The Racial Innocence of John Roberts

Jack Turner

Jack Turner is associate professor of political science at the University of Washington. He is the author of Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

Chief Justice Roberts is on a mission to dismantle public policies that correct the aftereffects of de jure white supremacy. Civil rights lawyer William Taylor warned us of Roberts’ softness on white power on the eve of his confirmation: “The most intriguing question about John Roberts is what led him as a young person whose success in life was virtually assured by family wealth and academic achievement to enlist in a political campaign designed to deny opportunities for success to those who lacked his advantages.” Taylor chronicled Roberts’ early career in the Reagan administration where he worked energetically to strip federal courts of the power to desegregate schools through busing; Roberts also worked energetically to block the 1982 re-authorization of the Voting Rights Act and to deny public education to children of undocumented immigrants. During the confirmation battle, Roberts maintained that he was simply following the orders of superiors. But through an analysis of legal memoranda from the period, Taylor demonstrates that Roberts took positions more hostile to the rights of African Americans and Latinos than those of his superiors.

Taylor’s worries about the implications of a Roberts Court for racial justice have been vindicated. In Parents Involved v. Seattle (2007), Roberts led the Court’s majority in striking down the use of a “racial tiebreaker” in the allocation of spots in oversubscribed public schools. In Ricci v. DeStefano (2009), he joined the majority in upholding the validity of a civil service exam that had a demonstrable racial bias in favor of whites. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), he led the Court in striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), rendering the Justice Department powerless to prevent states and localities with a history of racial discrimination from infringing citizens’ right to vote. What interests me is not just the pattern of Roberts’ race jurisprudence. It points clearly in the direction of a colorblind constitutionalism that protects white advantage. What most interests me is Roberts’ self-assured style of opposing race consciousness. That style bespeaks both a racial innocence born of privilege and an investment in an American “meritocracy” that just so happens to tilt in favor of whites. By analyzing this self-assured style, we get a window into the mindset of those who work to preserve racial stratification while congratulating themselves on rigorous adherence to the principles of liberal democracy.

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” Roberts propounded in Parents Involved. Though the formulation is forceful, the logic is old. Since the 1960s, conservatives have framed race-conscious remedies for racial injustice as morally equivalent to racial slavery and segregation. The logic turns on the idea that racial discrimination—in the weak sense of distinguishing racial groups—is morally repugnant in its own right and the first step down the slippery slope of racial oppression. The logic is appealing because it exploits a partial truth: reflexive racial categorization of people is a crude and often degrading form of social interpretation, and all systems of racial oppression require drawing distinctions among racial groups. Proponents of colorblindness thus portray themselves as heroic defenders of racial justice who tough-mindedly attack racism at its root. The logic’s weakness lies in its obfuscation of the fact that we live in historical time, and that centuries-old systems of oppression leave aftereffects even after those systems have been formally abolished. Refusing to take notice of race becomes a principled basis for refusing to track how the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow differentially affect the lives of citizens, conferring advantage on some and disadvantage on others.

This blindness to historically cumulative racial power could be an innocent intellectual mistake and therefore susceptible to correction. Or it could be the whole point: colorblindness leaves the material inequalities produced by slavery and Jim Crow intact, and makes them the presumably just baseline of our political life. The fact that African Americans make 60 percent the income of white Americans and possess just 10 percent of the wealth becomes an unfortunate phenomenon whose origins are mysterious—whose causes may even be “cultural”—instead of a predictable byproduct of longstanding failures to provide equal education to black citizens, to prevent discrimination in the workplace, and to ensure equal opportunities to own homes and accumulate wealth. (If Roberts is not convinced that these conditions are traceable to Jim Crow, he should do his homework—starting with Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro’s Black Wealth / White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality [rev. ed. 2006]).

Source: Edward N. Wolff, "Recent Trends in Household Wealth in the United States: Rising Debt and the Middle-Class Squeeze—an Update to 2007," Levy Economics Institute of Bard College Working Paper No. 589, March 2010, Tables 10 and 11. - See more at: http://inequality.org/wealth-inequality/#sthash.M9CxHxJm.dpuf

This strategy goes hand in hand with a triumphalist narrative of racial progress that holds that America was born in racial sin but redeemed itself through the Civil War and Civil Rights Movement, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which purged the sins decisively (excepting, of course, some final racist holdouts who can be dismissed as atypical). Roberts’ opinion in Shelby County v. Holder expresses this triumphalist narrative: “Our country has changed,” rendering the VRA’s current coverage formula an unjust imposition on states’ “equal sovereignty.” Roberts ignores empirical evidence vindicating the coverage formula. More striking is his failure to acknowledge the force of the VRA’s “bailout provision,” which enables any covered jurisdiction to relieve itself of Justice Department supervision by maintaining a clean record on voting rights for ten straight years, and which therefore addresses his concern about unwarranted federal impositions.

Roberts is exasperated by the fact that the preponderant number of covered states are states of the Old Confederacy; his pique seems directed at the very idea that the racial geography of slavery and Jim Crow is still morally significant. Acknowledging that significance means entertaining the thought that slavery and Jim Crow have afterlives that implicate whites in systems of racial advantage—systems that undermine white claims to merit and self-reliance. Could it be that Roberts’ anxiety over the idea that the racial past is “not even past” is deeply personal—an anxiety rooted in his own investment in his personal narrative of meritocratic success? If he is magnanimous enough to acknowledge that he benefitted from his whiteness somewhere along the way from private boarding school to Harvard College to Harvard Law to Hogan & Hartson to the Supreme Court, must he still cling to the idea that the system is basically just—that even when people like him benefit from whiteness, the magnitude of their merit eclipses all the little ways social systems dole out injustice? If the system is basically just, is not the primary task for the man of clarity and principle to preserve that system, and purge it of so-called correctives that indict both it and its beneficiaries? Must not the man of clarity and principle also insist that the situation of blacks and whites in America is morally symmetrical, notwithstanding any remaining inequalities?

Roberts’ acceptance of the idea that the situation of blacks and whites is morally symmetrical underwrites his hostility to race-conscious public policy. Relinquishing that idea would mean confronting his own placement at the pinnacle of American racial hierarchy. The notion that the playing field—even if occasionally rough and muddy—is basically level, and that the winners on that field have real reason to congratulate themselves, may be the primary source of Roberts’ hostility toward race-conscious public policy. For in attributing injustice to the system, such policy questions the merit of the winners. Losing his identity as a winner is too much for Roberts to tolerate.

Living On

Alex Hirsch

University of Alaska, Fairbanks

One popular view in contemporary democratic thinking holds that everything is densely interwoven in a field of public flesh. Everything is crossed and crossing over in a richly enfolded chiasm pulsing with togetherness. The world is seen as an active nexus where singularities merge and respond in mutual transfer. “We participate each other,” writes Norman O. Brown.

There is something highly seductive about this vision. But of course this is only half the story. The constant presence of friction, struggle and conflict – of politics – built into human affairs, belies all this conviviality. The idea that we are always already thrown open to one another misses the point that despite this situation we remain crucially at odds with one another.

This is the point of departure for what some are starting to call the tragic sensibility. To start, the tragic sensibility downplays rationality and especially rationality’s pretension to sovereign mastery over destiny and fate. It also casts doubt on the faith in the sufficiency and autonomy of the self. More specifically, the tragic sensibility names the rivalry between, on the one hand, what our will intends and, on the other, the worldly forces that conspire to thwart those intentions. In this way, it affirms the notion that we are vulnerable to powers not entirely within our control. But there is more. The tragic sensibility offers a searching reflection on the moral conflict generated out of contestations over the meaning of public pain.  

A haunting example of this can be found in Incendies (2010). A kind of Sophoclean tragedy, the film traces the journeys of twin siblings, Jean and Simon Marwan, through an unnamed Middle Eastern country (which we can safely assume is Lebanon) that is mired in a history of religious strife and catastrophic violence. Each sibling is tasked with tracking down an estranged family member (Jean, the twins’ father; Simon, their brother) when Nawal, their mother, posthumously leaves behind two sealed letters to be delivered to each by the twins.

As the twins work respectively to locate their father and brother they begin to unravel the mystery of their mother’s life. Weaving together past and present into an uncanny mosaic, the film gives the supple impression of a world where the consequences of what has happened endlessly open out. 

In a series of flashbacks to the 1970s and ‘80s we learn that as a young woman Nawal was a Christian who fell in love with and was impregnated by a Muslim (Palestinian?) refugee. She eventually gave birth to a son; but, having disgraced her family (once by bearing a child out of wedlock, again by loving a Muslim), the boy is abandoned to a local orphanage while Nawal herself is banished to Daresh, a fictional city on the brink of civil war. 

In Daresh, Nawal enrolls at the local university where she becomes a student activist and editor of a pacifist newspaper. Disgusted with the wanton violence committed by those who espouse the faith to justify hatred, Nawal disavows her Christian past in the name of promoting a peaceful future. 

In one of the film’s most wrenching scenes, we see Nawal riding a bus through a dangerous region of the countryside, frantically searching for her misplaced son amongst orphanages recently razed by Christian guerilla fighters. Along the way the bus is viciously attacked by the Phalangist, who spray a torrent of machine gun fire into its interior before setting the bus ablaze. Nawal, having survived the initial assault along with a handful of others, escapes by baring her cross out the bus doorway. Ironically, the Christian identity Nawal had repudiated saves her life but only at the price of making her the hapless witness and unwitting accomplice to a massacre. 

The tragedy of the scene can be viewed in light of what Bernard Williams writes of tragic situations: there was nothing Nawal could do and yet something had to be done. For Williams, what makes scenes such as this tragic is that Nawal is caught between an impossible choice (reclaim her Christian identity and live, or maintain her righteous contempt and die) and a no less compelling imperative to act (sacrifice her pacifist ideal and act vengefully against the Phalangist in order to prevent such massacres in the future). There is no right thing to do. Whatever Nawal does she is at once right and wrong. There is only the tragic happening and Nawal’s response to what that happening has rendered in her. 

Read in this light, one might say that the tragic sensibility is less interested in coming up with prescriptive standards of action (what should Nawal do?) than in asking questions about how to live on despite the lack of available options (how can Nawal survive such a scene with her moral integrity intact?). As Bonnie Honig puts it, the goal is “to salvage from the wreckage of the situation enough narrative unity for the self to go on.” 

 

There is plenty that can be said about what this modicum of narrative unity might be composed of (a self that is, as Kathleen Stewart puts it, a “fabulation that enfolds the intensities it finds itself in”). But what the tragic sensibility helps to supplement is a sense of what Hayden White means when, in a tragic key, he writes “History is not something that one understands, it is something one endures – if one is lucky.”

This is not to say that with tragedy there is no hope. The tragic sensibility is not tantamount to resignation. Rather, it is about finding ways to live with the intractable quality of conflict endemic to human experience. Not in order to be free of the troubling questions such conflicts evoke. Instead, the tragic sensibility is about grappling with the predicament of yearning for redemption and yet always failing to become redeemed. This is what Paul Gilroy means when he defines tragedy as “suffering made useful but not redemptive.” The tragic sensibility is all about finding ways of being lucky (in White’s sense); not merely to survive, but to live on (an important difference) even when mourning and redemption read like so much messianism. More, it is about marshaling creative forms of aesthetic responsiveness, political judgment, and critical imagination germane to the shared precarity such a condition entails. 

Think of Palestine, where the tragic sensibility of Incendies has taken hold. The goal of reconciling the sectarian conflict between Israeli settlers and Arab aboriginals has long been abandoned by most everyday inhabitants of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Instead the accent is placed on harnessing ways of living with what has turned out to be irredeemable. 

Neil Hertz talks about this in his recent ethnographic travelogue, Pastoral in Palestine. In 2011, Hertz lived in Ramallah, a Palestinian enclave settled in section A (according to the Oslo Accords of 1993/1995) of the West Bank, while teaching in neighbouring Abu Dis. He writes that of the many people he met, people whose occupied cultures were constantly under threat of erosion and collapse, few expressed any wish for reconciliation; only a desire to invent new modes of being / becoming in the midst of catastrophe. Hertz recalls encounter after encounter with people for whom “There is no solution, only ‘The Situation.’” Salim, a dinner guest, explains this to Hertz one evening: “It will just go on…One must live with it.”

This isn’t pessimism. Nor is it complacency. Indeed, one might say Salim’s position is akin to what Jonathan Lear means by “radical hope.” By this Lear is referring to a hope that is directed toward some future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is: “Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.” A hope that looks forward despite the future’s unpredictability; a hope without guarantees. Only a tragic sense that if we persevere, and act to sustain ourselves, we may get lucky. 

It is important that we recognize all the ways that we are borne out in thick expressions of mutual active witnessing that take shape in everyday rhythms of life. In the flux of a complex world, we really do “participate one another.” But this way of speaking must be complemented by a tragic sensibility sensitive to all the ways that we are connected as well as separated by what is happening and what the happening’s breaking down is doing to us. And we must listen carefully to those like Nawal and Salim who have been quietly inventing modes of staying power, techniques for committing to living on with the tragic sensibility when the deus ex machina of redemption remains an empty promise.  

Asian Girlz, White Patriarchy, and the Politics of Aesthetics

Chad Shomura
Johns Hopkins University

Recently, a music video called “Asian Girlz” by a talentless band has inflamed Asia America. It is not worth attention. But in this age of viral videos, it's difficult to heed the advice of Nietzsche's Zarathustra to pass by what we cannot love. I likewise am unable to pass by the racism and sexism expressed by the video that are ordinary features of Asian American life. That said, I address the video to criticize its expressions of White patriarchy. I also use it to comment on the politics of aesthetics framing racism and sexism in the Asian American contemporary condition.

In the video, a tattooed “Asian girl” comes home, turns on the lights, and uncovers a bird cage containing the Day Above Ground band, its members miniaturized. They serenade her with stereotypes—to her delight. She smiles to lyrics like “I love your creamy yellow thighs / Ooh your slanted eyes / It's the Year of the Dragon / Ninja pussy I'm stabbin'.” She undresses, dances, carries the cage into the bathroom, and bathes with the band. She leaves the bath, locks up the band, and turns off the lights, leaving the room as the camera zooms in on a “Shrinking Potion.”

The video's belittling of racism and sexism made me angry and disgusted, but not shocked—it screens a catalogue of orientalism that is too familiar. The intensity of my feelings was due not only to what the video depicts, but also to the effects of how the video shapes depictability itself. The video's frame functions as what Jacques Rancière calls a “partition of the sensible,” filtering what is seeable and sayable.  In the frame, we see an Asian woman enjoying the fetishism lavished on her. We do not see what Asian women outside the video don't enjoy—all the cat calls, unwanted gropings, and harassment on the street, at work, online, and just about everywhere, really, and all the sexual violence in cahoots with orientalism. Refract all that through what the video wants us to see—enjoyment—and we get an image of Asian women as wanting White patriarchy.

Of course, women's pleasure and play can be political, but the video doesn't connect fun to politics. Instead, it exaggerates the political agency available to Asian women at the cross-section of racism, orientalism, patriarchy, and empire. Responding to accusations of racism, the video's director Michael Steinberg insists that the Asian woman is “fully in control and in power;” she is aware that the men “have been captured by and held prisoner” to an “obsession” that she uses “for her own amusement.”  That is rape culture logic. It says that men cannot control desires sparked by seductive women, who could've dressed appropriately or just tried to enjoy being raped if it was happening anyway. That this logic circulates in courtrooms and police precincts highlights the video's continuity with US state patriarchy in the pseudo-agency it gifts women. Contemporary patriarchy depicts white men as diminished and contained in comparison with Asian women's gargantuan agency. It frames racism and sexism as playthings that can be left in the dark at the flip of a switch. It imagines that hardened histories can be upturned by a spot of fun. In short, the video misrepresents White sexist fantasy as Asian women's agency, establishing the former as fact while reducing the latter to having a good time. The orientalist partitioning of the sensible faced by Asian American women today says: White patriarchy is here to stay and you had better learn to like it.

Indeed, the band aims to control the seeable and the sayable. Its members respond to accusations of racism: they have Asian friends and girlfriends, and live in Asian communities (hell, one of the band members is himself Asian!); their video didn't intend to offend but is satire that people don't get; with artistic license, they sought to provoke controversy (wait, I thought they didn't intend to be offensive...); the video doesn't disparage Asian women, but worships them as gorgeous goddesses  (wait, I thought the video is supposed to be satire...). The band sounds like liars who trip over their own confused, sorry tales. It offers messy, desperate denials of the possibility that the video could be racist and sexist. That refusal has involved deleting accusations of racism from their Facebook and YouTube pages. In doing so, the band claims that it alone knows what racism and sexism look like. The band has been happy to play police, whose function, according to Rancière, is to close spaces of dissensus: “Move along, there's nothing to see here!”  By restraining what is sayable about racism and sexism, the band reifies White patriarchy.

How might Asians address both denials of orientalism and partitions of the sensible that enable those denials to work? I offer a few considerations.

First, our responses should beware the amplification of our anger into violent resentment. Zarathustra warned of the dangers attending ressentiment, and we who suffer the sting of abjection would do well to draw out its poison from our hearts. I hear ressentiment in the slut-shaming of Levy Tran,  the video's “Asian girl.” I hear ressentiment in calls from some Asian men for a video that disparages white women to see how “they”—presumably, white men—like it. Ressentiment-fueled responses hazard adopting White patriarchal violence as our own, and our ground for antiracism cannot be sexism.

Second, we must consider how to hold people accountable for the racism and sexism that runs through them. Ressentiment shapes a punitive stance towards those we blame for offending or damaging us. I worry that ressentiment works through a partition of the sensible that refocuses our struggles against orientalism on orientalists as targets responsible for long-standing histories. But White patriarchy operates subtly, shaping us well before we become aware of, let alone can work against, the process. It is easy to forget the class privileges of education, contingencies of upbringing, and circles of sociality that have long cultivated our capacity to sniff out racism and sexism. White patriarchy is so visible to our trained eyes that we get frustrated if others don't readily “see the light,” making ressentiment-driven responses appealing as quick fixes.

But some who invoke racism and sexism may come to acknowledge rather than deny, listen rather than speak, learn rather than refuse. With them, we might develop what William Connolly has called “relations of agonistic respect.”  Rather than vilifying them as sovereign and hence blameworthy, we might engage them as part of capitalist and orientalist histories that no one has authored. In this way, we distinguish between holding people accountable and holding power accountable. The latter reshapes the former by resisting the temptation to be punitive. We cultivate some patience, knowing that individuals don't change overnight, while putting hard pressure upon them to check their orientalism.

But what about those who, like the band, persist in their denials? Nietzsche warned against staring into the abyss for too long, lest its darkness seep into our hearts. Perhaps a little passing by is needed after all. So I think, finally, that our politics should not be only or foremost a “response.” Instead, we might affirm the vicissitudes of history and power that have made us complex meshes of violence, othering, and silencing, but also of expressivity, belonging, and thriving. This aesthetics of the self refashions the pieces of our broken, beautiful identities into something tragically joyful that can be paraded publicly and proudly. We march by those who continue to deny their orientalism.

Asian American affirmation can become a politics of aesthetics that repartitions White patriarchal sensibilities. I see an affirmative politics of aesthetics practiced by Asian Americans who have spent their energy on their own art or in promoting Asian American talent. Acknowledging that direct criticism may secure the attention desired by the band, Terry Park and Sean Miura have curated and circulated a YouTube playlist and Spotify channel of Asian Pacific American women musicians. This politics of aesthetics aspires to retune our eyes and ears to what is laudable rather than reprehensible, curbing the dangers of ressentiment and repartitioning the Euro- and Asian American sensible. It upsets the conditions of seeability and sayability that support White patriarchal policing of what counts as racism and sexism. It does not show that Asian Americans, like an afterthought of White American liberalism, can also be talented artists; rather, it wants to reframe the conditions of what counts as “talent” and “art.” It spotlights Asian women artists, not Asian girlz.

Many people may find these sentiments to be soft, apolitical, or just plain naïve. By asking us Asian Americans to be cautious and self-critical, I may be accused of splintering the minoritized to the benefit of White patriarchy. I am not against a hard-edged political response shaped in part by anger, demand, and calls for accountability. Still, I follow Zarathustra's desire for a hate that springs from love (agonistic respect) rather than from the swamp (ressentiment). Of course, relations of agonistic respect are untenable with persistent deniers of racism and sexism, and Nietzsche warns that changing others happens rarely and soils us often. So I end with a call for a multi-faceted politics that calls out orientalism whenever and wherever it appears, that derails White patriarchal efforts to control what counts as racism and sexism, that militantly holds accountable the most egregious denials, and that patiently and agonistically engages those who come to listen and learn, passes by the trolls who do not, and, above all, affirms ourselves through and through—through music, or performance, or writing, or any aesthetic that expresses our persistent, resilient, lovely lives.

My thanks to Jenny Hoang and Terry Park & his Facebook friends for help in fine-tuning these thoughts and words.

Nationalism, Tech Giants, and Spy States

John Buell is a columnist for The Progressive Populist and a faculty adjunct at Cochise College. His most recent book is Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age.










Despite persistent efforts by the US media to cast Edward Snowden as a traitor the affair has managed to expose not only abusive surveillance practices but also (even) the supportive role of strange bedfellows in these practices.

Consider first the tech giants. Silicon Valley's leaders project an image of support for market freedoms and open communication. And they trumpet the growth of high tech as the key to the restoration of our democracy. This image is, however, historically inaccurate and hides the role of the major tech giants today.

The telecom industry grew out of government funding and support for computers and the Internet. These companies in turn have enabled government intelligence agencies to solve some of their thorniest intelligence problems. We have here, then, an incestuous relationship with ugly consequences for a democratic citizenry.

In a recent post in her "Naked Capitalism" blog Yves Smith points out that such government surveillance plans as the infamous PRISM "depict the major telecom and technology players like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo as 'partners'. That's no misnomer... If you think ordinary customers are all that important to them, given that most of the markets they compete in are oligopolies, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you... The NSA, and the Department of Defense in general, have long been sponsors and funders of advanced technology. Need we say DarpaNet?... The NSA is an important customer and validator of tech products."

Companies like Google tout cooperation with government. Smith cites Google CEO Eric Schmidt's recent claim in The New Digital Age: "What Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century, technology and cybersecurity companies will be to the 21st."

Smith adds: "If the technology companies were really concerned [about customer privacy], lobbying dollars would go a hell of a lot further than money spent in quixotic fights in the FISA star chamber. But where has Silicon Valley been spending its money?" From a June 2013 story in the Atlantic: So far the fruits of Google's lobbying efforts have resulted in a huge win in an anti-trust case, but the company has even bigger plans...Google is working on updates to the Electronic Communication Privacy Act ­ that pesky bill the government uses to justify spying on your Gmail without a warrant."

Smith also highlights the (most omit) ominous aspects of these revelations:" The extensive cooperation between commercial companies and intelligence agencies is legal and reaches deeply into many aspects of everyday life,... Company executives are motivated by a desire to help the national defense as well as to help their own companies."

I draw several conclusions from these disturbing revelations. US politics has long been characterized by a mindset that political theorist  Bonnie Honig, drawing on the work of the late Michael Rogin, labels countersubversive: "That mentality casts the United States not as a political actor enmeshed in political conflicts with a concrete history, but rather as a hapless victim of alien monsters who appear inexplicably out of nowhere, who might be hiding anywhere, and whose threatening actions justify extreme, often mimetic, (re-)actions on our part."

She quotes Rogin: "Both the postwar Soviet Union and the radical labor movement of [the 1910s] posed genuine threats to dominant interests in American society, although the nature and extent of those threats are a matter of controversy. .. But the countersubversive response transformed interest conflicts into psychologically based anxieties over national security and American identity. Exaggerated responses to the domestic Communist [we could now say Arab] menace narrowed the bounds of permissible political disagreement and generated a national-security state." Indeed, we should say that linking labor to national security issues plays a major role in the defeat of welfare Keynesianism and the later hegemony of neoliberalism.

Perhaps the strangest revelation so far from the Snowden affair is the role of our erstwhile enemy in dismissing or denigrating his principled exposure of government lies and abuses. In his first response to Snowden's request for political asylum, Russian president Vladimir Putin demanded: "He must stop doing work aimed at harming our American partners, however strange that may sound coming from my lips." Putin, like the US corporate media, seemed to feel no need to explain just how Snowden's disclosures had harmed his "partner." Though Putin has now granted Snowden temporary asylum, his long term situation remains quite tenuous. Apparently, however much these national security states may see their opposite numbers as threats, each uses these threats to defend their own abusive bureaucracies, practices and secrecy from their own citizens.

Today, spy agencies all over the world, both whether governmental or private, accumulate reams of personal data with which they can denigrate or disrupt any dissenting politics, regardless of how nonviolent. And here in the US with the especially close ties between private corporations and the national security state, an already strong tendency among elites to identify all anti-corporate dissent as inherently violent and destructive will only intensify.

Even citizens who proclaim they "have nothing to hide" will  lose the stimulation and challenge of a venturesome culture and politics. Eventually, denied any outlet and opportunity to express and refine with others, those creative thoughts themselves may no longer come.

Finally, so much for both classic laissez faire and countercultural hopes for American democracy. The former, most notably Milton Friedman, argued that free markets and capitalist development nurtured freedom of speech and thought. Not only do markets often require the coercive power of the state in order to form, once formed they hardly ever remain free. Corporate power grows in tandem with and through government. And the state is then called upon to join other institutions in  helping to shape workers, consumers, church goers, the poor and so on to fit "the roles" the system has defined for them. this is an imperative of neoliberalism, not one of its side effects.

That's is one reason it is hard today to remain aloof from politics. But for those who seek to do so the message is just as clear. If the Internet has progressive possibilities, their realization will not be automatic. Today a countersubversive culture nurtures and is nurtured by an evolving alliance of high tech giants, government bureaucrats (whom Smith calls securecrats), the older more established military industrial complex and powerful private corporations that benefit from close ties to the state, including especially the oil  and investment banking community.

If the most repressive outcomes are to be avoided, the best course might be an evolving counter-coalition that would emerge from moral and historical critiques of and alternative to the countersubversive tradition. In Emergency Politics, Honig argues that the very focus on the question of the rules that should govern declarations of emergency and the protections that can be revoked in emergencies reinforce a notion of sovereignty as unitary and top down. Thus they "marginalize forms of popular sovereignty in which action in concert rather than institutional governance is the mark of democratic power and legitimacy." Unitary and decisive sovereignty committed to its own invulnerability is "most likely to perceive crisis where there may only be political conflict and to respond...with antipolitical measures."

The best answer lies not merely in challenging the constitutional status of this surveillance state but in building a political coalition that embodies the forms of popular sovereignty of which Honig speaks. This would include labor, consumer and environmentalist critiques of and alternatives to the role of the state and markets in fostering inequality. It would be attentive to the possibilities and risks of the social media and the limits of its own interventions in these.  The coalition might advance more democratic forms of enterprise and media as well as decentralized and more sustainable forms of energy production and transportation.  And in an era where hyper nationalism erodes so many democratic impulses, cross border initiatives in the interest of widespread access to an open Internet with robust privacy protections would be paramount. (Let's hope that) Edward Snowden's travels (in a world dominated by the state passport and surveillance system) helps to highlight the stake citizens of many lands have in a democratic Internet but a more exploratory and democratic polity.