George Shulman — Horror & Blackness

George Shulman

New York University

Last night I saw Get Out, an amazing “horror” movie about race in America. Get Out pairs nicely with Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro,” because Peck’s movie ends with Baldwin saying, “What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a ‘nigger’ in the first place, because I’m not a nigger, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need him. The question you’ve got to ask yourself.....is, if you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.” 

So Baldwin’s question is, who is the monster here, really? The horror genre in movies typically expresses white fear of blackness, and typically punishes those who cross Puritan norms of sexual propriety. White audiences experience the thrill of transgression, and then enjoy its punishment. But in Get Out the horror derives from, is inescapably tied to, whiteness. The white characters in the movie perform enlightened racial attitudes, but they are vampirish, committed to an operation that sucks the life out of, and controls, black bodies, by literally removing black brains and suppressing black agency. (Jordan Peele has said he was inspired by The Stepford Wives as a model.) The souls of black folk, hidden inside these occupied and docile bodies, try to warn our hero to “get out” before it is too late. There is much more to say here, but the horror is the whites and their obsession with black bodies, and the audience is drawn to identify with the black hero, and his struggle to escape the clutches of his white tormenters. He is not a Jeremiah Wright; but is the Obama era black man. The horror begins because he trusts his white girlfriend, who is the lure to draw him to his destruction. It is as if the Obama era romance -to “get out” of race, embodied in symbols of mixing- is here exposed as a fantasy that enables horror. 

When I saw the film at BAM the other night, the crowd was truly mixed in a way unusual for that theater, and I could hear whites readily identifying with the black hero and embracing his positionality toward the white characters. The construction of the film at once displayed and reversed the white gaze, but I wondered: did whites in the audience imagine themselves as exceptions, as exempt from the portrait of whiteness in the movie? When we were laughing at the fabulous humor, and when we felt terror at white predation, did we divide ourselves from whiteness by a kind of self-protective knowingness? Is that division exactly how Obama era politics could proceed while leaving the deep structure of white supremacy intact? The movie seems a fitting epitaph to the Obama era, when white supremacy acquired a veil, now dismissed as mere political correctness. All the more necessary, then, to see this film, whose central horror remains powerful and pointed: as Ishmael saw, the horror is whiteness, which absorbs all color and vitality into blankness and creates living (walking) dead. The irony Baldwin saw is indeed horrific: these people who call themselves white, who do so by making monsters to envy and consume, are themselves the horror. 

Richard Wright’s “How Bigger Was Born,” composed in March 1940, ends with an incredible final paragraph about the meaning of horror in America. “I feel that I’m lucky to be alive to write novels today,” the paragraph begins. Why? After all, he notes, Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne had “complained bitterly about the bleakness and flatness of the American scene,” and it is “true” that “we have only a money-grubbing, industrial civilization.” So what is good for a writer and for him as a writer? “We do have in the Negro the embodiment of a past tragic enough to appease the spiritual hunger even of a James; and we have in the oppression of the Negro a shadow athwart our national life dense and heavy enough to satisfy the gloomy broodings even of a Hawthorne” -whose insight into human depravity Melville called a “blackness ten times black.” So Wright concludes: “And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.” In Playing in the Dark, fifty years after Wright, Morrison says that horror did indeed invent Poe, in the sense that his work is inconceivable without the absent “Africanist” presence to organize stories of fear, fascination, and death. So the source of “life” in American fiction is indeed condensed in the “horror” (thus also fascinated attraction and use) associated with the black body in the white imagination, which mediates every aesthetic and political issue. 

One could say that in Native Son Wright himself tried to write a horror story about Bigger, as if to embody the white nightmare in a way that exposes the nightmare of whiteness. But Baldwin objected that Wright had inverted Harriet Beecher Stowe, retaining a metaphysically anchored blackness- as-damnation, and so retaining a “melodramatic” structure of evil and redemption. Wright thus remained trapped within the white nightmare of blackness, and failed to escape the nightmare of whiteness. Baldwin proposed a different kind of novel, that would express the richness of a black life not reduced to its relation to whites and whiteness. Baldwin suggested that would involve a “tragic” view of American history, plotted as novelized tragedy, or voiced in prophetic speech. But brilliant as Baldwin was, the claim of Get Out is compelling. Nothing short of Horror will do.

The question of how to represent that “shadow athwart our national life,” a shadow falling across and so uncannily entwining both black and white lives, remains our most important aesthetic and political question. In contrast to writers like Hurston and Morrison, or to a great film like Moonlight, which focus on black life, not whiteness, the gift of Get Out is that its humor about the absurdities of race, and its playfulness with Hollywood genres of horror and thriller, displays the possibility of facing - exposing - this horror in ways that cross racial lines, and by evoking affects other than self-righteous reproach and guilt. But the question remains whether this movie can - what act, event, or artifact possibly could - undo the knowingness by which Obama-era whites protect themselves from their implication in the horror, the horror. “I would vote for him a third time” says one heinous character in the film. And he would.

Tea Party Redux: Thoughts and Responses

George Shulman
   New York University

Thought #1: In response to Bill Connolly’s idea of distinguishing the “extreme” from the “radical” right, I wonder whether we should think about the “tea party” as a real social movement (TPM), perhaps on the model Lawrence Goodwyn described years ago in his history of the “genuine” populist movement, or perhaps in comparison to the CIO or Civil Rights Movement. (How is it different to talk about a resonance machine or a social movement?) The TPM has been engendered both by post-fordist capitalism, which has created for some few a material basis for a revivified entrepeneurialism or family capitalism, but also put this new sector at risk, and the TPM has been engendered by a cultural sense of displacement among whites, anchored in post-65 immigration and multi-culturalism. In the phrasing of C.Wright Mills, the TPM links “private grievance” to “public causes” in a way that mobilizes people to form what he called publics. In its anti-immigrant and anti-statist politics, it demonstrates a sense of crisis and urgency about national decline, fury at unwelcome change, and ferocity towards those it deems adversaries. It has an infrastructure (for the populists, traveling lecturers, for the tea party, talk radio and fox) that enables communication among de-centralized grassroots associations. Among its participants affect and creed are intertwined in both inconsistent and protean ways that include sharp disagreements. And lastly, there is a tense relationship of hostility and dependence between grassroots and the republican party and elected officials, even at the state level. What the idea of social movement may NOT reach, that resonance machine does, is the conjoining of very different ideological elements: as Connolly says, the right’s resonance machine is an assemblage relating secular free-market libertarians, corporate elites, and evangelicals. But his description of the “radical” right (the republican party elite, its funders, and corporate base) and the “extreme” right seems closer to the tension typical of social movement politics. (Patchen Markell’s association with Crespino on the white citizen’s councils is very suggestive in this regard while emphasizing the issue of race.) Republican elites gain legitimacy for their project from the ‘extreme’ voices, which do powerful ideological work against any form of state welfare and regulation, but elected elites are now also really afraid of the TPM, because it is willing to defeat incumbent republicans in primaries, and because it seems willing to create financial crisis, to refuse elite notions of responsibility.

Thought #2: To see the TPM as simply individualistic may be mistaken, not only because members articulate ideas of responsibility to family and community, but also because they are enacting the action-in-concert of the political. Maybe the TPM needs to be seen on the model of the “producer” ethos and politics in which a self-declared “productive” class identifies itself against “unproductive” classes above and below it. They speak an intensely exclusionary language as taxpayers (and so as the employed) against surplus or parasitic people unjustifiably supported by liberal elites. 

Their language thus combines race and class to create equivalence among illegal immigrants, poor people and prisoners. They do not challenge but endorse the logic of the market and neo-liberal rationality, and they replenish rather than question the worst of nationalism. Unlike the CIO or the CRM, they focus on the wrong target -the state- not the multi-national economic order and its bio-political disciplines and quarantines. Moreover, they have no vision of the future except as a return to an idealized past, whereas the CIO and the CRM wanted to create an alternative to both past and present. But are we mis-reading the TPM in any way? They do not avow properly “democratic” commitments in the progressive form the left reifies, they interpret equality in libertarian rather than social democratic ways, and so they oppose the extensive state regulation the left endorses, but is the “socialism” they attack in any way related to the corporate state, that we attack, the protection racket that binds political and economic elites? Are there voices among them who reject “corporate welfare” as well as the military-industrial complex or imperial state power? Can their commitment to de-centralization be affirmed in any sense? Can we challenge them to make good on that language more consistently? Is there a sense in which they are democratic not merely liberal individualistic? Is it a delusion to put them in Wolinian terms, to see them as enacting “demotic” power, even if we disagree with them over substantive positions? Is it crazy to ask if there are any strands of affiliation between them and a democratic anti-statist left? 

Thought #3: Paul Krugman says the real issue in American politics is not a lack of civility or the violence of rhetoric by the TPM, but profound substantive disagreements about the state and the market, foreign policy etc. But maybe Krugman is wrong, at least in one regard. For recent polling data suggests that a majority of Americans want the specific policies supported by the left - item by item, in the concrete- but remain opposed to “big government.” They are living that contradiction Marx called a double life. Perhaps, then, what Krugman depicts as a substantive or ideological division applies only to minorities on left and right, while the remaining 60% of the electorate is composed of people who are divided internally as it were, between something like a common sense understanding of their interests, which require state action, and the ‘common sense’ or ideology/fantasy of individualism and its anti-statist phobia.. The democrats have refused to make a strong narrative case to support state actions, therefore, to avoid offending that deep fantasy, and instead they focus on prosaic policy, case by case. But they lose when republican poetry (by the extreme or the radical right) stokes fear of state power. How is the investment in individualism, and the corresponding hysteria about the state, best addressed? It seems to me this is the central rhetorical and political question, and one democrats must address rather than avoid, though addressing it is also risky because it may alienate the “independents” they require.

Thought #4: Does the violent speech of the TPM require us to rethink ideas of an“agonal” politics? I am inclined to defend violent speech, maybe because of a misplaced attachment to memories of my own 60's radicalism -we were uncivil, and self-righteously used violent and demonizing speech. (And yes, we alienated a majority of the population.) In a culture that longs for the non-partisanship of more perfect union, or that seeks to avoid politics through juridical forms, shouldn’t theorists defend agonism, not only as the grounds for advancing a substantive democratic/left agenda, but also as a democratic/political idea(l) in itself? Is the political task now to contain “extreme” voices on the right by invoking norms of civility, or is the task to make a more vigorous left to contest the right? I want to say: make a left rather than look to umpires (the media, or Obama) to promote an ethos of critical generosity. But given the absence of a left, and given the ferocity of the right, maybe the emphasis on ethos is the only/best way to protect the interests and constituencies we care about? Maybe also a language of constitutionalism, and so a deliberative ethos, is needed to draw independents away from the right’s gravitational field? 

Thought #5: If only we could see our moment now, looking back from the future. Are we living in some version of 1850's America, when southern ‘fire-eaters,’ defining themselves as victims, are impossible to placate by any compromise, and use their sense of victimization to justify incredible personal and political aggression? As these folks depicted themselves as desperately trying to preserve an endangered way of life, are we like abolitionists (and Obama like Lincoln) in contrasting efforts to forge a response? What was needful or possible then, and what is needful and possible now? Are we living in some version of Weimar in 1930, the rhetorical violence heating up while a right-wing movement forms under the umbrella of liberal protections it uses and abuses (and abandons the second it gains formal power)? Does the left therefore need to recognize its dependence on a constitutional order whose limitations we have devotedly exposed the last thirty years? I don’t mean these are literally analogous moments, but can we get a broader view of our moment, our present, to help us decide what is needful? 

In sum, I find myself confounded by the TPM. I am happy to attack their idealization of “the individual,” of the market, of the past, and of the nation, but I am averse to attacking the violence in their rhetoric, their critique of the state and defense of decentralization, and their urgent sense of a whole “system” broken. And then I wonder if, in some fealty to agonism, I am defending people who are the American face on brown shirts, enemies (not merely adversaries) who would kill me in a second. Is my attachment to agonism -and critical generosity- blinding me to the real meaning of the TPM? In the face of an “extreme” politics endlessly replenished by victimology, and defended in the name of free speech and agonal contest, what is to be done?

The Politics of The Tea Party.

George Shulman
New York University
The latest polls suggest that “the tea party movement” may be nothing more than a discontented and “extreme” minority of Republican Party voters, surely no harbinger of a wide populist revolt. Surveys depict self-identified Tea Party members as overwhelmingly upper middle class, reliably Republican voters, exclusively white, and mostly men over the age of 60, who share anti-statist and national security views, but echo longstanding tensions between libertarian and religious/conservative stances toward cultural issues. Their protests now seem an instance, not of emergent popular association, but of the capacity of Fox media to produce the politics it claims to report. How these folks will be absorbed into or reshape the Republican Party remains to be seen, but their significance or newsworthiness as signals of a wider phenomena may have been discredited. My thought, however, is that this picture narrows way too much the resonance and actual support of tea party associations. As well, the entire episode raises issues political theorists should reflect on: first, how we explain the emergence and meaning of these protests; second, how we conceptualize the meaning of anti-statism in relation both to American history and to democratic theory; third, how we address issues around civility and violence. (This post is deeply indebted to conversations with Joe Lowndes and Peter Euben)

A. Explaining counter-subversive politics
The conduct of those organizing under the tea party metaphor seems self-evidently an example of racialized ressentiment in Nietzsche’s sense, but how do we analyze the patronizing, demeaning and even demonizing way we talk about them? My hope, then, is to turn a theoretical gaze back on ourselves as theorists. My model is Arendt’s account of the difference between Socrates and Plato: her Plato brings a truth to the ignorant, whereas for her Socrates seeks to draw out the truth in their doxa. What can we learn about or from these folks, that might (maybe not!) take us beyond saying simply that they are stupid, racist, paranoid (and propertied) men of a certain age, and undeserving of so much media attention? I am suggesting not that we conduct focus groups, but reflect on our frames of reference.
The most typical frame of reference is Richard Hofstadter’s analysis of “the paranoid style” in American politics. His argument invoked American exceptionalism: whereas European politics was organized by class conflict over structurally antagonistic interests, American politics oscillated between a pragmatic politics of “interest group” bargaining over material rewards, and a “status politics” enacted in impossible-to-compromise struggles over identity, i.e. who was “truly American.” Hofstadter attributed this rancorous status politics -and “paranoid style- to anxiety, and he derived anxiety both from the fluidity of a society shaped by markets not stable class groupings, and from issues of identity and belonging provoked by waves of immigration. Accordingly, he read the populist movement in terms of status and identity not class and interest; populist anger targeted not class domination but their displacement by “Un-American” (non-Protestant, individualist, and “native”) immigrants. For the children of these immigrants, now turned social scientists, McCarthyites and John Birchers were the heirs of these populist nativists; especially after the New Deal included the immigrant working class in a share of political and economic power, Hofstadter argued, paranoid anti-communism appeared from the margins to protest displacement (betrayal) by new and old elites sharing an increasingly pluralist center. He thus saw a society divided not by revolutionary subversives, but by irrational obsession with them. 

As Michael Rogin argued about Hofstadter and other cold war social scientists: “In classic American fashion, however, these children of immigrants were turning their own autobiographies into American history. They were elevating the conflicts between immigrants and natives, the upwardly and downwardly mobile, into the central principle of a non-interest based American historical conflict....It was as if the children of immigrants were saying to [Protestants from the hinterland], “You had the fantasy that our parents were dangerous to you; that fantasy made you dangerous to them. Then, America belonged to you and you tried to exclude us. Now, with the New Deal, it belongs to us as well. But while you had only superstition and religion to de-legitimize us, we can use modern scientific methods to discredit you.”
In sum, paranoid-style analysts were participating in the status politics they analyzed. More importantly, by focusing on a status politics that exaggerated minor differences, they ignored constitutive social divisions of class and race, as if fears of identity loss or displacement could be separated from structural inequalities and corporate power. Lastly, they located the paranoid style only at the margins of society and not also at the center: by an image of a pluralist and consensual center threatened by a lunatic fringe, they obscured how national politics was organized by anti-communism as an exemplary instance of the paranoid style. Rogin thus transfigurees the “paranoid style” into a broader “counter-subversive” tradition: “To win in the counter-subversive tradition is to be an English speaking white man. To lose is to fall back among the undifferentiated mass of aliens, women, and peoples of color.” In this tradition of discourse, the nation is imagined as an “imperial self” and “the contradictions denied at the center of American life are located in the dark side of Americanism, the alien. The alien comes to birth as the American’s dark double, the imaginary twin who sustains his (or her) brother’s identity. Taken inside, this subversive would obliterate the American, driven outside, the subversive becomes the alien who serves as a repository for the disowned, negative American self...”

By Rogin’s analysis, the Tea Party exemplifies a “counter-subversive tradition” at the center of American politics, which is recurrently organized around the trope of protecting core liberal institutions from subversive threats identified with people of color, women, alien immigrants, and non-liberal practices. People transform feelings of marginality and impotence into political power and cultural legitimacy by claiming to redeem a threatened nation and liberty. Jeremiadic tea party rhetoric thus bespeaks and continues the “culture war” politics of a post-Vietnam era characterized by eroding national power, de-industrialization, a second reconstruction, and mass immigration. But Rogin’s account also provokes questions. First, what is our own position relative to those participating in or excited by the Tea Party events? Surely, the organization and mobilization of Americans through race has proceeded openly since Kevin Phillips’ “southern strategy” won Nixon election in 1968, and racialized politics has divided the white working class in profound ways. But the election of Obama seems like a decisive defeat to those who for forty years have narrated politics as culture war. In response, how do we address them? Without saying so, do we speak as winners in the status wars to a minority of a minority party? Do we use our metro-culture skills to pathologize their resentment in a culture war they are correct to believe they are losing? Do we speak as their enemies and adversaries because of opposing class and racial identifications? Do we speak as a vulnerable and resentful minority still subject to their hegemonic cultural power, which they mistakenly fear is being displaced? Is addressing them necessary? possible?

Second, by interpreting tea party politics especially in terms of racialized resentment at displacement, as simply the defense of racial privilege, do we repeat the elision by which Hofstadter removed the issues of class and corporate power from his account of populism as a status politics? Surely, there is a powerful element of anxiety if not literal aversion in their racialized denunciations of Obama; their animus does bespeak a desperate defense of a whiteness few name directly. But do we interpret race, now, in the way he interpreted anti-Semitism then, that is, do we reduce their populism to ethnic grievance only, to status or identity politics, as if they had no legitimate grievance with Wall Street or with the State?

B. Is there a truth in their doxa?
To pursue questions about economic populism and anti-statism, we need to credit first how hostility to the state in the American case has been inseparably tied to the protection of racial privilege and racialized domination, and not only to the defense of the market and corporate power. Historically, anti-statism appeared in “republican” criticism of monarchy, and in “anti-Federalist” critiques of the “Junto” seeking to expand the powers of a centralized state, but what was being defended against the state and what was being sought through the state? Centralization appealed to those seeking to finance Indian war and infrastructure as expansionist national projects; it was opposed by those seeking to defend de-centralized political life as well as agrarian and artisan radicalism. Since the 1850's however, the language of local self-determination and popular sovereignty has served white supremacy (and local elites) against nationalized standards of formal equality and state intervention on behalf of (racial) equality. This is one way of narrating the civil rights movement, as equality required using state power against local (racial) tyrannies being defended in the name of democratic liberty. Because racial privilege cannot be separated from the defense of local liberty in American history, it is no surprise that the state has been seen by many whites -from Oxford Mississippi to Boston Massachusetts- as the enemy of their local liberty. 
In addition, herrenvolk republicanism invokes a “producer’s republic” to attack both a state parasitic on “productive” labor, and the undeserving (“unproductive”) poor supported by it. In the American political imaginary, indeed, blackness is linked to (among other things) state power; the central image in the counter-subversive politics of culture war is a demonic love triangle composed of the liberal state supporting unproductive blacks and aborting (i.e. unproductive and not only autonomous) women, at the symbolic and literal expense of white men. Tea Party rhetoric sustains these historical themes: a blackened Obama is associated with state power and redistribution as taxation of the productive supports the unproductive. (The health plan does avow a right to healthcare for 40 million uninsured people, who are coded black and/or alien, not poor.)

Anti-statism, therefore has a racial and not only market or neo-liberal dimension; indeed, at the core of anti-statism is an ambivalence about dependence that is wholly racial (and gendered) in meaning. Nevertheless, anti-statism historically has also included a “populist” critique of the connection between the state and entrenched elites, once (maybe still) coded in the paranoid association of the state with (Jewish) bankers, and now with poverty pimps and welfare queens on one side and chardonnay swilling liberal elites on the other side. Since the 1950s, the state has also been associated with an emergent “new world order” that is centralized, cosmopolitan, and violent. Tocqueville, as well as Staughton Lynd and Sheldon Wolin might be said to voice the truth in this doxa: the state enacts an imperial and corporate agenda that destroys customary forms of popular sovereignty and self-determination; the language of democratic legitimation by elections does not hold the state accountable but authorizes its power. From this point of view, democracy depends on expanding local forms of participation, though as Lawrence Goodwyn argued in The Populist Moment, 19th century populism teaches us that state power needs to be used against local elites to sponsor truly democratic de-centralization. 
Might we then affirm the voice in the Tea Party that criticizes the wedding of the state and finance capital, and that denounces the lack of transparency in policy-making? Moreover, don’t we ourselves need to be clearer about the state? Surely, some of these Tea Party folks are libertarian neo-liberals attacking the state to defend de-regulated markets. But in the case of Scott Brown’s election there were many “fellow-travelers” less ideologically bound, who might be open to a left populism that addressed the connection of the state to the banks, say, without racial coding or religious affiliation. Could we invent and offer a different chain of signifiers, to remake the meaning of the state and of liberty, to link rather than oppose these on behalf of social democratic social policy? But as Tocqueville asks, in what regards is the state a problem even on behalf of equality? Can a better welfare state be the horizon of democratic politics? As we pursue equality by way of the state, does there angry voice disclose a  paradoxes we need to recognize?

Despite their affluence, and their racial positioning, there is a profound sadness in these Tea Party events, and they say as much in testifying that they have “lost” their country. If we reduce this lament to endangered white privilege we may miss something important. Perhaps I am projecting here, but I hear an issue voiced in the Port Huron Statement, which also began with an assumption of affluence. That issue concerns not the sufficiency  of the American welfare state, but the meaning or purpose of a society that seems unhinged from forms of democratic accountability, indeed from identifiable human purposes, and which seems to be hurtling along on a path of self-destruction. Might we dispute how they define or explain that end, by first affirming their sense of unease and anguish, and their notion of democratic accountability, to solicit their participation in an alternative resonance machine?

 C. Speech and Violence 

There is a second issue provoked by the Tea Party episode, concerning appropriate political speech and conduct, specifically  hate-ful speech and violent conduct. I am disturbed by the scolding and parental tone used by critics of these protesting people, as I remember earlier days when the proverbial shoe was on the other foot. Perhaps memories of my own days of rage, and uncivil conduct, confuse me now; does an impulse to defend my own conduct then lead me, mistakenly, to protect their conduct now? Likewise, I have always defended “passionate” speech against the “reasonable” norms defined by “deliberative” democrats, but should I apply the same standard to those with opposed agendas? (As Judith Butler argued in regards to terrorism and 9/11, to try to understand violence (of Weathermen, terrorists, or right-wing actors) is not to condone it.) 
One issue here is how we understand the ethos of “agonistic politics.” Does it actually entail the norms defended by deliberative democratic? If the code is -accept when you lose (an election, a privilege, a country) and find a legitimate channel for your dissent- what counts as legitimate? Legal? Discursive? Are we saying: use your words children, not your fists, but also, you must make your words reasonable in tone and civil in manner, or you will be chastised, and rightfully excluded from the playground? Are we playing Aunt Polly, but won’t admit it? Does our anxiety to contain agonism betray it? Either these folks are performing the agonistic politics we say we want, or our agonism is profoundly restricted in ways we have elided. Perhaps, then, their conduct reveals how we identify with the authority of civility and law, and not with rebellion against it, just as we seem to be defending the state against those who attack it.
Their threats of violence, and actual acts of violence, provoke similar questions. On the one hand, even those protestors who endorse the arming of militias need to be heard for the truth they speak: not only is the first rule of paranoids, as Thomas Pynchon taught years ago, that “they” are indeed following you, but also, these paranoids are right to protest state surveillance and violence. Even if they are not consistent or universal in their defense of the victims of state violence -they mention Waco but not the members of MOVE incinerated in their Philadelphia homes- they register state violence in a way we could well credit rather than ignore. (Thus did Bill Clinton’s recent oped piece in The New York Times invoke McVeigh’s Oklahoma bombing as a lesson that dissent must be non-violent, while Clinton evaded but in effect endorsed and repeated the very state violence that McVeigh was protesting.) 

On the other hand, I have written about and in defense of John Brown. Brown’s violence is often condemned, but not the ordinary but normalized violence of slavery, or of the current incarceral system holding two and half million people in bondage. McVeigh invoked Brown, and Clinton’s critique of McVeigh must include Brown. I don’t mean to equate Brown and McVeigh, on the contrary, I want to make a political rather than a moral argument about violence. Some of us endorse unconditionally a non-violent politics, but canonical political theory repeatedly depicts moments in politics that inescapably involve or even justify violence. Machiavelli insists a free people must be “ferocious” in their agonism, to generate fear of retaliation by the grandeees. Machiavelli praises Junius Brutus because he killed his own sons to re-found the authority of law and equality in a corrupt republic. I imagine him endorsing a prince who uses popular or legal violence (against Wall Street Bankers or Enron executives) to sustain both respect for law and popular support. He distinguishes “fighting like men” by law and “fighting like beasts” by force and fraud, but as he shows the violence and fraud in law, so he recognizes the real and spectacular effects of enforcing law. In other words, would the tea party movement have emerged at all if Obama had signaled a left populism by acted decisively and punitively against Wall Street?

I don’t mean to endorse violence or to romanticize it, but I worry about moralizing it and sanitizing politics. Of course the tolerance for violence voiced by elected Republicans enables a chain of effects that can end in assassination, vigilante ethnic violence, and civil war. Maybe, given the play of forces in the United States, an absolute denunciation of violence is needful politically, because violence can only hurt the people we care about, but then we are talking about violence as a political rather than moral issue and we have not ruled it out absolutely. But is my resistance to those who sanitize politics leading me to actually defend racist right-wing people throwing bricks? Is it better to make a universal prohibition, or to recognize that some bricks are more justified than others?