AWOT Essay: Liberty and the Need to Assert Interests, Part II
Among the more jarring aspects of the war in Iraq is the way in which it melds two apparently contradictory justifications. On the one hand, the Administration claims that the war is one front in the war on terror, and that the purpose of invasion was to eliminate all potential threats to domestic security and to protect Americans against violent attack. On the other hand, the Administration claims that the war was a humanitarian gesture, motivated by a selfless moral principle of providing all victimized peoples with their basic human rights.
Rather than expose the obvious fallacies of both positions, we'd like to take a step back and discuss how these two arguments are actually intertwined. But even more so, we want to show how these arguments take place against a contemporary cultural backdrop. This backdrop reduces politics to an exclusive concern with physical safety, and bases individual equality not on the capacity of groups to assert their sense of the good life, but on the desire of all individuals to avoid injury. In a sense, the images of personhood represented by the war on terror and by humanitarian intervention are identical: in both cases, the safeguarded person is presented as a victim, isolated and subject to violence. In this essay, more theoretical than many of our pieces, we'd like assess how the rise of security as the defining political language goes hand in hand with the loss of interests as a meaningful way to talk about politics and collective liberty.
In Part I of this post, we discussed how the war on terror, the rise of a unitary executive, and the pervasiveness of arguments from security each result from a breakdown in social trust. One of the critical consequences of this breakdown is the way in which it undermines the ability of citizens to see each other as sharing collective interests, and thus to imagine politics as a means for unifying and asserting such interests. In Protest USA, we sought to illustrate how immigrant mobilizing hints at the social possibilities if interest is once again placed at the center of politics. Recent immigrant organizing has been reminiscent of the great historical efforts of the past (such as the labor, civil rights, and women's movements), which were all premised on concrete and common experiences, and saw group action as a means not only for redress but also for developing new, more compelling accounts of freedom.
Today, by contrast, the very idea that promoting one's interests should be the basis for democratic practice seems suspect. Interests are deemed "special interests," attempts by partial associations to serve their own selfish needs at the cost of the greater good. One sees this most clearly in how previous social movements -- those that sought to speak in the name of all Americans and on behalf of a specific account of liberty -- have each been transformed into "special interests."
Labor once had an expansive meaning, covering all agricultural, industrial, and service workers. Labor organizing struggled to demonstrate how shared economic interest, regardless of one's race or gender, could unite distinct groups and provide a common language for citizenship and freedom. Today, however, the labor movement has in large measure been reduced to a bargaining entity, the union, which exists as one among many competing interest groups employing money and lobbying efforts to capture benefits for members (benefits that at times directly undermine the interests of other marginalized, often non-white, workers).
The same story repeats itself in the cases of the civil rights and the women's movement, with no greater example than the ongoing debates over affirmative action. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of such policies, affirmative action illustrates how asserting interests no longer works to build collective solidarity (by articulating and emphasizing shared experiences), but instead reinforces social divisions. Opponents see such measures as the special benefit par excellence, balancing the material interests of one group against those of others. Where once the project of equality required uniting students, labor, churches, and disenfranchized citizens into a single coherent movement, now it seems to be a zero-sum game. The central question has become how best to redistribute a diminishing pie rather than how to articulate the common grievances that bind even seemingly opposed groups.
The result is a political divide between the high and the low. Most citizens have come to view the ordinary business of government as tedious pork-barrel politics, in which countless organized interests vie for money and goods. Such a vision reduces democratic life to little more than organized bribery and electoral turnover. For some, this is all there is to politics: competing groups fight over state entitlements, and to the extent that politicians can provide such entitlements they remain in office. A well-functioning democracy simply spreads benefits widely, and ensures an appropriate balance of power between conflicting interests so that no single group (business or the unions) can predominate. This image of politics goes hand in hand with the reality of massive popular demobilization. Citizens, who see themselves as sharing little of value with fellow neighbors and workers, view government as just an endless fight over resources in which the spoils go to whoever is richer, stronger, or more connected.
Perhaps even more insidiously, the breakdown of social trust means that citizens are increasingly loath to make arguments about freedom and liberty in terms of interests. Bringing up one's concrete economic, social, or political position smacks of selfishness and seems ill-suited for articulating lofty ambitions. With interests reduced to the low politics of group bargaining, high politics becomes the domain of moral argument. To the extent that we hope to convince others of the idealism and purpose of our commitments, individuals increasingly couch arguments in abstract moral terms (terms independent of one's social standing or particular experience).
For instance, supporters of affirmative action often avoid arguments defending the policy as materially improving the conditions of women or minorities (say by raising standards of living or increasing the size of the middle class). The actual tangible improvement is less important than the larger moral principle at stake -- be it diversity or historical redress. In other words, the principle of righting past wrongs justifies the policy even if the particular individuals who benefit may come from privileged backgrounds. Whether or not their current experiences necessitate action is less important than making the moral statement about equal dignity. The fear that affirmative action will be seen as simply a special entitlement leads proponents to diminish interest-based arguments, and to argue that the principle at stake is so valuable that it alone justifies whatever hardships or social costs are produced.
The classic example of the turn to moral argument as a basis for high politics is the discourse of human rights and, specifically, humanitarian intervention. Intervention is considered noble and morally worthy precisely because the intervenor has no "political" stake in protecting the victim of state violence or of foreign oppression. In a sense, such acts are entirely stripped of any basis in interest, and so cannot be accused of being selfish or morally questionable. Rights protection seeks only to guard individuals from violence, and thus serves no indentifiable interest besides the thin, universal one of freedom from cruelty. In fact, such arguments are not properly political at all, because they hope to transcend ordinary disagreements. For the activist, rights should be promoted regardless of the petty disputes and social commitments that ordinarily dominate government action and interest group mobilizing.
This vision of high politics as a realm that embraces moral rather that interest-based arguments suggests a serious hollowness in contemporary democracy. Exactly because humanitarian arguments are not rooted in the specific social experiences of the given activist, they underscore the difficulties of sustaining political action. Such mobilizing is ill-equipped to create links of solidarity either at home or abroad, since it bases activism on a deeply reduced account of what individuals collectively share. Rather than being tied by a common social position or set of grievances, humanitarianism links activists to far away victims by resorting to a lowest common demoninator -- one's equal subjection to physical harm. Think, for example, of T-shirts commonly seen at anti-globalization rallies that say 'We Are All Palestinians Now', a clear sign that the morally-inspired see the links between themselves and others in terms of victimization. Moreover, because the activist's position is usually disconnected from the actual material circumstances facing the "suffering" individual in Asia, Africa or the Middle East, humanitarian arguments tend to blind potential intervenors to the real political contests and thus the likely effects of foreign intervention.
The key point is not that human rights arguments should be abandoned or that one should never resort to purely moral reasoning. Rather, it's that for such arguments to bind citizens together and to create the conditions for collective action and a robust account of liberty, they must be tied to shared interests. Without such interests the foundation for popular power -- group solidarity -- disappears. Instead, we're left with two isolated realms of politics. One where any attempt to articulate interests seems tinged with corruption, and another where real political engagement reduces to the vanishing point one's actual personal stake in events and their outcomes.
Ultimately, it is under circumstances where social trust has collapsed and interests seem to divide rather than to unify constituencies that security becomes paramount. In a sense, security-talk underscores the same minimal account of politics -- protecting the body from physical violence -- that human rights arguments can devolve into at their most abstract. For individuals no longer bound by common grievances or shared aspirations, all that remains is an equality produced by universal threat. Under such conditions, if politics has any higher purpose it is merely to make physical protection widely accessible. Thus, the Administration can justify the war in Iraq as both against terror and in defense of human rights, because both bases are simply alternative means for guarding against bodily threat.
Lost in such an 'equal freedom from violence' are not only the social projects and collective commitments that once motivated citizens and grounded accounts of freedom, but the very means to achieve these goals. Chief among those means has been the attempt to mobilize individuals on the basis of their actual lives and predicaments, and to illustrate how these lives share far more than is ordinarily appreciated. To the extent that the war on terror is part of a larger cultural climate marked by isolation and social mistrust, only by reclaiming the value of interests and grounding popular mobilization in concrete experience can this climate be confronted.
Rather than expose the obvious fallacies of both positions, we'd like to take a step back and discuss how these two arguments are actually intertwined. But even more so, we want to show how these arguments take place against a contemporary cultural backdrop. This backdrop reduces politics to an exclusive concern with physical safety, and bases individual equality not on the capacity of groups to assert their sense of the good life, but on the desire of all individuals to avoid injury. In a sense, the images of personhood represented by the war on terror and by humanitarian intervention are identical: in both cases, the safeguarded person is presented as a victim, isolated and subject to violence. In this essay, more theoretical than many of our pieces, we'd like assess how the rise of security as the defining political language goes hand in hand with the loss of interests as a meaningful way to talk about politics and collective liberty.
In Part I of this post, we discussed how the war on terror, the rise of a unitary executive, and the pervasiveness of arguments from security each result from a breakdown in social trust. One of the critical consequences of this breakdown is the way in which it undermines the ability of citizens to see each other as sharing collective interests, and thus to imagine politics as a means for unifying and asserting such interests. In Protest USA, we sought to illustrate how immigrant mobilizing hints at the social possibilities if interest is once again placed at the center of politics. Recent immigrant organizing has been reminiscent of the great historical efforts of the past (such as the labor, civil rights, and women's movements), which were all premised on concrete and common experiences, and saw group action as a means not only for redress but also for developing new, more compelling accounts of freedom.
Today, by contrast, the very idea that promoting one's interests should be the basis for democratic practice seems suspect. Interests are deemed "special interests," attempts by partial associations to serve their own selfish needs at the cost of the greater good. One sees this most clearly in how previous social movements -- those that sought to speak in the name of all Americans and on behalf of a specific account of liberty -- have each been transformed into "special interests."
Labor once had an expansive meaning, covering all agricultural, industrial, and service workers. Labor organizing struggled to demonstrate how shared economic interest, regardless of one's race or gender, could unite distinct groups and provide a common language for citizenship and freedom. Today, however, the labor movement has in large measure been reduced to a bargaining entity, the union, which exists as one among many competing interest groups employing money and lobbying efforts to capture benefits for members (benefits that at times directly undermine the interests of other marginalized, often non-white, workers).
The same story repeats itself in the cases of the civil rights and the women's movement, with no greater example than the ongoing debates over affirmative action. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of such policies, affirmative action illustrates how asserting interests no longer works to build collective solidarity (by articulating and emphasizing shared experiences), but instead reinforces social divisions. Opponents see such measures as the special benefit par excellence, balancing the material interests of one group against those of others. Where once the project of equality required uniting students, labor, churches, and disenfranchized citizens into a single coherent movement, now it seems to be a zero-sum game. The central question has become how best to redistribute a diminishing pie rather than how to articulate the common grievances that bind even seemingly opposed groups.
The result is a political divide between the high and the low. Most citizens have come to view the ordinary business of government as tedious pork-barrel politics, in which countless organized interests vie for money and goods. Such a vision reduces democratic life to little more than organized bribery and electoral turnover. For some, this is all there is to politics: competing groups fight over state entitlements, and to the extent that politicians can provide such entitlements they remain in office. A well-functioning democracy simply spreads benefits widely, and ensures an appropriate balance of power between conflicting interests so that no single group (business or the unions) can predominate. This image of politics goes hand in hand with the reality of massive popular demobilization. Citizens, who see themselves as sharing little of value with fellow neighbors and workers, view government as just an endless fight over resources in which the spoils go to whoever is richer, stronger, or more connected.
Perhaps even more insidiously, the breakdown of social trust means that citizens are increasingly loath to make arguments about freedom and liberty in terms of interests. Bringing up one's concrete economic, social, or political position smacks of selfishness and seems ill-suited for articulating lofty ambitions. With interests reduced to the low politics of group bargaining, high politics becomes the domain of moral argument. To the extent that we hope to convince others of the idealism and purpose of our commitments, individuals increasingly couch arguments in abstract moral terms (terms independent of one's social standing or particular experience).
For instance, supporters of affirmative action often avoid arguments defending the policy as materially improving the conditions of women or minorities (say by raising standards of living or increasing the size of the middle class). The actual tangible improvement is less important than the larger moral principle at stake -- be it diversity or historical redress. In other words, the principle of righting past wrongs justifies the policy even if the particular individuals who benefit may come from privileged backgrounds. Whether or not their current experiences necessitate action is less important than making the moral statement about equal dignity. The fear that affirmative action will be seen as simply a special entitlement leads proponents to diminish interest-based arguments, and to argue that the principle at stake is so valuable that it alone justifies whatever hardships or social costs are produced.
The classic example of the turn to moral argument as a basis for high politics is the discourse of human rights and, specifically, humanitarian intervention. Intervention is considered noble and morally worthy precisely because the intervenor has no "political" stake in protecting the victim of state violence or of foreign oppression. In a sense, such acts are entirely stripped of any basis in interest, and so cannot be accused of being selfish or morally questionable. Rights protection seeks only to guard individuals from violence, and thus serves no indentifiable interest besides the thin, universal one of freedom from cruelty. In fact, such arguments are not properly political at all, because they hope to transcend ordinary disagreements. For the activist, rights should be promoted regardless of the petty disputes and social commitments that ordinarily dominate government action and interest group mobilizing.
This vision of high politics as a realm that embraces moral rather that interest-based arguments suggests a serious hollowness in contemporary democracy. Exactly because humanitarian arguments are not rooted in the specific social experiences of the given activist, they underscore the difficulties of sustaining political action. Such mobilizing is ill-equipped to create links of solidarity either at home or abroad, since it bases activism on a deeply reduced account of what individuals collectively share. Rather than being tied by a common social position or set of grievances, humanitarianism links activists to far away victims by resorting to a lowest common demoninator -- one's equal subjection to physical harm. Think, for example, of T-shirts commonly seen at anti-globalization rallies that say 'We Are All Palestinians Now', a clear sign that the morally-inspired see the links between themselves and others in terms of victimization. Moreover, because the activist's position is usually disconnected from the actual material circumstances facing the "suffering" individual in Asia, Africa or the Middle East, humanitarian arguments tend to blind potential intervenors to the real political contests and thus the likely effects of foreign intervention.
The key point is not that human rights arguments should be abandoned or that one should never resort to purely moral reasoning. Rather, it's that for such arguments to bind citizens together and to create the conditions for collective action and a robust account of liberty, they must be tied to shared interests. Without such interests the foundation for popular power -- group solidarity -- disappears. Instead, we're left with two isolated realms of politics. One where any attempt to articulate interests seems tinged with corruption, and another where real political engagement reduces to the vanishing point one's actual personal stake in events and their outcomes.
Ultimately, it is under circumstances where social trust has collapsed and interests seem to divide rather than to unify constituencies that security becomes paramount. In a sense, security-talk underscores the same minimal account of politics -- protecting the body from physical violence -- that human rights arguments can devolve into at their most abstract. For individuals no longer bound by common grievances or shared aspirations, all that remains is an equality produced by universal threat. Under such conditions, if politics has any higher purpose it is merely to make physical protection widely accessible. Thus, the Administration can justify the war in Iraq as both against terror and in defense of human rights, because both bases are simply alternative means for guarding against bodily threat.
Lost in such an 'equal freedom from violence' are not only the social projects and collective commitments that once motivated citizens and grounded accounts of freedom, but the very means to achieve these goals. Chief among those means has been the attempt to mobilize individuals on the basis of their actual lives and predicaments, and to illustrate how these lives share far more than is ordinarily appreciated. To the extent that the war on terror is part of a larger cultural climate marked by isolation and social mistrust, only by reclaiming the value of interests and grounding popular mobilization in concrete experience can this climate be confronted.
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