Author Archives: Peter

prospects for civic media after 2016

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Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice is a new book edited by Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis. I contributed the introductory chapter, “Democracy in the Digital Age.” On Nov. 16, I joined Eric, Paul, Ethan Zuckerman (MIT), Colin Rhinesmith (Simmons), Beth Coleman (University of Waterloo), and Ceasar McDowell (MIT) for a book-launch discussion that focused on the role of media in the 2016 election and the prospects for civic media in the near future. Here’s the video.

separating populism from anti-intellectualism

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I’m a populist, yet I advocate the life of the mind. I’d like to see less elitism (of certain kinds) along with more intense and widespread intellectual inquiry. Unfortunately, the most prominent varieties of populism today are anti-intellectual. This is a problem rooted in social structures. Some of the solutions involve changing the way formal educational institutions work. Others involve enhancing intellectual life in informal contexts.

Let’s define “anti-intellectualism” as a rejection of advanced, specialized, complicated thought, which is viewed as antithetical to common sense. According to Mark Fisher (The Washington Post 7/17), Donald Trump is an explicit anti-intellectual:

He said in a series of interviews that he does not need to read extensively because he reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.” Trump said he is skeptical of experts because “they can’t see the forest for the trees.” He believes that when he makes decisions, people see that he instinctively knows the right thing to do: “A lot of people said, ‘Man, he was more accurate than guys who have studied it all the time.'” … Trump said reading long documents is a waste of time because he absorbs the gist of an issue very quickly. “I’m a very efficient guy,” he said. “Now, I could also do it verbally, which is fine. I’d always rather have — I want it short. There’s no reason to do hundreds of pages because I know exactly what it is.”

Presumably, Trump’s anti-intellectualism was more of a political asset than a liability in the campaign, and that tells us something about our culture. (On the other hand, one of the most curious and thoughtful political leaders in modern America–and a very fine writer–won the two previous presidential elections, so politics is not a vast wasteland.)

Let’s define “anti-elitism” as a rejection of the superior position, entitlement, and power of some privileged group. This is different from anti-intellectualism because an elite needn’t be defined by knowledge or expertise: the business class, for instance, usually is not. However, the two ideas often come together, not only in Trump’s rhetoric but in many other examples from American history. For instance, in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), Richard Hofstadter wrote:

The kind of anti-intellectualism expressed in official circles during the 1950’s was mainly the traditional businessman’s suspicion of experts working in any area outside his control, whether in scientific laboratories, universities, or diplomatic corps. Far more acute and sweeping was the hostility to intellectuals expressed on the far-right wing, a categorical folkish dislike of the educated classes and of any thing respectable, established, pedigreed, or cultivated. The right-wing crusade of the 1950’s was full of heated rhetoric about “Harvard professors, twisted-thinking intellectuals … in the State Department; those who are “burdened with Phi Beta Kappa keys and academic honors” but not “equally loaded with honesty and common sense”; “the American respectables, the socially pedigreed, the culturally acceptable, the certified gentlemen and scholars of the day, dripping with college degrees .. . the “best people” who were for Alger Hiss”; “the pompous diplomat in striped pants with phony British accent”; those who try to fight Communism “with kid gloves in perfumed drawing rooms “; Easterners who “insult the people of the great Midwest and West, the heart of America; those who can “trace their ancestry back to the eighteenth century or even further” but whose loyalty is still not above suspicion; those who understand “the Groton vocabulary of the Hiss-Achcson group.”

The businessmen who distrusted independent intellectuals represented one elite quarreling with a different one–Wall Street and Detroit struggled for influence with the Ivy League and the State Department. But the “far right-wing” rejected elites that they defined in terms of social privilege rather than intellectualism. For these people, the problem with Groton School alumni was not their sophisticated ways of thought but their social pedigree and arrogance. These right populists were against Wall Street and Harvard. Although Hafstadter is writing here about the right wing, some left populists share the same targets.

I think anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism come together because educational institutions serve two functions simultaneously.

On one hand, schools and colleges are spaces for intellectual inquiry. They are the most prominent and best supported places where people address unanswered questions of public importance, conduct deep and sustained conversations about unresolved topics, and model and teach the skills and values required for those pursuits.

At the same time, schools and colleges confer social status. A college degree is a prerequisite for occupying many of the advantaged slots in our social order. Educational institutions at all levels teach not only intellectual skills, but also manners, modes of social interaction, and ways of writing and speaking that mark out the advantaged class. And despite their protestations that they admit students fairly, they are dominated by children of privileged groups. For reasons that I’ve explored in some length, I don’t think this situation is likely to change markedly.

To make matters even more fraught, the genuine search for knowledge can be conducted arrogantly or else responsively. One can pursue the truth by studying other people and their problems in order to change those people (for good or ill), or one can listen and create knowledge together. Finally, claims to advanced knowledge can be trustworthy or not. After all, highly credentialed experts are the ones who told us to blast highways through inner cities, minimize fat consumption, and invade Iraq.

I think several trends worsen the conflation of populism with anti-intellectualism today.

First, although advanced intellectual inquiry occurs in some spaces that aren’t educational institutions–community organizing groups, online magazines, some religious communities, and hip hop–the state of “informal” intellectual life does not seem to be strong today compared to the past. Most of the people who can spend a lot of their time reading, writing, and talking about complex issues work as teachers or professors.

Second, tools for data collection, analysis, and influence are giving frightening amounts of power to people who possess and deploy information.

Third, in a post-industrial economy, the workforce is increasingly divided between people who work with their hands in low-status roles, and others who work with symbols and data. The former understandably wonder why they must pay for the latter, whether directly or via taxation. University of Wisconsin professor Kathy Cramer describes how she would visit small towns in her state and introduce herself “as a public opinion scholar from the state’s flagship university.” When she asked citizens what concerned them most, they often “expressed a deeply felt sense of not getting their ‘fair share’ …. They felt that they didn’t get a reasonable proportion of decision-making power, believing that the key decisions were made in the major metro areas of Madison [where Kathy works] and Milwaukee, then decreed out to the rest of the state, with little listening being done to people like them.” It became clear to Cramer that when they complained about people who didn’t work hard enough, they were “talking about the laziness of desk-job white professionals like me.” Why did their tax dollars have to pay for someone to drive around the state asking people political questions so she could write her books?

Finally, today seems like a time of growing deference to high-status people. As I wrote last fall:

We live at a time when billionaires, celebrities, and CEOs are given extraordinary deference, especially in comparison to run-of-the-mill elected officials, civil servants, union leaders, and grassroots organizers. Politicians, for instance, are constantly in contact with their wealthiest constituents. First-year Democratic Members of the House are advised to spend four hours per day of every day calling donors. Meanwhile, many advocacy groups are funded by rich individuals, not sustained by membership dues, so their leaders are also constantly on the phone or at conferences and meetings with wealthy people.

One solution is to identify, strengthen, and lift up informal spaces where people who haven’t attended college–at least, not recently–engage in intense intellectual work. When I interviewed the great community organizer Ernesto Cortés, Jr. (Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) co-chair and executive director of the West / Southwest IAF regional network), he told me this was his organization’s strategy:

Building talented, committed, enterprising relational organizers through recruitment, training, and mentoring. We develop their capacity to be reciprocal, relational organizers. Ask–what do Aristotle and Aquinas say? Explore the different traditions. Offer all kinds of seminars with a wide range of scholars from left, right, center. Develop their intellectual capacity, which is the capacity to be deliberative. Help them to understand labor, capitalism, the various faith traditions, strategic thinking. We offer what amount to postgraduate-level seminars in how to create effective leaders in an institutional context–not lone celebrity activists–people who build institutions that can then be networked together. …

Another example is the impressive array of liberal arts programs now being taught in prisons on a pro bono basis by professors. For instance, the Jessup Correctional Institution Scholars Program explains:

Our Program is dedicated to a simple concept: no one in society should be deprived of access to ideas. This has led all of us, through different paths, to seek opportunities to teach and learn outside the walls of the academy, built to keep people out on the basis of their social standing and financial means. And it has ultimately led us to bring intellectual discussion inside the walls of the prison, a space that too many people consider radically separate from society. We see society as a whole riddled with locked doors and those of the prison are just one more set that we hope to open.

Everyone in the program is a scholar, and we think of ourselves as on equal moral and intellectual footing – we strive to create course content as a collaboration between teachers and students, and to make classes free-ranging discussions and workshops more than lectures.

Another solution is to do the intellectual work of the university in ways that better engage laypeople. Guided in part by Albert Dzur, I argue that the way to accomplish this is not to teach graduate students and PhD researchers to be more modest and humble. That message never sticks with an ambitious group, and it’s not really the ideal, anyway. We actually need more courageous and enterprising research. Instead, we can recognize that engaging members of the public in creating and using knowledge requires highly advanced skills–it’s a form of democratic professionalism. We should teach, evaluate, and reward excellent democratic professionalism in the academy.

A third solution is for the academy to take more responsibility–at the institutional level–for communicating research and intellectual life. It used to make some sense to assume that academics conducted research and professional reporters selected and translated the most relevant findings for their readers or listeners via mass media. If that model ever worked, it doesn’t work now that 30% fewer people are employed as professional reporters. Just as institutions of higher education created public broadcasting, so they must now launch new forms of communication.

None of these three strategies will solve the underlying problem completely. The social underpinnings are problematic and require reform. Meanwhile, there are tempting political payoffs for politicians who demonize intellectual life. But these are three ways of fighting back.

Levinson and Fay, Dilemmas of Educational Ethics

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Meira Levinson’s and Jacob Fay’s edited volume Dilemmas of Educational Ethics: Cases and Commentaries is enormously valuable. It not only addresses problems that confront educators every day but also suggests how moral reasoning can be revitalized in academia.

The book is organized around seven business-school-like cases. Each case poses a common dilemma. For instance, should a team of middle school teachers choose to promote a student who is far behind grade level? She will struggle and probably fail if she goes on to high school, but if they retain her, she will doubtless drop out. Each case ends at the point of decision. It is followed by half a dozen short reflective essays contributed by a mix of scholars and practitioners (although I noticed no systematic differences between the academics’ and educators’ chapters, which is interesting in itself).

Dilemmas of Educational Ethics represents a mode of thought that can fill a gap left in the tessellation of our current disciplines.

Social and behavioral sciences help to illuminate what is going on and predict what will happen as a result of various strategies. Management disciplines provide advice about how to operate as administrative leaders. And philosophy/political theory offers frameworks for asking “what is justice?” or “what should be done?”

But none of these disciplines directly addresses the question “What should we do?”–if “we” means a concrete group of responsible actors who have limited options and imperfect information. They face not only a practical question but also an intellectually challenging one. Practitioners would benefit if scholars thought from this perspective, and scholarly disciplines would be stronger if they addressed what is often a much harder question than “should should be done?” Social science misses the mark by bracketing the value aspect of the question “what should we do?”, and most philosophy/political theory loses the active agent (“we”) by focusing on justice as a virtue of social systems rather than an outcome of concrete action.

As advertised, the cases in this book are “richly described” and “realistic” (p. 3). The writing isn’t pretentious or mannered, but it is literary in the sense that various characters’ goals, emotional states, and interactions are described. The narratives build genuine suspense and force the reader to decide what she or he would do. This is a difficult form of writing that is unusual in most disciplines. In particular, it differs from the thought-experiments popular in moral philosophy: trolley problems and the like.

Philosophers prefer stylized situations that force a choice among theories that are revealed to be incompatible. For instance, whether to change the track of a runaway trolley forces a different response for a utilitarian or a Kantian. This is a dilemma in the sense of a choice between two bad options. A third choice is either defined as impossible or rejected as question-begging. You’re not allowed to ask, “Isn’t there something else the onlooker can throw in front of the trolley?” But many responses to the scenarios in this book do suggest a third or fourth option. Jeffrey Smith calls this move “breaking out of the binary” (p. 83). 

As Jal Mehta writes (p. 19), the cases in Levinson and Fay make you want to “diminish rather than ignite conflicts among first principles” and satisfy as many constituencies as you can, not necessarily for uniform reasons (p. 19). Mehta notes that that’s how skillful administrators think. It is, he adds, “diametrically opposed” to how “political philosophers” teach us to think. I’d say it is political thinking, in the best sense. Yet it is just as intellectually demanding as mainstream philosophy, if not more so.

Philosophers’ principles sometimes enter the discussion usefully. Christopher Winship addresses a case about school assignment rules by invoking John Rawls’ “Difference Principle” (any differences are legitimate only to the extent they are necessary to improve the situation of the least advantaged.) In turn, the Difference Principle emerged from Rawls’ highly abstract thought experiment of an Original Position, in which we shed knowledge of our own circumstances. But Winship doubts that “specific policy directives follow” from the Difference Principle for this case (p. 175). The best choice depends on predictions of the effects of various policies. Like other contributors, Winship thinks the best approach is to consider a “broad set of policy options” in case there’s a way to avoid the dilemma (p. 178).

Some of the authors balk at the focus on individual or small-group choices. Melissa Aguire, for instance, notes that the teachers in the first case study face a tragic choice that would be avoided entirely if the system were just. Her point is true and relevant; it should be made. At the same time, describing how things should be instead of what we must do can evade responsibility. Yes, systems should be just, but they aren’t, and what are we going to do about that? Many authors explore the constraints that teachers and others face in an unjust larger context, but they repeatedly insist that the specific actor is not powerless (e.g., 127). In the classic debate about structure and agency, they emphasize agency–not because it solves everything, but because it is the main concern of an actual agent.

Responding to a case about a teacher in a zero-tolerance school who thinks a vulnerable teenager has committed theft (which will result in a prison sentence), Tommie Shelby objects to the narrow focus on her “professional responsibilities.” “What matters first of all are the injustices that pervade society.” Still, Shelby doesn’t resort to calling for those injustices to be solved by someone else. Rather, he would “focus on her more general duties as a relatively privileged member of a profoundly unjust society.” That is to treat the teacher as an individual citizen, not just an individual professional. Shelby adds, “she can’t reform society on her own. She needs allies, and perhaps even a social movement, to be able to fundamentally change things.” (79, 81).

Needing a social movement is a problems of collective action. Jennifer Hochschild makes explicit references to the literature on collective action problems as she responds to a case about pervasive grade inflation in a private school. When everyone inflates grades, each teacher and school is forced to as well. But Hochschild’s brief review of the tragedy of the commons neglects more recent work by Elinor Ostrom and many others about how people actually solve collective action problems. They are not inexorable tragedies but suspenseful drams. Many of the suggestions in this volume are plausible solutions.

The scale gradually grows as the volume progresses–from choices made by one or a few teachers up to policies considered by school districts and states. As the scale grows, the active agent becomes more obscure. After presenting a case about comparing charter schools to other schools, Levinson asks, “would you support legislation that restricts charter school expansion?” (p. 185). Here the actor (“you”) is a voter, one of more than a million. The impact of each vote is infinitesimal, and the ballot question will be already framed by others. But Andres A. Alonso objects to a narrative that treats the Boston Public Schools (BPS) as the agent that chooses a school assignment plan. “Districts are hotbeds of internal and external politics. Virtually every decision is fought over by multiple stakeholders” (p. 165). His political analysis puts people’s agency back into the picture. 

Some of the authors suggest strategies at an important midsize scale that is usually overlooked in philosophy. Ethics focuses on individual choices, whereas the most influential political theories consider the ideal structure of a whole society; but here the focus is on purposeful groups. For instance, Toby N. Romer notes (p. 37) that as long as each teacher decides whether to send each student to a violence-prone “alternative” school, the right answer may be not to. But if all the teachers in the same middle school send all the relevant kids to that school, it will immediately improve, thanks to the broader range of enrollees. This is an example of collective action by a group, a “we,” that is small enough to make decisions and act together.

Authors cite Aristotelian phronesis (practical wisdom), Bent Flyvbjerg’s revival of phronesis, and pragmatism as methodological precedents. I share those enthusiasms, but I’m not sure that we yet have a satisfactory philosophical apparatus to clarify how people should think about what they should do. We must go beyond vague references to judgment or practical wisdom. We must face questions of agency and structure, relations between individual and group intentions and responsibilities, and challenges of collective action at various scales. I think this is an important frontier for philosophy and social theory.

See also Bent Flyvbjerg and social science as phronesis; community organizing, community-engaged research, and the problem of scale; a different approach to human problems

don’t confuse bias and judgment

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“Even good and, at bottom, worthy people have, in our time, the most extraordinary fear about making judgments. The confusion about judgment can go hand in hand with fine and strong intelligence, just as good judgment can be found in those not remarkable for their intelligence.” — Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, Dec. 29, 1963, translated by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
–W. B. Yeats

(Dayton, OH) A bias is a manifestation of cognitive limitations or weaknesses. It reveals that a person has failed to see the whole picture, to weigh evidence appropriately, to revise prior assumptions, to counter the influence of self-interest, or to grasp other perspectives. We are all subject to bias, constantly. It is wise to scrutinize our own and other people’s positions and opinions for signs of it. Certain professionals–reporters, researchers, teachers–are taught to acknowledge bias and to counter it. They are held accountable for any bias they appear to show. Anyone who writes in a public forum and purports to be a scholar or a teacher will sooner or later see the comment: “You’re biased!” (Or, just as likely, “Your bias!”, since grammar is not always the strong suit of the affronted.)

At the same time, each of us must make good judgments. Faced with almost any situation of any consequence, we can judge wisely and well, or judge badly, or fail to judge at all and thereby display negligence. Even journalists, scholars, and educators who advertise themselves as minimally biased must make constant judgments: what to cover, study, and teach, how to present information, whom to address, whom to take seriously, what counts as a legitimate position in a debate, and so on.

It’s essential to separate the language of bias from the language of judgment. They have different grammars: for instance, we say “good judgment” but not “good bias.” We accuse people of bias but not of judgment. A person can make the right judgment despite being biased; in fact, her bias may alert her to what really is the right conclusion. Or a person can somehow counter his own biases and yet make poor judgments. A typical example of the latter is a person who decides that taking a position would evidence bias and therefore fails to act–e.g., in response to a presidential candidate who is violating fundamental norms. Bias is empirically demonstrable, but demonstrating it does not prove that the speaker has reached the wrong conclusion. Judgment is wise or poor, but the difference is not empirically demonstrable in a straightforward way.

I think confusion between bias and judgment is one of the reasons that “even good and, at bottom, worthy people have, in our time, the most extraordinary fear about making judgments.” And that leaves the worst of us to display the most passionate intensity.

perspectives on identity politics

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One of the many debates that has intensified after the 2016 election concerns “identity politics.” Some liberals blame it for the Democrats’ loss. Mark Lilla writes, “If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions.” Others, like German Lopez, reply that politics is always about identity, that racial and sexual oppression are inescapable issues requiring explicit attention, and that the alternative to progressive identity politics is simply white nationalist identity politics.

The syllabus of my current philosophy class–planned months ago–concludes with a unit about identity and justice that we are entering right now. It follows a set of readings from political philosophy that are all egalitarian–in their various ways–and against discrimination, but that don’t delve deeply into questions of identity. And most (not all) of those writers have been White men. Now we turn to:

Some arguments from these readings in favor of identity politics:

People from oppressed groups must speak for themselves, not be the subjects of research or help from advantaged groups. Meanwhile, more differences need to be recognized. In current terms, justice requires acknowledging the “intersectionality” of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, etc., and hearing directly from people at each intersection. These two themes come together in a sentence by Lorde: “It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.”

People from oppressed groups need their “own strong solidarity,” built in somewhat separate spaces that are free from domination, so that they can “respond as a cohesive group” (Biko). Note that Biko uses “the black man” as a category that explicitly encompasses Zulus, Xhosas, Vendas, and South Africans of Indian origin, and implicitly includes black women. The logic of identity politics would suggest that he acknowledge more differences.

It’s not the job of oppressed peoples to educate their oppressors. “This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns.” For instance, to say that women of color must educate white women “is a diversion and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought” (Lorde). White women must educate themselves. This point seems somewhat in tension with Biko’s argument that “no group, however benevolent, can ever hand power to the vanquished on a plate. … No amount of moral lecturing will persuade the white man to ‘correct’ the situation.” Biko implies that oppressors will never educate themselves about oppression. But the two authors may agree that White people can and will change in the interests of their own liberation.

Oppressed peoples demonstrate better values than their oppressors. Biko celebrates traditional African religion (in the singular–presuming a unity across ethnic/national lines), in contrast to the “irresponsible people from Coca-cola and hamburger cultural background” who dominate South Africa. Identity politics of this type is not a form of cultural relativism but rather a call for better values.

Oppression is internal, psychological, implicit, and internalized by the oppressed. It’s not mainly about explicit power and rights. Therefore, changing explicit power and rights won’t solve matters. Biko depicts Black Consciousness as “the realisation by blacks that the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

Identity politics is a path to deep transformation and revolutionary change for all. It is not a matter of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” to use the current terminology popular in corporations and universities–i.e., accommodating or serving more people more fairly. Lorde might call that approach “the grossest reformism.” True identity politics is about liberation from current institutional arrangements. It is creative and innovative, “seek[ing] new ways of being” (Lorde).

What critics of identity politics hear as resentful complaints is often actually the sound of human beings flourishing. “Far from being constituted solely by their oppression and exclusion, group identities may be cherished as a source of strength and purpose [that] sustains us in struggle and makes political action possible” (Bickford.

Identity claims challenge supposedly universalist understandings of justice and the common good, since those were always “particular, biased, and selfish” (Bickford).

Oppressed peoples must devote attention to their own communities rather than mainly studying and seeking to change the dominant group. “Let us talk more about ourselves and our struggles and less about whites” (Biko). One reason is that there is simply much to learn and celebrate when one begins to look more closely at the marginalized group, its history and values.

Some arguments from these readings against identity politics:

Emphasizing differences divides people politically and prevents the construction of large coalitions. For that reason, it is simply a losing political strategy (unless, like Biko, one happens to live in a country where one oppressed group constitutes the majority). Further, no one will join a coalition for change as a result of being told that he or she is an oppressor. Being reminded of one’s privilege usually reinforces a desire to protect it. A winning strategy is to offer explicit benefits to all members of a large majority. That is the main argument of both Gitlin (1993) and Lilla (2016); and cf. Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: Future of the Civil Rights Movement,” Commentary (February, 1965).

The left is the heir to a tradition of explicitly universalistic values, whether those are liberal, Marxist, or Christian-inflected (e.g., in the Civil Rights Movement). “Universal human emancipation” (Gitlin) is the core of all authentically revolutionary and reformist politics. Its enemy is the kind of conservatism that prizes traditions, indigenous values, and social differences. Identity politics is a version of that kind of conservatism. Yes, progressive movements must address injustices related to sexuality, gender and color–not merely economics–but always in the explicit pursuit of a common good.

Identity politics has become apolitical because its practitioners are disconnected from elections, parties, unions, and reform movements and focus more on “symbolic representation” in places like universities and Hollywood (Gitlin). Also, they tend to depict “the oppressed [as] innocent selves defined by the wrongs done to them” and therefore demand protection from the government or institutions like universities and companies. That stance overlooks their own potential power and encourages them to ask others to manage and administer fairness, understood as a set of rules and regulations. Instead, they should be building power (Bickford, summarizing a view that she doesn’t hold).

Identity politics treats a short list of socially constructed labels as fixed, and thereby (ironically) reinforces the power of these labels. Identity is a “term thick with meanings” whose definition is rarely clarified (Bickford). It’s very unlikely that any particular identity is stable, uniform, or exclusive. Yet one sees in works like Biko’s a tendency to treat a given identity as essential. (However, as Bickford notes, wrestling with this problem has been a central focus for feminism for half a century now.)

I’d add some thoughts of my own:

First, we must consider the ways that identities, interests, and opinions can diverge. A person may have the identity of a woman, an objective interest in equal pay for equal work, and the opinion that this would make a just policy. These three things may be related in various ways, but they are also separable. Likewise, groups can be defined by identities, interests, or positions on issues.

Interests are valid and important. In fact, whose interests are served in a policy domain like health care can determine who lives and who dies. Nevertheless, we recognize that interests will conflict, that they require negotiation and compromise, and that, even in a reasonably just society, everyone’s interests will sometimes be outweighed.

In contrast, to assert an identity is to imply a right to be recognized and treated accordingly. After all, you can’t change your identity, yet you have a place in the society. No one should ask you to compromise your identity, only the interests that you assert. Finally, you are supposed to take other people’s interests and identities in mind as you critically reflect on your opinions. Most people should probably adopt opinions that are less predictably related to their identities and interests.

Interests, identities, and opinions are all “constructed” and malleable, but we are supposed to be maximally open to revising our opinions, yet protected against having to change our identities. The hard part is deciding whether a given claim is an expression of identity, interest, and/or opinion. The lines are very unclear, even to the person who makes a claim.

To make matters even more complicated, an identity can be something mostly embraced or mostly imposed. And it can be a name for a group that gives you strength or for a group to which your fate is tied, or both (Bickford, p. 120).

Second, practitioners of identity politics can miss the chance to be citizens in a particular sense. In this fascinating dialogue between Black Lives Matter leader Julius Jones and Hillary Clinton, Jones echoes Lorde’s argument that African Americans shouldn’t have to tell White people how to change. Complaining that the oppressed haven’t proposed specific solutions–as Clinton does–is “blaming the victim.”

The difference that is salient in Jones’ mind (understandably) is race: he is Black and Clinton is White; and she is asking him to solve the problems that White people have caused. But I think Clinton has a different difference in mind when she asks Jones to state his policy demands. She sees him as a citizen, and herself as a would-be leader. Citizens petition government for the redress of grievances–it even says so in the First Amendment.

To be sure, Jones is both a Black man and a citizen, so both perspectives are valid. But a danger inherent in identity politics is the suppression of one’s identity as a citizen. It is both a responsibility and a power of every citizen to advocate solutions to problems that others have created. As Biko argues, creators of injustice are unlikely to invent solutions themselves. It’s a political act to say what must be done.

Third, “intersectionality” can take forms that are hyper-individualistic. If many different factors constitute one’s identity–not just a short list like race, gender, and class, but also occupation, denomination, country of origin, region, linguistic dialect, birth order, party identification, age, generation, body type, and more–then each person has the grounds to assert a unique intersectionality. Perhaps nobody’s array of characteristics is actually unique in a nation of 323 million people, but within a given small group, everyone can claim her own niche.

In a culture that is generally individualistic, this potential is both attractive and a pitfall. As the concept of identity broadens beyond characteristics that have been used for brutal oppression, intersectionality offers an excuse to focus on everyone’s uniqueness at the expense of political solidarity and the distribution of basic rights. However, it’s hard to limit the characteristics that constitute identity when a huge range of factors do cause implicit bias. For instance, the same methods that demonstrate the pervasiveness of racial bias also show that we’re biased by partisanship, body type, age, etc. So why stop with race–or anywhere else? (This isn’t a rhetorical question. I’m inclined to think that we should stop with race, gender, and sexual orientation, and treat other differences as ones of opinion and interest, not of identity. But I would owe a defense of that view.)

Finally, we may need to think about new constructed identities. When historically marginalized people achieve hard-won and deeply valuable recognition, the traditionally dominant group is often left with an identity crisis. To take a foreign example: as Scots, Welsh people, Irish people, British West Indians, British Asians, and others assert–appropriately–their separate identities within Great Britain, Englishness is left to mean being a person whose ancestors lived in England. Since that group was exclusively White and traditionally dominant, it’s hard to celebrate one’s Englishness without being racist and xenophobic.

My point is not that we should sympathize with older White men who are struggling with their identities for the first time. Rather, we are all at risk unless they find identities that they can celebrate inclusively. A common response is to retell our national narrative so that everyone can feel inspired. This seems to me Barack Obama’s strategy and one of his great gifts as a national leader. But nations are awfully large and abstract. A different possibility that intrigues me is a city or metro area, because many people already feel loyal to their own cities, which are internally diverse. In the US, states with smaller populations may have the same value for rural people. So maybe we can reinforce identities as New Yorkers or Montanans, not to the exclusion of other identities, but as the basis of broader political coalitions.

should civic educators modify their neutral stance?

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(Washington, DC) I’m here for the National Council for the Social Studies annual convention. Right after the election, the NCSS sent a “post-election message” that talked generally about the importance of teaching about government and civic engagement:

As social studies educators, we teach and learn about our system of government, about controversial and timely issues, and about making informed decisions as active participants and defenders of our democracy. Our civic duty did not end at the voting booth; in fact, it has just begun. We can share instructional practices about the electoral process, the upcoming transition plans for newly elected leaders at all levels, and the new teams that will play a central role in our conversations for the next several years. We teach the principles of our U.S. Constitution.

This message could have been sent after any presidential election in the past century. There was no mention of Donald Trump or anything unusual about the campaign or the condition of the republic. I am not necessarily critical of this stance, which reflects a deep-seated and well-grounded commitment to a certain form of political neutrality. Many other schools, districts, universities, and nonprofits have taken a similar stance. However, civic educators must at least consider whether a different set of principles should apply in 2016.

Here are some arguments for neutrality:

  1. It’s dangerous for an arm of the state, a public school, ever to take sides on political issues. Citizens are forced to pay for public education and face considerable pressure to turn their kids over to these institutions. Children form an impressionable, captive audience in the classroom. Teachers have great power over students’ life-prospects. It’s unethical for them to use that power to change children’s political views.
  2. If teachers take–or imply–critical positions about any particular party or leader, elected officials and electoral majorities can press them to take different positions. Neutrality is no longer a shield.
  3. We are all subject to bias. Teachers split their votes between Clinton and Trump, but a majority preferred Clinton, and in big city districts on the coasts, the ratio was no doubt very high. Like everyone, Trump opponents need to remember that they could be wrong. Lots of people believe that Barack Obama is a dangerous enemy of American values. I heartily disagree, but this disagreement shows that judgment is fallible. A critical estimate of Donald Trump is a judgment, not a simple matter of fact. The “text” that we must interpret is the vast quantity of his statements over many months. People hear different points and take different messages from all this verbiage. Those of us who think Donald Trump is a profound threat to the republic could be wrong; and teachers shouldn’t communicate uncertain ideas as if they were truths.
  4. One of our worst problems is political polarization, a failure to interact with and understand people who disagree with us. We don’t learn or practice deliberation enough in the US today. But there is always some ideological diversity in a social studies classrooms, and teachers can advance deliberative values by creating spaces for open conversations. Further, if a particular group (such as Trump voters–or Trump opponents) happens to be missing from a given classroom, teachers can help students to understand the absent perspective. However, if the teacher takes a position, that can chill deliberation.
  5. Schools teach civics and social studies in the first place because elected officials tolerate it. Civics is rarely a high priority and is often on the list to be cut. Yet students benefit from civics. Therefore, the responsible course is for educators–and especially associations like NCSS–to keep their heads down. The last thing they should do is appear to oppose the incumbent administration, because it will be easy for federal and state governments to eliminate civics entirely.
  6. Since individual teachers will bear the brunt of any criticism and retribution, administrators and nonprofit organizational leaders should adopt a tone of complete neutrality to protect them.

But here is the opposite argument:

  1. We teach civics to instill republican, liberal, democratic, and humane values. We ask our students to preserve the republic against threats, both domestic and foreign. The acid test of good civic education is whether every graduate would “stand up” instead of “standing by” when a would-be dictator appeared on the scene.
  2. Yes, it is a matter of judgment, not a demonstrable fact, that Trump poses a threat to republican values. But some major Republican intellectuals and GOP political opponents have called Trump an authoritarian and a racist. One can give reasons, evidence, and arguments for these conclusions. Uncertainty remains, but uncertainty does not excuse us from having to decide. As Hannah Arendt would have said, “Ven zee cheeps are down, ve must make yudgments.” Judgment under uncertainty is exactly what citizenship demands. If we’re wrong, we pay the consequences, because–as Arendt would say–“politics is not a nursery.” Incidentally, Trump needn’t be remotely like a Mussolini or a Franco to pose a real danger. A Putin or a Berlusconi would be bad enough.
  3. To teach “standing up” or (as postwar Germans call it, Civil Courage) needn’t be partisan. In fact, if you think that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, then most of us liberals should have been more vigilant during the Obama years. We should have stood up when the current president executed people extra-judicially by drone strike. In other words, Civil Courage would support criticism of Trump, but it would extend far beyond him.
  4. Schools aren’t and shouldn’t be neutral, anyway. Among the values that they must defend are pursuit of truth and basic decency for all. Any political leader who exhibits a lack of regard for truth or bullying behavior violates principles that schools must uphold. They can’t give kids bad grades for using false information, or make them stay after school for bullying, and yet ignore such behavior by the president.
  5. Many teachers have students who are directly threatened by Trump–or feel that they are–and it is wrong for adults to ignore their sentiment by treating the President Elect as a normal leader. By extension, in a class where everyone feels safe, the students should be made aware of how others feel.
  6. If we refrain from exercising Civil Courage because of possible budget cuts or other political consequences, we are abandoning free speech. That is exactly how republics fall.

I actually think the the choice between these two approaches is fairly hard. Individuals and groups can reasonably reach various conclusions. I write only on my own behalf and do not know what I would say if I represented something like the NCSS or a school district. But, at a minimum, everyone involved in educating the next generation should consider this choice.

being young and evaluating democracy in 2016

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The claim that support for democracy is falling in most countries–and falling quickest among the young–has caused much consternation this week. One datapoint that supports this argument: “In 2011, 24 percent of U.S. millennials (then in their late teens or early twenties) considered democracy to be a ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’ way of running the country.” Erik Voeten and others have argued that this survey is being presented in an alarmist way by focusing on the minority who chose the extreme responses to key questions. Voeten shows that this is how support for democracy looks if you display the mean responses on a scale from 1-10:

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Most people are still in favor, and the gaps by age are not huge.

But it is natural to be a bit uninspired by democracy if you’re encountering it for the first time right now. In my freshman philosophy seminar, democracy has been our topic this week. We’ve been reading:

My questions include the following:

Is democracy a reliable means to achieve such (possibly) valuable ends as human happiness/welfare, liberty and rights, or equality? Is it a process that yields such outcomes? Or is it a good in itself? (To see it as an intrinsic good may require the belief that involvement in self-government is dignified or worthy in some way.) Does democracy mean “voting equality at the decisive stage” (Dahl), or a search for consensus (Wiredu), or an opportunity for discussion that enlarges people’s knowledge and empathy (Dewey et al, not assigned)? Is democracy necessarily adversarial (Eze) or can it be unitary (Wiredu), and if the latter, is unity a good thing, perhaps a sign of fraternité? Finally, is democracy a process or set of rules, or rather a culture and set of norms and practices?

My students are thoughtful, open-minded, and quick to understand various perspectives and arguments. But I think their current views are colored by what they regard as the debacle of the 2016 election–both its outcome and the campaign season that preceded it. I asked them whether they thought the election had changed their views of democracy, and they tended to think it had. They are unlikely to see democracy as an intrinsic good, because it rather seems like an undignified and disappointing spectacle. They are attuned to the dangers of communication (propaganda, group-think, polarization, selective use of evidence) and pessimistic about the potential of communication for learning and consensus-building.

I don’t necessarily disagree. And I certainly don’t play the advocate for any philosophical view in the classroom. But I think that those who hope to engage such young people must make the struggle against forms of politics that they despise seem intrinsically rewarding, and must demonstrate that responsible and responsive communication is possible.

what activist movements will look like in the Trump era

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Dave Karpf has a great piece entitled, “Cyclical patterns in activist politics: what do we know about the politics of opposition”? Karpf argues that opposing a government looks very different from the “politics of articulation” (trying to develop and promote an agenda). These are some key differences:

  1. Opposition unites. As Karpf notes, the Tea Party formed to oppose Obama before he had made any policy decisions. Its original rhetoric–and its very name–implied opposition to tax increases. But Obama mainly cut taxes. That was no problem for the Tea Party, which shifted to opposing the Affordable Care Act. It was nimble about policies because its raison d’etre was opposition to a person, his core values, and the institution he controlled.
  2. Rapid response becomes more valuable. Especially in the age of social media, activist networks are good at getting people out quickly. They are much worse at sustaining pressure, negotiating, and achieving new policies. When your side shares formal power, rapid response is relatively unimportant. But when the main goal is to block policies coming from the other side, rapid response pays.
  3. By the same token, it becomes harder to advance a positive agenda when a movement must spend all its time blocking new initiatives from the government.

I would add two hypotheses:

  1. I think activists on the left will shift from soft, proximate targets to confront their main ideological opponents. The global justice movement of the Clinton era criticized transnational corporations and the governments that supported them, yet it gained attention for protests outside the World Bank, which funds development projects. Occupy Wall Street claimed to target Wall Street, yet it got the most traction in conflicts with Democratic big city mayors and state universities that were simultaneously facing budget cuts from conservative legislatures. The environmental movement focuses on massive destruction caused by fossil fuels but achieved a notable victory by pressuring a Democratic president to block a specific pipeline that could be easily bypassed. The left tends to confront near-allies for showing hypocrisy or weakness, but that impulse fades when explicit opponents take control. (See Bayard Rustin’s absolutely indispensable and totally timely 1965 article “From Protest to Politics” for a similar point.)
  2. Maintaining political discipline will be an enormous challenge. As Rustin reminded his fellow Civil Rights leaders in 1965, the point is to win. That requires mobilizing and inspiring a majority of Americans, not just fellow travelers. National Review’s Jim Geraghty tweeted earlier today, “Anti-Trump protesters are gonna take the bait, aren’t they? They’re gonna burn flags, thinking they’re irking him, but alienating majority.” It’s very hard for any large, loose network to remember what the majority of people value, let alone maintain message-discipline. Whether anti-Trump movements can manage that task is enormously important.

See also: we need SPUD (scale, pluralism, unity, depth); to beat Trump, invest in organizing; building grassroots power in and beyond the election; and democracy in the digital age.

pluralist populism

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The leaders of China, India, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, and Hungary–plus the President Elect of the USA and major political actors in Britain, France, and Austria (among other countries)–are called “populists.” A populist in this sense is one who views The People as homogeneous on important dimensions–for instance, race, culture, occupation, or ancestry–and as distinct from both foreigners and elites. Indeed, foreigners and elites are often seen as collaborating against The People. A populist leader represents The People, speaking for them and serving their interests. Therefore, it is wise to entrust power in the leader, who talks directly to and for each citizen. Majority rule is an attractive process, but majority votes that do not support the populist leader are suspect. Obstacles to populist government–rule of law, checks and balances, an independent press and civic society–are problematic at best.

There is, however, another sense of the word “populist” that deserves attention. In this conception, The People are not only heterogeneous; they are defined by being more pluralistic than the straight-laced elites, who promote one way of life as best for all. Furthermore, The People are not interested in surrendering their power to any leader. Their populist activity is all about building direct, grassroots, horizontal, participatory power. They are proud of their democratic innovations, whether those are letters of correspondence, Grange halls, sit-ins, salt marches, or flashmobs.

Eli Rosenberg, Jennifer Medina, and John Eligon began a recent New York Times article about anti-Trump protests:

They came in the thousands — the children of immigrants, transgender individuals, women and men of all different ages and races — to demonstrate against President-elect Donald J. Trump on Saturday in New York.

Some held handwritten signs like, “Show the world what the popular vote looks like.” The throng chanted, “Not our president!”

Showing the world that the popular vote looks heterogeneous is a traditional populist gambit, familiar from social movements and popular uprisings since time immemorial. It’s a way of demonstrating SPUD (scale, pluralism, unity, depth). I emphasize it because I fear we face three unsatisfactory alternatives:

  1. Trump-style populism, which defines The People as homogeneous, excludes everyone who doesn’t fit, and disempowers the actual people by centralizing political authority in a leader.
  2. Technocratic progressivism, which defers to a highly educated global elite whose norms and range of experiences are actually quite exclusive and narrow.
  3. Thin versions of diversity politics, which celebrate heterogeneity within existing institutions (e.g., racial diversity within a university) but which lack a political vision that can unify broad coalitions in favor of new institutional arrangements.

We need a dose of populism that neither delivers power to a leader nor merely promises fair economic outcomes to citizens as beneficiaries. In this form of populism, diverse people create actual power that they use to change the world together.

See also: two kinds of populism, with some comments on Jan-Werner Müller and Laura Grattan, and why the white working class must organize.

Trump’s rhetorical style and deliberation

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Donald Trump’s speaking style is extraordinarily paratactic. That is, he utters declarative sentences without any of the explicit transitional words that can explain why sentences fit together. No “therefore’s,” “on the other hand’s,” or even “well, I think’s.” He just plunges in. Many listeners perceive the content of his various sentences to be logically unrelated. However, he is remarkably repetitive when he speaks at any length, so the unity of his speech derives from his returning to the same phrases. Finally, he uses “I” sentences overwhelmingly, plus “you” when he’s talking to someone in particular. He makes relatively rare use of the third person. We could name his style “paratactic/egocentric.”

I’ve been arguing that the way we organize our thoughts affects our ability to deliberate with others (to listen responsively to what they say). As I note in this video, some people hold such scattered thoughts that you can’t grab onto their argument in order to understand and engage it. Others have such centralized networks of ideas that all you can do is assess their one core principle (which might be individual freedom, equity, or God). If you happen to disagree with it, there’s no way to route around it. A better structure is connected, complex, and not overly centralized.

By this standard, Trump’s rhetoric is disastrous for deliberation. The network formed by his sentences manages to be disconnected except insofar as he repeats a few nodes and connects all his ideas to Donald Trump (which one cannot take as one’s own idea without becoming personally subservient to him).

My notion of what counts as good talk could be biased by class. After all, one of the things you learn as you accumulate years of education and pile on degrees is parataxis: connecting ideas by using explicit transitional words. That is either a sign of superior reasoning or a way for a white-collar elite to identify its own superiority. (Paging doctors Habermas and Bourdieu for a consult on that question.) Likewise, talking in the third person about ideas and institutions is either essential to deliberation or an evasion of personal authenticity. Some read Trump as honest and view more objective speakers as evasive.

I’ve been developing this view of deliberative rhetoric since long before I cared about Donald Trump. It’s in We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, pp. 50-2. I oppose and reject Trump for many reasons other than his rhetorical style. Therefore, I don’t think I’m just criticizing his style to score political points against him. But it’s worth thinking about whether the rhetorical standards suggested by my theory are class-biased.

See also: tracking change in a group that discusses issues; assessing a discussion; 10 theses about ethics, in network terms; structured moral pluralism (a proposal).