Chapter 15: Praxis – New York, September 1, 2018

Critical theory cannot content itself with diagnosing crises, unveiling illusions, and revealing our present political situation. Critical theory cannot retreat into critique as its sole form of praxis. It must also chart out critical practices specific to time and place. Today, in the United States, there is one immediate priority, two medium-term objectives, and one long-term project.

I.

The immediate priority is to stop Donald Trump in his tracks, now. This entails a combined effort of (1) using the courts to block Trump’s policies as much as possible, whether it is his executive order on the Muslim ban or the decision to include a citizenship question on the U.S. Census 2020; (2) campaigning to elect a leftist Congress in the mid-terms 2018; (3) investigating and exposing Trump’s corruption; and (4) challenging his Supreme Court nominations.

In terms of litigation, the ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Center for Constitutional Rights, EJI, and other public-interest law centers, are in the best position to quarterback these efforts and to coordinate the attorneys who are prepared to conduct the litigation. The most important task here is, for non-lawyers, to financially support these organizations, and for attorneys, to work with them on our litigation efforts.

Our litigation efforts need to be coordinated. The history of effective litigation campaigns—from desegregation to near abolition of the death penalty to same-sex marriage—makes clear the central role of coordination. Plaintiffs have to be picked carefully, jurisdictions have to be selected, timing has to be coordinated. Nothing should be left to chance. There needs to be direct communication, and it needs to be centralized and coordinated by the leading public-interest law centers.

In every legal challenge I have brought since January 2017—against the Muslim Ban with Tom Durkin in Amer Al Homssi’s case in January-February 2017, against discriminatory delays in Musab Zeiton’s case in August 2017, against the lethal injection of Doyle Hamm throughout 2017 and 2018—I have consulted closely with these organizations and I cannot underscore more the importance and value of doing so.

In terms of the 2018 midterms, Nate Silver’s Five-Thirty Eight, the Cook Political Report, and other statisticians have identified the swing districts. These are the ones that will require financial support and bodies. All of our resources should be poured into these swing districts. The New York Times has an exhaustive and geocoded list of the 27 toss-up congressional districts, the 9 most competitive that are leaning Democrat, and the 26 most competitive leaning Republican, easily accessible right here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/us/elections/house-race-ratings.html. There are additional stories and updates at that link with further information. The Cook Political Report has a detailed list of all the competitive congressional election races here: https://www.cookpolitical.com/ratings/house-race-ratings. Naturally, these are the districts that will require the greatest influx of bodies and resources.

The Democratic Party’s new Maoist approach to the 2018 mid-terms—its new “hundred flowers” campaign—is the right way to proceed. There is far too wide an ideological spectrum right now within the Democratic Party for anyone to impose a party line. What is needed is a voting block in Congress that can stop Trump—a wide coalition. The best way forward is precisely to let local candidates represent fully their constituencies. As Mao famously said in 1956, “The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science.” The same can be said now about the flourishing of an opposition coalition.

In terms of exposing Trump’s corruption, that is the task for special counsel and prosecutors. Not everyone is well qualified for this, so those who have the positions of authority, skills, and ambition will need to take the lead.

Finally, in terms of the Supreme Court, the Democratic Senators need to challenge as vigorously as possible Trump’s nominations until they have the Senate majority. That should be done on principle in light of the hold placed on President Obama’s nomination under even more tenuous circumstances; it should also be done in response to the withholding of documents pertaining to nominees and the slapdash confirmation processes.

The next priority is to make room, support, nourish, and empower a leftist groundswell movement in order to win the 2020 presidential elections. Instead of dictating who the establishment believes is the winnable Left candidate, we need to embrace the same type of “hundred flowers” approach for 2020. It is far too early to close ranks and it would be counterproductive. So the task here, now, is to create spaces for people to speak and be heard, and to support and encourage those who seem most promising.

It is crucial in this context to encourage greater political engagement from the disengaged and first-time voters; to build coalitions on the ground with them and with those providing support and services to those who are disengaged and disenfranchised; and most importantly to follow their lead. To find ways to allow their discourse to be heard so that they can orient our agenda—in the same way in which the GIP served to allow the voices of prisoners to be heard. We need to create space for the next generations to speak and give us direction. We need to help create the space for a groundswell to emerge. We need to nourish it and support it.

The strategy should be to use the 2020 presidential campaign, which is about to start after the midterms, as a way to galvanize a Left groundswell movement so that the candidate who emerges can serve as a mobilizing force. I think we should avoid using labels from the past that carry unnecessary luggage—whether it is Democratic or Socialist—and instead focus on the values of equity, compassion, and respect that we embrace.

Third, we need to reinterpret better and more. I argued earlier that the Nietzschian hermeneutic should guide us in our political battles and in these struggles that are brewing, this political storm. Thanks precisely to our interpretive training, critical thinkers have always known the vital importance of interpretation and how to lend meaning to things. We should be able to seize the upper hand now, because we’ve been doing this and knowing this for so long. We should never give up in the face of brilliant interpreters and meaning makers like Donald Trump or Steve Bannon, but instead, do what we do best: offer a better interpretation, change the meaning, propose a reading.

We knew that first. Donald Trump has become a master at it. Notice how Trump and his meaning-makers were able so rapidly to take the idea of “fake news” that the Democrats had seized on. Especially after Pizzagate, Trump took that meaning and turned it around, so that it is, today, the New York Times and all the liberal media that are associated with the concept of “fake news.” Trump is a brilliant interpreter. That is how he got elected. “Jail Hilary. “Clinton for Prison.” Those were brilliant—and yes despicable, but brilliant interpretations. He is a meaning-maker like few others. But remember, interpretation is our skill, our techne, what we grew up on. And it is now, more than ever, the time to refine it and redeploy it. We’ve begun to do that.

“Nasty woman.” “You can grab them by the pussy,” Trump said. Well, the opposition made a lot of pink pussyhats and marched. That was precisely reclaiming the meaning, giving another interpretation. And I believe it had the potential to start a pink revolution. A revolution that included “The power of the handmade.” The “power of individuality within large groups.” The “power of pink.”

We need to challenge Trumps interpretations and impose ours. We can do so in millions of ways – ways that will allow us to regain the executive pen, that pen that can do so much damage. We need to return, with Nietzsche, to the promise of tomorrow’s Daybreak:

There are no scientific methods which alone lead to knowledge! We have to tackle things experimentally, now angry with them and now kind, and be successively just, passionate and cold with them. One person addresses things as a policeman, a second as a father confessor, a third as an inquisitive wanderer. Something can be wrung from them now with sympathy, now with force; reverence for their secrets will take one person forwards, indiscretion and roguishness in revealing their secrets will do the same for another. We investigators are, like all conquerors, discoverers, seafarers, adventurers, of an audacious morality and must reconcile ourselves to being considered on the whole evil.⁴¹⁴

II.

Regarding the long-term project: we must inculcate the values of equity, compassion, and respect in ourselves and our neighbors and the next generations. For me, that means teaching just societies, promoting just societies, and recruiting a corps of students and activists dedicated to justice, critique, and praxis. It means creating the social networks among critical theorists that reinforce leftist values and build alliances.

The future lies in the long view of history—not a determinist vision of history, rather the long, laborious view of history. In this, I draw as well, paradoxically, on conservative thinkers and bend their theories toward a critical future. I have in mind, in particular, the moralist tradition of Edward Banfield and James Q. Wilson, and the historical tradition of the Annales School.

Edward Banfield and his disciple, James Q. Wilson, were offensive thinkers, to be honest. Political scientists, urbanists in particular, you will recall their central thesis—that moral backwardness is characterized by present-orientedness, whereas, by contrast, moral superiority is marked by future-orientedness. You may recall that Banfield infamously published a book about Southern Italian society under the title “The Moral Basis of a Backward Society.” He had spent the summer in Southern Italy with his wife, who spoke a little Italian—he did not—and interviewed some of the residents of the small town of Chiaromonte, in the region of Basilicata, in 1955. Since Banfield didn’t speak Italian, his wife served as translator. And what he argued, in the book he published three years later in 1958, was that the short-sightedness of the Southern Italian people, who purportedly acted only on the short-term immediate interests of their families, was the source of their “moral backwardness” and plight. In later work, and in that of his disciple, James Q. Wilson, they argued that the problem with inner-city residents in the United States, and minorities more generally, was similarly their present-orientedness—by contrast to the future-orientedness of the upper class. Together, Banfield and Wilson helped carve out, for the future, the temporal dimension of conservative thought that historically had always looked back.

The Annales School of historiography could also serve here. Their concept of “la longue durée,” the long view of history—coined by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, the two historians who founded the journal in 1929 Annales d'histoire économique et sociale—focused on the deeper structures that influence, but do not determine, history. These historians, in their own words, preferred to “neglect[] surface disturbances” and instead “to observe the long and medium-term evolution of economy, society and civilization.”⁴¹⁵ In effect, to unearth the deeper long-term forces that shape, but do not dictate, our future.

Rather than reject these schools of thought as reactionary, I have come to see in them something important for critical praxis. Much of the attention among critical practitioners is focused on the here and now. The assemblies are prefigurative models of democracy that we instantiate here and now. Tariq Ali’s call for a second revolution at Tahrir Square, similarly, was temporally immediate. The Invisible Committee’s latest intervention, their 2017 book Maintenant (Now), captures well this temporal dimension. And similarly, if you look at most of the interventions by the liberal left over the past decades, for instance in the former East since the fall of the Berlin Wall, they have revolved around implementing new constitutions and civil institutions, or reinforcing institutions, that were intended to serve as a bulwark against authoritarianism. A focus on the present, again.

What was lacking there was attention to the future: to the deeper structures and forces that shape us, our desires, our ambitions. As a result, those new institutions, and constitutions, easily became the tools and weapons of ambitious new authoritarians, as we are seeing in Hungary and Poland today. The immediate institutions do not themselves forestall the illiberal or totalitarian tendencies, they become instead the new battleground for civil war. The effort of the Polish government to retire older oppositional judges—placing a 65-year age limit on judges, though granting discretionary exceptions—is precisely the kind of manipulation that presentist solutions enable.

So instead, I place my faith in future-orientedness. Not on moral grounds, but on political grounds. To till the fields, laboriously, for rewards that we might reap in the future. To create institutions of a different vein, like the Federalist Society on the right for instance—not rights bulwarks, but slow social network labor that reinforces certain values and builds reputations. There is no reason to believe that explicitly calling for revolution advances the cause of social change. The slow time-consuming labor of shaping ideas and desires may be far more important. It is precisely how conservative organizations were built over decades and have now come to dominate. Popular dissatisfaction and the desire “not to be governed in this way” are what bring about social uprisings, perhaps; but those are shaped by decades-long struggles.

The most pressing need, then, is long-term investment in networks, ideas, institutions, and organizations that promote human values of compassion and equity. I do not believe there is the groundwork or foundation for an egalitarian revolution in this country yet. Far more work needs to be done. Trying to start a revolution now could be counter-productive. Separatist cellular insurrections may be equally pointless. But conventional party politics are just not enough. What we need is long-term concerted groundwork to promote critical thought that pierces through illusions and, at the same time, nurtures the values of equity, compassion, and respect. This is hard, ungrateful work, not satisfying in the short-term, thankless. It involves a time horizon that is hard to bear.

In the midst of the last major crises—after the events of May ’68, the repressions, and the rethinking of power that took place—Foucault reminded us of the stakes of the political struggle.⁴¹⁶ He emphasized how serious the political struggle was. I cannot stress enough how right he was—even if we need to replace his notion of civil war, which is too binary and time-bound, with the concept of endless battles. The political situation today is critical. Not only that, but the neoliberal consumerist horizon is so terribly seductive. Consumption is so frighteningly powerful, and the digital age, so awfully distracting. In the face of that, now more than ever, critical theorists need to reorient critical praxis for the twenty-first century. We now need to do the long hard work of reinforcing existing institutions, alliances, and networks, and creating new ones that will instill the values of equity and compassion, especially among the generations to come.

III.

We are today, in the United States, far down a dangerous path. Few realize the magnitude of the historical shift, even though so many of us have heard the alarm bells. But unless and until we begin to recognize the truly epochal transformation that crystalized counterinsurgency warfare strategies into a new mode of governing post 9/11 and, especially under President Trump and this new Supreme Court, into a new constitutional counterrevolutionary form of government—unless we realize we are now living the American Counterrevolution—it will be impossible to properly resist it.

The priority now—as the priority would have been in 1932 Germany—is to defeat Trump. He has a political charisma and stamina that few others have. This will require first and immediate attention to the 2018 midterms; alongside that, we need to support and nourish a leftist groundswell movement that promotes the values of equity, compassion, and respect. Most importantly, we need to create space for the young, those who are disengaged, and first-time voters, to be heard and to lead.

For myself, I will place my greatest energies in building critical community with a long view of history—the long labor of promoting the values of the critical tradition. I will build critical spaces that are oriented to praxis and not just contemplation. I will foster social networks among critical theorists that reinforce leftist values and build lasting alliances.

In the end, politics is a constant endless battle. We must never forget our political condition, but instead struggle as intelligently as possible. That is the only way to win this coming battle in order to continue fighting what is, in effect, an endless struggle.

Bernard E. Harcourt, New York, September 1, 2018