Plurality and Charlottesville

Plurality and Charlottesville

[caption id="attachment_19118" align="alignright" width="300"] By Evan Nesterak - After the clash, CC BY 2.0[/caption]

"Samantha Hill: How’s everyone doing? Has everyone been following what’s been going on politically? It’s kind of hard to miss, but not everyone reads the newspaper. It’s been occupying a lot of our thoughts for the past couple of days, and I know yesterday-to me, at least-felt like Inauguration Day. And so I found myself last night going through some of Arendt’s older essays, and I came across one I remember she wrote for a symposium in The New York Times in 1968 responding to the question, Is America By Nature a Violent Society?

Arendt's contribution was titled "Lawlessness Is Inherent in the Uprooted." In that essay she takes on questions of race, the Civil Rights Movements, and the use of violence in political movements. She repeats one of her central thoughts about American politics, that "Freedom of Assembly is among the most crucial and cherished and, perhaps, most dangerous rights of American citizens." We should all take this seriously and think about how freedom of assembly is both central to American democracy and dangerous. Democracy, according to Arendt, is not safe. It is a contest and an engagement. And she celebrated the fact that in the 1960s students others were engaged and became active in politics. She says in this essay, they became "de-alienated" from politics.

But after celebrating the power and success of the peaceful and non-violent Civil Rights Movement, Arendt adds a caution. The power of freedom of assembly and the success of the Civil Rights Movement should not, she writes,

"make us forget that the Ku Klux Klan and the [John] Birch society are also voluntary associations, and no one will deny that the outbreak of violence can be greatly helped by such groups. It is difficult to see how this danger could be eliminated without eliminating freedom of assembly; it is not too high a price to pay for political freedom."

What Arendt is saying in this quote is that we have to remember that the KKK and other organizations we often associate with words like racism, or bigotry, or hatred, that these are volunteer associations that people join because they have political opinions. And we might really disagree with their political opinions, but they choose to join these organizations. And Arendt is saying that with these organizations, with the freedom of assembly, comes the threat of violence. Further, that the only way we can insure that this violence does not exist is by getting rid of the freedom of assembly; and that’s too high a price to pay. It’s very provocative to think that allowing these organizations to exist and thrive is the price of freedom and democracy.

So, why is Arendt making this argument? For Arendt plurality and politics necessitate one another; they go together. Plurality is a condition of politics, it’s a condition of small ‘d’ democracy, of a democratic society. She defines plurality in The Human Condition and it’s a key part of the first three chapters on action that you’re reading for Language & Thinking. In these passages, she talks about how we appear before one another in as distinct individuals in a public realm, who have the ability to engage one another, and the world around us, with speech and action. And it is this condition of plurality, our distinctness and difference, that is essential to the public, political realm. We cannot foreclose the appearance of individuals, because they might have contentious political views, we must find a way to engage with difference as a democratic practice.

At the beginning of the book Arendt writes:

"Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live."

-The Human Condition, 8

And at the opening of Chapter 24, which you've read for today, she adds:

"Human plurality, the basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction.”

-The Human Condition, 175

RB:

I think the quote that we started with that Sam read must be understood within the context of Arendt’s thinking on plurality and politics. Voluntary associations are essential for both plurality and politics. So when she says that the KKK and the John Birch Society are voluntary associations, what does she mean?

Arendt has a very important belief about the centrality of voluntary associations to democratic politics.  These voluntary associations and the right to public assembly-the right to act and speak in public in ways that matter-are for her the essence of democratic freedom. For people to come together and act together in politics to pursue their ends is what it means to be free. And this is to her the essence of democracy. It’s participation, it’s engagement, it’s acting in concert.

And so when she says that even though the KKK - and we could add now the neo-Nazis - are racist, and clearly violent in the sense that they envision a society built on oppression, exclusion, and violence, they are also expressions of voluntary associations and thus democratic. These fringe groups are at the root of what it means for a group of people who share a common opinion to get together and express that opinion. We need to understand and even appreciate the pluralistic spirit of these protests even as we have the right, and I think, responsibility, to oppose that opinion if we don’t agree with it and to argue strenuously against it; but that doesn’t mean eliminate it.

Arendt's argument in her essay reminds me of the quote she knew well from Federalist Paper 10 by James Madison, perhaps the most famous quote from our founding era: “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire.” You can’t have fire without air, right? And you can’t have liberty without faction, without disagreement. To seek to abolish faction by taking away liberty is always a seduction, especially when those factions are dangerous and offensive. But the faction that comes from liberty is, in Arendt's words, "not too high a price to pay for political freedom."

It is important for us today that we remind ourselves that you can’t have action and speech, you can’t have politics, without plurality. And that means that in all plurality, in all faction, in all disagreement, in all action and speech, there’s going to be both equality and distinction. That means that we are distinguished from the KKK and the neo-Nazis, but we’re also equal to them in a certain way, and we have to hold onto both those ideas. We are, as Arendt says in the quote from the Human Condition, "all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live."

This is not to say at all that the KKK and the anti-fascist groups are the same. Plurality does not affirm sameness or equivalency, which is the mistake President Trump made in his initial remarks and then again on Tuesday. Plurality does, however, affirm both our sameness and our difference. And affirming both is important.

I think a good comparison here is that Hannah Arendt later, in 1963, published a book called Eichmann in Jerusalem. One of the things she said in that book is that the Jews who worked in the concentration camps for the Nazis, and the Jews who worked in the ghettoes for the Nazis, were wrong to do so. And people went nuts and said to her, "How can you blame the Jews for the Holocaust?" And she said, I'm paraphrasing here: "I never blamed the Jews for the Holocaust. I said they were wrong. That doesn’t mean they were at fault for the Holocaust. The Nazis are at fault for the Holocaust." It’s not an equivalence. And yet she also wanted to say the Jews were wrong. And I think there is a parallel to what’s going on today. We can and should say that those on the left who are engaging in violence are wrong without in any way saying they’re responsible for what’s going on or that there’s an equivalence.

And why are those on the left engaging in violence wrong? That’s an important question. The Arendtian answer, is that to engage in violence in order to try and eliminate faction, or eliminate disagreement, or eliminate plurality is anti-pluralistic. It is to suggest that politics is not about dissent and opinion, but about one truth that has to be violently imposed. And the core of Arendt’s thinking throughout her entire life emerges from this idea of plurality, that if we really want difference, uniqueness, distinction in the world, we have to be willing to let plurality exist, even amidst those people we find offensive." 

Fascism and the Partisan Press

[caption id="attachment_19120" align="alignleft" width="300"] By Evan Nesterak - White supremacists clash with police, CC BY 2.0[/caption] A few days before the marches and violence in Charlottesville, Robert Leib published a long essay arguing that one important cause of the rise of Nazism was the increasingly common rhetoric of civil war that helped discredit the press and militarize Germany's public debates.

"What might an analogy with Nazi Germany look like in a cultural register? We might begin to lay our contemporary scenario over historical accounts in the following way: Throughout the 1930 campaign, the Nazis had tried every stereotype, and the increasingly divided press had taken the bait, legitimizing their talking points. As historian Bernhard Fulda (2009) writes, “Years of hostile press coverage had undermined the legitimacy of parliamentary democracy in the eyes of a substantial part of the electorate” (168). This era of ‘alternative facts’ proved ripe for an assault on the Republic itself. The story of the next two years shows what is possible when the culture of a free press is unprepared to declaim a political discourse built upon fears of violence and salacious consumer appetites. From 1930 into 1931, violence was increasingly present at right wing events, and, in one case, directly responded to an article published by Goebbels in his newspaper, Angriff. This led to the first in a series of regional newspaper bans throughout the Reich. Central to this controversy was the language chosen by the press in covering these incidences, evoking ‘civil war’ with increasing frequency. As Fulda argues, “compilations of long (and one-sided) chronologies of political clashes… conveyed the impression that contemporaries were already experiencing the first signs of… a fully-fledged civil war” (173). Addressing street violence in a non-partisan way became almost impossible. By mid-1931, President Hindenburg issued an emergency decree compelling newspapers to print replies from the government, intended to prevent “concealment and distortion of true [facts] and the assertion of false facts” (176). While proclaimed on the basis of perceived necessity, and without explicit political inclination, by 1932 Hitler had convinced the president that his ministers were using the press decrees to the advantage of the left-wing KDP. Hitler’s portrayal of the Nazi party as victims of the decree, along with his own promise to abide by the Republic’s laws, led to his appointment by Hindenburg to the chancellorship in 1933. A cluster of rhetorical moves here signals the deterioration of the media’s credibility and status as a free press. This, I think, is an analogy that does not rely on direct comparison between Trump and Hitler or the alt-right and Nazism. A political disjunction in the press can be a primary cause of social instability and the impetus for a restriction of free speech among citizens. Political leaders exist in a symbiotic cultural relationship with the press that covers them, and executives can find legal reason to silence them if this balance becomes too precarious. I am not prepared to suggest let alone predict that Trump would issue an executive order against the press without broad support, but the more divisive right and left wing politics become, the greater this possibility. Increasingly, the issue of censorship could fall into the hands of a person who takes criticism personally, is erratic and vengeful in his invocations of necessity. It may not even be Trump but a successor who takes this step."

Take 'Em Down

After New Orleans removed four 19th century Confederate monuments earlier this year, Mitch Landrieu, the city's mayor, spoke eloquently on why he believed actually honoring the history of the city required it to change the symbols it uses to identify itself:

"This is however about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile and most importantly, choose a better future for ourselves making straight what has been crooked and making right what was wrong. Otherwise, we will continue to pay a price with discord, with division and yes with violence. To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past. It is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future. History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over, and the Confederacy lost and we are better for it. Surely we are far enough removed from this dark time to acknowledge that the cause of the Confederacy was wrong. And in the second decade of the 21st century, asking African Americans — or anyone else — to drive by property that they own; occupied by reverential statues of men who fought to destroy the country and deny that person’s humanity seems perverse and absurd. Centuries old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place. Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart. Indivisibility is our essence. Isn’t this the gift that the people of New Orleans have given to the world? We radiate beauty and grace in our food, in our music, in our architecture, in our joy of life, in our celebration of death; in everything that we do. We gave the world this funky thing called jazz, the most uniquely American art form that is developed across the ages from different cultures. Think about second lines, think about Mardi Gras, think about muffaletta, think about the Saints, gumbo, red beans and rice. By God, just think."