with very similar political opinions, but also similarly located in academic positions. “The raison d’être of politics is freedom. Freedom is the right to be a participator in politics, in government, or it’s nothing.” These short sentences capture what I take to be the key to Hannah Arendt’s political thinking. I’m going to deploy them today as a departure point for reflecting on our current political predicament. We live in a political climate characterized by daily scandals generated by random presidential tweets, a climate in which there is continual hand-wringing over public life in an echo chamber, a post-truth climate in which a pervasive sense of threat and of threatening others—think immigrants—far exceeds any credible empirical evidence, and actual threats to citizen well-being—think climate change—are dismissed as fake news; a climate in which Americans have vastly more trust in the military and small business than they do in Congress. The list goes on. It can seem strange in this climate to talk about freedom, unless of course one is talking about constitutionally based civil rights such as the right to freedom of assembly, to free speech, to religious liberty, and so on. According to the freedoms we associate with our specific form of democracy, namely liberal democracy, politics is a mere means to secure constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, and especially the freedom from politics. For Arendt, however, the activity of politics itself is freedom. We are free when we act, not before and not after. Freedom is not something we possess by means of constitutionally based rights. According to her, it is a fateful error to confuse constitutionally based civil rights with the constitution of political freedom, fateful because such confusion can lead us to misrecognize the origins of constitutionally guaranteed rights in the actions of a law-giving sovereign, rather than in the practices of citizen action in concert, which is political freedom proper in her view. And fateful because such confusion entangles us in the political logic of sovereignty from which the American Revolution, in Arendt’s view, represents a decisive break. Now, there are several registers or dimensions to Arendt’s critique of sovereignty, all of which are relevant to the current crisis of liberal democracy; but for the purposes of this talk I’m going to focus on what is called “organ

Crises of Democracy

sovereignty.” Organ sovereignty is the idea that somewhere in any political body there must be an ultimate authority that has the last word; that is to say, one institutional organ can trump all the others in the polity. This is of course the problem animating the current battles between the president and the Congress, the president and the courts, the president and the free press, etc. It is the problem that is at the heart of federalism and the system of checks and balances that characterizes the American political system. But Arendt’s critique of sovereignty goes beyond conventional understandings of the liberal constitutional order and the idea of “limited government.” It goes beyond these because its inspiring principle is not negative freedom in the sense of constitutionally guaranteed rights, but political freedom in the sense of being a participator in government. Those of you who are familiar with Arendt’s work will know that she celebrated the American Revolution as unique in generating a space of public freedom that was not reducible to constitutionally based civil rights. Thanks to historical circumstances and a variety of contingent factors, a federal system of institutions was created around local practices of self-government. She also celebrated Jefferson’s unrealized idea of a ward system, and she was equally taken with the phenomenon of revolutionary councils, from the Paris Commune of 1871, to the Russian soviets of 1917, to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Arguably, she would have celebrated the councils of the Spanish Indignados, or the Occupy movement in 2011, those of the Arab Spring in 2011, or Gezi Park in 2013, and yes, Black Lives Matter and the Women’s March. Arendt’s praise for the ward system, the councils, and the soviets is commonly read as of a piece with her celebration of action and the space of appearance in which action, and thus genuine politics, could be momentarily experienced by citizens as part of what she called “the lost treasure” of political freedom, only to give way to the deadening forces of representative democracy and the modern state. This reading, though not wrong, misses a vital aspect of Arendt’s account. As my student Nikolas Plaetzer argues, the councils, just like the wards, were always also organs of order to her as much as organs of action. They are forms of “power” in Arendt’s idiosyncratic sense of the word that have nothing to do with sovereignty or power over others; rather, power is what arises when people act together in concert. As power, this acting together in concert, however, has a kind of stability or durability that action lacks; that is to say, wards, councils, soviets, etc., are organizational forms that have not yielded action to order. They are not episodic in the way that spaces of appearance are, but inaugurate a different kind of state of being in common that we have yet fully to grasp. The main point is that she thinks of the councils as being wholly alien to the principle of sovereignty and as proliferating sites of power, in her idiosyncratic sense of the word, that can counteract attempts at achieving sovereignty in any one sphere of government.

Jacksonian and Arendtian Critiques of Liberal Democracy

Linda Zerilli

Now, how does Arendt’s account of these alternative sites of power and critique of sovereignty help us to think through the impasses of contemporary liberal representative democracy? One crucial way she does so is by calling our attention to how contemporary struggles within the Democratic Party might become caught in the logic of sovereignty. It is all too easy to associate this logic with the DNC and its failed candidate, Hillary Clinton. The Sanders campaign, “Our Revolution,” which rightly challenges the fundamental configuration of the Democratic Party, also stands in danger of losing track of the lost treasure of political freedom that Arendt saw as being resurrected in the councils. When we focus almost exclusively on achieving certain social goods, as important as these are—free tuition, Medicare for all, etc.—we risk losing sight of another source of anger and frustration that has led to the momentous shifts that characterize U.S. contemporary politics. This is not just frustration over a government that is unresponsive to citizens’ needs and demands, the decline of the welfare state, the erosion of the middle class, the growth of a permanent underclass, and the impoverished homeless. This is also a problem of what happens when citizens are reduced to beings who can be “represented.” The question then is whether we are represented well or represented poorly; but political representation, whatever its form, is not synonymous with the experience of political freedom in Arendt’s view. Critical analyses of our contemporary political malaise tend to focus on what government, and in particular the Democratic Party, has or has not delivered in the form of goods, be they jobs, health care, housing, defense, etc. These are crucially important to how citizens view their government, no doubt; but it seems hard to imagine that the general loss of faith in government and the pervasive disdain for politics as the very lowest of all activities will be assuaged by a better delivery system of goods. The overwhelming sense that ordinary citizens have no say includes, but surely goes beyond, these goods and their delivery. Likewise, the current debate over gerrymandering, which has made its way to the Supreme Court in the Wisconsin case of Gill v. Whitford, only begins to scrape the surface of our deep democratic deficit. The claim that gerrymandered districts essentially deprive citizens of their constitutional right to vote for their electors, to be represented by candidates of their choosing, is of course right; but it is also symptomatic. Will non-gerrymandered or less-computer-generated gerrymandered districts really address the problem that Arendt diagnosed? Like Uday Mehta, who spoke earlier today, I am suspicious of arguments to “save liberal democracy.” For these mostly fail to acknowledge the ways in which our current political crisis is symptomatic of certain limitations in our historical practice of liberal democracy. I’m not talking about liberal democracy in the abstract; I’m talking about the way in which liberal democracy has actually been enacted and practiced in this country. And with all due

Crises of Democracy

respect to Micah White, who spoke about the importance of winning elections, I don’t think that pursuing sovereignty should be the main goal of a political movement that takes seriously the importance of political freedom as Arendt understood it. Now, does this mean that we’re condemned to a purely negative oppositional politics, as Martin Gurri suggested yesterday? Well, I think not. Black Lives Matter, feminism, radical environmentalism, and yes, even Occupy Wall Street, are not or were not devoid of demands or visions of what would constitute a more just society. They are affirmative. They are not just negative. I really think that this is a false critique. The fact that they don’t want to repeat familiar sovereign forms of leadership leads us to think that they don’t have any demands or a vision of what would be a better society, but this critique does not resonate with my own reading of these groups and, to some extent, participation in these groups. What also disturbs me in the discussion of saving liberal democracy is the implicit and at times quite explicit assumption that it must be saved from “the people.” The caricatured image of populism that circulates on both the right and the left leaves us wondering how ordinary folks could ever be capable of self-government. I thank James Fishkin for his wonderful talk this morning, which reminded us of the capacity of ordinary people to rationally deliberate about what is best in their lives and of how important it is to hold on to this idea. Finally, in reference to the Alternative für Deutschland, which we heard about this morning: it is mistaken to label that populism or to call it the people’s party. The AfD was founded by a group of conservative elites, not by “the people.” It is a party that has articulated the legitimate grievances that people have, just as Donald Trump has articulated politically some of the legitimate grievances that people have, in such a way as to completely obfuscate the real sources of those grievances; and that’s really what we need to be focusing on. In other words, political parties articulate people’s grievances. They can articulate them better, or they can articulate them worse; but it’s not as if these parties are just “the voice of the people,” as if that voice were not heavily mediated and articulated by power.

Jacksonian and Arendtian Critiques of Liberal Democracy

Linda Zerilli

Jacksonian and Arendtian Critiques of Liberal Democracy Walter Russell Mead

When elites or members of the American policy establishment talk about our nation’s politics, and particularly America’s role in international relations, we have an unfortunate tendency to overlook the views of a large and vocal segment of our population. Those of us with degrees in political science, those of us who have studied international relations theory, often claim we understand how the world works, and that we can describe American foreign policy absent the underpinnings of our domestic political movements. We are a world leader, we say, because of our economic strength and the strength of our democratic institutions; because people the world over wish to emulate our liberal democratic norms and achieve our success in material standards of living. But there is a prevalent strain in American politics that challenges these elite assumptions. Members of this movement don’t believe that it’s America’s responsibility to lead the “free world,” nor do they believe that peoples of different nationalities and cultures necessarily flock to America’s liberal ideals. In short, this movement, which for years I have called Jacksonianism after President Andrew Jackson, is skeptical of America’s ability to sculpt the world in its image. Jacksonians are nationalists in the traditional sense of the word: they strive for a healthy “folk” community and strong ties within that community more than anything else. They are happy to let the rest of the world continue on its own trajectory undisturbed until some foreign entity threatens the safety of our “folk”; at this point, the Jacksonians don’t hesitate to use any and all means at the nation’s disposal to deal with enemies. I’d like to use a story to illustrate what this movement looks like in practice in 2017. I had a very unusual experience earlier this year. It started when I received a text on my phone one day from someone who said they were Steve Bannon and that they would like to talk with me. So I—thinking, “Eh!”— called back, and discovered that this man was, in fact, Steve Bannon. We ended up having a couple of conversations, the first during that week before he left the White House, and the second talk a couple of weeks after. What I found out, among many other things—Steve Bannon is a very interesting man to talk to—is that unfortunately there is a link between a book that I wrote and something that is in the president’s office, which is to say that the portrait of Andrew Jackson that Donald Trump had installed in the Oval Office is there because Steve Bannon had read my book Special Providence, which talks about Andrew Jackson and Jacksonian populism, and Steve Bannon

Crises of Democracy

thought that was exactly the model for President Trump. You may have read that President Trump went down to the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s home in Tennessee, and paid a visit to the grave, and then installed this portrait. So now I have visions that when I’m dead, on my tombstone it will read the intellectual architect of the trump administration. My conversations with Bannon were an interesting confirmation that this idea of Jacksonian populism, which is something which I’ve been thinking about and writing about for some time, really does register with people who are seen as advocates of this strain in American life. So for those of you who aren’t students of either Steve Bannon or of Walter Russell Mead, I’d like to talk about what this movement means and then talk about its relationship with liberal democracy as we experience it; that is to say, why are they so mad at the status quo in America? And I hope to open up a conversation rather than end it. This is a topic which I’m still trying to explore myself. How do we explain Jacksonians? Who are they? What was Andrew Jackson’s political movement? To begin, Andrew Jackson was a very interesting man. Among other things, he was from South Carolina, and during the American Revolution, when he was a young boy of 12 or 13, he was fighting with the guerrillas and was captured by British troops. A British officer told him to shine his boots. Jackson, as a 13-year-old prisoner of war, refused, and the officer cut him across the face with his sword. Jackson got many votes later in life because of this scar that he bore. As commander of U.S. forces in one of the wars against the Creek and Seminole Indians in what is now our State of Georgia, Jackson found that the terrorists, as we might say now, were being supplied with weapons of mass destruction—that is, rifles, and bullets, and other war instruments—by two British traders who were living in what is now the State of Florida but was then still Spanish property. For Jackson it was perfectly clear what to do: he sent U.S. forces across the international frontier into Spanish Florida, arrested those two British merchants, brought them back to U.S. soil, tried them before a military tribunal, and then hanged them. Right there you see everything that the European Union doesn’t like about the United States in that one incident. And his handling of that incident helped make Andrew Jackson so popular that his election to the presidency was just a matter of time. In foreign policy, Jacksonians aren’t trying to change the world. They don’t believe the U.S. is on a mission from God to convert the world to Christianity, or to human rights, or anything else. Their policy toward foreigners is live and let live until the foreigners attack the United States, at which time it’s kill, kill, kill. The Jacksonians believe that war is something that—if it’s important enough to fight in the first place—should be fought with everything you’ve got. In other words, war is something you try to end as quickly and decisively as possible; otherwise, you don’t bother with it.

Jacksonian and Arendtian Critiques of Liberal Democracy

Walter Russell Mead

On December 6, 1941, a minority of U.S. public opinion was in support of entering into World War II. After the Japanese sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, Jacksonians not only supported the war; they were so angry at Hirohito that even four years later President Truman felt it would be political ruin for him not to use nuclear weapons against Japan. In fact, if you look at the last five months of World War II, American forces killed somewhere between 900 thousand and one million Japanese civilians in air raids at that time. In one night of bombing on Tokyo—March 9–10, 1945—American forces killed somewhere between 80 thousand and 100 thousand Japanese civilians by dropping incendiary bombs in neighborhoods where the houses were built of paper, which was the Japanese practice at the time. The total killed in those five months—not including Hiroshima and Nagasaki—was double the number of all U.S. combat deaths in all of our foreign wars from the Revolution to the present day. That one March bombing raid in Tokyo saw more civilian deaths than the total number of U.S. military deaths in the Korean, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars combined. Like it or hate it, this is a way of war. You could see it even in our own Civil War, where Sherman’s march to the sea very much represented the deliberate use of what was effectively terror against a civilian population. “These people,” he said, “don’t know what war is, what it means. We must teach them what it means to rebel against the United States.” And he did. In the same way, during World War II, some of Franklyn Roosevelt’s advisers suggested to him that it was a mistake to call for an unconditional surrender of Germany, because this would help Nazi propaganda persuade the Germans to keep fighting to the last minute. Roosevelt’s advisers suggested that offering peace could serve to divide the Germans. What Roosevelt said was, listen, the reason we’re fighting this war is that during World War I the Germans never really learned what war was. When World War I ended, German troops were still in France. The German people had never really experienced the horrors of war, in Roosevelt’s estimation at least. Roosevelt thought, “This one will not end until the Germans know what war means deep in their bones.” That’s a very Jacksonian sentiment. In Roosevelt’s defense, you’ll notice that neither Germany nor Japan has been particularly warlike in the last seventy years; that represents a marked change from their previous foreign policies. We tend to ignore this side of our history and this side of the American national character. We have a tendency to think that what draws the world to us, what is making the world an American-style world, is the sheer beauty of our ideas and the glorious example of our conduct, and so on. I would argue that the example of our conduct is possibly quite influential, but maybe not in such a glorious way. So the Jacksonian worldview can essentially be reduced to the idea that we are a country surrounded by hostiles, but that within this country we’re a folk, and we’re democratic and equal within our own community. As I’ve 52

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mentioned, outside this community, the Jacksonian sees enemies whom we must guard against. This notion turns out to be very foundational in the way American liberty and the American government develops. This is the sense of a free folk that doesn’t have nobility or aristocracy amongst itself, but which distinguishes between those inside the folk and those outside the community, the latter being excluded from our protection. This notion had much to do with forging the American nation and forging American democracy. In American politics, Jackson is the one who introduced universal male suffrage—white male suffrage, of course—into the American electorate. Before Jackson’s presidency, in some states you actually needed more property to vote than you would have if you had been a British citizen in certain boroughs trying to vote in a parliamentary election. And it was Andrew Jackson’s revolution that broke the church establishments that persisted in New England: at the time, Massachusetts and Connecticut still had an established church that all citizens had to pay taxes to support, whether they belonged to that church or not. The Jacksonian phenomenon in American politics, therefore, is premised on both radically egalitarian politics among us—however the us is defined—as well as a very polarizing dynamic among those who are not us. You can see a lot of evidence of this today when we look at how Jacksonians define the “outlaw” as someone who is literally out of the law; that is, outside of the protection of the law. Jacksonians wouldn’t think that terrorists are particularly entitled to the same rights and considerations as American citizens, which is why Jacksonian opinion by and large was not disturbed by Guantánamo. This same mentality is one of the reasons why it’s so hard to convince a jury in the United States to convict a policeman, even under circumstances which appear to the layperson to be pretty unambiguous. In other words, the policeman or the soldier is the agent of the community in holding the chaos of the outside world at bay, Jacksonians would say, and therefore deserves the protection and support of that community. This is a deeply engrained sentiment of a sort of American folk culture, and it’s one of the reasons that the jury system has been so slow to respond to issues that Black Lives Matters and other groups are raising. In 2017, we’ve seen that the Jacksonians are real and that they vote. Steve Bannon was not wrong in that it was the Jacksonian vote that was primarily responsible for Donald Trump’s presidency. And as I say, we can see them in two ways: we can see them as being very democratic and egalitarian, but we can also see them as standing very strongly, even in revolt, against many of the things that we think of as essential to liberal democracy. I don’t have much time to trace this out, but I would say that Jacksonians believe that legitimacy derives from the people, and by “the people” they don’t simply mean an aggregation of individuals who live in a particular territory; they mean people who share some sort of cultural heritage and set of cultural and political commitments.

Jacksonian and Arendtian Critiques of Liberal Democracy

Walter Russell Mead

Jacksonians don’t believe that America is an idea or a nation built on ideas. They think it’s a nation just like other nations, which means it’s built on people. Jacksonians have traditionally been the heart of opposition to desegregation, to immigration from non-Anglo or non-European cultures. Over time, Jacksonians have somewhat mellowed. You don’t see the same kind of open racism from this camp that you did when I was a child and segregation was still legal in much of the country. But Jacksonians have not lost the sense that there is a clear divide between people who are in, and people who are out. How that boundary is defined is subject to question, it’s subject to negotiation, and it’s subject to change over time; and in many regards we see American public opinion moving away from some of the more narrow Jacksonian values of the past into something more open. Equipped with this understanding, we’re faced with the question of how to deal with the Jacksonians as a movement that is very active in American politics. I would like to address this with a conjecture which may also be a bit of a provocation. As I see it, there are two possible ways of dealing with Jacksonians: one is to simply hate them, repudiate them, and hope they go away. To some degree, I would say this was President Obama’s approach, at least at points during his presidency. In his best moments, I don’t think this attitude characterized Obama; but when he talked about bitter clingers, people clinging to their guns and their Bibles, a lot of Jacksonians saw that as his equivalent of the “basket of deplorables.” And the problem, of course, is that there are a lot of Jacksonians out there, and they don’t seem to show much sign of going away. We can take this tried path of engaging in a politics of repudiation, opposition, and struggle; or, alternatively, we can try to engage in some kind of politics of engagement, of exploring common ground, of developing ideas of citizenship, of trying to overcome cultural and political and social divides in order to understand people and work together while still undoubtedly disagreeing on some key points. I’m not sure that either of these options is 100 percent satisfactory; but my guess is that if you want another four years of Trump after this current term, the best way to do that would be to keep looking for ways to alienate and irritate Jacksonians. To conclude, I’d like to offer what may be my most provocative observation: eventually, minority identity politics leads to majority identity politics. That is bad for everyone, majority and minority alike, but probably worse for the minority. That is something that we need to be thinking about as we look at the very difficult political situation in our country.

Crises of Democracy

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist? Roger Berkowitz, Introduction Marc Jongen, Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist? Ian Buruma, Response to Marc Jongen

Roger Berkowitz: In liberal democracy, we are wary of nationalism and patriotism that risk defining the content of a “we.” The reason is obvious. In any collectivist definition there is both inclusion and exclusion. And we fear the dangers and injustices of exclusion. But it is undoubtedly also true that when we forego the language and experience of inclusion, we ignore a fundamental human need to belong. The question that our next speaker very much has occupied himself with is the question of, “What is a political we?” What does it mean for Americans to be American, or Germans to be German, or Indians to be Indian? It’s an old question. It’s a question that goes to the very foundations of representative, democratic nation-states. And it is in many ways one of the root questions of the democratic crises that are going on around the world, crises in which many people say, “We want to be X—French, American, German, etc.” And in response to these questions about inclusion, many others, especially many liberals, answer: “What is that we?” We live in a multiethnic, multiracial world. What does it mean to be an American? A German? An Indian? Aren’t these questions dangerous? The question of national collective identity has specific challenges in a country like Germany, where to be German has had negative connotations for the last fifty to sixty years. But this is a question in the United States, too. “Make America Great Again.” What does that mean? We need to address the question of national identity. To be human is to belong to collectivities. And yet too often today politics denies the power and attraction of such identity. Our next speaker is someone who has given this question great thought. What is more, he has sought to move from the realm of thinking to the realm of action. He recently was elected to the German parliament, the Bundestag. Marc Jongen is a German philosopher, essayist, and political activist. He taught for many years at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, and he was an assistant to the well-known philosopher Peter Sloterdijk there. He immigrated to Germany in 2001 from Italy and he has become one of the leading members, both in his native Baden-Wurttemberg and also nationally in the German party Alternative für Deutschland, which, as many of you know, won about 13 percent of the vote in Germany. He’s going to be speaking about this question of populism, but also about belonging and national belonging, and what populism means in a modern democracy.

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

Marc Jongen: Since I joined the AfD, the Alternative für Deutschland party, my experience has been that conferences where I am invited to speak are disrupted. There was a huge protest going on when I was asked to give a talk in Switzerland, in Zurich, in a theater. Four hundred German intellectuals and people from the art scene protested against me, protested against my freedom to speak; and the whole conference was disrupted and couldn’t take place. That is the situation in Germany and in Europe right now. So, for me, at least in my case, America turned out to be the land of free of speech, and I am very grateful for that. In one sense I’m not going to speak freely here in the sense that I have to read my remarks because my English, unfortunately, is not so fluent that I can speak freely. So please be patient with me. Our question is about populism today: does politics have to be more populist? In regard to this topic I have a big advantage compared with probably all of you. I am a populist myself. Yes. That is true at least if we follow the German media and political observers in Germany. So, merely by phenomenological insight and careful description of what I find within myself—by telling you about my dark ambitions and motivations—I should be able to give you an account of what populism is. I’ll do my best. For the last few years I have been acting a bit as an amphibian, going back and forth between the political realm and the academic realm. Being a political activist, or even a politician, at the same time as an academic, I try to observe myself. And that’s what I’m going to do now. In my case, we have to speak about right-wing populism, or even far-right populism, because, as you maybe know, the Alternative für Deutschland is considered a right-wing party, even far-right, which means the party is largely demonized, in my view in a totally absurd manner. The specters of Marx, as Jacques Derrida put it, are not haunting Germany these days, but the specters of Hitler. Politics in Germany has become, sadly, and to a large extent, a fight against specters. Today, in politics we project specters onto others in order to exclude them from serious political discussion. A sort of “ghost busting” is going on. And the notion of right-wing populism is sort of a preliminary state to the often used Nazi, and I’m a bit sensitive about that term, as you can imagine. I’m going to talk here about the German situation that I know best. But I think analogous conclusions can be drawn for other European countries. If that is also true for the United States, we will to have to discover afterwards in our conversation. To examine the German situation, it is useful to look back and see when and why the AfD, my party, was founded. As in other countries, in Germany, too, the foundation of a new, and I should add a successful new party, is a very hard and complicated thing. In postwar Germany it happened only once before AfD, when the Green Party was founded back in the 1970s. So, there must be a lot of suffering and discontent with the existing parties and existing

Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

Marc Jongen

politics before the hard work of party founding is begun. So, what made the AfD possible? The AfD was a reaction or a rebellion to what our chancellor Angela Merkel called, in German, Alternativlösigkeit. There is no good English translation for this word, which means a lack of alternatives. We might speak of what Merkel called the alternativelessness of her politics. She is the German TINA. You know the acronym TINA: There Is No Alternative. She said that several times. But what does Alternativlösigkeit mean? No alternative to what? First of all, the phrase was used with regards to the euro, the common European currency, and in regard to the euro rescue policy. When the euro fails, Europe fails. That was Angela Merkel’s mantra. But in fact, from an economic point of view, the euro is already, and was at that time, a failed currency. It has done an awful amount of harm to the Southern European countries. Greece has almost become a third world country in economic terms because of the euro rescue policy. The situation there is terrible. Suicide rates went up, and there is an economic crisis. And the euro has led to this totally crazy zero or even negative interest rate policy by which the savings, the wealth of the people, are slowly melting away, including the pension system, which is a very serious problem. The only ones benefiting from this policy are the big financial institutes and not the people. I don’t have the time to go into depth here, [not to mention] the fact that I’m not a financial expert. But my important point here is that Chancellor Merkel’s euro rescue policy led to a postpolitical and even postdemocratic situation, as if Colin Crouch, the author of Post-Democracy, had written the script to this development. In 2012, without any discussion in European parliaments—at least in Germany there was none—the so-called European Stability Mechanism in Brussels was established with 700 billion euros in starting capital. It’s a monster bureaucracy with the right to take as much money from the national budgets of euro states, mainly from Germany, as it believes is necessary to address a state of emergency. In fact, we have been living since then, I would say, in a permanent state of emergency, or state of exception. And if we follow Carl Schmitt’s famous saying, “Sovereign is who decides over the state of exception,” Angela Merkel turned out to be sovereign in this sense of the term. Can Chancellor Merkel still be called a democratic leader anymore? Carl Schmitt wrote the above-quoted phrase in an essay called “On Dictatorship.” Maybe we should call what is now going on democratorship, or Demokratur in German, to describe this postdemocratic form of government. On the surface, our democratic government today is still liberal, and it calls itself democratic, After the election of Donald Trump, Angela Merkel has even been called the leader of the free world, which to my ears sounds like a total mockery.

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

It is against these elite leaders who are detached from the people and who do not represent them as they should—and this is not only my view but widely shared in Germany—the AfD has, since 2013, demanded that on issues of crucial importance for the whole country—such as the introducing or the maintenance of a new currency, of the euro, against all economic logic—the people have to be asked in a referendum. And it’s quite clear that back then, when the euro was introduced, Germans would never have voted to quit the German mark. You can call that populist, the call for introducing more referendums; but then you will also have to claim that Switzerland is a populistic country where such referendums are the common form of political decision-making since a long time. I would rather call it democratic. In fact, populus, the Latin word from which populism derives, and demos, the Greek word within the term democracy, mean exactly the same, namely, “the people.” A democracy without any populist aspect is an unthinkable thing. But let me come to the current state of emergency. A significant and alarming deepening of the state of emergency occurred in 2015, when the Merkel government again, in a sovereign decision, against any law, explicitly against article 16a of the German Constitution, decided to open the borders and let into the country first 10,000, then 100,000, and by the end of 2016, far more than one million mainly young, mainly male, mainly Muslim immigrants. Some of them are real refugees, persecuted in their home countries and legitimately looking for shelter in Germany. But with them, in their shadows, so to say, also many of the persecutors of these refugees came, and many criminals, and many soldiers of fortune attracted by the German welfare state. You cannot blame them for it. If there is the possibility to come, you and I would also come in their position. Donald Trump, in his not-so-polite manner, has called this policy insane. And even if I’m critical towards the personality of Trump, in this case, in the core, I think he was right. Since then, in Germany we have been experiencing a tremendous loss of inner security. We have experienced a new kind of terrorism, formerly unknown in our country, a rise of crimes committed by new immigrants, even if it is not politically correct to say so. But it is a truth proven by the statistics: namely, severe crimes like robbery, rape, even murder. And the climate in the country has completely changed. This climate is totally opposed to the official slogans of the government, namely, to Angela Merkel’s other famous mantra: “Wir schaffen das.” It is the German version of Yes We Can! We can integrate all these people. And our answer to this is, “No, we cannot.” Even those who are full of goodwill will fail to integrate, not to speak of assimilate, all these culturally alien people, for the simple reason that there are too many. And even more so, as the example of France shows, because their Islamic faith turns out to be

Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

Marc Jongen 59

a serious obstacle to integration. I don’t want to go deeper into this difficult Islam discussion here, but rather come back to my point from before. Not only do we have to state, “No, we cannot”; but maybe we also have the right to say, “No, we don’t want to.” Or to put it in the words of Melville’s Bartleby, “We prefer not to.” We haven’t really been asked if we want to—if we want to open the borders. This decision to open the borders has been imposed on us; and anyone who dares to be skeptical towards this no-border, no-nation policy is threatened, is called a racist, a nationalist, or even a Nazi. It is hard to remember that only ten years ago, even in Germany, such a policy would have been wisely regarded as a dangerous but, thank God, unrealistic reverie of the extreme left. From a psychopolitical point of view, what has happened with the mass immigration into Germany since 2015 is a traumatic experience. It was in fact an act of violence; and as with all traumatic experiences, the consequences do not appear immediately. First, on the surface, life went on as if nothing [had] happened; but on a deeper level, a profound shock occurred that can, step by step, disturb and transform the whole society and the political system, or at least mainstream politics. Already, it is now obvious that this state of emergency wantonly provoked by the Merkel administration led to a massive loss of trust in representative democracy. And not for nothing, I may say, and I’m very concerned about this crisis of democracy. Again, the AfD is the political force giving a voice to all those who feel uncomfortable with this forced transformation of Germany into a country of uncontrolled mass immigration. And for that, the party has become a scapegoat made responsible for all the troubles the country is going through right now. There is also the traditional violence against the scapegoat, including physical violence, which we are suffering. The official or hegemonic political narrative goes that the populists are the disturbing factor. We are said to be capitalizing politically on the situation. We are thought to be promoting fears and hate against foreigners, and so on and so on. Of course, I am strongly opposed to that narrative; instead, I claim that the rise of parties like the AfD is not the cause for our troubles, but rather a sign or a symptom that things are going profoundly wrong. And it is very dangerous and destructive for our political debate to call “nationalist” or “racist” or even “Nazi” everyone who is not willing to accept uncontrolled mass immigration and who insists on a controlled form of limited immigration according to certain well-defined criteria. And that brings me to the last and main point in my initial remarks here, and that’s the question of the “we” Roger spoke about before, the question of the “we,” which I think is crucial when we speak about the future and the fate of democracy. Who are we, and who do we want to be? These are the questions that have been posed for us through the mass immigration in a quite radical manner, and we all agree, and I explicitly also agree, that it would be a

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

very bad idea to build our society and our nations and states on the concept of race, of genetic affiliation. The horrific experiences, two horrific experiences, in the twentieth century have seen people trying to build a we on racial and genetic categories; that is over and done, thank God. But on the other hand, I would claim we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater and say that the feeling of the we so essential to a functioning democracy and a democratic society hasn’t got anything to do with parentage and can be easily obtained just by handing out a passport to anyone crossing the border with whatever intentions. At this point, the term populist probably reveals its deeper, or deepest, meaning. For the Latin populus, the English people, and the German Volk, the Greeks had two words, namely, demos, the sum of citizens that constitute the democracy, to make it very short; and the ethnos, the people defined by partly genetic, partly cultural affiliations. Now, the demos can certainly not be reduced to the ethnos, as said before; it’s called democracy and not ethnocracy. But there is enough evidence, I think, to suppose that a sufficiently strong consciousness of we for a functioning democracy can only be established amongst a people who share the same values and thus will engage in a common project for the future. And for sharing the same values, to put it very cautiously, it is very helpful to be rooted in a common ground, to be united by a common past or history. To stress the need for a common ground, a common past, and a common history may be—in this difficult period of transition we’re going through—may be the positive and necessary role of those called populists; if not all of them, at least some of them. Now, I’m aware of the fact that the situation in the U.S. is quite different from the situation in Europe. And much of what I was saying about populism might not apply to the American phenomenon named such. Other than the European countries, the USA have always been an immigration country; they have been the immigration country, multicultural and multiethnical. But nevertheless, I would think that the formation of something like the American nation could only succeed by the shared English language and by something in German called Leitkultur, literally translated as “leading culture”; namely, the strong shared belief in liberty, democracy, and equality of all human beings. The crisis in democracy, in my belief, consists in the forgetting of those roots of democracy, without which the common we will fall apart in several small we bubbles, or identities, each one concerned only about its own rights, its own interests, but not forming a common demos anymore. I hope that shows that I’m quite critical towards identity politics, as you can guess; but that would be another discourse. Ian Buruma: I was asked to respond, which I will do. I promised that I would not use the menace of Nazism; I won’t even mention the Nazis. I do not think you’re a racist. We won’t be beastly to the Germans, at least not more than necessary.

Response to Marc Jongen

Ian Buruma

I’ve listened to your discourse with great interest, and I’m glad to say, or perhaps sorry to say for the sake of debate, that I agree at least in one respect: I think Angela Merkel has made mistakes, possibly not the same mistakes that you think she’s made. I do think there’s a problem with the euro, and I do think that the Greeks in particular, but the Southern Europeans in general, are being badly treated; but not necessarily because the euro itself was such a terrible idea. I think it will only work if there is sufficient solidarity amongst Europeans to bail out a country that’s in trouble when necessary, and I think the Northern Europeans—and I include here my own native country, the Netherlands, which in a sense has become, economically certainly, a part of the Großdeutschland— have behaved very hypocritically. Because, for a long time, they made a huge amount of money—the German and Dutch banks did, and so on, and you probably wouldn’t disagree with this—by lending the Greeks and others huge amounts of money when the going was good, profiting from it enormously. And after the crisis of 2008, when the going no longer was so good, Angela Merkel made the big mistake, in my view, of blaming the Greeks and other supposedly lazy Mediterranean people for not working hard enough, implying it is their fault, and saying that they should become more like Germans and pull their socks up, and that there is no need to be of any further assistance. And that has led to the sorry situation that I think you described. So I think there we can agree. Referendums—I’m not at all as enamored by them as you are. I think it’s a tool much more commonly used in authoritarian systems than in democracies. Mussolini was of course a great fan of referendums, but so have been other dictators. The whole point, I think, of a representative democracy is that we elect people to represent the people, and not have the so-called people’s voice decide directly in referendums on very complicated issues in which there often isn’t a clear yes-or-no answer. We see the results of referenda in Britain today. On the immigration issue, again, I don’t totally disagree. I think it is a mess in Europe; but perhaps we don’t agree about the reasons. One of the problems in Europe is that neither the EU nor individual European countries have ever had a clear policy on immigration. They have a policy on refugees and on asylum seeking; but the category of economic migrants has never really been properly acknowledged. As a result, even those who cannot make a living in their own countries—and there’ll be more and more because of climate change and so on—who feel forced to move to more prosperous parts of the world, have to pretend to be refugees in order to be allowed in. In fact, they are often coached by people to do so, which then creates the impression amongst people that they’re all shysters and liars. The answer to that, in my view, is to make a distinction, and to have a policy on asylum seekers and refugees, which there is to some extent, but also to

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

have a policy on how many migrants to allow in, what categories to have, and so on—something slightly more akin to what they have in the New World. Now, the situation that you’ve painted, which is rather alarmist, does not seem to me to be an exact reflection of reality. Angela Merkel no longer talks about open borders. She no longer talks about a million refugees; there are already limits to that. There is no such thing as open borders, even though they may be insufficiently guarded, but nobody has a policy of allowing anybody in who wants to come in. I think that is an alarmist view. The fact that there is crime amongst immigrants does not come as news to anybody in this country. Of course there is crime amongst immigrants. People who are often helpless and don’t know the language sometimes rely on gangs; all people take care of their interests. The history of immigration in the United States is full of stories of crime. Now, is the crime committed by refugees and immigrants in Germany sufficient to be a kind of existential crisis, something that’s completely transformed German society? That proposition seems extremely doubtful to me. Your claim that we cannot integrate people who have a different religion or different customs is a very old one, and I promised not to mention the Nazis, so I’ll mention another country, impeccably liberal in its history: Norway. When Norway became an independent country, they had nice liberal philologists, classicists, and learned men who saw themselves very much as representatives of Enlightenment thinking. They were asked to draw up a constitution for Norway. And it was indeed a very liberal constitution except for one article, which said that Jews could never become citizens of Norway. And the reason was argued along Enlightenment lines: Jewish religion and culture can never be integrated in a Western liberal democracy. Jews can come as guests, or as tourists, but they can never be citizens of a Western liberal democracy, because it is impossible to integrate people who have such a different culture and religion. And this is simply to illustrate that the ideas that are becoming popular in Europe today have a provenance that is not necessarily Hitlerian or anything of that sort, but can come from a completely other, different direction as well. On the question of citizenship, again, let’s not talk about Hitler; let’s go back a little bit further. You say that people should come from the same soil, to have certain family histories that are akin, and share a culture, to build a democracy; and that it’s not a help to have people of too many different ethnic groups, religions, cultural backgrounds. Well, let’s take a look at the very end of the nineteenth century, when the United States and Britain were indisputably more democratic than Germany at the time, under Kaiser Wilhelm II. This is not to say Germany was an evil country, but it was certainly less democratic. Now, one of the things that Kaiser Wilhelm II said—and he took his cue from an Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who married Wagner’s daughter—was, first of all, that the United States and Britain were terrible

Response to Marc Jongen

Ian Buruma

countries because they were, as he put it, so charmingly verjudet, Jewified, by which he meant that these were mongrel populations. And why were they mongrel populations? Because in another even less charming word he used, because in Britain and America—and I’m quoting Kaiser Wilhelm here—“every Basuto nigger can buy citizenship for two shillings.” The idea is that you could become a citizen whoever you were, wherever you were from, if you were part of the society regardless of your background. And this was then associated with money and with capitalism, which of course were very much identified with the United States and Britain. Now, I put it to you—again, let’s avoid the 1930s and ’40s. The idea that democracy somehow is inextricably linked to a notion of the Volk based on bloodlines is historically, at least, a questionable one. And I’ll leave it at that.

Discussion and Audience Q&A MJ: That was a huge range of issues you put forward here. So, to begin with the common ground we share, I think that’s a good thing that we are looking for the same goal. We want to have a functioning democracy. We are both against discrimination and racism and all that. But we have a different view of what is going on right now. You made some historical analogies which I can follow. I understand what you mean, but I think most of them are false analogies. And by looking at the past exactly in that way, exactly that happens, what I said before; that we rather see the specters of the past, and we are fighting against these specters, rather than facing the actual problems. Coming back to the question of the Jewish people, well, now as you maybe know, many Jewish people are leaving France today not because of the rise of the populist party there, but because they get attacked on the streets; they are not feeling secure anymore, and these atrocities come from Muslims. That is a fact that has to be acknowledged. And also in the streets of Germany you now hear slogans which I don’t want to repeat here because they are so terrible, against Jews, coming from the Muslim community. I don’t claim that every Muslim thinks like this. I don’t say Muslims per se can’t be integrated in a democratic modern society; but we have to face the fact that many problems arise out of this community, and if we do not look clearly at these things we will achieve exactly the opposite of what we want to achieve, of what you want to achieve. The result at the end will not be a functioning democracy where we all feel that we are one society heading for the same goals; but we will be a society separated in different—well, parallel worlds hostile towards each other. That’s my point of view. Q: Good morning. My name is Wilmot James. I’m a former South African member of parliament and chairman of its main opposition party, which is a

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

liberal democratic party. I’m now at Columbia, and I’m deeply disturbed by this conversation because of two reasons. The first is that if you think about the South African scene, we’re a country with eleven official languages and extremely diverse; and therefore the notion of a nation is principally that of Oscar Wilde, that is, “a bunch of people living in one place at one time.” And that’s who we are. So I find this notion of the Volk, which also has strong ties with apartheid South Africa, extremely chauvinistic. I find the notion of the nation not simply European but rooted in German chauvinism. And I just want to mark the fact that I deeply disagree with that idea, and I find it in fact historically offensive. My question is about the idea of populism. When I think of populism as a politician in South Africa, I think about using cheap tricks to attract votes. So, what is populist in fact is to have slogans to abolish the death penalty, for example, because of rising crime on the basis of very superficial and empty intellectual evidence. That’s what I understand populism to mean. And so I’m a bit confused about the idea of populism that’s been offered here. My question is, what exactly do you mean by populism, given the history of the meaning of the term? Thank you. MJ: I’m aware of the fact that the term populism is usually used in the way you just mentioned it, in a very negative way. In discourse, our party and myself are all the time called populists, but I do not find these populist motivations within myself. So I am trying to redefine the term populist for me, and to pull something positive out of it, which is possible if you see, as I tried to explain, the connections between the populus and the demos. And in this point of view you could say, maybe these people, the populus, are not all so bad as they seem, and not so destructive; but maybe they are something like, how do you say, rescuers, or promoters, or saviors (that may be saying too much) of democracy. The people are the answer to the crisis of democracy, and they will help in their way to get out of this crisis, not because they will take over the power everywhere but because they make the others react, or make the system react and readjust and think about what is really at the root of democracy. So at least the term populist can become ambivalent. And about the offense you were feeling or expressing: it is not my ambition to offend you. And I was aware that my point of view [would] not be the one [in] the majority here; that’s certainly, certainly clear. At least maybe you can recognize, even if you don’t agree with what I said, that my goal— where I want to go—is not different from yours. It’s not really different. It is also my aim to restore democracy. I don’t want anything else; not a dictatorship. On the contrary, I’m deeply concerned about these postdemocratic developments. The difference is that I think that a society which is too nonhomogeneous is likely to lose its democratic form, because it is split apart into many parallel societies. If I’m not completely misinformed, in the USA right

Discussion and Audience Q&A

now you have deep, deep gaps between different groups in the society. And the crisis of democracy in the USA has also to do with this lack of a common “we.” But correct me if I’m wrong. IB: Perhaps it’s useful to at least make a distinction between different kinds of populism. There is what you could roughly call left-wing populism based perhaps more on class than anything else, which in the history of the United States you had in Louisiana, where you had a demagogue who spoke up for the common people, the less privileged ones, against big corporations, big banks, and that kind of thing. The elite, then, is couched in class terms. The other form of populism, which I think is closer to yours—and I’m not saying that you want a dictatorship, or that you’re not democratic, or anything of that sort at all, but which is closer to yours—is the idea of the common people, being the natives of a country, who have been dominated by an elite that’s no longer in touch with the native spirit, the elite that often coddles alien minorities. Call them Jews, call them Muslims; that just depends on the historical circumstances. So what the populist has to defend is, to use the German term, the gesundes Volksempfinden, the healthy feelings of the native people against the out-of-touch elite and their coddled minorities. And that’s a very different kind of populism from the class-based economic populism, and I think we have to be clear about that. RB: Wilmot brought up this question of Oscar Wilde, which is a different definition of a nation than you hold, Mr. Jongen, right? In the United States we’ve had an idea of the nation. We talked a little bit about it yesterday. The idea was that the nation was supposed to be no national people; it was a nation without a nationality, a nation of nations. And yet in practice, the American nation has often been racialized. One of the problems here is how to develop an idea of the nation outside of concretizing a racial or ethnic idea of the nation. A nation-state is a weird term because a state is supposed to be a group of equal people, all citizens under the law, and a nation-state says there’s one nationality which has outsized weight or importance in that state. And that’s one of the reasons that Hannah Arendt was so skeptical of the nation-state project and so supportive of a non-national republic like the United States as she saw it at the time. I guess in a lot of ways the last thirty or forty years has seen Germany become more like Oscar Wilde. And you’re in a sense asking it to go back. I’m wondering if that’s a realistic approach. MJ: I’m not asking it to go back. I’m very aware of the fact that going back is not possible in history. And if you mention Hannah Arendt, I think she had very good reasons at that time to state that the nation-state is a problematic

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

thing. That was at a time when the nation-state committed the most horrible atrocities and put the whole world into chaos and covered it with crime. So her critique of the nation-state was very understandable. But I think we have to look at these problems now with different eyes. Then it was necessary and right to criticize the notion of the nation in front of such terrifying nationalism. Today it’s rather the opposite; we are in danger of losing the concept of the nation, totally losing it. It’s getting lost more and more in Europe. The official policy of the European Union is the concept of the ever-closer union, and by that, the dissolving of the nations. Now the threat is to lose at the same time democracy and enter a postdemocratic government. In Europe you can make it very clear because there is no such thing historically as the European people, so there are people in the several traditional nations— there [are] the German people, and French, and so on—and they developed in a difficult historical process their democracies, some earlier, some later. But it is not taken for granted that democracy is transferrable to this supranational state of Europe. We don’t have, for example, a common European language. The situation in the U.S. is different. You have the English language, which is the language for all, more or less, until now; but we don’t have that. There the problem begins. So again, don’t put these specters of the past on the present situation. IB: Now I have a question: one thing that Germans and the Chinese and the Jews have in common is that their identity cannot be defined by nationhood or common citizenship, because of the Chinese diaspora, or the Jewish diaspora. Certainly before the war, if you were a Volksdeutsche in Tyrol or Sudetenland or Russia, you were not a citizen of any German nation; and I think that may be part of the problem we’re talking about. Now my question to you is to what extent your own (and I know it’s unfair to bring personal histories into political views, but I’m interested anyway) family background in Tyrol has played a role in developing ideas of what nationhood, and the Volk, should represent? MJ: Yes, well, it’s no problem for me that you ask that. My situation is even more complicated because I come from Tyrol, from the Italian part of the South Tyrol. And so not only was I a German-speaking Italian, but my father is Dutch, so I had two citizenships, the Italian one and the Dutch one, and now I have the German one and the Italian one. And I always considered myself what Nietzsche called “a good European,” and there was a time where I somehow jokingly said, “I’m an EU patriot.” I come from that background, so this way of thinking in European terms is very familiar to me. But I somehow changed my mind without forgetting this background. I changed my mind when I saw in which direction the European Union is evolving. And that’s why I stress so much the nation now.

Discussion and Audience Q&A

And you are right that the Germans have not always been living in one state, and that nation and state must not be equated; but we don’t have to think in black-and-white categories when we talk about all these questions. When I say the nation is important, it doesn’t mean that this nation has to be ethnically pure and all of that. That’s not the point. Q: I’m from Germany and Austria, and I’ve found this discussion very interesting, and I thank Professor Buruma for a lot of the points that were brought up. One specific thing really stood out to me in your speech, which is the idea of shock in Germany. We’re somehow from the same part of Germany, and my grandparents are from a working-class and farming background. And I think in the context of Germany it is very important to keep in mind that the immigrants and refugees that are coming there have experienced trauma and shock. And I just really wanted to define what you mean by shock in Germany, and trauma, in relation to what the people who are coming to Germany really feel. I think it’s very hard to listen to, and it’s heartbreaking in that sense, because these people that come have experienced real shock and trauma. MJ: I think in such complicated situations we have always to consider both sides, and our analysis of the situation very much depends on what examples we have before our eyes. You have the example of the traumatized Syrian refugee, who has experienced terrible things and comes to Germany. I don’t doubt that there are such people; there are quite many. But not all of them who came are traumatized, real refugees. There are also people coming from Northern Africa and other countries who just took the opportunity of the open borders and came, and they don’t have this background of persecution. That’s a fact. So yes, we have to recognize and have before our eyes both groups of people. Then the picture becomes complete. We also have to look not only at what these people have experienced, which is important, but also, what does it mean to those who are living in Germany, to the Germans and those who are living there for a longer time, as our Chancellor Merkel put it? What does it mean when so many aliens, alien people, are entering the country? You know that the country will change profoundly, and the German people haven’t been asked if they wanted to change or not. The refugees just come, and your political leader tells you, “Yes, we can do so,” and you have to do so. So that, in my view, is also a form of violence, yes? Your life—if this goes on and on, and another million will come, and another million, another million—and the country will change. And my point is, we have a right to ask this question, and then to decide: do we want this or not, and to what extent? The problem is that many have the feeling that this right is taken from us, we just have to accept it, because otherwise we’re bad, otherwise we are all nationalist, racist, Nazi. All that.

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

And that is not true. That deepens the crisis of democracy. That leads to all these demonstrations on the streets in Germany, and so on. We have to bring this question back to the political debate which is happening now. But it was a difficult way and still is a difficult way, because, you’re right, it’s not easy discussing these questions. Q: My question is for Professor Buruma. In Marc Jongen’s speech I heard echoes of the dichotomy presented in your book, Murder in Amsterdam, of a tension between two extremities and how these extremities instill terror, creating fear for the other and alien terms—both terms I heard used in Marc’s speech. So how do you see these principles of fear as detrimental or even crippling to the stability of an equitable society? And how could emphasizing an idea of the alien “other” and creating fear of this other ever be beneficial for a democracy? IB: Creating fear of others in a society is obviously never a good thing for democracy. But I’ll give you an answer which may not be a direct answer to your question but I think is pertinent. If you look at the way democracies developed, and the first and most successful democracies developed in the Western world and certainly in Europe, it does not follow the pattern that Marc Jongen is suggesting, which is that you have a common people with common values and a common faith, who then can agree to establish common institutions. I think in some ways it’s the opposite, and that people forget how divided European nations were until very recently, and to some extent still are. My father grew up in a country where, if you were Catholic, you would be told in church by the priest not to go and shop in a certain store because that was owned by Protestants, let alone that you would allow your son and daughter to marry a Protestant. These were completely separate communities. And longer ago, these communities were mobilized along these faiths, and fought horrendous and incredibly bloody wars as well. Democracy in a way came about because people realized that the only way to live in relative peace is to find some way to solve conflict of interests and conflicts between these communities by having representative parties and representative politicians come to agreements and compromises. And out of that democratic institutions grew stronger. So my premise is really the opposite of Mr. Jongen’s. I don’t think you start off with common values and everybody thinking the same. What you start off with is huge potential conflicts, both cultural, possibly ethnic, and then you find institutions to come to a way to solve those conflicts by compromise and negotiation and representation. MJ: I agree with that.

Discussion and Audience Q&A

Q: I have two questions for you as a politician. As a politician, what policies do you what to implement in your parliament to make sure that one person doesn’t represent a whole group of people, meaning Muslims. If a Muslim does something wrong, does the whole community have to pay for it? When a German white person does something, maybe the same, it’s an exception. So how are you going to do that in the policies that you want to propose? And the other question: if you want to be clearer about your relationship with history, because it seems that you don’t want to be. You’re claiming on one side that you’re not looking back to history, but on the other side, you defend your premises with the German man, the language, and things that actually were constructed a few years ago, because German people didn’t exist at the beginning of time. That was a cultural construction, a historical construction. Can you clarify that? MJ: I heard that the people, German people, or French, or whatever, are constructions, yes? You claim that. I don’t think so. I think, yes, certainly culture is always a form of construction, if you want. There’s nothing found in nature called culture. But we construct our culture. In that sense, that culture is something obviously man-made and a whole structure of concepts, not a thing like a stone you can find anywhere. In that sense, yes, everything is constructed. But not to the point that we can wantonly or willingly change it as we want. A culture, a people, has its tradition, and it is something, even though it is in some sense constructed, it is something not so easy to change. It is something very stable. We have to take into account also those coming to European countries from other parts of the world. They bring their culture with them, and a realistic politics, or realpolitik in German, in regard to them means not to be naïve, not to think, well, if we make some good-weather policy, everything will be fine, and there will be no more cultural fights, and so on and so on. So that means our approach to all these problems is that of the advocatus diaboli, who always looks at what bad developments can occur if we don’t pay attention. So that’s our role in the democratic system. I would define it like the Advocatus Diaboli position.

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

An Open Letter to the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College It was a mistake to invite a German far-right politician to your conference Originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, October 23, 2017.

Dear Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center, and Leon Botstein, President of Bard College: We are writing to make clear our objections to the invited talk given by the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) politician Marc Jongen during the 2017 annual conference of the Hannah Arendt Center, “Crises of Democracy: Thinking in Dark Times” (October 12–13, 2017) (program1) as well as your subsequent defense2 of that invitation. We believe that Jongen’s participation in the conference, regardless of the organizers’ intentions, enabled him to leverage Hannah Arendt’s legacy to legitimize and normalize the AfD’s farright ideology. The leadership of the Hannah Arendt Center and of Bard College has so far disregarded pressing questions of personal and institutional responsibility arising from this legitimation and normalization. This disregard is particularly troubling given that Hannah Arendt was a GermanJewish refugee who fled National Socialism and wrote powerfully about the plight of the stateless and the special dangers posed by race-based ideologies. Jongen, known as the AfD’s “party philosopher,” rose to prominence only after joining the party in 2013. The AfD subscribes to a nationalist farright agenda and is closely allied with the violent street movement “Pegida” (“Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West” ) that attacks refugees, immigrants, and Muslims. Jongen is devoted to providing intellectual legitimacy to the AfD’s extreme rhetoric and actions. His philosophical jargon seeks to justify the incitement and violence carried out by Pegida, including the physical blockade of refugee buses, as the expression of a laudable “thymos,” or rage, that has been suppressed by liberalism and multiculturalism. During his talk at the Hannah Arendt Center, Jongen repeated the racist and xenophobic statements that make the AfD such a dangerous phenomenon in contemporary German politics. We agree with Professor Berkowitz that there is a need to engage with a wide range of political views, including illiberal and even neofascist ones. We also believe, however, that organizers of highly publicized events have crucial responsibilities when the speaker makes statements that vilify already vulnerable groups. Given Jongen’s and the AfD’s well-known positions, it could not have come as a surprise to the conference organizers that Jongen’s talk would target refugees, immigrants, and Muslims, as illustrated by tweets sent by the An Open Letter to the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard Collegez

Hannah Arendt Center quoting Jongen during the event: “We have experienced a tremendous loss of inner security & a new form of terrorism & a rise of crimes caused by immigrants.” “Mass immigration was traumatic . . . & an act of violence in my opinion.” “The Jews are leaving France, not because of populists, but because they are being attacked by Muslims.” Jongen and the AfD have significant institutional representation in the Bundestag. They have no difficulty finding public outlets to express their opinions. But the underprivileged and terrorized groups whom Jongen and the AfD regularly attack have no such power or privilege. Questions of responsibility have been further compounded in the aftermath of the event, especially because of the fact that the Hannah Arendt Center livestreamed the conference, posted videos of all the sessions, and broadcast statements of conference participants on its official Facebook and Twitter accounts. Accordingly, the center lent its institutional legitimacy and communicative power to Jongen’s statements. What remains to be taken into account by the organizers is how this online content serves the interests of farright propagandists. For instance, on October 14, 2017, Jongen shared the center’s post on his own Facebook account and official website, celebrating his invitation as a victory for the AfD’s “cause.” Arendt’s name and the center’s reputation have now been used to legitimize the AfD’s far-right politics. That is a direct threat to the plurality the Arendt Center says it wants to promote and defend. Unfortunately, the statements of Professor Berkowitz and Professor Botstein fail to address such dangers of legitimation and include no discussion of the concrete steps, if any, they will take to mitigate the damage that has been done. Professor Berkowitz suggests3 that there was no need “to belabor the obvious” by stating that the Arendt Center does not endorse the AfD’s agenda. However, one of the “crises of democracy” in our time is that “the obvious” can no longer be taken for granted, especially when esteemed institutions broadcast racist and xenophobic views to a wide audience without critical commentary. As a result, we are disappointed that neither the center nor Bard College has issued an unequivocal, principled statement distancing itself from the anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, and Islamophobic agenda of Jongen and the AfD. Such a statement could have also rebuked the AfD’s persistent calls for the abandonment of Holocaust memorialization. Indeed, Jongen’s request that the conference participants should not invoke Nazism or Hitler when discussing the AfD remains unchallenged. This collective statement is a last resort, not the first. These concerns were conveyed to Professor Berkowitz, in the hope he would issue a statement addressing them and welcoming a broader discussion of the risks inherent in the center’s hosting and broadcasting of Jongen’s views. The idea of making a collective public statement was delayed in the immediate aftermath of the conference in order to give Professor Berkowitz sufficient time to respond to

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

concerns expressed to him. For these reasons, we are surprised and disappointed that President Botstein saw fit to dismiss4 these attempts to foster a public dialogue as acts of “ganging up” and to compare them to “a Soviet era pattern of self-censorship.” It is baffling that our critical opinions have not been given the respect afforded to Jongen’s racist and Islamophobic ideology. In writing this public letter, we hope to bring to view a set of common concerns shared by a wide range of scholars from different countries, disciplines, and perspectives. As scholars concerned about the rise of the far right across the world, we see this public letter as a step to face up to our own responsibilities in the aftermath of this event. The question is not whether Jongen has a right to freely express his beliefs but whether he should be granted the privilege and power to use the Hannah Arendt Center to advance his agenda. Having granted Jongen that privilege and power, the center and Bard College cannot evade their responsibilities, especially those that arise from the normalization and legitimation of the AfD. We strongly urge the Hannah Arendt Center and Bard College to recognize these responsibilities and consider how best to live up to Arendt’s intellectual and political legacy. Signed, Andrew Arato, Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor of Political and Social Theory, The New School for Social Research Étienne Balibar, Anniversary Chair Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University; Visiting Professor at the Department of French and Romance Philology, Columbia University Ronald Beiner, Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto Cristina Beltrán, Associate Professor, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, Yale University Richard J. Bernstein, Vera List Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research Jacqueline Bhabha, Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, and Jeremiah Smith Jr. Lecturer, Harvard Law School Linda Bosniak, Distinguished Professor of Law, Rutgers University–Camden Wendy Brown, Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley William Callison, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley

An Open Letter to the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard Collegez

Joseph Carens, FRSC, Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto Robin Celikates, Associate Professor of Political and Social Philosophy, University of Amsterdam Simone Chambers, Professor of Political Science, University of California, Irvine Jean Cohen, Nell and Herbert M. Singer Professor of Political Thought and Contemporary Civilization, Columbia University Çigdem Çidam, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Union College Volkan Çidam, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Bogaziçi University Alexandra Délano Alonso, Associate Professor and Chair of Global Studies, The New School for Social Research Lisa Disch, Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies (by courtesy), University of Michigan Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton Leonard Feldman, Associate Professor of Political Science, Hunter College Alessandro Ferrara, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Rome Tor Vergata Rainer Forst, Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy, Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt Simona Forti, Professor of History of Political Philosophy, Università del Piemonte Orientale, Italy Nancy Fraser, President, American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division; Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics, The New School for Social Research Zeynep Gambetti, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Bogaziçi University Jeff Goodwin, Professor of Sociology, New York University Peter E. Gordon, Amabel B. James Professor of History, Harvard University Greg Grandin, Professor of History, New York University Ayten Gündogdu, Associate Professor of Political Science, Barnard College– Columbia University Lawrence Hamilton, Professor of Political Studies, Wits, and NRF/British Academy Bilateral Research Chair in Political Theory, Wits University and University of Cambridge Bonnie Honig, Nancy Duke Lewis Professor, Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science, Brown University Axel Honneth, Jack C. Weinstein Professor for the Humanities in the Department of Philosophy, Columbia University James Ingram, Associate Professor of Political Science, McMaster University Turkuler Isiksel, James P. Shenton Assistant Professor of the Core Curriculum, Political Science, Columbia University Andreas Kalyvas, Associate Professor of Politics, The New School for Social Research Steven Klein, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Florida

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

Lori Marso, Professor of Political Science, Union College John P. McCormick, Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago Benjamin McKean, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Ohio State University Anne McNevin, Associate Professor of Political Science, The New School for Social Research A. Dirk Moses, Professor of Modern History, University of Sydney James Muldoon, Lecturer in Political Science, University of Exeter Laurie E. Naranch, Associate Professor of Political Science, Siena College Frederick Neuhouser, Viola Manderfeld Professor of German and Professor of Philosophy, Barnard College–Columbia University Patricia Owens, Professor of International Relations, University of Sussex Serena Parekh, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Northeastern University William E. Scheuerman, Professor of Political Science, Indiana University, Bloomington Joan Wallach Scott, Professor Emerita, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton George Shulman, Professor, Gallatin School of New York University Ann Laura Stoler, Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies, The New School for Social Research Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Modern Literature and History, University of East Anglia Miriam Ticktin, Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology, The New School for Social Research Nadia Urbinati, Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory and Hellenic Studies, Department of Political Science, Columbia University Camila Vergara, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, Columbia University Anna Yeatman, Professorial Fellow, Whitlam Institute within Western Sydney University

1. Available at hac.bard.edu/con2017. 2. R oger Berkowitz, “An Open Letter on the Hannah Arendt Center’s Inclusion of a Talk by Marc Jongen as Part of the Conference ‘Crises of Democracy: Thinking In Dark Times,’” Medium, October 19, 2017; medium.com/@arendt_center/an-open-letter-on-the-hannah-arendt-centers-inclusion-of-a-talk-by-marc-jongen-as-part-of-the-46390f0ddb9d. 3. Ibid. 4. Leon Botstein, response to Berkowitz, “An Open Letter,” available at medium.com/@arendt_center/ an-open-letter-on-the-hannah-arendt-centers-inclusion-of-a-talk-by-marc-jongen-as-part-of-the46390f0ddb9d. Used with permission of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Copyright© 2018. All rights reserved.

An Open Letter to the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard Collegez

Against the Tyranny of Intellectual Mobs The Arendt Center’s director answers critics of his decision to invite a farright politician to give a talk Roger Berkowitz Originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, October 24, 2017.

To the Editor, I write in reference to the open letter addressed to Leon Botstein and me. The letter says I made a mistake in inviting a speaker to a two-day conference. Not one of the fifty-six signatories attended the conference they are criticizing. At the same time, not one person who chose to attend the conference signed the letter. For those who would like to move beyond posturing, I suggest you take the time to view the conference in its entirety. You can do so here.1 I fully agree when the Open Letter argues that “there is a need to engage with a wide range of political views, including illiberal and even neofascist ones.” It was in this spirit that I invited Marc Jongen to speak. The signatories argue that Jongen is an unacceptable illiberal or neofascist thinker. Thus, they insist I must admit that inviting him was a mistake, and disavow him. My question for the signees of the letter is this: what kind of illiberal, neofascist speaker would they find acceptable? The core claim of the Open Letter is found in this sentence: “We believe that Jongen’s participation in the conference, regardless of the organizers’ intentions, enabled him to leverage Hannah Arendt’s legacy to legitimize and normalize the AfD’s far-right ideology.” Listening to a speaker at an academic conference does not legitimize their ideas; on the contrary, it opens a space for critical engagement with those ideas. The AfD is a real-world example of the crisis facing wobbling liberal democracies. The only way to respond to this crisis is to listen to, engage, and reject these arguments. That is precisely what happened at the conference. Hannah Arendt spent her entire life on the receiving end of mass criticism. She was mercilessly attacked for her opinions on Zionism, Soviet totalitarianism, and Adolf Eichmann, and each time she joined the fray to argue that “debate constitutes the very essence of political life.” Arendt taught self-thinking against the tyranny of intellectual mobs. She celebrated universities as fragile bastions of free thought and contestation. The role of the educator is nothing more than to present the world as it is to students for their judgment. She hated nothing more than those who assign themselves the role of censor. Which is why she wrote:

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

“Education can play no part in politics because in politics we always have to deal with those who are already educated. Whoever wants to educate adults really wants to act as their guardian and prevent them from political activity.” Sincerely, Roger Berkowitz Associate Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities Bard College

1. The archived webcast of the conference is available at totalwebcasting.com/view/ ?func=VOFF&id=bard&date=2017-10-12&seq=1. Used with permission of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Copyright© 2018. All rights reserved.

Against the Tyranny of Intellectual Mobs

Roger Berkowitz

Bard President Responds to Critics of Far-Right Figureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Talk The invitation to Marc Jongen â&#x20AC;&#x153;does not constitute either legitimation or endorsementâ&#x20AC;? Leon Botstein Originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, October 24, 2017.

I read with some sadness the open letter to the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Bard College, signed by a stellar cast of distinguished colleagues. The number and quality of the signatories are impressive. But that does not make the argument in the letter right. I am afraid therefore that we will have to agree to disagree. The invitation by an academic center on a college campus, even one named for a distinguished individual, does not constitute either legitimation or endorsement. Right-wing and neofascist parties are a reality of modern political life. We cannot pretend they do not exist. We need to hear what their representatives claim directly so that they can be properly challenged. In this case, the speech was followed by a response from Ian Buruma, a preeminent intellectual and scholar, a longtime member of the Bard faculty, and now editor of the New York Review of Books. The event was part of a two-day conference featuring over twenty-five esteemed speakers on the crisis facing liberal democracies. The speaker was not presented in any context of endorsement or legitimation. Neither Bard nor Roger Berkowitz, director of the Arendt Center, needs to apologize or issue a denunciation. The accusation of an implied endorsement is actually an insult, given the public record of the college, the Arendt Center, and the published public record of both Roger Berkowitz and myself. The self-righteous stance of the signatories and the moral condemnation in the letter do, sadly, bear a family resemblance to the public denouncements of the Soviet era by party committees in the arts that put terror in the hearts of young musicians and writers, and deterred them from speaking and acting against a group consensus. The issues here are the survival of open debate and of academic censorship. I do not need to be reminded by this open letter of the horrors of fascism and right-wing xenophobia, any more than would Hannah Arendt. I was a child immigrant to the United States in a Polish-Russian, stateless family. My father was the only survivor on his side, and two uncles perished in the Warsaw Ghetto. The lesson I learned growing up, which was reinforced by Arendt in her role as a teacher, is that freedom is a political category and that

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

it is incumbent on colleges to protect it. Allowing the expression, in a public discussion forum, of views and positions that we find reprehensible is a necessary part of the exercise of freedom in the public realm. This is particularly true in the academy. I am therefore, much as Hannah Arendt might have been, disappointed but honored by the chorus of well-credentialed critics. Sincerely, Leon Botstein President, Bard College Used with permission of The Chronicle of Higher Education. CopyrightÂŠ 2018. All rights reserved.

Bard President Responds to Critics of Far-Right Figureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Talk

Leon Botstein 79

The Academic Mobbing of the Arendt Center Peter Baehr Originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, October 24, 2017.

To the Editor: The Soviet-style collective letter directed against Roger Berkowitz and Leon Botstein (The Chronicle Review, October 23) allows the following brief translation: “Stray from the orthodoxy that we demand of you, and we will seek to destroy your reputation.” That Arendt scholars, of all people, should have fired this cannonade is nothing less than bizarre. Academic mobbing—a protest letter with fifty-six endorsements!—is not something one associates with the fiercely independent mind of Hannah Arendt. Nor is group denunciation. Both require a determined push back from all who believe that frank argument and opposing views are the beating heart of university life. As for the incident that provoked the ire of Arato et al.—the decision to invite Marc Jongen to participate in the Hannah Arendt Center’s recent conference on “Crises of Democracy”—this much is obvious, at least to me: the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), of which Dr. Jongen is a Bundestag representative, is a legal political party, constituted under the rules of a federal republic and militant democracy that does not shy away from banning extremist entities. The Federal Republic is not the Weimar Republic. The AfD is not a fascist organization. It is currently the voice of nearly six million voters who believe that the political elites of Germany routinely ignore the concerns of Germans about mass immigration and border security. These are also the concerns of millions more voters across Britain and Europe (and America). Who better to articulate this disquiet than Marc Jongen, a recent vessel of electoral disenchantment? Who better to contest his views than the conference respondents? Where better to have a vigorous discussion than the Arendt Center? Liberals of a robust disposition—people committed to openness, freedom of expression, principled disagreement, and individuality—have long known that thought is only truly alive when it enables multiple perspectives and engages competing views with understanding and candor. Max Weber urged German universities dominated by conservative nationalists to hire Marxists and anarchists. An anarchist professor of law, he declared, would offer an angle on jurisprudence that conservative lawyers would never consider. John Stuart Mill, the father of British liberalism, actually sought out rivals to debate his views. Mill looked for critics because he assumed engagement with diverging standpoints would sharpen his own. He was equally emphatic that

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

a précis of an opponent’s argument is never as good as hearing it stated with conviction by the opponent. Only a believer, present and animated, is likely to give a nuanced, earnest and sympathetic account of their beliefs: “Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field.” The letter signers prefer to doze under a warm blanket of unanimity. They lack Weber’s courage and Mill’s confidence. The protesters state one thing—a support for a wide expression of views—but demand another: the exercise of “responsibility,” a mealy-mouthed word beloved by the censor. Prohibiting speakers whose views one opposes is not responsibility by any sensible measure. It is social tyranny. Arendt saw plenty of it in her own time; intellectuals mobbed against her on at least two occasions. Not surprisingly, one is hard pressed to find in her work any mention of intellectuals as a group that is not disparaging. The attributes she disliked—self-importance, pomposity, a lack of nerve, a propensity to outrage, conformity to a line, and, not least, disloyalty to friends—are all amply showcased in the anti-Berkowitz/Botstein missive. By its very nature, politics entails dispute. It involves controversy, suffering, sacrifice, exposure, risk taking, ideological battle: principled stands fought in the open. Embodying Arendt’s conviction that “debate constitutes the very essence of political life,” the Hannah Arendt Center is a noble and much-needed forum for discussion about the most pressing matters of our time. Most of the credit for that initiative lies with the indefatigable Roger Berkowitz; he is fortunate to have the support of Bard’s president, Leon Botstein. I urge both of them to continue defending a space for the expression of rival views. They have, rightly, issued no apology for a nonexistent crime. When forums like the center are pilloried and their directors traduced, when a gang of intellectuals aims to determine who will and who will not speak in public, then we really have arrived at “illiberal democracy.” Unchecked and unopposed, worse is bound to follow. Peter Baehr Professor of Social Theory Lingnan University, Hong Kong Used with permission of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Copyright© 2018. All rights reserved.

The Academic Mobbing of the Arendt Center

Peter Baehr

Addressing the Inclusion of Marc Jongen Wilmot James Originally published on Medium, October 24, 2017.

The politically conservative right is surging worldwide. If moderating forces wish to influence, occupy, and hold the center so that things do not fall apart, they must come to grips with the issues that seize the right and determine whether there are any upon which to build common ground. There may well be none, but it is fundamentally important to discern whether there are any. To enable an authentic discussion, one needs an authentic conservative capable of rational discourse. Marc Jongen fitted the part. A German philosopher, essayist, and political activist, Jongen is regarded as one of the key intellectuals part of the far-right Alternative for Germany party that won 13 percent of the national vote in September. I looked forward to what he had to say at a conference that dealt with the crisis of democracy. Coming from South Africa, the land of apartheid, Jongen’s narrow-minded German chauvinism offended me, and I said so. I have had bitter experience with the consequences of rigid unicultural nationalistic thinking in a heterogeneous society. But Jongen said a few things that anyone concerned about the future of democracy should take very seriously indeed. Firstly, Jongen noted that he does not represent the populist right, a segment with which it is very difficult to hold a rational discussion because they have no real ideas and are basically anarchists. He leads a more thoughtful tendency with fairly clear programmatic objectives with which one may agree or disagree. Politics are a fight over ideas about resource distribution and a smart politician must know what that fight is about. Secondly, Jongen was aggrieved that German citizens were not consulted as to whether 1 million refugees fleeing the Syrian conflict should be resettled there. How deeply that feeling resonates in German society is not obvious, but that level and kind of leadership decision, right as it was in my outsiders’ view, requires widespread consultation and buy-in from the local people who have to act as a welcoming committee to strangers. Thirdly, Jongen claimed that he is no Nazi and no mad-hatter populist. He is a right-wing conservative politician who abides by constitutional values and pluralistic party politics. The challenge to moderating forces in democratic politics is to accept his credentials and hold him to it. Calling him names does not help. Describing him as someone he is not is dishonest. Prohibiting him to speak, as they do in Europe, merely silences a voice. The risk of alienating the rational right is national breakup and fragmentation. Germany is not South Africa, but that was the risk Nelson Mandela as president had to manage. He defused right-wing conservatives by taking 82

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

them seriously, listening to their views, and taking measures (such as having a pure proportional representative electoral system with no thresholds) to include rather than exclude. We should become equally strategic. Political correctness is not strategy. If we wish to defeat the conservative right, we must take them seriously, hear what they have to say, and come up with a compelling set of alternative ideas that resonate in the marketplace of votes in elections. That is why it is important to listen to people like Jongen, so that we know and understand what we need to counter and replace. Wilmot James, a former South African MP, is a visiting professor at Columbia University’s Medical Center and School of International and Public Affairs. He is a coeditor of Nelson Mandela’s presidential speeches, published as Nelson Mandela: In His Own Words (Little, Brown, 2013).

Addressing the Inclusion of Marc Jongen

Wilmot James

I could have assigned my class to read about far-right ideology, or to watch a video, but it wouldn’t have been the same as seeing this politician in the flesh. On 13 October, Marc Jongen, a leader of the German far-right populist party, AfD, engaged in an onstage conversation with New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma, as part of the annual conference given by Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center. Jongen’s participation in the conference, Crises of Democracy: Thinking in Dark Times, sparked intense debate. A damning letter published in the Chronicles of Higher Education and signed by dozens of academia’s brightest stars, criticized the Arendt Center director, Roger Berkowitz, and charged that the German politician’s inclusion “enabled him to leverage Hannah Arendt’s legacy to legitimize and normalize the AfD’s far-right ideology.” In a letter of his own, the Bard president, Leon Botstein, pushed back against the “self-righteous stance of the signatories and the moral condemnation of the letter.” And in the New Yorker, Masha Gessen sided with the academics: “An invitation to talk at a famous center at a prestigious college does lend legitimacy to the speaker and his views.” Arendt “stressed the simplicity and the ‘preposterous’ nature of ideas that underlie evil: these were ideas to be called out, not debated. She was also sensitive to the appearance of legitimacy that an invitation can lend.” It was pure coincidence that, on the afternoon of Jongen’s morning appearance at the conference, my Bard literature class met to discuss Gitta Sereny’s journalistic masterpiece, Into that Darkness. A book-length interview with Franz Stangl, the former Kommandant of the Treblinka extermination camp (where an estimated 1.2 million people were killed), Sereny’s book is based on conversations conducted in the German prison where Stangl was held after his capture in Brazil, and on interviews with Stangl’s loved ones, associates, and with Treblinka surviviors. Officially, my class is called “Literary Responses to Totalitarism,” but the range of the regimes in the plays, stories, novels and memoirs on the syllabus is so wide (from Pinochet to Pol Pot, from Stalin’s Russia to Atwood’s fictional Gilead and Philip Roth’s Nazi-ruled America) that it is more accurately a class about literature generated in response to—and in anticipation of—extreme and oppressive governments. The writers include Nadezhda

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

Mandelstam, Roberto Bolano, Nuruddin Farah, Wallace Shawn, Norman Manea and Spalding Gray. Because I am a novelist and not a historian, I tend to place a nuts-and-bolts emphasis on authorial decisions: determinations about tone, form, length, focus, dramatization, narration, etc. But because of the nature of the books, and because my students feel the pressure of the current political moment, our discussions range more widely. We talk about choice, resistance and complicity, about the ways that repressive governments take hold, about the assault on individuality, and the persecution of so-called enemies of the state. The week before Jongen’s appearance, we’d had an incisive and moving conversation about Primo Levi’s memoir, Survival in Auschwitz. My students admitted they’d found it a difficult book, because it is painful and dense. But they were full of praise for the mostly dispassionate, even taxonomic tone in which Levi (a scientist, after all) describes the routines, the prevailing spirit and the horrors of daily life in Auschwitz, a narrative calm broken by passages of deeper emotion and by reminders that the Nazi social experiment (that is how Levi describes it) took a brutal approach to the question of what it means to be human. My class’s response to the Sereny book was even stronger. One student saw a warning in the way in which the Nazi leaders and their minions viewed themselves as victims. Another spoke about Sereny’s ability to make us consider whether one person can decide that another should make a moral decision that will likely result in death. A student noted the confusing compassion he felt for so many of the people (even the evil ones) with whom Sereny spoke. And they kept returning to the book’s subtitle: An examination of conscience. What did Stangl tell himself? How could he do what he did? A quarter of my students had been to hear Marc Jongen that morning, and the discussion was different than it otherwise would have been. Unlike the academics and Gessen, they noticed that Jongen was not alone on stage, ranting and waving his arms, but was engaged in conversation with Buruma, who impressed the students with his civility, knowledge and, above all, his ability to make Jongen reveal what he was (“a Nazi,” they said) and not what he claimed to be (a thoughtful German citizen concerned about his nation). A Muslim student said that despite Jongen’s anti-Muslim ideology, he wanted to hear him; he didn’t want him shut down. Another suggested that what Buruma did was akin to what Sereny accomplished. They’d both tried get at the truth of who someone was: what he thought, and why. None believed that Jongen’s presence had legitimized his ideas; he hadn’t been awarded an honorary degree. Being invited to address a conference at a college, they agreed, was not like being asked to speak at a public rally. They were proud to be associated with a school that trusted their ability to weigh

My students heard a far-right politician on campus. Here’s what they learned.

Francine Prose

unpopular ideas, an institution brave enough to invite Jongen: an educational institution. They felt that hearing Jongen had been part of their education. It was. Seeing Jongen made them realize that the past is not the past (as Jongen insists) but the present as well, that the evil espoused by Hitler and carried out by Stangl did not die with them. Gessen writes that “what Jongen said has been heard before, and could have been discussed in his absence.” I disagree. I could have assigned my class to read about far-right ideology, or to watch a video, but it wouldn’t have been the same. It would not have had the effect of seeing Marc Jongen (as it were, in the flesh) and realizing that men of that sort are not all dead and gone, but remain a living, pernicious force in the world that my students are about to inherit.

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

Learning to Live Together in Our Political Reality Donna F. Johnson Originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, November 2, 2017.

To the Editor: I attended the “Crises of Democracy” conference at which Marc Jongen spoke. It was the fifth Hannah Arendt annual conference I’ve attended at Bard College. I am a Canadian—neither an academic nor an Arendt scholar—who comes to these conferences because I am concerned about the dismal state of U.S. and world politics, and because I have found in the Hannah Arendt Center a light in the darkness. The annual conference is a place where thoughtful Americans gather to think—and learn to think better. It is a place where difficult conversations regularly take place—conversations that attempt to go beyond positions, isms, parties, and ideologies in search of ways for human beings to live together in the political sphere, with all our differences of standpoint and opinion, without killing each other. Whatever the hot-button topic, Roger Berkowitz, the center’s director, makes a point of inviting speakers with divergent points of view. Berkowitz invites controversy, not for its own sake but in an effort to help us understand the thinking of people on various sides of the political spectrum and to grapple with the implications for living in a common world. It’s one of the things I value most about coming to Bard. Progressive values are reinforced and thinking is expanded. Sometimes I hear things I don’t want to hear, but it keeps me alive to the challenge of sharing the planet with people committed to a very different vision. The question before us always is this: how shall we live together in the political realm? There is always a large and diverse presence of high school and college students at these forums. The conference is a laboratory for respectful listening and speaking and for the hard work of understanding and judging. Given the level of rancor in American politics it is heartening to see young people—our future leaders—exposed to an elevated discourse and models of civil communication. They are given tools and the opportunity to use them. The microphone is open following each presentation. They—we—are never told what to think. We are taught how to think; encouraged at every turn to develop skills to analyze and evaluate what we read and hear. Difficult conversation is what the Hannah Arendt Center is all about; the struggle to understand and to become involved politically so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past. At last year’s conference we wrestled with race, sex, Learning to Live Together in Our Political Reality.

Donna F. Johnson

and religion and the growing practice on college campuses of disrupting or disinviting controversial speakers. During the highly contentious U.S. election, the center cosponsored a public dialogue between two supporters of Donald Trump and two supporters of Hillary Clinton. The event was billed as an attempt to understand each other. This is the context into which Marc Jongen was invited. I had never heard of him. I knew his party, the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), had made a historic breakthrough in Germany’s recent election, winning 13 percent of the vote, and that the country was on edge. I was interested to hear what he had to say. I am not, as I said, a political scientist or philosopher who has devoted his life to studying these movements. For me it was a rare opportunity to hear how a leader of the far right thinks, to learn his symbols, his language, his rationalizations and justifications. I might not have wanted to hear him on his own turf, but here at Bard, with plenty of brilliant minds on hand to challenge him, and in the company of many people with a deeply personal stake in thwarting the rise of extreme-right ideology, I welcomed the opportunity. I wanted to listen and make up my own mind. I consider it a mark of respect to me as a citizen to be permitted to think things through for myself. Is it dangerous? Yes. But what is the alternative? To have someone else determine what I should think, who I can or can’t listen to, what information I should be exposed to? I’m concerned about what is happening in Europe. I’m concerned about what is happening at my own dinner table some nights when a conservative friend or family member speaks against Muslims, immigrants, refugees, indigenous people, etc. Many of my American friends tell me of terrible splits in their families and communities since the U.S. election, and that they are holding things together by agreeing not to talk politics. These divisions are infecting all our countries. Jongen outlined the AfD platform clearly. He knew he was not preaching to the choir and said as much. He was given a respectful hearing, but as he spoke the temperature rose in the room. Some of the students behind me began to mumble “hashtag white supremacist.” Following his dialogue with Ian Buruma, participants lined up to confront him personally. I observed several of these conversations from the sidelines, commenting to one academic that people on the extreme right never seem to budge in their thinking. “There’s no changing their minds,” she agreed, “but we have to find a way to live together.” The fifty-plus scholars who signed the open letter to Roger Berkowitz and Leon Botstein worry, with reason, that Jongen will exploit his invitation to Bard College for his own ends. Through their thoughtful letter these distinguished scholars have played the role they wanted Bard to play. They have called out the speaker in no uncertain terms. Ironically, their public challenge has increased Jongen’s exposure exponentially, expanding his

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

platform to dozens of universities in at least ten other countries—the moral being, we cannot control the results of our actions. I went to Jongen’s Facebook page. Indeed, he has posted a video of his talk at the conference. I ran some of what he has written through Google Translate. About speaking at Bard, he writes, “Thus, the public space is conquered against great resistance.” This language sends a chill through my body. Like I’m walking through a graveyard. This is precisely what the writers of the open letter feared. Perhaps it is a mistake to give a right-wing extremist a platform. I scroll down the page. Further on I find this: the full agenda from the Hannah Arendt conference “Crises of Democracy: Thinking in Dark Times.” The full list of speakers, including their publications. And the entire conference video. Racism, populism, nativism, right-wing extremism were named and challenged by every other speaker on that program. Jongen has in his turn given a platform to the great political thinker Hannah Arendt and to the eminent scholars, artists, and activists who gathered on October 12th and 13th in her name. At the end of the day I would argue that the risks of inviting Jongen to Bard College are outweighed by the good that comes from allowing citizens the dignity to think and judge for themselves. This is the first step to developing the capacity to think critically—the precursor to civic engagement and political action. Donna F. Johnson Ottawa, Ontario Used with permission of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Copyright© 2018. All rights reserved.

Learning to Live Together in Our Political Reality.

Donna F. Johnson

Faith in Open Discourse Matt Harris Originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, November 20, 2017.

To the Editor: I feel I must first acknowledge the incredible intellectual weight of the signatories of this open letter (“An Open Letter to the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College,” The Chronicle Review, October 23) and their impact in political science, political theory, and related fields. So early in my undergraduate career, a few of these signatories have already influenced me substantially. One in particular, Judith Butler, has significantly changed my views on feminism and Zionism, with her witty corned beef sandwich gag. One day, far in the future, I hope to join the ranks of these accomplished academics that I respect very deeply. However, neither my respect nor the many illustrious signatories makes the arguments presented in the open letter correct on face value. I attended the conference at Bard College and heard Dr. Jongen speak. I can say that my stomach hurt when he spoke; I felt physically ill. His perspectives run counter to many of my political opinions and values. Yet, I am glad to have been in the audience, to have seen the productive and critical discussion that arose as Dr. Jongen was critiqued, questioned by the audience, and confronted with facts. It was very valuable for me to see this exchange. We must hear the other side speak and understand how they view the world in a setting where the perpetrators of hateful rhetoric can be deliberately examined and perhaps dismissed. Yes, Dr. Jongen was given a platform, but he was not given support; no one walked out of that conference committed to the AfD party’s values. Islamophobic, antirefugee and anti-immigrant sentiments exist in our world, and are increasingly incorporated into mainstream political thought and the discourse and decisions of our leaders. Not only would censoring these ideas run counter to liberal democracy but it also turns a blind eye to the development of hateful and xenophobic rhetoric that we see so blatantly in mass politics today. Make no mistake: Dr. Jongen, in my opinion, is wrong and harbors dangerous viewpoints. But, placing him on a podium and allowing the audience, moderator, and critic to publicly question him gave us the opportunity to consider his arguments, and as a collective, wholly disregard them. Dr. Jongen, who has a doctorate in philosophy, quite frankly embarrassed himself. He was not given privilege; he was overtly critiqued. He was not “legitimized” and his opinions did not threaten the plurality, for his opinion is part of the plurality which the Hannah Arendt Center rightfully presents. After the conference, a few of my peers and I approached Dr. Jongen and discussed the proceedings of the conference. He seemed visibly shaken by 90

Discussion: Does Democracy Need to Be More Populist?

them, as if he had just run a marathon with little training and not enough water. This, of course, is an apt metaphor for what he had just done: he spoke expecting to be lightly critiqued, but instead his views were soundly dismissed as foolish. He even thought he might find a few allies, but there were none. No one but the four of us, undergraduates at a neighboring college, even spoke with him afterwards. No one reinforced his worldview, no one offered him directions, no one wished him goodbye. To be clear, he was not dehumanized; he was just lost. I was actually saddened by our exchange; I felt sorry for him. I kept looking for him to be mean or cold, but all I found was a lost man with dreary, watery, gray eyes smelling slightly of cologne in a gray suit and looking, with darting eyes, for people to talk to; I found a lost human in front of me. I do not mean to oppose the perspective of the signatories, only to offer a perspective, however novice, from an unaffiliated point of view. This exchange was of paramount importance to my education and understanding of political discourse. Being present for the critique of Dr. Jongenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reactionary and divisive opinions has cemented my faith in open discourse and given me the tools to engage in such debate with his American counterparts. Matt Harris Marist College Class of 2020 Used with permission of The Chronicle of Higher Education. CopyrightÂŠ 2018. All rights reserved.

Faith in Open Discourse

Matt Harris

Is the Private Political?

The Fragility of Persons and the Need for the Imaginary Domain Drucilla Cornell

In this essay, I will argue that embodied human beings demand many forms of so-called “public support” in order to engage in the project that I have called becoming a person. Privacy, both in Anglo-European philosophy and in the jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court, has always turned on the notion of the individual as a given and the legal person as an expression of this idea of a self-contained subject inextricably tied to private property and literal spaces of retreat. Feminism is not antiprivacy in any simple sense; instead, a feminist rethinking of what is of value in privacy demands that the entire discourse of the private and the public be rethought, particularly because of the fragility of our lives as embodied human beings. In 1995, in a text called The Imaginary Domain, I argued that we need an entirely new political and ethical rhetoric to adequately defend crucial rights for which feminists have fought.1 Here I am going to focus on the right to abortion, but it is only one of many examples. I argue in that text—and I still hold to this position—that the imaginary domain is the moral, legal, and ethical space that embodied and sexuate human beings need in order to play out their different personas. This domain enables us to be the source of our own imaginary and narratives of how we have embodied ourselves as sexuate beings who inevitably see themselves through an unconscious imago that can be endlessly played with, re-preformed, and ultimately re-narrated in the infinite project of becoming a person. Key to this argument is the idea that the person is not a given but rather a project that we pursue throughout our lives. This project demands at least three minimum conditions of individuation. They are as follows: “1) bodily integrity, 2) access to symbolical forms sufficient to achieve linguistic skills permitting the differentiation of oneself from others, and 3) the protection of the imaginary domain itself.”2 These minimum conditions of individuation could turn us to a much more profound understanding of transindividuality—the notion that human interactions make us who we are—as it has been particularly embodied in African philosophy. Unfortunately, it is beyond the scope of this essay to go into transindividuality further. I will now discuss the way I use the word person. A person is what shines through a mask even though the concept of the mask is the usual association made with the word persona, which in Latin means literally “shine through.” For a person to be able to shine through she must first be able to imagine herself as a whole, even if she knows that she can never truly succeed in becoming a whole person, or indeed succeed

The Fragility of Persons and the Need for the Imaginary Domain

Drucilla Cornell

at differentiating between the mask and the “self.” The equal worth of each one of us demands as a matter of legal equality an equivalent basis for the chance to transform ourselves into the individuated beings we think of as persons. The project of the imaginary domain is to synchronize the values of equality and freedom, and in a certain sense to rethink what is of value in the legal notion of privacy. That “the personal is political” (a famous saying in the third wave of feminism) is of course in no way part of an antiprivacy movement; rather, it is deeply rooted in the long history of how erotic transformation, challenges to heteronormativity, and the viscous misogynistic abjection of the feminine must always be part of radical transformation. In The Spirit of Revolution: Beyond the Dead Ends of Man, Stephen Seely and I make an extended argument about how radical transformation is integral to any meaningful revolution.3 The imaginary domain as a legal right would, of course, be only one aspect of such sweeping transformation. But as I will now argue, it does allow us to defend the right to abortion on the basis of equality. Justice Blackmun in his original decision in Roe v. Wade found he faced a dilemma. He could not defend the right to abortion on the basis of privacy. And why was that the case? Because most of our decisions (“our” being the United States Supreme Court) have defined privacy as the right to have a space, in which the state has no business interfering.4 Equality was also not a possible basis for Blackmun, because equality under our jurisprudence turns on comparisons between men and women, and pregnancy is a real difference between the sexes, and all attempts to find an equivalent condition in men, such as heart attack or prostate cancer, seemed to falter or to be outright ridiculous. To quote Justice Blackmun, The pregnant woman cannot be isolated in her privacy. She carries an embryo and, later, a fetus, if one accepts the medical definitions of the developing young in the human uterus. See Dorland’s Medical Dictionary 478–479, 547 (24th edition 1965). The situation therefore is inherently different from marital intimacy, or bedroom possession of obscene material, or marriage, or procreation, or education, with which Eisenstadt and Griswold, Stanley, Loving, Skinner, and Peirce and Meyer were respectively concerned.5 Blackmun has been criticized by the left and the right, and indeed the middle, for the incoherence of his decision, but in fact he did not have the jurisprudential resources to defend the right to abortion—and let me emphasize the “to,” because our Supreme Court, and indeed our Constitution, has not been comfortable with imposing positive obligations on the part of the state. In the first trimester, the “public” nature of the abortion led the court

Is the Private Political?

to include the doctor in the process of a decision. In the second trimester, Blackmun realized that women might need much more extensive medical care. What is often forgotten in Blackmun’s judgment is that the second trimester begins before “viability,” when the baby can supposedly live outside the mother’s body. His primary concern was to provide effective health care for second-trimester abortions. It was only in the third trimester that the state could weigh in the interest of the infant against the right of the mother: since fetuses are not persons under our constitutional jurisprudence, they do not have rights.6 In a series of judgments following Roe, Webster, and Casey, the court allowed states to enjoin public facilities and employees from providing abortion. They did so on the basis that such restrictions did not infringe on the woman’s right to “choose.”7 In the case of Casey further restrictions were placed on how and under what conditions women could get even first-trimester abortions.8 Of course, today, the state’s interest in protecting fetal life now goes all the way through pregnancy. The language of choice, of course, is completely inadequate: if a woman is terminating an unwanted pregnancy, she obviously didn’t choose to get pregnant. Our bodies are not our own, and to avoid the horror of abortions done illegally in terrifying isolated conditions with “medical equipment” such as coat hangers Blackmun knew that he had to provide women with actual material support in order for them to have safe abortions. The right to an abortion obviously goes way beyond the notion of choice. And yet the critics are right that Blackmun’s judgment falters into incoherence, despite its creativity, precisely because privacy and gender equality jurisprudence could not give an adequate account of the right to abortion. But I would argue that the equal protection (to use legal language) of the minimum conditions of individuation would allow the right to abortion to be justified as a matter of equality. To do so, we have to understand exactly why the body, from the very beginning, needs to be able to protect itself as a whole, even when that “who” is indeed imaginary. In the text The Imaginary Domain, I relied on Jacques Lacan to argue that the infant needs the mirroring of others in order to see himself or herself as whole. This projection of bodily integration is necessary to avoid psychosis and, as Lacan always tells us, the ego in the imaginary is a bodily ego.9 From the beginning, then, the infant is dependent on others for a projected wholeness. It is not only through the mirroring process that the infant comes to have an imagined bodily coherence—and yes, it is imagined, which is why we need the space of the imaginary domain. The body’s coherence depends on the future anteriority of the projection, in that what is yet to be imagined is already given. The infant, then, does not recognize a self that is already there in the mirror. Instead, the self is constituted in and through the mirroring process as other to its reality of bodily disorganization, and does this by having itself mirrored by others as a whole. The Lacanian account allows us to

The Fragility of Persons and the Need for the Imaginary Domain

Drucilla Cornell

understand just how fragile the achievement of individuation is and why we so desperately need the protection of minimum conditions of individuation. The denial of the right to abortion should be understood as a serious symbolic assault on a woman’s sense of self precisely because it thwarts the projection of bodily integration and places the woman’s body in the hands of the imagination of others who would deny her coherence by separating her womb from herself. It is not an exaggeration, then, to say that the denial of the right to abortion can be understood as the symbolic dismemberment of women’s bodies. It is only in the worst kind of masculine fantasy that wombs wander. The wrong, as I have described it, begins long before any woman actually becomes pregnant, because our bodies are taken away from our own imagined projection of the meaning of our sexuate being.10 Pregnancy is not like prostate cancer or a heart attack; it is a unique condition. But if we are to equally protect minimum conditions of individuation, then we can justify the right to abortion and all the facilities needed to support it on the basis of equality. The right to always demands that we recognize the public nature of the support we need, even if we are “healthy,” to have our imaginary domain protected, so that our sexuate being and other forms of primary identification are ours to narrate, not the state’s. This is also a basic matter of freedom, because it is in the case of abortion that women are given the freedom of imagination to narrate the meaning of their own experience. Some feminists had difficulties with any women who said that they regretted their abortion or found it a tragic experience. In order to defend the right to choose, it seems that abortion had to be labeled a fairly trivial matter. But under the imaginary domain and bodily integrity, it is the woman who has, as part of her right, the ability to narrate her own imagined projection of the meaning of the bodily experience. I agree with Justice O’Connor that viability became a very incoherent standard for when the state’s interest in the fetus could trump the woman’s right as defended in Roe v. Wade.11 My response, today as in 1995, is that there is one coherent standard, and that is to recognize the right to abortion all the way through the cutting of the umbilical cord; then the baby is truly outside of the woman’s body. On what basis did I, and do I, defend the imaginary domain and minimum conditions for individuation? I still think Lacan is helpful, but we could also get to the fragility of the human body and the need for public support of it through other intellectual heritages, such as African philosophy, as I suggested earlier, and its notion of transindividuality.12 But how does one judge whether or not the imaginary domain is right? The answer is that it is an aesthetic idea in Immanuel Kant’s sense. Famously, Kant argues that the great ideas of reason cannot be known but only configured, and therefore the reflexive judgment on these ideals cannot have rules that tell us definitely what is right or wrong.13 The promise of the imaginary domain and the minimum conditions of individuation was that they could synchronize the values

Is the Private Political?

of freedom and equality in that emotionally fraught sphere of life we call sex and sexuate being, but it would always be applicable, as I have argued, to other forms of primary identification such as language rights. Whether or not this synchronization has been achieved demands judgment as to whether justifying abortion in this way empowers women to give their own meaning to their abortions, to imagine their own bodies, and to represent their “sex” with joy within their difference.

1. D rucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain: Abortion, Pornography and Sexual Harassment (London: Routledge, 1995), 3–31. 2. Ibid., 4. 3. Drucilla Cornell and Stephen Seely, The Spirit of Revolution: Beyond the Dead Ends of Man (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 1–14. 4. Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (London: Routledge, 1992), 147–54. 5. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). 6. Cornell, The Imaginary Domain, 55–64. 7. Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 U.S. 490 (1989). 8. Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992). 9. Cornell, The Imaginary Domain, 38–43. 10. Ibid., 43–55. 11. Ibid., 65–69. 12. Cornell and Seely, The Spirit of Revolution, 132–42. 13. Immanuel Kant and Norman Kemp Smith, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Boston: Bedford, 1929).

The Fragility of Persons and the Need for the Imaginary Domain

Drucilla Cornell

Birthing Feminist Freedom Lori Jo Marso

Taping her Netflix comedy special (Baby Cobra) while visibly pregnant, Ali Wong says she tricked her boyfriend into marrying her. She doesn’t want to work, she confides to the audience; she wants to stay home and relax! Claiming she is the kind of feminist who does not want to “lean in” but instead wants to “lie down,” Ali Wong’s feminist comedy rejects the verticality of the “stand-up” routine and the stated public ambitions of feminist politics (Wong 2016). Wong’s claim to want to lie down prompts me to wonder which postures express freedom, and her pregnancy draws my attention to the birthing of feminist freedom. Should feminists stand like the men, lean in to the corporate table, lie down on the daybed? Beginning with beginnings, at scenes of birth, my essay explores postures of birth as metaphor for birthing feminist freedom. A quick Google search yields suggestions for several birthing postures—some envisioned alone—rocking, squatting, leaning forward—and some envisioned with others—squatting with a partner, semi-sitting with a partner. To suggest that we not stand, squat, or lean alone but rather actively enlist support immediately adds others, in addition to the mother, to the scene of birth. But lest we forget, the mother is already, to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendt, two-in-one. The addition of others (mother plus child, and more) begins to make for a crowd. Or maybe it’s an assembly? Is the birthing room suddenly a public space? What will the baby (aptly named Freedom) make possible when she appears?

Metaphors Matter Starting with questions about postures of freedom and postures specifically imagined as birthing feminist freedom, I follow Hannah Arendt’s interest in natality as metaphor for freedom and action. While freedom for Arendt inheres in speech and action—it is the disclosure of the “who” rather than the “what” in our appearance, and hence is worldly and political—natality as actual birth is, for Arendt, private, natural, nonpolitical. And yet Arendt chooses birth as metaphor for the emergence of freedom, and singles out the newborn to affirm our faith in new beginnings. Arendt contends, but only as metaphor, each birth is a new beginning, a disclosure of uniqueness, an appearance in the world, the event of our first appearance to others. Pressing upon natality as metaphor to consider actual birthing postures as metaphor for birthing feminist freedom, I challenge the divisions Arendt so carefully crafted between private and public. The metaphors we prefer for postures

Is the Private Political?

that make birth possible and that make freedom possible (lying down, leaning in, pushing with others) affect and shape our practices of freedom. To question Arendt’s boundary drawing is not a new thing to do, and it is especially not a new feminist thing to do. Others have ably discussed the erasure and denigration of women’s reproductive role, the ways birth is made political by the state’s regulation of the right to abortion and birth control, the regulation of women’s bodies, and how medical professions and norms control women’s reproduction. I am interested here in exploring what is lost when having used natality as metaphor for action and freedom Arendt then too cleanly separates the natality of physical birth from natality as the appearance of the new in public space. I press upon Arendt’s use of natality as metaphor to argue that the encounter between mother and child (and others, if others are present) at the moment of physical birth is itself a political moment where freedom might be seized, diminished, or squandered. The postures taken here portend postures we take toward freedom in public space. Not only that: the birth of a child is itself a moment of action and potential freedom. For one thing, it unfolds in a space of encounter: there are always at least two, mother and child (and many times, several others), present. Secondly, the postures and practices valorized or erased in this space are significant for how we think of freedom in public space. Think, for example, of Hobbesian men who spring from the earth like mushrooms to express their desires in a way of life that is nasty, brutal, and short. Freedom in the Hobbesian world is reduced to self-interest. For Arendt, as we well know, freedom is much more and depends on conditions of plurality. While there may not be strict Arendtian plurality in the birthing room (for Arendt, plurality is not simply alterity; it is a political condition where we are able to disclose ourselves and the world, something an infant is not able to do), drawing on the work of Simone de Beauvoir, I argue that encounters in the space of birth are political in that they diminish or expand freedom. I am not arguing that the private is always political or that there is no distinction between private and political, personal and public. As Linda Zerilli (2016a) insists, to treat the private as always political is to risk missing how, when, and by which actions (usually collective actions) the private can be politicized. It also misses specifically feminist reasons for not politicizing the private, for standing against that sometimes, too. As feminists have long shown, line-drawing between private and public—how, where, and when—is a political action. What is surprising to me about Arendt’s line-drawing is that the newborn is the private thing able to cross the line. She, the newborn (or more commonly, He the newborn in the Christian imaginary, the baby Jesus), makes the leap into the public space of appearance while the laboring body (and the people engaged in facilitating that labor, the Virgin Mary’s imaginary sisters) remain in private. Leaving aside for a moment how Arendt is able to cleanly separate

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natality from labor and the body, and from the laboring body of the mother, thinking about this unlikely leap makes me wonder about what enables leaping. I will ask how imagining the postures and movements of bodies, leaping or limping from private to public, alone or together, and from being prevented from making that transition, alone or together, affects the way we think about freedom in the public sphere and how we think, too, about the politics of appearance, so important to Arendt’s theorization of freedom.

Leaning In In a recent book called Inclinations, Adriana Cavarero (2016) urges us to think about leaning in, but differently than Sheryl Sandberg does in her well-known advice to America’s women in the book called Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013). Rather than simply coax women to lean in to leadership, ambition, and work like Sandberg does, or do the opposite and just lie down as Wong prefers, Cavarero critically examines posture as metaphor for freedom. Doing so, she draws attention to the shortsightedness and sterility of the height and uprightness (and normatively, the rightness) of standing or verticality as metaphor for freedom. Criticizing the masculinity of philosophy by seeing verticality as gendered male, Cavarero explores inclination as an alternative to verticality. She says to incline means to “bend, to lean down, and to lower” (2016: 3). Tracing inclination into the history of philosophy, Cavarero leans towards Arendt and her comments on natality. Cavarero admits this: “natality is perhaps the most original category of thought that Arendt gave to the twentieth century.” She adds, though: “In Arendt’s reflections, birth, rather than being a biological phenomenon (incorporating, for example, the processes of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth), is essentially a scenario, a given of human experience—a theme for the imaginary in much the same way that death has been a theme for philosophy” (Cavarero 2016, 113–14). Just as philosophy tends to clean the scenario of death from all marks of its embodiment and the often quite difficult process of dying, Arendt, too, abstracts from the phenomenology of birth to make political use of the concept of natality. Arendt leans away from the mother, ignoring her role in birth, an indispensable one, to instead focus on the newborn—specifically the appearance of the newborn. A child has been born unto us! The passive voice makes us wonder exactly how that child got here, how the child made the leap not only into the public sphere, but into the world. The mother cannot leap, nor can she appear. The same is true for any caregivers at the scene of birth, those who may support the mother: hold her hand, wipe the sweat, produced by labor, from her brow. The baby, the one whose name is Freedom, is curiously alone, even though Arendt tells us it is this same baby who guarantees plurality. To ask these questions leads to more: what difference does focusing on one posture—standing up, leaning in, lying down, or in this case unsupported

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leaping—make for Arendt’s version of freedom? Arendt insists that the newborn’s appearance onto the scene of the world marks the unpredictability of beginning, celebrates the possibility of the new, and emphasizes plurality as the condition that makes freedom with others the sine qua none of political life. If we, for a moment, agree that the newborn is not only unlikely but also completely unable to leap from the private to the public, without the support of the mother or any others, we should also agree that leaping is not likely a good candidate as a metaphor for the posture of birthing freedom. A newborn cannot stand up without support, nor even raise her head. Challenging Arendt’s boundary drawing but following her direction, let’s consider other birth scenarios and other postures. Recall for a moment that Arendt is in no way reluctant to use birth as metaphor and that, as already noted, she seizes specifically on the appearance of the newborn as a metaphor for plurality, beginning, unpredictability, politics, action, and hence freedom. Judith Butler, another astute reader of Arendt, takes seriously Arendt’s observation that to speak of appearance we have to consider spectators. As Arendt knows so well, we appear to others, not alone to ourselves. And yet, Arendt refuses on principle to consider how our bodies appear as already saturated with political meanings. Whiteness, straightness, youth, able-bodiedness, maleness—or the deviations from these norms, always situates, and sometimes fully determines, whether and how we can appear in public space and how we will be received. As feminist thinkers have demonstrated, the first proclamation made about the newborn at the scene of birth—It’s a girl! or It’s a boy!—is itself a politically charged declaration and sometimes a decision. For Simone de Beauvoir, who acknowledges the twoness of pregnancy and birth, figuring freedom as a birth already positions it as plurality. The mother is there to acknowledge the appearance of the child, the child to acknowledge the mother. And there may be more, such as the hospital workers anxious to document the sex of the child. Adriana Cavarero also acknowledges the presence of the mother, although not any other caretakers in the room, and she imagines the mother as inclined toward the infant in a caring arc. Cavarero relies on the Christian imaginary of nativity to emphasize the child’s original dependence on the mother. Mary inclines forward, with a protective gaze, over her son (see page 102). In this Christian imaginary, Christ shares his vulnerability and original dependency with humanity (Cavarero 2016, 97). As Bonnie Honig aptly demonstrates, however, to imagine this scene in this way obscures other scenes and other kinds of inclination. Speaking of sororal inclination in Antigone, Honig (2013) notices Antigone’s whispered confidences to Ismene in the play’s first scene, and the sister’s conspiratorial collusions in their final scene together. Unwilling to obscure the agonism that is often intertwined with care, Honig shows that the sisters differ, beseech, and forgive each other in various scenes. As Honig also notices, the inclination that Cavarero claims is maternal care is also performed by Antigone at the scene of

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Leonardo da Vinci. The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. Oil on wood, c. 1503. Louvre Museum. Wikimedia Commons.

the burial of Polynices. This is a feminine, potentially feminist, posture, but it is not just about natality and cannot be claimed for women just via maternity. Like Honig and contra Cavarero, Beauvoir is also unwilling to separate care and agonism, emphasizing its twinned presence even at the scene of birth. She claims that mother and infant might react to each other in a variety of ways. Doing so, Beauvoir affords the newborn some agency (if not Arendtian action) and refuses to claim to already know the intentions and desires of every mother. Beauvoir says that the infant can turn away, refuse to nurse, make bonding difficult or impossible. As the baby grows into a child, she is more than a mirror reflecting the motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s desire. As Beauvoir explains, â&#x20AC;&#x153;The

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mother can have her reasons for wanting a child, but she cannot give to this other—who tomorrow is going to be—his own raisons d’être; she engenders him in the generality of his body, not in the specificity of his existence” ([1949] 2011, 539). And for the mother anything is possible too: women who were reluctant mothers might find themselves charmed by their infants, and those who desired motherhood ardently may feel the opposite. These conflicting and unpredictable feelings begin even in pregnancy described by Beauvoir as “a drama playing itself out in the woman between her and herself; she experiences it both as an enrichment and a mutilation; the fetus is part of her body, and it is a parasite exploiting her” ([1949] 2011, 538). Will the baby become enemy, ally, or friend? The outcome depends on situation, ambiguity, and encounter. Beauvoir situates the infant neither as an autonomous actor (like Arendt does) nor as a dependent extension of the mother (as Cavarero does). For Beauvoir, the infant is an “other” whose desires and dreams can be denied or realized in freedom with the mother or others. Even with the mother, whether freedom will be enriched or denied depends on the encounter and what the two, in this case mother and infant, make of it. As Beauvoir insists of every encounter: “I can invent the most urgent appeals, try my best to charm . . . but [the other] will remain free to respond to those appeals or not, no matter what I do” ([1944] 2004, 136). As we see above in The Second Sex and other writings, Beauvoir not only describes postures of birth but also describes postures for birthing freedom. Especially important for Beauvoir is who is on the scene for both events and how they react within encounters. Encounters between actors might result in asking for, offering, providing, or withholding material forms of support. Mutual care, or even sharing a direction, are neither necessary nor predestined outcomes of any encounter at the scene of birth, not even the encounter between mother and child. These embodied postures, the movements that create the in-between, as Arendt would put it, at the scene of birth as well as in the public sphere, mark how encounters produce, diminish, deny, or enhance conditions of freedom. When we recognize private spaces as potentially political spaces, we have to additionally acknowledge the many political roles that not only individuals (the ones Arendt makes invisible: mothers, caretakers, doctors) but also the state can play. The state can recognize family violence, the state can define or redefine marriage, the state might provide daycare and health care services, or the state might, as we are warned by Wendy Brown’s early work (1995), become a too-willing partner with feminists, one that, for example, defines pornography in ways that assume and attempts to fix the desires of women. But Bonnie Honig’s Public Things (2017) and Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos (2015) each caution that in these times we should defend what the state can do for us, and we should try to enlist it.

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Arendt Lies Down Thinking with feminist theorists, we can more readily see that several kinds of encounters at scenes of birth, including both those where the state is involved and those that seem to be wholly private or natural, affect the birth of freedom. Arendt’s unwillingness to see these encounters as political makes the interrogation of how metaphors matter less likely. If we accept Arendt’s singling out of the newborn as the metaphor that matters for matters of freedom, we miss how the scene of birth is embodied, that it is shared by more than one, that it is affected by state intervention and contingent on reactions and encounters between those on the scene. To make these encounters visible and to see how and why they become political, we must contest Arendt’s depiction of the newborn as alone, as unmarked by bodily characteristics, and as able to leap alone from private to public. To use the newborn the way Arendt does, as metaphor for spontaneity, novelty, and plurality, denies the role of others (in particular the mother), the postures of encounter between actors, and between actors and the state, that combine to situate the birth or stillbirth of freedom. While I challenge Arendt on the postures of birth and their implications for birthing freedom, I am drawn to the depiction of her posture in Margarethe von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt (2013). Arendt is often shown lying down, in the film, on a daybed no less: she is not eating bonbons and watching daytime television; she is smoking and thinking. Thinking, she is with others who are absent but whom she brings to mind. There is a constant conversation going on in Arendt’s head, one that is impossible for a camera to capture. For Honig (2015), Arendt’s couch becomes a scene for psychoanalysis as well as a scene for thinking. For me, it becomes a scene for noting how Arendt theorizes the two-in-one as disembodied thinking versus Beauvoir’s pregnant body (Marso 2017). But this scene may offer even more possibilities. Moving postures of birth into a space of public judgment and scrutiny, feminists such as myself follow Arendt’s lead on matters of thinking and judgment as she lies on her daybed. Here is the real Arendt, also inclining (see opposite). Arendt tells us that thinking brings to mind things or people that do not appear, and that when we think of these things and people, we can move them from the realm of settled knowledge into the space of appearance where judgments can be rendered. This is a brilliant explanation of how the personal, or the private, becomes political. As Linda Zerilli explains in A Democratic Theory of Judgment, getting objects into view to be collectively judged is a political act: the objects themselves need not be already considered political objects (Zerilli 2016b, 8–9). But as Bonnie Honig (2017) shows, the objects do a lot more than serve as a site for judgment. Drawing on Arendt and Winnicott, Honig argues that public things are shapers and sources of our capacity to care for the world (2017, Lecture 2). When we query the scene of birth, asking who is there, what is their posture, what are the possibilities and meanings of their

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Portrait of Hannah Arendt by photographer Fred Stein, 1949. Fred Stein Archive/Getty Images.

encounters on this scene, and how do these, even the objects, affect the birth of freedom, what we are doing is (borrowing from Honig) a kind of feminist care for the world that asks how the private is political. Via this kind of questioning and thinking, we create a political space for the birth of freedom. That Arendt produces this process in her head, lying down on a daybed, makes newly powerful to me Ali Wongâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s suggestion that lying down is the posture that best expresses feminist freedom. But when Arendt lies down on her couch, she is enabled to be alone by a world of caregiving, also depicted in von Trottaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s film. Arendt is able to think in a reclining position on her daybed precisely because of the care of others, not least of all the interventions of her female friends on her behalf: in particular, Mary McCarthy and Lotte Kohler, her personal secretary. Returning to the scene of birth, we know that there is always a woman, the mother, and there are often others too, others doing the labor that makes appearance possible. To forget them is to fail to make present, to fail to make appear, those whose presence in the public sphere is disallowed or invisible for a variety of always political reasons. To not understand this is to fail to take Arendtâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work on thinking seriously. With Ali Wong, we might ironically conclude that lying on her daybed, Arendt embodies the posture that births feminist freedom. It is certainly a better metaphor than the leaping newborn.

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Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. [1958] 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beauvoir, Simone de. 2004. Philosophical Writings. Edited by Margaret A. Simons. The Beauvoir Series. 7 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. [1949] 2011. The Second Sex. Trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage. Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Brooklyn: Zone Books. Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. Flexner Lectures. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cavarero, Adriana. 2016. Inclinations. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Honig, Bonnie. 2013. Antigone, Interrupted. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2015. “Arendt on the Couch.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. 26 (2): 93–105. ———. 2017. Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair. Thinking Out Loud Lectures. New York. Fordham University Press. Marso, Lori Jo. 2017. Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter. Durham: Duke University Press. Sandberg, Sheryl. 2013. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. New York: Knopf. Trotta, Margarethe von. 2013. Hannah Arendt. Zeitgeist Films. Wong, Ali. 2016. Baby Cobra. Netflix Special. Zerilli, Linda M. G. 2016a. “Politics.” The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory. Ed. Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016b. A Democratic Theory of Judgment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Beyond the Private/Public Distinction: Phenomenological and Political Dimensions of Birth in Arendt’s Thought Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

“For some time now, a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward making life also ‘artificial,’ toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature. It is the same desire to escape from the imprisonment to the earth that is manifest in the attempt to create life in the test tube, in the desire to mix ‘frozen germ plasm from people of demonstrated ability under the microscope to produce superior human beings.’” “There is no reason to doubt our ability to destroy all organic life on earth.” —Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Arendt’s thinking confronts us with an unresolvable ambiguity regarding the private/public distinction: Does she treat this distinction as a historical institution, elaborated in political philosophy, in order to diagnose its collapse in Western modernity? Or does she want to preserve in some measure its normative status? What obviously undermines the private/public distinction in Arendt’s work is her analysis of the modern historical phenomenon, which she calls the rise of the social and which, as I and Rosalyn Diprose argue in Arendt, Natality, and Biopolitics (2018), can be more fruitfully rethought as the rise of biopolitics. Although the status of the private/public spheres is less clear on the methodological and normative levels of Arendt’s thinking, we can nonetheless argue that the key concept of natality also calls this historical institution into question. Such a rethinking of the private/public divide is called for by Arendt’s phenomenological description of the event of birth as the appearance in the world, and by her famous claim that natality—sometimes regarded merely as a second order of political birth—is both the condition of political action and “the central category” of political thought. Let me begin with the question of biopolitics and its implications for the private/public distinction. The claim about the biopolitical character of Arendt’s thought is elaborated in depth in Diprose and Ziarek (2018). Developing Agamben’s claim that Arendt is the first thinker of biopolitics, we argue that her influential philosophy of natality both anticipates and provides an alternative to the biopolitical theories of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. While Beyond the Private/Public Distinction

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Foucault does not have Arendt’s and Agamben’s in-depth accounts of either totalitarianism or racism, Agamben’s biopolitics of “bare life,” unlike Foucault’s and Arendt’s, fails to address in detail the nuanced operation of discrimination within biopolitics in neoliberal democracies. And both Foucault and Agamben ignore the way that biopolitics, working in tandem with political theology, sexism, and racism, targets women’s reproductive agency. By contrast, we argue that Arendt’s philosophy of natality provides the means of diagnosing interconnections between three dangers that biopolitics poses within Western democracies today: first, the ongoing destruction of human plurality, enacted precisely through the conjunction of racism with homophobia, Islamophobia, neoliberalism, and biopolitics; second, a continuous threat of fascism and right-wing populism; and, finally, the increasing restrictions of women’s reproductive freedom. However, we also argue that what distinguishes Arendt’s philosophy of natality from other accounts of biopolitics is her powerful account of agency, interrelational freedom, and action, all of which provide means of countering the negative effects of biopolitics in ways usually ignored by other thinkers of biopolitics. And this Arendtian contribution has important consequences for political theory and feminist theory alike. Natality is therefore both the target of biopolitics and a condition of political action, which provides the means for overcoming the negative effects of biopolitics and neoliberalism. We reinterpret the frequently misunderstood Arendtian concept of “the rise of the social” and her account of the precursors of totalitarianism vis-à-vis Foucault’s definition of biopolitics by paying particular attention to the changed character of labor in the public sphere, political and economic “organization of the life process itself ” (HC, 46), statistical analysis of the population, and the substitution of action by normalized behavior. As Arendt has already pointed out in The Origins of Totalitarianism, such normalization works in tandem with eugenics and the criminalization of racialized and sexualized “abnormal” identities. However, we extend Arendt’s analysis to show how biopolitics targets women’s reproductive agency. In fact, we argue that it is impossible to reclaim and recalibrate Arendt’s theory of natality for feminism and political theory today without confronting head on the politics of reproduction, abortion, and women’s reproductive freedom. Furthermore, as the epigrams at the beginning of this essay suggest, the conjunction of racism and the biopolitics of reproduction—alluded to in Arendt’s reference to eugenics at work in the production of life in a test tube—is intertwined with our capability to destroy all organic life. This interconnection between the biopolitics of reproduction and the destruction of the planet makes the famous Foucauldian distinction of the two operations of biopolitics —make live and let die (Foucault 2003, 240–63)—inoperative. Consequently, one of the important biopolitical implications of Arendt’s thought, evident in both The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, is that the conceptual significance and political institutions based on the

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distinctions between private and public, nature and history, life and death, are no longer working in Western modernity. The unprecedented emergence of totalitarianism erases the difference between zoe (natural life) and bios (political life), between living and dying. Totalitarian terror and the “ghastly” (OT, 438) horror of total domination in the camps destroys both bios and zoe, and in their place aims to “fabricate” what did not yet exist, a kind of “new species” characterized only by a predictable “bundle of reactions,” species different even from animal life because stripped from the organic spontaneity of life itself (OT, 438). In a different historical context of The Human Condition, biopolitical implications of “the rise of the social” also undermine the traditional distinction between the private and the public, and submit the laboring and reproductive bodies to biomedical experiments, technology, standardization of behavior, and the biopolitical administration of life. In the modern world of biopolitics, power invested in zoe attempts to create bios that would be quantifiable in terms enhanced behavior rather than action This double biopolitical framework, which attempts to cut “the last tie” with organic life, as Arendt puts it in the prologue to The Human Condition, raises a crucial question about the status of the inherited political distinctions—private and public, zoe and bios, labor and action—that operate in some contexts of Arendt’s work while being radically questioned in others. These biopolitical implications of Arendt’s work are in tension with what might be called her phenomenological analysis, which focuses on the plurality of the sensible appearances in the world as the condition of all human activities, but especially action, art, and thinking. The enabling tension between the biopolitical and phenomenological frameworks of Arendt’s work is crucial for any analysis of the relation between natality and reproductive labor, and, by extension, of the private/public distinction. In this context I would like to raise two sets of questions: First, if natality is both a target of biopolitics and a phenomenological condition of action, then in what sense does Arendt’s thought of natality allow us to diagnose and intervene into the racist biopolitical regulation of birth? What are the most helpful elements of her thought that could be mobilized for feminist critique of the way biopolitics targets women’s reproduction? Second, how can Arendt’s action-based model of politics, especially her notion of political alliances, contribute to women reproductive struggles? To answer these questions, I will focus first on the status of birth in Arendt’s work and then propose a kind of thought experiment, which is also a political experiment, by staging an encounter between Arendt’s thought of natality and the indigenous women’s theory of reproductive justice.1 The shared concern with the destruction of human plurality, the destruction of the world, and commitment to action justifies such a thought experiment, which might open new ways of thinking about the status of women’s reproduction. While Arendt did not address the biopolitics of reproduction and birth control directly and would not consider it a political issue, her theory of

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natality not only puts the question of birth at the center of politics but also reconsiders it “from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears” (HC, 5), which include the destruction of the planet and the biopolitical engineering of life. Despite this reconsideration of the human condition in the biopolitical frame, Arendt considers “natality” to be the “central category of political thought” (HC, 9). Indeed, as Cavarero (2014) points out, this notion of natality, though underdeveloped, is still Arendt’s most important contribution to twentieth-century philosophy (17). This fundamental relation between action and natality in turn implies an inextricable connection between the first order of birth and the “second birth” into the political sphere of speech and action (HC, 176). No matter how we formulate the relation between the first and the second, explicitly political, order of birth, the interconnection between them is central to Arendt’s phenomenology of natality, which is a condition of political action and interrelational agency. Developing the insights of Arendt’s commentators, especially Seyla Benhabib (1996, 109–10), Peg Birmingham (2006, 30–33), Cavarero (2014), and Anne O’Byrne (2010, 90–98) in the context of the biopolitics of reproduction, we argue that the two orders of births are inseparably intertwined (Diprose and Ziarek 2018).2 Natality in the first sense of being born is inescapably a political and biopolitical notion. First, the socalled biological birth is always already implicated in the common world we share, in the operations of power, technology, medicine, law, and economy. Even prior to the biopolitical modern age, birth, like death, according to Arendt, has never been a “simple natural occurrence,” because human birth and death presuppose a fabricated human world “whose durability and relative permanence makes appearance and disappearance possible” (HC, 96–97). A second way Arendt coimplicates these two orders of birth is by implicitly assuming that the disclosure of natality in the political order relies on the newborn’s appearance of uniqueness and a new beginning to others. This phenomenological understanding of birth as a worldly appearance allows us to redefine the first order of birth in terms of the event of our primary exposure to others, which precedes our relation to ourselves. In other words, what makes natality the central political concept is that the first order of birth signifies a new beginning and presupposes human plurality that precedes the subject’s awareness of herself; it foregrounds the primacy of being with others. However, despite the fact that the first order of birth is already a worldly event of the appearance of the new and the singular, what justifies the differentiation between the first and the second orders of birth (which historically has been interpreted in terms of the private/public distinction) is the newborn’s lack of interrelational agency characteristic of the political disclosure of natality through action. This is the case because, as O’Byrne (2010) puts it, our sense of our own birth and of our agency occurs belatedly and retrospectively (103).

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Despite this belated awareness of our own political relational agency, Arendt nonetheless claims that the “new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something new” (HC, 9). But, for “new beginning” to be “inherent in birth,” then, in addition to the newcomer’s “capacity of beginning something new,” the event of birth itself has to be removed from the domain of biological necessity and historical determinism alike, and reinterpreted instead within the parameters of human plurality and interrelational agency. Such agency should also include maternal desires and women’s reproductive freedom. And this of course entails a political reinterpretation of birth. Only when the significance of the first order of birth remains beyond biological and historical determinisms, as well as outside biopolitical population control, can it appear in the “guise” of a miracle, which, as Arendt famously puts it, “always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability” (HC, 178). In addition to suggesting the phenomenological significance of the first order of birth for the politics of natality, Arendt also stresses its linguistic and metaphorical connection with the realm of action. Arendt characterizes political action, and in particular revolutionary action, as “the birth of a new world” (OR, 42; emphasis added). What is the status of this metaphor and what does it say about the concept of natality? Does not this key political metaphor of “the birth of a new world” suggest a relation between women’s reproductive agency and political agency par excellence? Let us recall that for Arendt metaphor is an extraordinary “gift” of language (LM 1, 105) because it reveals that even the most abstract thoughts and concepts, including the central political concept of natality, are linked with sensibility, human plurality, and the common world of appearances. Metaphor can perform this role because it is characterized by a fundamental transferability: it is a bridge connecting the visible and the invisible, the past and the present, the particular and the general, the sensible and the conceptual. For instance, in the context of solitary thinking, metaphor performs “the transition from one existential state, that of thinking, to another, that of being an appearance among appearances” (LM 1, 103). Metaphor performs this transferability between different aspects of existence depending on the context: it crosses the temporal gap between the past and the future, between singularity and the generality of linguistic meanings. By performing these transfers, metaphor establishes relations among opposites and connects heterogeneous and seemingly incompatible registers of existence (LM 2, 102). For Arendt the metaphorical origins of language in sense experiences confirm the primacy of bodily existence, plurality, and being in the world even for the most abstract thinking (LM 1, 108). What is especially important for our analysis is that metaphor, including the key metaphor of the birth of the new world, is “a kind of ‘proof ’ that mind and body, thinking and sense experience, the invisible and the visible, belong together” (LM 1, 109).

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Here we come to the central paradox in Arendt’s thought: despite her provocative phenomenological and linguistic reformulations of birth, which enable natality to function as the central political category of action and freedom, she does not include women’s reproduction in the discussions of the political. What does the coimplication of the two orders of birth say about the agency of women giving birth?3 Arendt’s lack of sustained attention to women’s reproductive labor and agency has produced a very long history of disagreements among her readers regarding the status of human reproduction. For example, O’Byrne, following the well-established criticism of Arendt, argues that in the age of “animal laborans,” fertility, pertaining to the cyclical life of the species (98), replaces and diminishes all creativity in the political. Writing from the opposite feminist perspective, Mary G. Dietz (1995) and Linda Zerilli (1995, 2005) persuasively argue that more generous readings of Arendt’s notion of the body, labor, and the private/public distinction are possible. Not engaging with rich feminist criticisms of Arendt, Miguel Vatter (2014) reclaims Arendt’s notion of biological fertility as a process of singularization of life linked to “freedom” (150–57). Whether we understand reproduction in terms of the loss of creativity (O’Byrne) or, on the contrary, as the singularization of life (Vatter), this ongoing debate in Arendt studies does not address two central issues: first, the inherent relation between the biopolitics of reproduction and racism in liberal democracies; and second, the relation between political agency and women’s reproductive labor. Needless to say, Arendt herself did not develop this connection between reproduction, biopolitics, and different forms of racism, even though in The Origins of Totalitarianism she argues that antiblack racism, anti-Semitism, Western colonialism and imperialist politics in Africa are key preconditions of totalitarianism. Consequently, to move beyond the limitation of Arendt and her critics, and to develop in greater depth the operations of racist biopolitics of reproduction,4 we propose a kind of Arendtian thought experiment (see Diprose and Ziarek 2018) and juxtapose her theory of natality with women of color theorizing reproductive justice in the groundbreaking book Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice (2016), by Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena R. Gutiérrez. Focusing specifically on indigenous women’s activism and theories of reproductive agency in the United States—theories most often ignored in mainstream feminist and biopolitical theories alike—I would like to suggest some important parallels between their work and Arendt’s, concerning the key role of the world, political alliances, and action in the struggle with racist biopolitics of reproduction. And since Arendt’s articulation of alliance occurs primarily in the context of her theory of revolution (OR, 165–78), this juxtaposition of Undivided Rights with On Revolution has two important implications. First, it allows us to see indigenous women’s struggles for reproductive agency not only in terms of cultural and political survival but also in

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terms revolutionary struggles for a just nontoxic world without racism—that is, in terms of positive political freedom. Second, this juxtaposition points to the important limitations in Arendt’s account of the American and French Revolutions; it reinforces Gines’s point about Arendt’s’ “egregious omission of the Negro question and slavery in the French context” (Gines 2014, 76), and underscores her disregard of the political relevance of slavery and settler colonialism in the American context. Struggling against different effects of the racist biopolitics of reproduction, U.S. women of color—African American, Native American, Asian American, and Latina—have consistently opposed the narrow, liberal prochoice approach dominating white mainstream feminist opposition to state limitations of women’s access to legal abortion and birth control. As Silliman contends, “pro-choice” feminist arguments, which are based on the protection of women’s individual decisions against the encroachment of big government into private lives, obscure the racist biopolitics of reproduction and population control (Silliman 2002, xi). Because of the history of subjection to involuntary sterilization and long-lasting, illegal, and unsafe birth control in the twentieth century, both by the U.S. government and by physicians, one of the main issues distinguishing the political struggles of women of color from the mainstream pro-choice movement is the claim that the access to safe, affordable abortions and birth control are intertwined with the right to have children, to raise them as members of political communities, and to create a nontoxic, nonviolent world. Consequently, reclaiming of the reproductive agency by women of color is inseparable from both political action and the deep concern with protecting world against environmental destruction. Despite the lack of direct engagement between women of color and Arendt, and despite important differences in their diverse positions, we nonetheless see an important parallel in the emphasis on the worldly character of human birth, and therefore on the worldly character of reproductive agency, often missing in mainstream white feminism. As Silliman et al. argue in Undivided Rights, women of color in the United States have for decades been engaged in documenting, diagnosing, theorizing, and engaging in action opposing racist biopolitics of reproduction. The specificity of Native American women’s activism lies in the fact that their political actions are inextricably intertwined with the struggle against settler colonialism and cultural and political genocide, and for Native sovereignty, community, land claims, and environmental justice. Again, the parallel between these broad coalitions for reproductive rights and Arendt’s emphasis on interrelational agency and political alliances gathering diverse participants for action is rather striking. This activism is still the most invisible in the United States, as if, to use the Arendtian formulation in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Native women were continually deprived of their place in the world, in which their actions and political claims could be heard and be meaningful and

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effective. However, when we contest this invisibility, the parallel between these broad coalitions for reproductive rights and Arendt’s emphasis on interrelational agency and diverse political alliances is rather striking. Let us recall that for Arendt, these dynamic, participatory, and plural alliances are precisely what generates power. And if such power is preserved in the aftermath of action by the continuous commitments and mutual promises, it leads to an enduring transformation of political relations and the world In the racist biopolitics of settler colonialism the destruction of women’s reproductive capacities is inseparable from the destruction of Native sovereignty, community, culture, and language, and the degradation of health and the environment. This genocidal framework of reproductive control collapses the traditional political distinctions between private and public, the biological and the political, bios and zoe, nature and culture, as well as the Foucauldian distinction of “make live” and “let die.” Only this broad biopolitical/genocidal framework of settler colonialism can explain some of the deadly paradoxes of federal policy and practices of the Indian Health Service (IHS), which simultaneously violated Native American women’s abortion rights, exercised by Native women in their cultures, and perpetrated sterilization abuses. The refusal of the already extremely limited access to abortion, available only in the case of rape, danger to the mother, or incest, in the aftermath of the Hyde amendment limiting federal funding for abortion to only these cases (Silliman et al. 2016, 120), allows IHS to pressure women to undergo permanent sterilization or dangerous, long-lasting contraceptives as birth control methods (ibid., 119). The object of these policies is the destruction of women’s reproductive capacities and agency in order to take control over Native American lands. Racism and biopolitical control over reproduction are central operations of settler colonialism, aiming for foreclose what Arendt calls the event of natality in Native American cultures and politics. However, Native American women’s activism against involuntary sterilization and for reproductive rights reclaims natality understood as the disclosure of interrelational agency, human plurality, and the world at the center of political action, despite the failures of white feminism and white populations to witness their struggles as such. Women of color have not only contested racist biopolitics of reproduction but also proposed a broader political theory of reproductive justice. According to Loretta Ross, the national coordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, the concept and the term reproductive justice was used for the first time on the national level at the inaugural conference of SisterSong in November 2003, and since then it has profoundly influenced the reproductive rights movement: “Reproductive Justice is a positive approach that links sexuality, health, and human rights to social justice movements by placing abortion and reproductive health issues in the larger context of the well-being and health of women” (Ross 2006). This platform has served as the basis of political activism, alliances, and the theoretical

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reconceptualization of the political stakes of women’s struggles over reproductive rights. Reproductive justice allows, first of all, for broader political coalitions with antiracist, civil rights, feminist, economic justice, and environmental justice movements by locating reproductive politics at the heart of multiple political struggles. It also allows for a fuller diagnosis and critique of the racist biopolitical population control to which women of color were subjected. Consequently, reproductive justice is both a political theory and action. Such a political notion of reproductive justice not only resonates with Arendt’s idea that natality is a central idea of political thought, directly connected with acting in concert, but also expands it, by linking women’s reproductive agency with political freedom and being in the world. In the case of Native American women’s activism, reproductive justice establishes connections between Native cultures, languages, communities, bodies, and the world. And finally, reproductive justice positions women of color not only as the objects of biopolitical regulation and domination but also as theorists and political agents struggling for justice, despite the fact that their contributions have been obscured by the mainstream feminist movement. As this thought experiment suggests, women’s reproductive labor lies at the center of the racist biopolitics in liberal democracies and intersects with settler colonialism. It is puzzling therefore that political regulation of birth and abortion has not received a sustained analysis in mainstream biopolitical theory. By contrast, Arendt’s claim that birth and death are historical events, subject to biopolitical regulation, power and technology, reproductive labor and the first order of birth in the context of Arendt’s theory of natality, understood as the condition of political action, plurality, and the expression of singularity. Yet, for birth to be regarded as a worldly expression of natality, two crucial political conditions have to be fulfilled. First, women’s reproductive agency, always intertwined with political and worldly concerns, must be respected. Such agency cannot be curtailed either by the state regulation of the population or by the reckless destruction of the world. Second, we have to recognize that natality, the plurality of human existence, and concern for the world is at stake in women’s struggles for reproductive agency. The juxtaposition of Arendt’s politics of natality with a political and theoretical framework of reproductive justice, proposed by women of color, is a powerful articulation of these two political conditions.

1. For further analysis of this thought experiment, see Diprose and Ziarek (2018). 2. F or conflicting feminist interpretations of the two orders of natality, see Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (Honig 1995). 3. For a critique of this exclusion of the maternal and reproductive labor, see Cavarero (2014, 17–28) as well as Diprose and Ziarek (2018). 4. For the most comprehensive critique of Arendt’s failed responses to the “Negro question,” see Gines (2014).

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References Arendt, Hannah. [1948/1976] 1994. The Origins of Totalitarianism (OT). New edition with added prefaces. San Diego: Harcourt. ———. [1958] 1998. The Human Condition (HC). Second edition with introduction by Margaret Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. [1963] 1990. On Revolution (OR). London: Penguin Books. ———. [1971] 1978. Life of the Mind, vols. 1 and 2 (LM 1, LM 2). San Diego: Harcourt. Benhabib, Seyla. 1996. The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Birmingham, Peg. 2006. Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cavarero, Adriana. 2014. “‘A Child Has Been Born to Us’: Arendt on Birth,” translated by Silvia Guslandi and Cosette Bruhns. PhiloSophia 4, no. 1 (Winter): 12–30. Dietz, Mary G. 1995. “Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt.” In Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, edited by B. Honig, 17–50. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Diprose, Rosalyn, and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek. 2013. “Time for Beginners: Natality, Biopolitics, and Political Theology.” PhiloSophia 3, no. 2 (Summer): 107–20. ———. 2018. Arendt, Natality and Biopolitics: Toward Democratic Plurality and Reproductive Justice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collége de France 1975–76. Edited by M. Bertani and A. Fontana. Translated by D. Macey. New York: Picador. Gines, Kathryn T. 2014. Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Honig, Bonnie. 1995. “Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity.” In Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, edited by B. Honig, 135–66. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. O’Byrne, Anne. 2010. Natality and Finitude. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ross, Loretta. 2006. “Understanding Reproductive Justice.” trustblackwomen.org/our-work/ what-is-reproductive-justice/9-what-is-reproductive-justic3, last modified March 2011 (accessed October 29, 2016). Silliman, Jael. 2002. Introduction to Policing the National Body: Sex, Race, and Criminalization, edited by Jael Silliman and Anannya Bhattacharjee, ix–xxix. Cambridge: South End Press. Silliman, Jael, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, and Elena R. Gutiérrez. 2016. Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice. Chicago: Haymarket Books. First published in 2004 by South End Press. Vatter, Miguel. 2014. The Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society. New York: Fordham University Press. Zerilli, Linda M. G. 1995. “The Arendtian Body.” In Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, edited by B. Hoenig, 167–194. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ———. 2005. Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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When Common Decency Prevails: Rescuers during the Holocaust and Disobedient Subjects in the Milgram Obedience Experiment François Rochat

According to Patrick Cabanel, a French historian whose field of study is the resistance movement in France during World War II, what happened on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon during the years 1940–44 was a different kind of resistance compared to the well-studied armed resistance against the occupying forces in France.1 This resistance involved a whole community of villagers and farmers whose religious faith spanned Huguenots, Protestants, and Roman Catholics, among other Christians. This community resistance reflected cooperation to answer the call of people in need of help, to whom they opened their doors and with whom they shared their food. They had not planned on rescuing persecuted people, but once these people came to the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, they found villagers and farmers ready to come to their aid, and they did so with ease, asking no questions, requesting no explanations. In Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the villagers were used to having people from elsewhere visit during the summertime. However, this was different. The new visitors, the persecuted people, had lost their belongings and were hunted by the French police and Gestapo; they were vulnerable to denunciation and had nowhere to go. Furthermore, the authorities requested that the French population report Jews to the police or military forces. They were presented to the public as dangerous enemies of the state. Yet, the refugees looked much more like frightened people in need of being protected from persecution than evil conspirators or perpetrators. In other words, what happened on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon was a collective and spontaneous response to people trying to escape arrest, and undoubtedly a deadly destiny.2 In 1971, Yad Vashem wanted to name the pastor of Le Chambon-surLignon, André Trocmé, one of the Righteous Among the Nations for his role in the assistance toward Jews.3 Pastor Trocmé refused to be honored alone. He wrote, “Why me? Why not the multitude of humble peasants of the HauteLoire, who did as much and more than me? Why not my wife . . . ? Why not my colleague Theis . . . ? I would not be able to accept the Medal of the Just except in the name of all those who committed themselves for our unjustly persecuted brothers and sisters.”4 In 1988, seventeen years after Pastor André Trocmé had expressed his request, and long after he had died, Yad Vashem decided to make an 118 HA

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exception to its rule of honoring only individuals: it honored the people of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and its surrounding villages and hamlets as a whole community, bestowing the title of Righteous Among the Nations.5 What the people of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon did was significant. They ensured that those helpless people in political, economic, and social need were protected against arbitrary rules, deprivation of rights, and violence. The community of villagers and farmers took those persecuted under their own protection, enabling them to go on living. In short, they displayed what we may call common human decency—something simple but all too rare in the world. On the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, common decency was stronger than the appeal of Marshal Pétain’s “new social order” summarized by the motto “Work, Family, Homeland” (Travail, Famille, Patrie). This common decency displayed by the villagers was the self-evident thing to do when facing a person in need of protection against persecution. Common decency is about understanding human life and preventing suffering and destruction, which implies opposing persecution for any reason, refusing to go along with it, or to participate in it. It is a way of responding to others‘ difficulties, suffering, and needs, based on kindness; it is a sense of caring for people whose misfortune can be lessened by giving them a hand. Common decency values ordinary life because ordinary life makes room for all of us and is inseparable from all the small things that keep life moving forward—all the things that are on the side of our shared humanness—and keep us from forgetting about it or neglecting it. Common decency both renders the ordinariness of goodness possible and prevents it from disappearing from our social life. Deeds of common decency keep alive our interaction with one another and make the quality of our interpersonal relationships possible. Indecency would amount to forgetting all about this or ignoring it. And yet, common decency seems to be unevenly distributed among people, according to the findings of Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, whose study on obedience to authority showed that a large number of men and women are ready to go along with orders given by an authority figure, even when it means harming an innocent victim.

Milgram‘s Experiment on Obedience to Authority The findings one can draw from Milgram‘s experiments on obedience to authority6 may be linked to common decency in a way that relates directly to the action of the people of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon during World War II. For the subjects who arrived at the laboratory, Milgram‘s obedience experiment was a scientific study of memory and learning. However, as the experiment unfolded, there was no doubt that the learner wasn’t learning the word pairs he was supposed to memorize: his memory worsened as he

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received an electric shock for each wrong answer. For the teacher in the experiment, the experiment was not working: the learner wasn’t making progress; on the contrary, he was getting worse and was unable to complete the task. Administering to the learner increasingly painful electric shocks rendered him only less able to learn and continue taking part in the experiment, so he expressed his unwillingness to go on and asked to be released, but the experimenter didn‘t listen to him.7 In those circumstances, common decency would tell us to stop delivering electric shocks to our fellow participant in the experiment. Some subjects in the experiment did precisely that, but they were a minority. The large majority of subjects went along with the experimenter‘s request to continue administering shocks until they reached the maximum of 450 volts. So how did that minority of subjects oppose the authority‘s pressure to go on, and stop punishing their fellow participant in the experiment? Analyzing the course of the interaction between the subject and the authority figure during the unfolding experimental procedure, Andre Modigliani and I were able to verify that “the earlier in the procedure subjects begin to resist notably, the more likely they will end up defiant.”8 If subjects go along with the procedure, even when they don‘t like it or they disapprove of it, they are caught up in the experiment and very likely end up obedient. How did those defiant subjects know they shouldn’t go on with the experiment? Further analyses of the interaction between the subject and the authority figure during the experimental procedures led us to the conception of the ordinariness of goodness.9 When opposing the experimenter‘s orders, disobedient subjects object to the experimental procedure by telling the authority figure that “One should not impose one’s will on another,”10 which amounts to reminding the experimenter that the subject made it clear that he was unwilling to go on with the experiment for several reasons: because it was too painful and he asked several times to be released, and his health comes first. A second set of reasons disobedient subjects referred to while objecting to the experimenter‘s prods amounted to reminding the authority figure that “One is responsible for what one does to another.”11 A third set of reasons given to the experimenter by disobedient subjects revolves around the theme that ”One is always free to choose not to obey harmful demands.”12 Along the line of the ordinariness of goodness, one abides by a measure of common decency. That measure accounts for what one should be doing or not doing to others, namely during interpersonal relationships and social interaction, in addition to how we treat animals and nature. Common decency is not based on facts or derived principles. Rather, it is about being sensitive to what it means to be human. Facts and principles can be misused to justify what one shouldn’t be doing, or in psychological terms, to reduce cognitive dissonance. That is why those who claim that they were only following orders are contra-examples of common decency.

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A first example of how common decency works is taken from Milgram‘s last experimental condition of his obedience experiment, the “Bring-aFriend” condition,13 in which subjects were asked to bring a friend along to the laboratory.14 As the friend in this experimental condition complained about the punishment before getting his tenth electric shock, 150 volts, the subject objected to the experimenter asking him to give that shock and to continue with the experimental procedure. The subject said, “I don‘t want to give him no shocks anymore.” The experimenter was prodding him to continue but to no avail. The subject answered to the prodding, “Yes, I‘ll teach him but I won‘t give him no shocks,” and went on to the next word without giving his friend the 150 volt shock; he stopped the experimental procedure soon after this. A second example15 in which the subject‘s objection is based on a sense of care for his friend‘s well-being can be found in Milgram‘s experiment. After giving the twelfth shock (180 volts) and listening to his friend, he said, “OK, that‘s enough. He [the friend] can‘t take it.” As he was prodded to continue, he responded to the experimenter, “Well, I ain‘t going to continue if he‘s going to get hurt.” As this answer didn‘t keep the experimenter from prodding him again, he said, “Well, that‘s a little bit high, isn‘t it? One eighty!” Responding once again to the experimenter who kept prodding him, he said, “Nah, ain‘t going to do it. Not if he‘s getting hurt. I‘m sorry, I didn‘t think it was going to be that rough on him. I didn’t think . . . they were going to be that painful. I thought we were getting just a little shock. But that was getting a little high. I’d give you the money back before I’d hurt him.” A third example16 involves a subject who was objecting to the experimental procedure after giving the fifth punishment (75 volts). Responding to the experimenter’s prods, he said, “I don’t know, uh . . . I don’t know how he [the friend] feels about it, but I think it is too much. Too many wrong answers here. He’s getting too much. Five shocks . . . I don’t see it. Frankly, I don’t see it. I wouldn’t uh . . . unless one of you is a medical worker.” The experimenter kept prodding him by saying, “It is absolutely essential that you continue,” and he responded, “Well, it can’t be essential. I refuse to. . . . It’s not essential for me or for him.” Most subjects in the Milgram obedience experiment did not succeed in helping their friend or fellow subject in the experiment. Disobedient subjects were a minority, while the majority went along with the experimenter’s demands all the way to the end. This is a salient fact, but we should not forget that we have more to learn from disobedient subjects than from obedient ones, namely, that control and even oppression aren’t always able to override common decency, which is a powerful resource when it comes to resisting a lack of humanity, governmental arbitrariness, and military domination.

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Common Decency on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon The people on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon not only responded to those who asked them for help but also “helped without trying to know first who they were helping, and why these people needed help. As Henri Héritier, a French rescuer, said: ‘We never asked for explanation. When people came, if we could be of help. . . .’ [ . . . ] From their own accounts, and the testimonies of the persons they helped, it appears that in most cases rescuers responded immediately to the people in need of help. They did not know that the person they would take in for one night would eventually stay with them for one year, or even more, until the end of the war in some cases. Although they did not know what helping would actually entail, they were not thinking first whether they should do it or not because it seemed self-evident that their help was needed, and so they helped.”17 As descendants of Huguenots, many people on the plateau kept alive their own history of being a persecuted religious minority, and they could relate to what was happening to the Jews of Europe under Nazi rule.18 There was no need to talk much about what it meant to have to flee and look for a refuge in order to save one’s life. Moreover, helping people in need was well established on the plateau; it meant helping people in order for them to be able to go back to living a normal life after regaining physical and moral strength through spending part of the summer on the plateau, which was especially the case for children coming from industrial cities and working-class families but which was also the case for adults and children fleeing the advance of General Franco’s army during the overthrow of the Spanish Republic in 1938. When Marshal Pétain, the head of France during World War II, declared on the radio that he had given the French army the order to cease fire, to stop fighting the German army, and had asked Hitler to accept France’s defeat, several people in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon saw right away the treachery involved in Pétain’s demand. Indeed, it meant turning over to the German police all those who were in trouble with the Third Reich authorities and who had found refuge in France since 1933. To the people on the plateau, such treachery was shameful, and there was no way they could go along with it. They came to the aid of those Pétain had sacrificed in his submission to Hitler’s will, and they did so spontaneously and with simplicity and grace. Rescuers’ deeds can indeed be described as graceful. When human kindness trumps brutality, a quiet moment of thankfulness occurs. And yet, such caring comes as a surprise when destructive enterprises are being implemented against human beings by those holding in their hands military forces, state authority, and propaganda tools, for going against those enterprises seems hopeless and almost impossible. On the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, the way the rescuing activities went makes it clear that common decency was spontaneous and did not follow any plan. Furthermore, gestures of common decency have their value as deeds done,

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and once they are done one doesn’t talk much about them. They have an intrinsic value, for common decency takes into account the quality of human interactions, their features, and excludes certain types of behavior from the realm of what may be done. A good way to understand people’s common decency is to find out what they see in other people. Do they see them as obstacles to reaching their own ends? Are they treated as means to advance their own interests? Caring for the well-being of those who were coming to the plateau to find protection only meant extending to others the conditions for a living one is benefiting from. Under the war circumstances, it meant sharing those conditions in order for everyone to be safe enough, as rescuing people pursued by the police forces was risky. Common decency thus includes reciprocity, a premise that sharing needs always to be there because one cannot live alone, all by oneself; one can live only with the help of others, help being given to others as well as received from others. The premise of common decency can be expressed in the following way: don’t even think of living without the help of others or you may lose your sense of reality. That is why caring about others, helping for a time those in need and getting help when one needs it, is essential to social life, and it doesn’t require some extraordinary character feature to do so. The will to preserve common decency from its corruption by the implementation of minority people persecution as put forward under Nazi rules was publicly expressed the same week Marshal Pétain announced France’s defeat and submission to the Third Reich in a radio broadcast on Monday, June 17, 1940. On June 23, the pastors of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon (Pastor Trocmé and his colleague Pastor Theis) preached in the village’s temple. Their sermon was a call not to submit oneself to the new ruler of France, who would give orders contrary to the content of the Gospel, orders requesting the use of violence against one’s fellow human beings, orders going against one’s sense of respect for all of God’s children, as each person is to be seen in the Christian view. The pastors called on their brothers and sisters to resist, and announced that they would humbly oppose authorities’ orders whenever such orders would go against what the Gospel told them to do. For the people of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the pastors’ sermon came at the end of a traumatizing week during which they had learned about the defeat of the French army, the fall of France, and the terrible conditions of the armistice. That Sunday was the beginning of their disobedience, their refusal to meet the new rulers’ demands, for the pastors had made it clear in their sermon that they would not submit to orders contrary to their faith, contrary to what was just. Responding in such a way to the announcements made on the radio during that deeply demoralizing week meant, on the one hand, early resistance; on the other hand, it meant doing what the villagers had always done and would continue to do, despite the new political and military order and the authorities’ attempts to replace common decency with denunciation to the police and refusal to help the persecuted.

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Implications for Today One may want to know which community, which people, common decency belongs to. Or who founded common decency as a way of getting along with one another without the use of domination. Who might the founding mothers or fathers of common decency be? Where does common decency come from? We won’t be able to address these questions here. Suffice it to say that today, we live in a world where common decency appears to be in short supply. We may have forgotten about it, its importance receding as we become more competitive with one another, more adversarial, so that controlling others seems more natural than sharing with them. Our means to control others tends to make us think that we can do things all by ourselves: we just need to give orders, to order things, so that we don’t have to count on others’ help and don’t need to take them into account as people to whom we may be obligated in return. When going about our everyday life in that manner, interacting with others stops when we have what we were looking for, and by the same token, it stops the sharing process as well. Common decency protects us as it drives us to protect others who happen to need our help. It protects us against the kind of brutalization that enables a group of people to feel authorized or pushed to show who is the boss when it comes to those who have been rendered vulnerable, when protective rights have been abolished, or when safety isn’t guaranteed anymore. In turn, brutalization works as an offer to take advantage of those weaker than we are, to feel entitled to do so, or to let go of all worry about treating helpless people badly. When weakening people has been rendered banal, the demise of common decency is likely to be a matter of course, and all sorts of routinized behavior appear as well as industrialized ways of dealing with certain people who are purposely treated as if they deserved to be stripped of their dignity as human beings, of their needs as individuals, of their right to live a decent life. An earlier version of this article was presented as the Andrew J. Bernstein ’69 Memorial Lecture at Bard College, on April 18, 2017. I am very grateful to Professor Stuart Stritzler-Levine for the gift he offered me by making my stay at Bard College a memorable event. I would like to thank Professor Roger Berkowitz for proposing that I publish my lecture in this journal. I am thankful to David Shapiro for his close reading of my writing and for his comments and suggestions.

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1. Patrick Cabanel, “André Trocmé—un portrait,” lecture given 18 November 2016 at the Maison de Paroisse de Saint-Gervais, Geneva. 2. There are by now several well-documented books on what happened on the Plateau VivaraisLignon during the Holocaust. Among those are François Boulet, Histoire de la Montagne-refuge (Polignac: Les Éditions du Roure, 2008); Peter Grose, The Greatest Escape: How One French Community Saved Thousands of Lives from the Nazis (London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2014); Patrick Henry, We Only Know Men: The Rescue of Jews in France during the Holocaust (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2007); and Richard P. Unsworth, A Portrait of Pacifists: Le Chambon, the Holocaust, and the Lives of André & Magda Trocmé (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012). There is also an outstanding documentary film on that subject by Pierre Sauvage, Weapons of the Spirit, Chambon Foundation, 1989 (remastered 2014.) 3. Yad Vashem is a commemorative institution, the Holocaust martyrs and heroes memorial in Jerusalem. It is presented is the following words by Mordecai Paldiel, who has been for many years director of the Department for the Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem, in his book Sheltering The Jews: Stories of Holocaust Rescuers (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996): “When Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, called into being a national Holocaust memorial under the name of Yad Vashem, it was meant primarily to commemorate the six million Jews of Europe murdered at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. But the 1953 Yad Vashem law also was aimed to highlight the role of individual non-Jews who tried to save Jews from the Nazi-instigated Holocaust and to express the appreciation of the Jewish people for their humanitarian conduct. The Knesset thereupon chose the ancient Hebrew term Hassidei Umot Haolam (Righteous among the Nations) to designate non-Jews who, in the legislation’s wording, ‘risked their lives to save Jews’ during the Holocaust, and obligated the newly established Yad Vashem memorial to document and honor them. The linkage between the rescue of Jews from annihilation with the risk to the life and safety of the non-Jewish rescuer has since formed the basic criterion for the attribution of the ‘righteous title by Yad Vashem” (2–3). 4. Quoted by Gérard Bollon (our translation) in Patrick Cabanel, Philippe Joutard, Jacques Sémelin, and Annette Wieviorka, eds., La montagne refuge: Accueil et sauvetage des juifs autour du Chambon-sur-Lignon (Paris: Albin Michel, 2013). 5. In her remarkable book on rescuers of Jewish children, Hidden Children: Belgian Nuns and Their Daring Rescue of Young Jews from the Nazis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Suzanne Vromen addresses the issue of the recognition of rescuers as Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem. She writes: “The [evaluation] commission’s task is to scrutinize all applications for recognition based on evidence provided by those who were rescued and other relevant documentation. Over the years, the commission has developed an intricate and cumbersome process of authentication that demands steadfast perseverance from the petitioners and at times taxes their patience, as my interviewees mentioned. As survivors are aging, they are concerned by the slowness of the process. Sadly, the honor now is very often bestowed posthumously” (126). 6. S tanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). 7. T homas Blass, The Man Who Shocked The World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram (New York: Basic Books, 2009). 8. See Andr Modigliani and François Rochat, “The Role of Interaction Sequences and the Timing of Resistance in Shaping Obedience and Defiance to Authority,” Journal of Social Issues 51, no. 3 (1995): 107–23 (113). 9. See François Rochat and Andre Modigliani, “The Ordinary Quality of Resistance: From Milgram’s Laboratory to the Village of Le Chambon,” Journal of Social Issues 51, no. 3 (1995): 195–210. 10. Ibid., 208. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid.

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13. For a presentation of that experimental condition with its findings, see François Rochat and Thomas Blass, “Milgram’s Unpublished Obedience Variation and its Historical Relevance,” Journal of Social Issues 70, no. 3 (2014): 456–72. 14. The following quotations are taken from audio recordings and data files of Milgram’s subjects that are deposited in the Milgram Papers at the Yale University Library Archives. This is subject no. 2422, experimental session run on 16 May 1962; the fellow subject in the experiment is the subject’s brother-in-law. 15. The following quotations are taken from audio recordings and data files of Milgram’s subjects that are deposited in the Milgram Papers at the Yale University Library Archives. This is subject no. 2428, experimental session run on 19 May 1962; the fellow subject in the experiment is the subject’s nephew. 16. The following quotations are taken from audio recordings and data files of Milgram’s subjects that are deposited in the Milgram Papers at the Yale University Library Archives. This is subject no. 2440, experimental session run on 23 May 1962; the fellow subject in the experiment is the subject’s friend. 17. See Pierre Sauvage, Weapons of the Spirit: Transcript of the Feature Documentary (Los Angeles: Friends of Le Chambon Foundation, 2007), 11. 18. Jacques Semelin, Persécutions et entraides dans la France occupée (Paris: Éditions du Seuil / Éditions des Arènes, 2013).

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A Party in the Desert or a Polis on the Playa? Ron H. Feldman

A key area of interest to Hannah Arendt was the concept of freedom, and how it does or does not emerge in the context of human community. In particular, she saw the emergence of freedom as rare because the necessary context “does not always exist, and although all men are capable of deed and word, most of them . . . do not live in it.” 1 As a participant in Burning Man annually since 2010, it seems to me that the organizers have happened upon a formula that generates a community conducive to the emergence of the kind of freedom celebrated by Arendt. In this essay, my aim is to use Arendt’s political theory as a way of understanding the qualities of the public realm intentionally created at Burning Man, while also exploring how the structure and rules of the event make it a kind of lab where Arendtian freedom can emerge. I conclude that this temporary community—with its emphasis on participation, performances, art, and limitations on commerce—is as much a polis on the playa as it is a party in the desert. The “playa” is a dusty, white, hot, flat, alkali seabed devoid of visible life that is part of the Black Rock Desert located north of Reno, Nevada. This is the site of Black Rock City (BRC), where over seventy thousand attendees (known colloquially as “Burners”) gather for a week in late August. Along with the campsites full of tents, RVs, and structures of every sort, BRC is filled with performances, music, and hundreds of works of art—primarily large interactive structures or mobile art cars (known as “mutant vehicles”). On the Saturday night toward the end of the week a large wooden effigy is burned (the eponymous “Burning Man”), a bit of performance art to which the organizers have eschewed attaching any meaning. According to the Burning Man Organization, the event is “an experimental community, which challenges its members to express themselves and rely on themselves to a degree that is not normally encountered in one’s day-to-day life.”2 Despite the stereotype of Burning Man as “a party with sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll in the desert,”3 it is quite different from the typical festival where participants are provided entertainment by the producers. “Participants join in the effort to co-create Black Rock City, a temporary metropolis dedicated to art and community. Burning Man isn’t your usual festival. It’s a city wherein almost everything that happens is created entirely by its citizens, who are active participants in the experience.”4

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Freedoms, Private and Public Arendt celebrated the public activity of citizens. While her theoretical perspective is present throughout her books and essays, it is in The Human Condition (1958) that she develops a theory of politics and freedom derived from her understanding of the ancient Greek polis (city-state) that posits an ascending hierarchy of “three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action.”5 Labor is the realm of biology and economics whose purpose is to provide for the sustenance and reproduction that maintains life, and is the activity shared with other life-forms. Labor is characterized by necessity, and in Greek antiquity was relegated to the private realm of the home that included the activities of women, servants, and slaves. Work is the activity that “provides an ‘artificial’ world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings,”6 whose exemplary products are tools, buildings, and lasting works of art. This also includes laws, because “the laws, like the wall around the city, were not results of action but products of making.”7 The walls and laws provided the context for the people, who constituted the polis, to experience Action: “In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.”8 The purpose of the Greek polis, Arendt writes, was “to multiply the occasions to win ‘immortal fame,’ that is, to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique distinctness. . . . Its foremost aim was to make the extraordinary an ordinary occurrence of everyday life.”9 This is a realm of freedom beyond the necessity, inequality, and violence (to humans and nature) of economics10 that manifests in the public realm outside of the home or the workplace. The main preoccupations of what passes for politics today—especially the concern with economic well-being, whether from the right or the left—is for Arendt an unpolitical intrusion of the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom. “To be free meant both not to be subject to the necessity of life or to the command of another and not be in command oneself. It meant neither to rule nor to be ruled.”11

Arendt’s “Fundamental Human Activities” and the “Ten Principles” of Burning Man A surprisingly Arendtian realm of freedom is created and experienced at Burning Man. One way to see how this works is to think through how Arendt’s “fundamental human activities” intersect with Burning Man’s “Ten Principles,” which were formulated “as a reflection of the community’s ethos and culture as it had organically developed.”12 In what follows I will suggest

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Arendt’s “Human Activities” Burning Man’s Ten Principles

Labor

Radical Inclusion

Work x

Gifting

Decommodification

Radical Self-Reliance

Radical Self-Expression

Communal Effort

Civic Responsibility

Leaving No Trace

Action

Participation

Immediacy

how these “commonly-held values”13 combine to devalue the activities of Labor and Work while promoting Action, thereby inverting the priorities and experience of “the default world” outside of BRC. In the table above I suggest which principles address an aspect of Arendt’s “human activities.”

Labor At Burning Man the realm of “Labor” is virtually absent. The economic processes of production and reproduction that allow for ongoing life, and make it possible for people and “all the things”14 they need to get to the playa, are preconditions for BRC to exist. Yet, like the household in Arendt’s polis, they are mostly hidden from view—in this case by time and place shifting: everything is created elsewhere prior to being transported and erected on the playa. Money, commerce, and markets of every kind (including bartering) are prohibited on site, replaced by alternate economic principles that conspire to devalue Labor. Decommodification aims “to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.”15 Sponsorships and branding are prohibited, and participants are encouraged to modify or deface commercial logos on their vehicles. Radical Self-Reliance is the result when commerce is prohibited: each person is responsible for bringing everything needed to physically survive

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for a week—only porta-potties are provided, financed by the entry fee. This encourages most people to band together and self-organize into “camps” of every size, cooperatively providing for their own necessities and often creating a public offering of food, drink, service, art, or performance. Even though there is no economic production, there is certainly the potential for waste. The principle of Leaving No Trace aims to consciously control BRC’s impact on the nonhuman environment. Trash is reformulated as Material Out of Place (MOOP), implying that there is no such thing as an externality: while there may be waste, there should be no refuse left behind.

Work The idea that each year Burners re-create “Black Rock City” frames the endeavor as something akin to establishing a polis. BRC is especially notable as an exemplar of Arendt’s activity of “Work” because it is such an unmistakably artificial imposition on the flat white palate of the playa, including a gate and a boundary fence. In Arendt’s theory, the “element of violation and violence is present in all fabrication, and homo faber, the creator of the human artifice, has always been a destroyer of nature.”16 Yet, for Arendt this artifice is not only necessary but also has a positive aspect because it is precisely the artificial aspect of the polis that makes it most characteristically human: “The man-made world of things, the human artifice erected by homo faber, becomes a home for mortal men . . . only insomuch as it transcends both the sheer functionalism of things produced for consumption and the sheer utility of objects produced for use.”17 The principle of Civic Responsibility describes the idea that when people come together in mutual interaction, they “assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants.”18 Communal Effort expresses the intent “to produce, promote, and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.”19 Radical Inclusion asserts that anyone can buy a ticket and whoever enters the gate is part of the community. Taken together, these principles encourage Burners to be active citizens creating and maintaining the public space, not passive consumers. They provide the setting for the experience of “human plurality,” which Arendt describes as having “the twofold character of equality and distinction.”20 The way Burners voluntarily organize themselves into camps and projects is both the origin and manifestation of these principles, and it is key to doing the work that makes the event successful. Just as for the Greeks the people were the polis, the Burners are Burning Man.

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Action The creativity of Work provides the human-built stage for “Action,” Arendt’s realm of human freedom characterized by words and deeds. “In order to be what the world is always meant to be, a home for men during their life on earth, the human artifice must be a place fit for action and speech, for activities not only entirely useless for the necessities of life but of an entirely different nature from the manifold activities of fabrication by which the world itself and all things in it are produced.”21 The economically dominated experiences and perspectives of Labor and Work prioritize production and productivity as the highest good, and are inclined “to denounce action and speech as idleness, idle busybodyness, and idle talk.”22 In contrast, activities often seen as “unproductive” because they have no “product” other than the performance itself—such as healing, navigation, dance, playacting, flute playing—“furnished ancient thinking with examples for the highest and greatest activities of man.”23 It is precisely these types of activities that are central opportunities for Burners to distinguish themselves. Radical Self-Expression “arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content.”24 But self-expression is virtually meaningless if there is no audience, for the purpose is to reveal something. In this sense it emphasizes a key aspect of Arendt’s activity of Action: “This revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for nor against them—that is, in sheer human togetherness.”25 At Burning Man people are self-consciously on display, and BRC is a stage where every moment is potentially performative. There is a heightened awareness of how one appears because almost everywhere is public, and the exploration of self-representation is encouraged—hence the evolution of Burning Man couture and costume. The lack of commerce and physical needs (since you brought “all the things”) means that gifts are surplus, and whether the gifts are physical items or events of some type, Gifting is a kind of giant mutual potlatch and performance. “The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.”26 Such words and deeds are central elements of Action: these activities are done in public, largely between strangers, for the pleasure of the activity itself—none of it is essential for survival. Gifting is one way to manifest Participation, which declares, “Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart” (emphasis added).27

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This experience of involvement creates a community where everyone is a performer as well as an observer. Immediacy complements this because there is no “product” other than the activity itself. “Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers.”28 This expresses the essence of Action, which Arendt describes as inherently unstable because it “does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being, but disappears . . . with the disappearance or arrest of the activities themselves,”29 thereby exhausting “their full meaning in the performance itself.”30 Some have described Burning Man as a “do-ocracy”:31 people are noticed, get appreciated, and gain status for creating a great work of art, show, or activity. This is the epitome of Action for Arendt, who observes that, “Because of its inherent tendency to disclose the agent together with the act, action needs for its full appearance the shining brightness we once called glory, and which is possible only in the public realm.”32 The temporary nature of BRC heightens the awareness of the transitory nature of action. Much of the art is also transformed from lasting edifice into performance by burning, one of the unique traditions of Burning Man: “build it up to burn it down.”33 The burning of art by its own creators emphasizes immediacy by conspicuously destroying durability, thereby constituting a critique that valorizes Action over the culture of commodification and accumulation (buying and collecting the products of Work, including “art” objects) and the designed disposability of mass-produced items of consumer culture (the processes of Labor).

A Party in the Desert or a Polis on the Playa? Of course, in certain ways BRC is fundamentally not like the ancient Greek polis. Burning Man is a time-limited event run by the Burning Man Organization, which can be likened to an oligarchic city council that establishes the laws and takes care of infrastructure. The event itself is of course subject to the laws of the country in which it takes place. Because of these limitations there are no doubt those critics who will say that Burning Man is fundamentally unpolitical, and perhaps include it among the “communes of hippies and drop-outs”— Arendt’s words—that constitute “a renunciation of public life, of politics in general.”34 The all-too-common description of Burning Man as a party in the desert is meant pejoratively, expressing the perspectives of Labor and Work that view a party as a waste since it drains resources, has no lasting physical product, and has no purpose other than the activity itself.

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Yet, from the perspective of Action these characteristics of a party are a virtue. In particular, the artificial framework set by the Ten Principles facilitates a replicable, albeit temporary, space for the kind of public interpersonal freedom Arendt describes, multiplying the opportunities for Action while marginalizing the importance of Labor and Work. Over fifty “regional” versions of the original Burning Man event take place at other sites around the world, on every continent, with especially large events in Australia, South Africa, and Israel,35 showing an ability re-create itself in different times and locations. While there are certainly limitations that make BRC less than an ideal polis, the Ten Principles conspire to create an experience where the extraordinary becomes ordinary, provoking an awareness of liberatory potential and a desire for a better world. The week of art and play alerts Burners to alternative possibilities within themselves and of freedom in human togetherness (as indicated by many testimonies of personal transformation). A vision of how their own lives and the life of the human community at large might be different is aroused, and Burners are less likely to be complacent about accepting what “is” as what “must be” in the default world. In a political world dominated by the activities of Labor and Work, setting aside a time and place for the activity of Action to come to the fore may be the best way to get a taste of Arendtian freedom. While Burning Man may have started as a party in the desert, I think that Black Rock City has become a kind of polis on the playa.

1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 199. In what follows I will not consider whether Arendt’s interpretation of Greek thought or vision of the Greek polis is correct. For purposes of this essay, when I discuss the polis I will be doing so through Arendt’s perspective. 2. burningman.com/whatisburningman/. 3. Catherine Saillant, “Burning Man Becomes a Hot Academic Topic,” Los Angeles Times, October 20, 2010. 4. burningman.org/event/brc/. 5. Arendt, The Human Condition, 7. 6. Ibid., 7. 7. Ibid., 194–95. 8. Ibid., 179. 9. Ibid., 197. 10. Ibid., 32. 11. Ibid. 12. burningman.com/whatisburningman/about_burningman/principles.html. 13. survival.burningman.com/culture/the-10-principles/. 14. fest300.com/magazine/pack-all-the-things-the-ultimate-burning-man-checklist. 15. survival.burningman.com/culture/the-10-principles/. 16. Arendt, The Human Condition, 139. 17. Ibid., 173. 18. survival.burningman.com/culture/the-10-principles/. 19. Ibid. 20. Arendt, The Human Condition, 175.

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21. Ibid., 173â&#x20AC;&#x201C;74. 22. Ibid., 208. 23. Ibid., 207. 24. survival.burningman.com/culture/the-10-principles/. 25. Arendt, The Human Condition, 180. 26. survival.burningman.com/culture/the-10-principles/. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Arendt, The Human Condition, 199. 30. Ibid., 206. 31. journal.burningman.org/2016/04/black-rock-city/participate-in-brc/glc-2016-volunteerismthe-backbone-of-burner-culture/. 32. Arendt, The Human Condition, 180. 33. blog.burningman.com/2012/08/building-brc/the-time-is-now/. 34. Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 232. 35. regionals.burningman.org/.

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Hannah Arendt, Charlottesville, and the Crises of Democracy A Discussion between Roger Berkowitz and Samantha Hill This discussion took place on August 16, 2017, as part of the Rostrum Lecture Series sponsored by the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College.

Roger Berkowitz: Hannah Arendt was a German Jewish student in the 1920s. She was brilliant and quite precocious. She was arrested in 1933, escaped Germany, went to France, worked bringing Jewish children to Israel or Palestine, eventually made her way to the United States in 1941, and then in 1951 published a book called The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is considered one of the great books of the twentieth century. It’s on all those silly lists of the 100 Greatest Books of the Twentieth Century. In this case it’s really justified. It was an attempt to understand the intellectual roots of totalitarianism, both in Germany and in the Soviet Union, and understanding it as a problem that lasts because it’s a part of modernity. And that’s why she remains important. Her work throughout her life is an attempt to think through politics, our realworld problems, with the background of the humanities and philosophy and literature and thinking. Professor Bill Dixon has asked Samantha and I to talk with you about chapters 24–26 of Arendt’s book The Human Condition.1 My understanding is you’ve read these chapters. The way we’re going to do this is, we’re going to talk about a couple of quotes, mostly from the readings that you’ve done from this book. We are also going to talk to each other about them as a way of taking you through some of the main ideas of this book, and then open it up to questions. Given that the topics of the readings today are plurality and politics, they intersect in important ways with the events of the last year, last six months, and last three or four days in Charlottesville, Virginia. We are going to try and highlight how what you’re reading very much relates to the events of the last few days and last six months, in ways that will affirm many of the things you believe, but I also believe very strongly they will challenge and provoke you in many ways that you might find difficult. So, I ask you to be open to that and try and understand why we emphasize the ways that Arendt is provocative, not for the sake of being provocative but for the sake of getting us all to think clearly and deeply about these issues. Samantha Hill: The Human Condition is actually the first book of Hannah Arendt’s that I read in my first semester of college. And I had no idea what

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she was talking about, but I loved the way that she wrote. I became somewhat obsessed, and I wanted to read more. How’s everyone doing? Has everyone been following what’s been going on politically? It’s kind of hard to miss, but not everyone reads the newspaper. It’s been occupying a lot of our thoughts for the past couple of days, and I know yesterday — to me, at least — felt like Inauguration Day. And so I found myself last night going through some of Arendt’s older essays, and I came across one I remember she wrote for a symposium in the New York Times in 1968, responding to the question “Is America by nature a violent society?” Arendt’s contribution was titled “Lawlessness Is Inherent in the Uprooted.” In that essay she takes on questions of race, the civil rights movements, and the use of violence in political movements. She repeats one of her central thoughts about American politics, that “Freedom of Assembly is among the most crucial and cherished and, perhaps, most dangerous rights of American citizens.” We should all take this seriously and think about how freedom of assembly is both central to American democracy and dangerous. Democracy, according to Arendt, is not safe. It is a contest and an engagement. And she celebrated the fact that in the 1960s students and others were engaged and became active in politics. She says in this essay, they became “de-alienated” from politics. But after celebrating the power and success of the peaceful and nonviolent civil rights movement, Arendt adds a caution. The power of freedom of assembly and the success of the civil rights movement should not, she writes, “make us forget that the Ku Klux Klan and the [John] Birch society are also voluntary associations, and no one will deny that the outbreak of violence can be greatly helped by such groups. It is difficult to see how this danger could be eliminated without eliminating freedom of assembly; it is not too high a price to pay for political freedom.” What Arendt is saying in this quote is that we have to remember that the KKK and other organizations we often associate with words like racism, or bigotry, or hatred, that these are volunteer associations that people join because they have political opinions. We might really disagree with their political opinions, but they choose to join these organizations. And Arendt is saying that with these organizations, with the freedom of assembly, comes the threat of violence. Further, that the only way we can ensure that this violence does not exist is by getting rid of the freedom of assembly, and that’s too high a price to pay. It’s very provocative to think that allowing these organizations to exist and thrive is the price of freedom and democracy. So, why is Arendt making this argument? For Arendt, plurality and politics necessitate one another; they go together. Plurality is a condition of politics; it’s a condition of small d democracy, of a democratic society. She defines plurality in The Human Condition and it’s a key part of the first three chapters on action that you’re reading for Language and Thinking. In these passages,

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she talks about how we appear before one another as distinct individuals in a public realm, who have the ability to engage one another, and the world around us, with speech and action. And it is this condition of plurality, our distinctness and difference, that is essential to the public, political realm. We cannot foreclose the appearance of individuals because they might have contentious political views; we must find a way to engage with difference as a democratic practice. At the beginning of the book Arendt writes: Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live. (HC, 8) And at the opening of chapter 24, which you’ve read for today, she adds: Human plurality, the basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction. (175) Roger: I think the quote that we started with that Sam read must be understood within the context of Arendt’s thinking on plurality and politics. Voluntary associations are essential for both plurality and politics. So when she says that the KKK and the John Birch Society are voluntary associations, what does she mean? Arendt has a very important belief about the centrality of voluntary associations to democratic politics. These voluntary associations and the right to public assembly—the right to act and speak in public in ways that matter—are for her the essence of democratic freedom. For people to come together and act together in politics to pursue their ends is what it means to be free. And this is to her the essence of democracy. It’s participation, it’s engagement, it’s acting in concert. So when she says that even though the KKK—and we could add now the neo-Nazis—are racist, and clearly violent in the sense that they envision a society built on oppression, exclusion, and violence, they are also expressions of voluntary associations and thus democratic. These fringe groups are at the root of what it means for a group of people who share a common opinion to get together and express that opinion. We need to understand and even appreciate the pluralistic spirit of these protests even as we have the right, and I think, the responsibility, to oppose that opinion if we don’t agree with it and to argue strenuously against it; but that doesn’t mean eliminate it. Arendt’s argument in her essay reminds me of the quote she knew well from Federalist Paper No. 10 by James Madison, perhaps the most famous quote from our founding era: “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire.” You can’t have fire without air, right? And you can’t have liberty without faction,

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without disagreement. To seek to abolish faction by taking away liberty is always a seduction, especially when those factions are dangerous and offensive. But the faction that comes from liberty is, in Arendt’s words, “not too high a price to pay for political freedom.” It is important for us today that we remind ourselves that you can’t have action and speech, you can’t have politics, without plurality. And that means that in all plurality, in all faction, in all disagreement, in all action and speech, there’s going to be both equality and distinction. That means that we are distinguished from the KKK and the neo-Nazis, but we’re also equal to them in a certain way, and we have to hold on to both those ideas. We are, as Arendt says in the quote from the Human Condition, “all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.” This is not to say at all that the KKK and the antifascist groups are the same. Plurality does not affirm sameness or equivalency, which is the mistake President Trump made in his initial remarks and then again on Tuesday. Plurality does, however, affirm both our sameness and our difference. And affirming both is important. I think a good comparison here is that Hannah Arendt later, in 1963, published a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem. One of the things she said in that book is that the Jews who worked in the concentration camps for the Nazis, and the Jews who worked in the ghettoes for the Nazis, were wrong to do so. People went nuts and said to her, “How can you blame the Jews for the Holocaust?” And she said (I’m paraphrasing here): “I never blamed the Jews for the Holocaust. I said they were wrong. That doesn’t mean they were at fault for the Holocaust. The Nazis are at fault for the Holocaust.” It’s not an equivalence. Yet she also wanted to say the Jews were wrong. And I think that’s the parallel to what’s going on today. We can and should say that those on the left who are engaging in violence are wrong without in any way saying they’re responsible for what’s going on or that there’s an equivalence. And why are those on the left engaging in violence wrong? That’s an important question. The Arendtian answer is that to engage in violence in order to try and eliminate faction, or eliminate disagreement, or eliminate plurality is antipluralistic. It is to suggest that politics is not about dissent and opinion but about one truth that has to be violently imposed. And the core of Arendt’s thinking throughout her entire life emerges from this idea of plurality, that if we really want difference, uniqueness, distinction in the world, we have to be willing to let plurality exist, even amidst those people we find offensive. Samantha: Plurality means that uniqueness and distinction exist in the world. It is a condition of our birth. And when there’s any kind of attempt to restrict the appearance of plurality, or the spaces where we can appear before one another and engage in conversation (even if that’s a conversation where we’re

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having a political disagreement because we have different political opinions), then for Arendt that’s a sign of totalitarianism encroaching upon democratic politics, upon our democratic polity. I want to illustrate what Roger was saying in material terms and give the example of the protest that happened in Durham, North Carolina, the other night. Did anyone see the video of the protestors who gathered together around the war memorial and tore down the statue, and then proceeded to boot-stomp it violently and take pictures in front of it? This was an act of violence. It was an act of destruction, and it was organized on the left. We might disagree about whether or not these Confederate statues should be taken down, but individuals forming a mob, gathering in a public square, and violently removing war memorials is not democratic. So, when Arendt talks about plurality in this context, what it means is that politics requires us in our difference to come together in a public space and to have a civil conversation with one another about why we should remove these memorials. Or, why we should let them stay, or what we should do with them. And then if the people of Durham, for example, voted to remove this memorial, then the memorial gets taken down. But then it’s a democratic decision, then it’s not the will of a small group of individuals. Audience question: When she said the Jews were wrong, what was she suggesting they do? Weren’t they kind of forced to work at risk of being killed? Samantha: She’s not saying all Jews. Roger: No. No. Certainly not all Jews. It’s those who actually killed other Jews on behalf of the Nazis. And those who actually chose to save themselves and their families by sacrificing other Jews to be transported to the camps. Were these Jews who cooperated with the Nazis forced to do so? Well, it depends what you mean by forced. They were forced to in the sense that if they hadn’t they probably would have been killed. So they chose to save their lives by killing others or helping to kill others. And what Arendt says is— L et’s break it down: it’s a choice no one should be forced to make. And because it’s a choice no one should be forced to make, none of us can be clear how we would react to it. And we shouldn’t say that they are responsible for the deaths of Jews in a legal way. They shouldn’t be punished for it. And they are not the ones responsible for the fact that Jews are dying, for the Holocaust or for the deportations. But Arendt still thinks that, morally, cooperation was the wrong choice. So what should they have done? There are a couple of options. One: they should have fought back and maybe died fighting. That’s her preferred option. They should resist. That is what it means to act politically. Second, they could try to escape. And third, they could commit suicide. She thinks all of these would be

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morally more honest and more meaningful, and she thinks would do more to help Jews. Not everyone is going to act morally—we shouldn’t expect all people to be superbly moral. And those who don’t act morally aren’t evil. They are not equal to the Nazis. But they were wrong. What is more, their wrong choice did make it easier for the Nazis to kill Jews. Because some Jews complied with the Nazis, they proved to the Nazis that people were willing to go along with what the Nazis were doing. They didn’t make the Nazis confront their own horror. In fact, one of the reasons it’s so abhorrent that at the time of this talk no one in Trump’s administration is resigning and only six CEOs have stepped down in the last three days and the 200-plus other ones have not, is because those who stay give to those on the extreme fringe solace in saying “What you’re doing is not bad enough for me to take a stand against it.” And the point is that at some point you have to take a stand against things like this, and that takes courage. Q: I don’t understand—I guess that you’re stating that they shouldn’t have torn down the monument because it’s an act of violence, but then the Jewish people who were working for the Nazis should have rebelled. I just don’t understand where that line is drawn. Samantha: It’s a good question. I don’t think that we can compare those two situations, and I don’t think that we can compare them for a couple of reasons. The most important of which is that America is still a democratic society. Since Donald Trump was elected in November, the question that I get asked more than anything else is, is America fascist? Is America becoming a fascist country? No. The answer is no. I think that sometimes we feel a sense of crisis, like yesterday and in the past week, and it’s been more present lately than at other moments in recent history; but this is a constitutional republic. The United States has representative democracy, and our political institutions are remarkably resilient. We have a public sphere where we can engage in civic discourse with one another. And I think that we have a moral responsibility to think about what that engagement looks like. When Hannah Arendt is writing The Origins of Totalitarianism, and when she’s later writing Eichmann in Jerusalem, she is trying to understand the phenomenal appearance of an entirely new form of government in the world, which is totalitarianism. And the hallmark of that form of government that people were living under is the foreclosure of public space and the ability to appear before one another as unique individuals, and to engage in conversation. Totalitarianism is in part defined by the absence of plurality. America is not a totalitarian country, which is not to say that there isn’t violence, or

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racism, or anti-Semitism; but that we have a public sphere where we can appear before one another and engage in civic, and civil discourse. Roger: At the time Arendt is talking about the Jews, they’ve been denaturalized. They had their citizenship taken away, they had no political rights, they couldn’t vote, they actually no longer could hold most jobs, they were in concentration and death camps. They had been disappeared from society. In a democracy, Arendt sees that it is absolutely essential that we have what we call equality in public. That means we all can vote, that we all can talk, we can all act, we can all speak. She says in another book that the great sin of the United States and what may in the end undo it was slavery. And the sin of slavery was that it made blacks in the United States invisible, not appearing. It thus made them not part of the public space. So when Sam says we’re not in a fascist country right now and we’re not in a totalitarian country, what I take that to mean is that we still have a public sphere; we still have a place where people of all sides, whether they’re neo-Nazis, or whether they’re Antifa, or whether they’re liberals or conservatives, or blacks or whites, or Muslims or Jews, can organize, join voluntary associations, run for office, and engage in public discourse. Obviously that was not always the case in this country. And so in another essay called “On Violence,” Hannah Arendt says, there are times when violence is necessary for politics. The denaturalization and killing of Jews in Germany was one such time because Jews were not part of the public sphere. And she argues that up until the 1970s or ’80s, for African Americans in this country, violence was necessary at times in order to make visible grievances on behalf of those who are rendered invisible. So Arendt says terrorism, at times, can be justified if the people engaging in it are so invisible that it’s their only way to make their claims visible. But what I think Sam is saying—and I certainly agree with her—is that this is not the case in the United States right now. The danger of the people acting like they did in Durham and tearing [down] the statue is that we will so come to overuse violence that the very public sphere that makes violence unnecessary will disappear. That’s the danger. If that happens it will turn us into a fascist country. There’s nothing in our country that will prevent it if we continue down this path. Let me move on to the next quotation on plurality from The Human Condition. Human distinctness is not the same as otherness. . . . Otherness, it is true, is an important aspect of plurality, the reason why all our definitions are distinctions, why we are unable to say what anything is without distinguishing it from something else. . . In man, otherness, which he shares with everything that is, and

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distinctness, which he shares with everything alive, become uniqueness, and human plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings. (176) There are three different words Arendt opposes here: otherness, distinctness, and uniqueness. Otherness is simply that everything is other. There’s the book, the chair, and the person—they’re all other things; that’s sort of the most obvious category. Distinctness is something else. Distinctness is what we share with dogs and cats. It’s the things we share with things that are alive. It’s not just that we’re other inorganic things; we are all alive yet live differently. We are all alive, and yet we’re different from each other in meaningful ways. And then there’s uniqueness, which is not just otherness or distinctness but an expression of our human ability to “distinguish himself ” even from other humans; and this is the core of plurality. We really are unique. Well, what Arendt is saying is, not so fast. Human beings are not just other and not just distinct; they’re unique. And they have completely different views. It’s not surprising that some people want to live a religious life and some people think religion is an opiate of the masses. It’s not surprising that some people want to live amongst people like themselves in tight, homogenous communities and other people want to live amongst cosmopolitanism and difference. And not one of these is right and one of them wrong. That’s plurality. Taking that seriously is at the heart of her understanding of what it means to be human. Samantha: Let me introduce our next quotation. Speech and action reveal this unique distinctness. Through them, men distinguish themselves instead of being merely distinct; they are the modes in which human beings appear to each other, not indeed as physical object, but qua men. . . . A life without speech and without action . . . is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men. (176) Arendt uses the word men. She’s German, and in German the word she uses is Mensch, which is a kind of universal —human rights in German are called Menschenrechte—so she means everybody, but the standard translation of Mensch in English is “man,” which is to be heard, if you can, in a nongendered way. Arendt says here that speech, action, and appearance go hand in hand. When Roger was talking about why violence was okay politically inside the concentration camps, it was precisely for Arendt because those people were not able to speak and act and appear as unique individuals. They were

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reduced to what she calls the “atomization of the masses.” She understands that totalitarianism squeezes us together so that we lose our distinctness and uniqueness and our ability to appear before one another as unique and distinct individuals. . . . We live in a country where the political antagonisms that underlie our democracy are becoming visible on an increasingly daily basis; and those antagonisms, for the most part, tend to break down along race and economic lines. So a number of people who are American citizens who have the right to vote, who have the right to engage in civic discourse, don’t actually feel like they can appear as equals in the public sphere. And even when they do have that right, they sense that they are valued differently, that they are discriminated against, and they are treated violently by the apparatuses of the state, like the police force or the National Guard. In the United States, if people don’t feel like they do have that ability to appear as equals, then how do we open up that democratic space where they might receive recognition? Roger: That’s one of the most important questions that we’ve been struggling with for the last forty or fifty years, since the different civil rights movements, the suffrage movements, and the gay rights movements, and many others. I think one of the problems we have right now—again, this is not an equivalency—is how many different groups feel that they are invisible in society, including a lot of white men, a lot of men, a lot of religious people. I was at a retreat with a lot of Bard students; many of these were minorities and many were from the South. And a lot of these students are religious. And one of the things that came out at the retreat, at least the year I was there, was that for many people at Bard the thing they feel most invisible about and unable to come out in public about is not race or class but religion; and so I think it depends on what community you’re in and where you are. But one of the situations we have right now is that so many different groups throughout society feel invisible and are making claims upon it. Samantha: So how do we think about appearance in the public sphere as individuals who want to claim an identity? What about those who want to argue for representation based upon the identity that they claim? How do we engage in civic discourse and conversation when a number of individuals want to foreclose the possibility of even saying, well, you know, why are we talking about the existential crises that white men are experiencing in this country when they’re the ones who have rendered us invisible in the first place? How do we start that conversation in an Arendtian spirit? Roger: You’re asking me now? Samantha: Yes, I’m asking you! It’s a conversation, right?

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Roger: I think those are essential questions. We have different ways that we must respond. One is through institutional change. Let me just put out some ideas. We absolutely need laws that make any kind of discrimination in public, political, or legal activities illegal, or don’t legalize them. And I think we’re pretty close to that. I’m sure there are some laws that still need to change. For example, the one major institution in the United States right now which most obviously is not legally race-neutral is the prison system. We see an unbelievable overincarceration of black men. The different ways we address black and white drug users is a scandal and needs to be changed. Also the laws which prevent felons from voting in many states even after they are released disproportionately and unjustly disenfranchise black men. If I were to put my energies to changing one of these public laws, or legal regimes, that would be the one. And I assume most you know, many of you know, that at Bard we’re very involved in that struggle with the Bard Prison Initiative. Then there are the social realms. We have to do a better job of bringing more unique people with different perspectives into the public conversations that we have. As you know, we sponsor many public conversations at the Hannah Arendt Center. We make a concerted effort to bring a wide variety of unique voices into our public conversations. This is not simply a matter of race or gender, although those are important markers. It is important to bring in business leaders—a group typically excluded in academic conversations. And we want to include artists and writers. But also conservatives, who are woefully underrepresented in academia. And there’s the question of education. We need to constantly force ourselves to have hard conversations about these questions. We need to ask about what gender and race and religion have meant in the past in this country, what they mean in the present, and what they mean in the future. You can’t run away from it. Part of our job here is encouraging you students to have these conversations. I think in the last year conversations around memorials and monuments have been happening around the country, and I think that’s great. I have my opinions; you have your opinions. I believe mine are right, but that doesn’t mean they’re true; they’re my opinions. You may believe yours are right; that doesn’t mean they’re true. We have to figure out how to negotiate our differences and come to some sort of common understanding of what we can agree on, and that’s the challenge of living in a multiracial, cosmopolitan democracy. Samantha: Let me read the next quote from The Human Condition on the topic of what it means to speak and act and appear in the public sphere. Arendt says, To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, “to begin,” “to lead,” and eventually “to rule,” indicates), to set something into motion (which is

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the original meaning of the Latin agere). Because they are initium, newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action. (177) One of the things I like about Arendt is, she’s a very compact writer. There’s a lot going on in this passage, but I actually want to focus on this idea of newcomers. In a letter that she wrote to Karl Jaspers after she started teaching in the 1950s at the University of Chicago—he had asked her about her classes: “What is it like to teach American students?”—she answered: “My classes are great. The students are engaged, except, you know, I have this one student, and he is the worst kind of newcomer” (the German is Anfänger, which has the sense of one who is who is caught up in something). What she meant is that the student refused to think; that they came with their opinions, they were “caught up” in their worldview, as Roger was just talking about; they believed that their opinions were right, and they refused to engage in a kind of conversation that would open them up to thinking differently about what they were talking about. Arendt is talking about the relationship between education, democracy, and truth, and what it means to inhabit a space in thinking where we can see the world anew, where we can begin anew. At the beginning of The Human Condition, in the preface, the axiom that Arendt offers us and I think underpins a lot of her work is: “What I’m trying to do here is to simply stop and think what we are doing.” She means that we stop, we pause, we take a deep breath, and we think. We ask of ourselves, we engage in a conversation with ourselves about a question, about what we’re thinking about; and this is thinking. It’s a self-reflective form of thinking. It’s what she calls a two-in-one conversation, where we engage in dialogue with ourselves. This is incredibly politically powerful. If we could stop and think about our opinions, and then listen, and think about what another person is saying, and find a way to have a conversation, and let go of any attachment we have to a fixed worldview or sense of right, then we are thinking democratically. Then we are actively fighting against what Arendt called tyrannical thinking, which is reductive and universalizing. To think this way is to inhabit a kind of vulnerable space, an in-between space, where we’re constantly coming into being, where we’re constantly open to new ways of thinking about the world. Roger: I’m going to move on to this next slide of natality and plurality. This idea of newness and beginning, initium, that Sam is talking about is essential for Arendt. And one of the words that she uses—and I find it overused, and so I try not to use it too much but I’ll mention it to you—is this idea of natality. Natality means birth or birthliness; prenatal means before birth.

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Aristotle says that man is a political animal, a zoon logon echon, an animal that has the capacity of speech or reason. Christian philosophers said that man is created in the image of God, and thus is almost mortal but not yet a divine being. Immanuel Kant says that man is a rational being, a vernünftige Lebewesen, a living being that has reason. Arendt rejects all these definitions of humanity, and she says instead that man is a beginner. That’s her idea of man. Man is someone who begins things new, and that’s natality. If action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth, if it is the actualization of the human condition of natality, then speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness and is the actualization of the human condition of plurality, that is, of living as a distinct and unique being among equals. . . . The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability. . . . The new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle. (HC, 178) For Arendt—and this is, again, shocking to many of us—miracles are not crazy things that religious people believe in. There is no humanity without miracles, because a miracle is, humanly speaking, simply something that could not have been predicted, that could not have been expected. So, for example, the emergence of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King for her was a miracle. Gandhi and his movement were a miracle. The American Revolution for her was a miracle. And the great hope of politics for Arendt is that miracles are possible, and that’s why we should never be pessimistic. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried; but it means we should never be pessimistic. Samantha: Let me move on to the next quotation from the text. In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world. . . . This disclosure of “who” in contradistinction to “what” somebody is—his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide—is implicit in everything somebody says and does. (179) The moment we want to say who somebody is, our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is; we get entangled in a description of qualities he necessarily shares with others like him; we begin to describe a type or a “character” in the old meaning of the word, with the result that his specific uniqueness escapes us. (181)

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So who and what are actually proper philosophical categories for thinking about—I don’t want to use the words human beings now, but let’s call them individuals. Who a person is varies from what a person is. And I think today this is actually a really important point politically, because we confuse them. We mistake certain forms of identity politics for who a person is when in reality it’s more of what a person is. What a person is [is made up of] characteristics, consumer choices, things that are material, that give form to our material sense of self. Who is how it is that we think about the world, how it is that we engage in conversation, how we develop as distinct individuals through thought, through speech and action, and not through what it is that we do. I could ask you: who are you? And you might give me your resume, what you do, where you’re from. But that’s not who you are, that’s what you are. And similarly, today, people are often quick to introduce themselves with all of their identity modifies—cisgender, heterosexual, genderqueer—but this is just another form of what. Who a person is, for Arendt, exists beyond any form of identity politics. Roger: I’m going to move on to Arendt’s understanding of the polis and the importance of politics as a “space of appearance.” The Polis was supposed to multiply the occasions to win “immortal fame,” that is, to multiply the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique distinctness . . . to offer a remedy for the futility of action and speech. (197) The Polis is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly. (198–99) The polis is a Greek word for—well, I won’t translate it. It’s not a state and it’s not a city. Here’s the best way that I can explain to you what a polis is. Polis, which is the root of our words political and politician, comes from the Greek word pelein. And pelein was the verb that the Greeks used to describe the circular motion of smoke rings as they come up out of a peace pipe. So how does politics come out of the verb for smoke rings? Because politics is, as both Aristotle and Plato understood, the unity of a multitude; or in Arendt’s words, the shared common center of a plurality. It is the pole, the center, around which different and plural and unique people revolve, that holds them together. The polis is not only a physical place, not only a legal entity; it’s a spiritual togetherness of plural and different people.

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And that spiritual togetherness of plural and different people for Arendt provides a space of appearance, because we know that when we act, when we speak, what will happen? People will listen, see us; even if they kill us, they will have showed us that we occurred, we mattered. The worst thing that could happen is that they ignore us. The worst thing that you can do to someone if you don’t like them, whether it’s Milo Yiannopoulos or Donald Trump, is ignore them, because that makes them invisible. But the polis is what unites us. Samantha: Let me move on to the next quotation from Arendt’s The Human Condition. . . . Power is what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence. . . . Power preserves the public realm and the space of appearance, and as such it is also the lifeblood of the human artifice, which, unless it is the scene of action and speech, of the web of human affairs and relationships and the stories engendered by them, lacks its ultimate raison d’être. Without being talked about by men and without housing them, the world would not be a human artifice but a heap of unrelated things to which each isolated individual was at liberty to add one more object. (200–4) What she’s talking about at the end of that quote resonates with what she was talking about at the beginning of the chapter, and what the difference is between otherness and distinctness. We appear in the world, and we engage with one another. Arendt is using the word artifice, which for her refers to the world that we build with our hands, homo faber, through architecture, language, poetry, music, and so on. She draws a distinction between the earth, which we inhabit and must share together, and the world that we build. We interact with the common world that we build together, which includes our political institutions. And we are able to understand one another through a common language, because in some way we are equal and can appear before one another in speech and action. When we do this, we’re building a web, a web of relationships, a kind of string between peoples. And part of this web for Arendt is our collective inheritance, which is constituted through human relationships, storytelling, remembering one another, remembering that George Washington and Jefferson Davis are two different people and perhaps should not be compared to one another. That is, it’s having stories, having our political stories, having the stories of individuals told. Earlier on in the section that you’re reading she talks about the word hero. And hero, as Arendt reminds us, used to mean anyone who was qualified to participate in the public sphere, somebody who was free, and somebody

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who deserved to be remembered. We all deserve to be remembered for our distinctness, and we do that by telling stories and telling one another’s stories. Roger: So we’re going to try and end, but one last thing on power and action. She writes on page 200, What first undermines and then kills political communities is loss of power and final impotence; and power cannot be stored up and kept in reserve for emergencies, like the instruments of violence, but exists only in its actualization. Where power is not actualized, it passes away, and history is full of examples that the greatest material riches cannot compensate for this loss. Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities. This is a key idea for her. A lot of you, and a lot of us, think that the great evil is power. We’ve internalized this idea. You’ve heard the phrase “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” For Arendt, that’s wrong. Power is what enables us to be free. Power is what enables us to act, to talk, to speak, to present ourselves, to insert ourselves, to force ourselves into the conversation. We need not to limit power but to multiply it. And the way to protect against one power becoming too dominant and thus restricting all of us, or limiting our freedom, is to multiply power so much that no one power can dominate them all. Think of The Lord of the Rings, right? There’s no one ring to rule them all. It’s actually very much Arendt’s thought, and there’s some great papers on Arendt and Tolkein around those ideas. “Where power is not actualized, it passes away.” And this is what I would tell you all. You asked a question about what to do. Where we stop actualizing power, where we stop engaging, where we stop acting, it withers away. Power requires that people be involved in self-government. And history is full of examples, she writes, that the greatest material riches cannot compensate for this loss. I think you’re seeing that happen in the United States right now. No matter how rich we are, if we don’t engage politically, power will wither away, and when it does, there is the chance for violence to come in and replace it. And that’s, I think, the great danger we’re facing today.

1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 8. Hereafter abbreviated HC.

Hannah Arendt, Charlottesville, and the Crises of Democracy

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Contributors Roger Berkowitz is associate professor of political studies and human rights at Bard College and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition and coeditor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt’s “Denktagebuch.” Leon Botstein has been president of Bard College since 1975; he also holds the Leon Levy Professorship in the Arts and Humanities at the College. He is chairman of the board of the Central European University, a board member of the Open Society Foundations, music director of the American Symphony Orchestra (since 1992), and the author of Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture. Ian Buruma was educated in Holland and Japan, where he studied history, Chinese literature, and Japanese cinema. In 1970s Tokyo, he acted in Kara Juro’s Jokyo Gekijo and participated in Maro Akaji’s butoh dancing company Dairakudakan, followed by a career in documentary filmmaking and photography. In the 1980s, he worked as a journalist, and spent much of his early writing career travelling and reporting from all over Asia. Buruma now writes about a broad range of political and cultural subjects for major publications, most frequently for the New York Review of Books, New Yorker, New York Times, Guardian, La Repubblica, and NRC Handelsblad. He is the editor of the New York Review of Books. Drucilla Cornell is a professor of political science, women’s studies, and comparative literature at Rutgers University. She is a playwright and also launched The Ubuntu Project in South Africa in 2003 and has been working with the project ever since. Cornell’s theoretical and political writings span a tremendous range of both topics and disciplines. From her early work in critical legal studies and feminist theory to her more recent work on South Africa, transitional justice, and the jurisprudence of Ronald Dworkin, Cornell continues to think through new and evolving issues in philosophy and politics of global significance. Her latest title, coauthored with Stephen Seely, is called The Spirit of Revolution: Beyond the Dead Ends of Man. Ron H. Feldman, PhD, is a visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union. He edited The Jew as Pariah and coedited The Jewish Writings, two collections of Hannah Arendt’s writings on Jewish topics. He has written about

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the environmental aspects of ancient Jewish calendar texts in the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and rabbinic sources, especially the cycles of the Sabbath and new moon. Most recently he has written about Burning Man, which he has attended annually since 2010. Much of his writing can be found on his website, ronhfeldman.com. Samantha Rose Hill is the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and visiting assistant professor of political studies at Bard College. Hill is currently completing a manuscript of Hannah Arendt’s poetry, which has been edited and translated into English, and working on a monograph that explores the ethical dimensions of melancholia. Marc Jongen was born in 1968 in Merano, Italy, and is a German philosopher, essayist, and political activist. He is a lecturer in philosophy and aesthetics at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung), where he also worked as an assistant to Peter Sloterdijk for many years. While his first book was on Indian Vedanta philosophy, Jongen has further written on the continuation of premodern, religious, and spiritual worlds of thought in the imaginary and the real of technological civilization. He has also published on cultural and sociopolitical topics in major German newspapers. An opponent of political developments in Germany and Europe that he considers a threat to democracy, such as the euro rescue policy and German immigration policy, he joined the new Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in 2013. Jongen was elected to the German Bundestag as a member of the AfD in 2017. Lori Jo Marso is Doris Zemurray Stone Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies and Professor of Political Science at Union College. Her latest book is Politics with Beauvoir: Freedom in the Encounter (Duke University, 2017). She has written, edited, or coedited six other books, including two in 2016: Fifty-One Key Feminist Thinkers (Routledge) and (with Bonnie Honig) Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier (Oxford University Press). She has won the Susan Okin and Iris Marion Young Prize for feminist theory (2013) and the Contemporary Political Theory Prize for best article published (2014). With Jill Frank, she is consulting editor to Lawrie Balfour for the journal Political Theory, and she is chair of the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association. Marso is currently writing a book on encounters between objects and bodies in feminist film. Walter Russell Mead is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College and editor at large of the American Interest. He is the author of several books: Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (Knopf, 2001; winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize and

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nominated for the 2002 Arthur Ross Book Award); Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk (Knopf, 2004); and God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (Vintage, 2008). He is a contributing editor to and writer on international affairs for the Los Angeles Times; he also writes articles, book reviews, and op-ed pieces for Harper’s, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Atlantic, and other magazines and newspapers. Mead was a finalist for the National Magazine Award (essays and criticism) in 1997, and was a President’s Fellow of the World Policy Institute at The New School from 1987 to 1997. Yascha Mounk is a lecturer on government at Harvard University and a senior fellow at New America. He is a weekly columnist for Slate, host of the Good Fight podcast, and has written for publications including the New York Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, and Foreign Affairs. He is the author of three books; his latest work is entitled The People vs Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (Harvard University Press, 2018). François Rochat is a professor in the Faculty of Sciences and Medicine at the University of Fribourg. With Andre Modigliani at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he formulated a contrasting but noncontradictory conception to Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis—the ordinariness of goodness— based on the study of ordinary people who defied authorities to rescue persecuted minority people during the Holocaust. His current work deals with collective resistance to political mass violence. Zephyr Teachout is one of America’s leading anticorruption scholars and activists. She is an associate law professor at Fordham Law School and a senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. She received her BA from Yale, and a JD and MA in political science from Duke University. She has published two books: the edited volume Mousepads, Shoeleather, and Hope (Routledge, 2008), about internet organizing; and the award-winning Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United (Harvard University Press, 2014). Her articles and essays have been cited in courts around the country, including the Supreme Court, and she has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, American Prospect, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, the Nation, Politico, Daily Beast, and other news outlets. Micah White, PhD, is a public intellectual and lifelong activist who cocreated Occupy Wall Street, a global social movement that spread to 82 countries, while an editor of Adbusters magazine. His essays and interviews on the future of protest have been published internationally in periodicals including the New York Times, Guardian, Folha de São Paulo, Washington Post, Poder (Brazil), and Los Angeles Review of Books. He has been a featured guest on major network

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television shows such as Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect, the BBC’s Newsnight, and The National, Canada’s flagship nightly current affairs broadcast. Widely recognized as a pioneer of social movement creation, White has been profiled by NPR’s Morning Edition, the New Yorker, and the Guardian, and Esquire has named him one of the most influential young thinkers alive today. Learn more about him at micahmwhite.com. Linda Marie-Gelsomina Zerilli is the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College. She is the faculty director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Zerilli is the author of Signifying Woman (Cornell University Press, 1994), Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 2005), A Democratic Theory of Judgment (UCP, 2016), and articles on subjects ranging across feminist thought, the politics of language, aesthetics, democratic theory, and Continental philosophy. She has been a Fulbright Fellow, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and a Stanford Humanities Center Fellow. Zerilli has served on the executive committee of Political Theory and is currently serving on the editorial or advisory board of the American Political Science Review, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Constellations, and Culture, Theory and Critique. Ewa Plonowska Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Buffalo. In January 2016 she was awarded the honorary doctor of philosophy degree from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, University of Maine. She is the author of Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism (Columbia University Press, 2012), An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford University Press, 2001), and The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (SUNY Press, 1995); editor of Gombrowicz’s Grimaces: Modernism, Gender, Nationality (SUNY, 1998); and coeditor of, among other books, Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis (SUNY, 2005), Time for the Humanities (Fordham University Press, 2008), and Intermedialities: Philosophy, Art, Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). Her interdisciplinary research interests include feminist political theory, modernism, feminist philosophy, ethics, and critical race theory. She is currently working on a book devoted to Hannah Arendt.

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About Bard College Founded in 1860, Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, is an independent, residential, coeducational college offering a four-year BA program in the liberal arts and sciences and a five-year BA/BS degree in economics and finance. The Bard College Conservatory of Music offers a fiveyear program in which students pursue a dual degreeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a BMus and a BA in a field other than music. Bard offers MMus degrees in conjunction with the Conservatory and The Orchestra Now, and at Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bard and its affiliated institutions also grant the following degrees: AA at Bard High School Early College, a public school with campuses in New York City, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Newark, New Jersey; AA and BA at Bard College at Simonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Rock: The Early College, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and through the Bard Prison Initiative at six correctional institutions in New York State; MA in curatorial studies, MS and MA in economic theory and policy, and MS in environmental policy and in climate science and policy at the Annandale campus; MFA and MAT at multiple campuses; MBA in sustainability in New York City; and MA, MPhil, and PhD in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan. Internationally, Bard confers dual BA and MA degrees at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University, Russia (Smolny); dual BA and MAT degrees at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem; and dual BA degrees at American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan and Bard College Berlin: A Liberal Arts University. Bard offers nearly 50 academic programs in four divisions. Total enrollment for Bard College and its affiliates is approximately 6,000 students. The undergraduate College has an enrollment of more than 1,900 and a student-to-faculty ratio of 10:1. In 2016, Bard acquired the Montgomery Place estate, bringing the size of the campus to nearly 1,000 acres. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.