The Democratic Future of the Green New Deal

Lida Maxwell

Associate Professor

Boston University

What does it mean to have a future? The monarch’s eternal body used to represent the continuity and futurity of the kingdom (over and against the mortality of both him and his subjects). In modern social contract stories, by contrast, ordinary men gain a future by moving out of a state of nature beset by uncertainty, violence, and hierarchy; mastering a state of nature that otherwise would master them. Yet nature in these stories is not a factual reality, but a metaphor for forces that feel uncontrollable or unpredictable. As Carole Pateman has argued, patriarchal mastery is necessary in social contract stories for liberal democratic futurity. So too the mastery of other races and peoples (as thinkers such as Uday Mehta, James Tully, and Adam Dahl have argued). These social contract stories, which continue to haunt our political imagination, position the future of white European bourgeois men as dependent on the subjugation of others.

This mastery-centered idea of what it means to have a future may help to explain why it has been so hard for many commentators, presidential candidates, and ordinary citizens to see the Green New Deal as a real possible future. Even people who say they support the Green New Deal feel like they can only talk about it in old terms, in terms of legislators balancing a series of trade-offs between individuals and the collective – as Cory Booker is doing right now (“I’ve endorsed the framework and the resolution, but I don’t endorse doing things that are going to hurt…a strong economy”). But this whole way of thinking is rooted in the idea that mastery by someis a condition of futurity for everyone – that the future of the collective depends on elites mastering “nature” (women, poor people, marginalized individuals, etc.) through (for Booker) technocratic policy making.

The Green New Deal is moving us toward a different conception of what it means to have a future – a democratic conception of futurity that has been prefigured in environmental politics and thinking. Here, futurity depends neither on mastery over some people, forces, and nonhuman nature; nor on separating politics from nature, the public realm from the private realm. Rather, futurity opens up through an ecological (holistic, interconnected) attention to how the attempt at mastery has left almost everyone in a situation of precarity, and the attempt not to master unpredictable forces, but instead to democratically understand, adapt, and respond to those forces so that everyone, and not just a few, might flourish.

This is the central idea in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. After detailing the ecological devastation (actual and potential) caused by insecticides and pesticides, Carson argues in her last chapter, entitled, “The Other Road”: “We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one "less traveled by" — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth” (277-278). On the one hand, Carson seems to be suggesting here that the choice is between two futures: 1) the “deceptively easy” “superhighway” that seems to be leading quickly toward greater prosperity and comfort, but actually ends in the “disaster” of destroying the earth that actually allows our lives and pleasures to exist; and 2) a future where we push back against that tendency and preserve the earth. Yet implicit in Carson’s formulation, and in the remainder of the chapter, is a deeper distinction: not just a choice between two futures, but between what a future is. The “deceptively easy” superhighway constitutes what we usually think of as a “future”: a space of inevitable progress brought about by capitalist industry and technology, and by what Carson calls the “control of nature,” or what Val Plumwood calls the “mastery of nature.” 

The other “fork of the road” is, in contrast, an open-ended path, made possible by our rejection of the attempt at mastery. In the closing pages of Silent Spring, Carson does not describe in detail what that path looks like. She notes that there is “a truly extraordinary variety of alternatives to the chemical control of insects” (278), and lauds ecologically grounded approaches to insect control, “biological solutions, based on understanding of the living organisms they seek to control, and of the whole fabric of life to which these organisms belong” (278). Yet she does not proscribe a particular course, a particular way of proceeding. Rather, what distinguishes this fork in the road is its democratic character. Directly after describing the fork in the road, Carson says: “The choice, after all, is ours to make,” she says. “If, having endured much, we have at last asserted our ‘right to know,’ and if, knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course is open to us.” (my emphasis, 278). Looking about enables a possible future because we are no longer deferring to technocratic, corporate elites. Instead, we become agents in creating a world where everyone can flourish. Just because the “smooth superhighway” is easy does not mean we should stay on it. We may “see what other course is open to us.”

The Green New Deal resolution offers us this democratic “other course,” this “other fork in the road.” If Carson called for the public to use the knowledge she gives it to demand the regulation of insecticides and pesticides, the Green New Deal calls for the public to engage in political and governmental action that will address climate change: a “new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal” (4). Also like Carson, the GND’s vision of the future on behalf of which they call us to mobilize is ecologically grounded: the aim is not only to ensure jobs, “prosperity, “economic security,” but also “clean air and water,” “climate and community resiliency,” “healthy food,” “access to nature,” “a sustainable environment,” and “justice and equity.” Like Carson – and perhaps more than Carson – the GND recognizes that justice and equity are connected with a sustainable climate, that prosperity and economic security are unimaginable without healthy food and clean air and water.

Yet also like Silent Spring, the GND resolution does not use expert knowledge to offer a precise map for how to “solve” the problem of climate change, and foreclose democratic decision-making (nor does it make false claims of ease, as in Cory Booker’s statement: “we did it when I was mayor of Newark; we just retro-fitted our buildings. We drove down our carbon footprint; we drove down our city’s energy costs. We created jobs for our residents, and we dealt with the issues of climate change. We created a win, win, win, win…”). 

Rather, the GND uses knowledge to empower communities. The resolution begins with a clear depiction of the hard truth of the devastation that climate change has brought and will bring (the consequence of staying on the “smooth superhighway,” despite the many warnings of Carson and others). This knowledge, rather than inducing powerlessness, instead serves as a framework that enables communities to become agents of their own future. 

The resolution continually portrays “community-defined projects and strategies” (6, cf. 9) as an integral part of addressing climate change, and places democracy at its center: the resolution calls for ensuring “the use of democratic and participatory processes that are inclusive of and led by frontline and vulnerable communities and workers to plan, implement, and administer the Green New Deal mobilization at the local level” (12). Refusing the assumption of many that democracy is incapable of addressing an urgent problem like climate change, the GND shows that democracy is the only way that Americans can claim and create the future they desire.

While this future is mostly illegible in terms of contemporary political “common sense,” we should take the Green New Deal as an opportunity to show why this “common sense” actually makes no sense. Thea Riofrancos, Alyssa Battistoni, and others are already doing that in Jacobin, to great effect. The Green New Deal invites a new way of thinking and feeling the future: not as requiring the “smooth superhighway” that exists only through eradicating that which appears unsettling, uncertain, or unpredictable (including democratic claims for equality and freedom), but instead as the possibility of things being otherwise that emerges from the democratic practice of refusing deference and opening ourselves to the pleasures, difficulty, and meaning of democratically governing ourselves.

Lida E. Maxwell — The Mo(u)rnings After*: On Behalf of Democratic Government, or Lessons from Arendt on the Dreyfus Affair

Lida E. Maxwell is Associate Professor of political science at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and is the author of Public Trials: Burke, Zola, Arendt, and the Politics of Lost Causes.

As it became clear last night that Trump was going to win the election, I found myself increasingly thinking about Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the Dreyfus Affair in The Origins of Totalitarianism, which she argues offers a “foregleam of the twentieth century.” In particular, I found myself thinking about Arendt’s claim that the anti-Dreyfusard hatred of Jews and distrust of government – their “suspicion of the republic itself, of Parliament, and the state machine” (92) – were tied together. Arendt reads the Dreyfus Affair as a crucial moment in France – and in Europe – that enabled and paved the way for the ultimate collapse of the Third Republic. Does Trump’s victory – marked, as anti-Dreyfusard sentiment was, by scapegoating of outsiders and distrust of government – similarly presage the decline of our republic? 

There are reasons to see similarities between Trump’s campaign/victory, and the anti-Dreyfusard movement in late 19th century France, which was characterized by anti-Semitism, disregard for factual truth, trust in myth and ideology rather than government, and mob violence. Yet the similarity that I want to focus on here is that both the anti-Dreyfusards and the Trump campaign were driven by a conflagration of hatred of “outsiders” and a distrust of government. Arendt argues that these two passions were entangled during the Dreyfus Affair, but that they did not grow out of the Dreyfus Affair itself – which crystallized around the conflict over whether the conviction of the Jewish Army Captain, Alfred Dreyfus, was just or unjust. Instead, this twin hatred of Jews and distrust of government grew, Arendt argues, out of citizens’ disgust with scandals having to do with unsavory connections between business and politics. 

Most notable of these scandals was the Panama Scandal, wherein it came to light that most of Parliament had received bribes from the Panama Company to secure Parliament backing for millions of francs in private loans – loans for which, after the Company went bankrupt, Parliament (and thus the public) were on the hook. The bribes were made public by Edouard Drumont’s anti-semitic daily, La Libre Parole – the alt-right paper of its day – which gained in publicity and influence out of the scandal. The bribes found a place in Drumont’s paper because the intermediaries for the bribes were Jews. Portrayed as “parasites upon a corrupt body,” Arendt argues that these Jews’ role in the scandal “served to provide a thoroughly decadent society with an exceedingly dangerous alibi. Since they were Jews it was possible to make scapegoats of them when public indignation had to be allayed” (99). The scandal, in other words, stoked distrust of and alienation from government, while also allowing the public to blame that distrust and alienation on a group of supposed “outsiders,” or “parasites”: Jews. Thus, hatred of “outsiders,” the “parasites” that the Anti-Dreyfusards depicted Jews to be, and the suspicion of government go together and reinforce each other – creating the sense that the government is “under the influence of the Jews and the power of the banks” (92). 

What Arendt is suggesting is that anti-Dreyfusards were not created by the Dreyfus Affair, but existed before Dreyfus’ conviction and were available to be called into anti-Semitic, violent action. Specifically, they already existed as what Arendt calls a “mob.” For Arendt, the mob is “a group in which the residue of all classes are represented” (107), and which, in contrast to “the people” which fights for “true representation,” will “always shout for the ‘strong man,’ the ‘great leader’” (107). The mob did not come into existence because of impersonal economic and political forces, but because an elite’s greed and decadence, and its use of political power to further that greed, created a class that felt superfluous, unnecessary, left behind. As Arendt puts it, the mob was “produced” by the “[h]igh society and politicians of the Third Republic,” in a “ series of scandals and public frauds” (107). Thus, when the Dreyfus case arose, the mob was available for hatred, and available to be soothed with slogans like “Death to the Jews!” and “France for the French!” 

The similarities between Arendt’s account of the rise of the Anti-Dreyfusard “mob” and Trumpism is obvious. The 2008 bailout of Wall Street, along with the flaunting of politicians’ ties to business and finance (the revolving door between politics and finance and lobbying), and the various scandals surrounding especially Hillary Clinton’s ties to finance (such as the Goldman Sachs speeches) have made obvious to everybody that Clintonian (and Reagan-ian and Bush-ian) neoliberalism favors the wealthy and leaves the poor and working class behind. In this sense, it is also obvious – as it has been to many of us throughout the campaign – that Trump’s popularity is at least in part a byproduct of neoliberalism. It is because neoliberalism created a superfluous class, marked by anger and resentment, that they were available for Trumpism.

This does not mean that a Clinton presidency would have been the same thing as a Trump presidency will be. Far from it: many diverse groups would have been more valued and protected under a Clinton presidency, and racism, misogyny, and anti-immigrant sentiment would have been declaimed and likely fought against. Climate change would have been addressed – even if not aggressively enough. It is important, in other words, to make distinctions between Clinton and Trump. Yet it is also important to acknowledge that more Clinton-ism would likely not have meant an end to Trumpism, but probably more of an audience for it. 

That audience, like the Anti-Dreyfusard mob, craved scapegoats. And Trump, like the Anti-Dreyfusard leaders, eagerly fed this craving. He portrayed himself as an outsider who was challenging a “corrupt” system – exemplified for him and his victims by “Crooked Hillary.” Hillary, however, served a dual purpose for his campaign. She both exemplified corrupt government – the intimate ties between corporations and government (the Goldman Sachs speeches, the Clinton Foundation, etc.) – but also the “outsider” who can be blamed for that corruption. The misogynistic discourse and symbols of Trump rallies – notably, the “Trump that Bitch” and “Hillary sucks but not as much as Monica” T-shirts – portray Hillary’s female-ness (and not just her supposed corruption and ties to big money) as parasitic on what might be an otherwise healthy body politic. 

Of course, women are not the only outsiders blamed in the Trump campaign. Unlike the Dreyfus Affair – fueled almost solely by anti-Semitism – the Trump campaign portrayed not only Jews, but all manner of diverse groups as parasites that must be silenced, deported, or banned in order for the country to be made “great again.” To name just a few others: his continued promise to build a wall along the southern border, his portrayal of Mexican immigrants as rapists, his diminishment of Muslim Americans (even Muslim members of the Armed forces, such as Captain Khan – here very reminiscent of the Dreyfus Affair, and the worry about Jews in the Army), his call for a ban on Muslim immigration, his affirmation of police violence against African Americans, his and his followers’ making fun of and physically harassing the disabled, and the homophobic chants at rallies (after the Orlando shooting, people yelling, “the gays had it coming”). For the Trump campaign, not just a single group, but the presence of all diverse – non-white, non-straight, disabled, immigrant, non-male – people in the American public sphere and workplace are the reason why “Americans” are unhappy and out of work, and why they can’t trust their government, which, with its “PC” discourse, is under the sway of these groups.

What to do? The main lesson I want to glean from Arendt, at least for today, is that despair in democracy or the republic is not an option – or, at least, that we should allow (in Bonnie Honig’s terms) mourning to be implicated in morning, to find openings in our despair for beginnings, if we are to find a path away from Trump-ism and the politics of the mob. For Arendt, the true hero of the Dreyfus Affair was not Dreyfus, and not Zola – but Clemenceau. What made Clemenceau heroic, for Arendt, is that he refused to engage in the scapegoating that the mob demanded. Instead, he offered a positive vision of society, based in equal justice under the law and human rights: “There was only one basis on which Dreyfus could or should have been saved. The intrigues of a corrupt Parliament, the dry rot of a collapsing society, and the clergy’s lust for power should have been met squarely with the stern Jacobin concept of the nation based upon human rights – that republican view of communal life which asserts that (in the words of Clemenceau) by infringing on the rights of one you infringe on the rights of all” (106). Clemenceau was not motivated by a hatred of a particular class or group – Jews, the bourgeoisie, women, immigrants, Muslims, the disabled. Rather, he was motivated by a fiery love of justice. As Arendt puts it, Clemenceau, “in his consuming passion or justice, still saw the Rothschilds as members of a downtrodden people” (119). He was the hero of the story, for Arendt, because he refused to leave anyone behind. Everyone should have an equal place in the republic, and that is what he stood for.

Indeed, for Arendt, what made the Third Republic fall (thirty years after the equivocal conclusion of the Dreyfus Affair), ultimately, was not the persistence of anti-semitic, Anti-Dreyfusard sentiments, but rather a lack of Clemenceaus: that is, “the fact that [France] had no more true Dreyfusards, no one who believed that democracy and freedom, equality and justice could any longer be defended or realized under the republic” (93). What was lost at that point, in other words, was a faith that government and law could achieve equality – that representative government could create equal, free conditions for all of us. It was because of this vacuum, and not because of the force of anti-Dreyfusard sentiment, that the republic could fall to the Nazis.

In the wake of the Trump election, it is easy, on the one hand, to be consumed by a hatred of, resentment toward, or fear of Trump and his followers; or, on the other hand, to despair of democracy and government altogether. I am tempted to those paths myself. Yet to do so would be to cede the republic to neoliberal elites and the resentful class their excesses and greed have produced. Instead, we should be working right now to offer a Left democratic vision of freedom and equality that refuses the scapegoating logic of Trumpism, and the neoliberal moderation of Hillary Clinton, which happily produces classes of winners and losers, while trying to check its worst excesses. Such a Left democratic vision would affirm and pursue a government that will be an active, radical agent of freedom and equality and that refuses to leave anyone behind, including Trump supporters. What might this look like? The first things that come to mind: I see such a government as one that creates a new, clean energy economy, powered by a large tax on fossil fuel companies and corporations, and which creates jobs for its citizens in alternative energy and the building of a new infrastructure focused on mass transit. It is a government where, as Bernie Sanders demanded, all citizens are promised a free college education, and where everyone has affordable, excellent health care. It is a government that aggressively monitors, restructures, and de-militarizes the police. It is a government that treats refugees and immigrants as equals.

This incipient vision might seem ridiculous in the context of a Trump victory – pipe dreams. But now is not the time to narrow our vision into the confines of a defensive posture. It is exactly the time to dream big, to demand more, to call for what we really want: freedom and equality for everyone. Only such a vision, and the political action to match, can create a bulwark against the worst excesses of elite greed, the (white, male) resentment it spawns, and the misogyny, racism, ableism, and anti-immigrant sentiment that this resentment enables and feeds on.

*The title is indebted to Bonnie Honig’s writing on morning/mourning in “Corpses for Kilowatts?: Mourning, Justice, Burial, and the Ends of Humanism,” in Second Nature (ed. Archer, Ephraim, Maxwell; Fordham University Press, 2013)

Lida E. Maxwell — Donald Trump's Campaign of Feeling

Lida MaxwellTrinity College 

In the promotional video that the RNC aired about Donald Trump on the last night of their convention, Rudy Giuliani said that, as president, Donald Trump would “make us feel like what we should feel like: that we are exceptionally lucky to live in this country.” Giuliani’s gloss on Trump was revealing. Trump’s campaign is – as many have noted – a campaign of fear. Trump stokes fear of “radical Islam” and “illegals” and solicits a desire for the safety and security offered by a strongman (him). But his campaign is also one that solicits and relies on a more general politics of sentimentality: his audience’s feeling that feelings are powerful. That is, his campaign fuels the (self-help-ish) idea that feeling good about something makes it good – that feeling like America is great will make America great. 

This was evident in his speech at the Republican National Convention. Trump’s speech (and campaign) had almost zero policy prescriptions (besides building a wall), but he nonetheless suggested that the very day that he gets into office, everyone will be safer. It is difficult to make sense of this claim unless you put it in the context of Trump’s campaign manager’s interview with Jake Tapper earlier that evening. Tapper had seen a draft of Trump’s speech, wherein Trump claims that we need a “law and order” approach in a moment when violent crime is on the rise. Tapper confronted Paul Manafort with data that shows that violent crime has been going down for decades. Manafort responded by saying that he didn’t know the statistics, but that people don’t feel safe. The problem Manafort and Trump are addressing, in other words, is a problem not of actual crime, but of a feeling of insecurity. And if the problem is a feeling of insecurity, then having a feeling of security – when Donald Trump is president – is solution enough. 

This politics of feeling is – in many ways – nothing new. As Lauren Berlant argues in her essay, “The Subject of True Feeling,” sentimentality has long pervaded American politics. In particular, Berlant suggests that minority and subaltern groups have often challenged dominant groups in America, and sought redress for their injuries, in the register of feeling and sentimentality: “[s]entimentality has long been the means by which mass subaltern pain is advanced, in the dominant public sphere, as the true core of national collectivity” (53). Berlant (sympathetically) criticizes the attempt to use sentimentality and pain to create legal change and national unity, arguing that the focus on the pain of individuals blinds us to the structural injustices that produce that pain. Berlant also argues that the discourse of sentimentality creates a “sense that changes in feeling, even on a mass scale, amount to substantial social change” (54). In other words, Berlant is suggesting that casting our political claims in terms of our feelings of pain and trauma creates a culture where feeling better seems to mean that things are better.

I am not trying to suggest that minority groups’ claims of pain and injury have paved the way for Trump’s alienated whites’ politics of feeling – Berlant places minority discourses of suffering in the context of a broader American sentimentalized politics. Rather, I want to suggest something a little different: that Trump and his core supporters (alienated male whites), like other conservatives before them, are coopting progressive politics. If many important demands for justice and freedom – for LGBT, immigrant, and other minority rights – have had to proceed in part through a display of suffering, feeling, and pain that aims to elicit the sympathy of the dominant class, then Trump’s campaign is about proclaiming that the feelings of that dominant class should be a (no, the) matter of common concern – hence the strange slogan for the last night of the RNC, “Make America One Again.” What this approach leaves out, of course, is that the bad feelings of the dominant class are not produced through structural injustices aimed at white, male Americans, but have rather emerged as a belligerent response to policies aimed at redressing the structural injustices that have long been done (and continue to be done) to women, people of color, immigrants, and queers (among others). 

One way to respond to Trump’s campaign of feeling is by unmasking Trump’s claims about national (in)security, and the alien threats that supposedly menace us, as lies – lies that wrongly encourage hatred toward minority groups, and which distract us from the real problems this country has to deal with. This is largely the approach taken by the Clinton campaign and, while many Democrats certainly agree with this approach, it doesn’t seem to be diminishing Trump’s luster with his core constituency. And there is a reason for this. The whole point of Trump’s campaign is that facts don’t matter – feelings matter. Throwing facts in the face of feelings is, in this election cycle, pretty pointless unless you are addressing an audience who is already convinced that facts matter.

An alternative approach to responding to Trump’s campaign of feelings would be not to try to unmask it, but instead to offer an alternative politics of feeling – one that diagnoses, as the product of diverse forms of structural injustice, the bad feelings of insecurity (economic, political, social) that plague many Americans (white men and others), takes them seriously, and addresses them with material solutions. This is, to a large degree, what Bernie Sanders’ campaign did. In his Michigan debate with Hillary Clinton, Sanders was asked whether unions protect bad teachers. Instead of addressing this small issue, Sanders put that issue in the context of the bigger crisis of public education. He said:

“What our campaign is about, is asking people to think big not small. And when we think big and we talk about education, we’ve got to ask ourselves a simple question – how is it, starting at college that hundreds of thousands of bright young people are today, unable to go to college because they can’t afford it? How is it that maybe your kid – and when I was growing up, we didn’t have any money – were not even dreaming of going to college because they knew it was another world. So starting with the top, now I know some people think it’s a radical idea, I don’t. I believe that every public college and university in this country should be tuition free.”

What Sanders does here is offer a savvy diagnosis of why we are even asking questions about unions protecting “bad teachers,” and encouraging a shift in how we think about “solutions.” Specifically, he is suggesting that concern about whether unions protect “bad teachers” is rooted in a broader, material insecurity: about whether our children are receiving, and able to pursue, the education they deserve – an education that, in turn, will allow them to achieve an equal place at the social and political table. That problem is a big problem that demands, Sanders is arguing, a large scale shift in our political imagination – a shift that allows us to see a good, full education not as the privilege of a few, but as a basic right for everyone in a democratic country.

In this moment and others, Sanders’ campaign acknowledged how bad many people in this country feel – how their lives feel insecure and pointless, and how (in contrast to previous generations) it feels like the future might get worse and not better. Sanders did not treat those feelings (as Trump does) as truths in themselves. Instead, he explained them as the product of concrete human decisions, policies, and laws – decisions, policies, and laws that could be otherwise. In turn, he offered his audience a radical political imaginary – a vision of what government and law could be and do if we just, simply, changed it. 

Sanders, of course, is no longer in the picture – and I don’t bring up his campaign simply to wax nostalgic. Rather, I bring it up to suggest that Hillary should take a page from his book: to move away from only trying to unmask Trump’s sentimentalism, and toward also offering an alternative sentimental politics akin to Sanders’. While offering large-scale political dreams is not Hillary’s strong suit – she excels at pragmatic compromise (which is also an important political virtue) – she has shown a remarkable capacity to shift and change during her political career. And if Sanders’ campaign got us to imagine that our politics could be otherwise, could we not imagine that Hillary could be otherwise, too? What if we saw, during the remainder of this campaign, a Hillary who returned to the way she viewed politics when she was at Wellesley College, where she said in her commencement speech that, “for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible”? What if we saw a Hillary who didn’t try to turn us away from the realm of feeling, but diagnosed feeling, and offered a concrete vision of what equality and freedom would look like right now? Such a vision might solicit and create feelings of a different register than the one on which Trump is working: feelings not of alternating fear and greatness, but of possibility, freedom, and solidarity – feelings, in other words, that might embolden political action and participation on behalf of freedom and equality, rather than encourage deference to a huckster. 

 

Lida E. Maxwell — Who Gets to Demand Safety?

Lida E. Maxwell is Associate Professor of political science at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and is the author of Public Trials: Burke, Zola, Arendt, and the Politics of Lost Causes.

As protests against racism on campus have rocked the University of Missouri and Yale University—and spread to places like Claremont McKenna and Amherst—student protesters have come under fire for their call for “safe space.” In particular, writers like Connor Friedersdorf have argued that their demand for safe spaces has created a new kind of intolerance, where all dissenting views are excluded and condemned. This critique of the demand for safety finds allies in leftists who see student activists’ demands for safe spaces as an attempt to avoid rather than address the complexities and realities of the world. In contrast, writers like Roxane Gay have drawn attention to the fact that critics of students demanding safe spaces at Yale, Mizzou, and elsewhere tend to be those who have never feared for their safety, who experience safety as an “inalienable” right. For Gay, the call for safety is not a call to be “coddled” or not to hear opposing perspectives, but rather for the freedom for all students to voice experiences and views in a setting where they do not feel in danger of being mocked, derided, or physically threatened. While some (white, male, cisgender) students might take the privilege of safety for granted—and, in turn, their ability to speak their views however and whenever they like—others (notably, black, female, and queer students) may have to demand it.

I agree with Gay that critics of the student protesters fail to acknowledge the privilege of safety that most of them inhabit. However, I think that Gay’s claim that some people “have” safety while others have to ask for it may keep us from seeing a different and perhaps more insidious problem: namely, that some people’s demands for safety are taken more seriously than others. That is, the issue is not that some people simply feel safe while others do not, but rather that some people’s demands for safety are backed up by state violence and law, while others are left at the mercy of that violence. Put differently, the “feeling” of safety that Gay rightly says is a privilege is one that is created through social, political, and legal institutions that frame some people’s demands for safety as legitimate and urgent—and in need of violent enforcement—while framing others’ demands for safety as a desire for “coddling.” 

For example, while black students and their supporters at Mizzou and Yale are often mocked when they ask for a safe space, Donald Trump is taken seriously by Republican voters when he argues that we must erect a United States’ southern border to keep Americans safe from Mexican rapists and criminals. In fact, Trump’s demand that we keep (white) Americans safe from Mexicans has him atop the Republic primary poll in New Hampshire. Similarly, when Darren Wilson says that he felt so threatened by Michael Brown that he had to shoot him, or when George Zimmerman claimed that he felt threatened by Travyon Martin (and thus had to shoot him), or when the Cleveland police officer who killed 12 year old Tamir Rice claimed that he felt so threatened by this little boy that he had to shoot him, these men are taken seriously and their demands for safety are affirmed legally and sometimes politically.

Some people might say that the kind of safety that police officers and Donald Trump and George Zimmerman demand is an entirely different kind of safety than the kind called for by the college students at Yale and Mizzou—that they are talking about physical rather than psychological safety. But can we separate out these two kinds of safety? The safety from racist comments, threats, and (yes) even costumes that these students demand is not just a demand to be kept safe from the violence of speech, but also from the always present risk that hateful speech will turn into hateful violence—a risk that many of us have felt when having homophobic or racist comments shouted at us, or when we have been sexually harassed or intimidated. On the other hand, Trump’s, Wilson’s, and Zimmerman’s claims that they felt or feel physically threatened are not at all self-evident; their demands for safety are demands that we see certain kinds of individuals (Mexicans, African-Americans who possess no weapons but who look, in Wilson’s words, “like a demon”) as greater threats than others (i.e. the armed white men who kill or threaten to kill black and Latino individuals).

Surely what the students at Yale and Mizzou are protesting is not simply racism, but precisely this kind of racist view of safety: that is, a view of safety that allows certain lives to count more than others, and that allows some people’s demands for safety to come at the expense of the lives of others. 

The logic of safety expressed in the violent acts of Wilson and Zimmerman (among others)—that in order for some to be safe, others need to be disciplined, threatened, or killed—is entirely familiar. It is evident not only in the police violence against (and racial profiling of) black men and women, and in violence against queers and trans people. It is also evident in the cycle of violence that we see re-perpetuated in response to the Paris attacks, where some French and American leaders claim that in order to be safe, Syrian refugees must be kept out, and cities in Syria must be bombed.

In the context of these racist and Islamophobic demands for safety—backed up by state violence and law—it seems more important than ever to support and stand in solidarity with college students’ demand for safe spaces. While their demand for safety could certainly re-enact (on a limited scale) the exclusivity of the violent logic of safety I sketched above, their demand for an ideal of safety as a space of inclusion and equality stands as an important counterpoint to the racist idea that safety depends on the violent exclusion of difference. In this ideal, safety is not contingent upon the exclusion and disciplining of (minority) others, but rather upon the shared commitment to affirm, acknowledge, and find space for the diverse experiences of everyone. Here, safety is not a feeling of knowing that threats to you have been killed or quarantined, but rather in a feeling of knowing that the risk of being who you are—expressing your views, presenting yourself freely to others—will be borne not only by you, but also by others, who will create a space of safety around you.  

Student protest at the University of Missouri

One thing—among others—that these student protestors have done is reminded us of an insight of the feminist and gay rights movements: that safety is not a purely physical condition, having to do with whether you are physically threatened, but also a political and social condition. In other words, political and social structures—such as racism, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia—turn certain people (usually marginalized groups) into supposed “threats,” and in turn license violent behavior toward them. The move to create “safe spaces” for women and gays and lesbians was a way to try to create spaces where individuals could feel the freedom and equality that they wanted to create on a broader social scale. In our current political moment—where demands for safety have been used to license increasingly violent acts—standing with students’ demands for an ideal of safety premised on equality, freedom, and shared risk holds out one of the few hopes of challenging this violent logic for safety on behalf of creating (even if only in microcosm, as an ideal) the conditions of a safe world for everyone.

Student protests at the University of Missouri

Jurisdiction and Justice in the Bales Case

Lida Maxwell
  Trinity College
Ever since news broke of the massacre of Afghan civilians by Sgt. Robert Bales, the press has told us that, due to “agreements” between the United States and Afghanistan, the U.S. has jurisdiction to try Bales.  On March 20th, however, the New York Times was more specific about these “agreements” – claiming that the U.S. has jurisdiction “under a longstanding ‘status of forces agreement’ between the United States and the Afghan government.”  Yet the United States does not have a formal “status of forces agreement” with Afghanistan, as it does with Iraq and many other countries.  A “status of forces agreement,” or a SOFA, is an agreement, ratified by Congress, that sets out the terms under which foreign service members may operate in a particular country.  The United States’ agreement with Afghanistan takes the form of an “exchange of notes” from 2002 and 2003 that gave military personnel the same status as administrative U.S. Embassy staff – which meant, in effect, that U.S. military personnel would be immune from prosecution by Afghan authorities.  An “exchange of notes” is one of many informal forms of international “soft” law that, in contrast to a SOFA, do not need legislative approval and which are often more aspirational than strictly regulatory.

Does it matter that the U.S.-Afghan relationship is governed by an “exchange of notes” instead of a SOFA?  In my view, it does matter – primarily because it suggests that American jurisdiction in the case is not as hard and fast as the press is making it out to be.  While an exchange of notes certainly carries a great deal of diplomatic weight, it is not un-revisable, nor un-amendable, and could certainly be revisited by the two parties to it.  

There are other reasons, within the text of the exchange of notes (as reported by R. Chuck Mason in a Congressional Research Brief), to think that American jurisdiction should not be understood as automatic.  Mason says that the “exchange of notes” offers the following immunity for U.S. personnel: they “are immune from criminal prosecution by Afghan authorities…except with respect to acts performed outside the course of their duties” (my emphasis, p. 8).  While Bales’ crimes may have been deeply linked to his military service, couldn’t one still make the argument that his crimes were “performed outside the course of [his] duties” and thus that immunity should not apply in this case?  Indeed, a member of the military makes this same point in a comment on a military justice blog.

The press’ continual insistence that the United States simply “has” jurisdiction obscures the grey areas that govern jurisdiction here and thus portrays the question of jurisdiction as settled.  The problem with this tendency of the press is not only that it is misleading; it is also that it forecloses the possibility of a conversation about how to do justice in the Bales case.  By simply asserting American jurisdiction, the press – as well as the Obama administration – has forestalled a broad, public, transnational discussion about how to do justice in a case where, allegedly, a foreign service member methodically kills, and then burns, Afghan men, women, and children.

Such a conversation would likely be filled with dogma from both sides of the political spectrum and it might end in disagreement.  Yet, in my view, it would nonetheless be well worth having.  After all, Americans and Afghanis are already divided over this trial (recall the unheeded demands from Afghanis directly after the attacks that Bales be tried in Afghanistan).  If we opened up the question of how to do justice to broad discussion, there might still be division, but such a conversation could be a good in its own right.

At its best, a transnational conversation about how to do justice in the Bales case could prompt exchanges of visions of justice, give attention to the victims of the shooting (which have been extremely under-reported in the press), and perhaps even generate broad discussion of the stakes for Afghani civilian life of the presence of American soldiers in Afghanistan. Such a conversation might also produce unexpected moments of transnational understanding and respect – understanding and respect that is sorely lacking, given ongoing civilian deaths perpetrated by the United States in Afghanistan, as well as disrespectful acts of American soldiers, such as the burning of Korans.  Certainly, President Obama’s comment that Americans will treat Sgt. Bales’ crimes as if they were committed against our own children is an example of this.

But in the end, these were not our children.  They were Afghan children, as well as men and women, who belonged to families and communities halfway around the world.  Thus, if we were able to engage in this broad, public discussion about Sgt. Bales’ alleged crimes, we should ask seriously whether we can do justice to these crimes in an American military court, or whether such crimes demand hearing in a public, transnational tribunal, where both Americans and Afghans could see, discuss, and come to judgment on the proceedings.

There would be risks to engaging in this kind of conversation– risks that it would turn Bales’ trial into a “political” one, more about the U.S. presence in Afghanistan than Bales’ alleged crimes.  (This is seemingly what American military personnel are worried about when they label Bales a “bad apple” and call the shootings an “individual act.”)  Yet haven’t Bales’ alleged crimes already become a symbol of the American presence in Afghanistan?  Since news of these crimes broke, I have heard numerous stories relating them to (among other things) the “kill team” crimes of 2010-2011, American night raids in Afghanistan, and the toll taken on service members by repeated deployments.

Rather than trying to pretend that Bales’ trial can be divorced from its enmeshment in the American presence in Afghanistan, perhaps we had better try to have a transnational conversation about how and whether justice can be done in a situation where jurisdiction is grey, the truth is messy, and the power of the two states involved are in deep disequilibrium.  Such a conversation may in the end risk justice, but perhaps we had better run this risk than a far greater one: the risk of leaving justice not only undone, but also untried.