The Shared World of Adversaries
03-11-2020 By Nikita Nelin
Day 1We were raised to believe that by the time of our adulthood we would have colonized the moon, be at war with China, and have jet packs, but instead we are competing for part-time remote work with other invisible people. —The Voice of the Opt-Out Generation
10:15 a.m. Citizenship and Civil Disobedience
“If history teaches anything about the causes of revolution . . . it is that a disintegration of political systems precedes revolutions, that the telling symptom of disintegration is a progressive erosion of governmental authority, and that this erosion is caused by the government’s inability to function properly, from which spring the citizens’ doubts about its legitimacy. This is what the Marxists used to call a ‘revolutionary situation’ — which, of course, more often than not does not develop into a revolution.”1
Thus, with this quote from Hannah Arendt, Roger Berkowitz opens the Eleventh Annual Hannah Arendt Conference. He adds a caveat: Arendt’s caution against seeing too much wisdom in history as “the present is always unprecedented and we must look upon it fresh.” And yet, he admits, here we are, at the foot of some crisis. Unquestionably, regardless of one’s political affiliation, it is this crisis that brings us here today—our one, tangible and sense-worthy, common truth.
The four hundred–seat lecture hall is at capacity. It is filled with lifetime academics, activists, artists, retirees seeking a revival of their fleeting ideals, and high school and college students eager to understand the mechanism of power and the feasibility of their generation achieving a grip upon its levers.
I am at the pastoral Hudson Valley campus of Bard College, at a conference hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center, of which a former teacher of mine, Roger Berkowitz, is the director. This will be two days of lectures and panels and conversations, mildly argumentative but ultimately civil, focused by the topic of this year’s conference, “Citizenship and Civil Disobedience.” And in the spirit of my immigrant conditioning I am asking myself: what am I doing here?
The conference breaks its topic into seven questions: Is civil disobedience an exemplary act of citizenship? Why is citizen activism emerging across all parts of the political spectrum? Can civil disobedience help reunite majority opinion around common truths? Is civil disobedience usable by dissidents on both the left and the right? Are we today in a revolutionary situation? Should violence be used in civil disobedience? Does democracy require civility?
I have been asking similar questions for six years, and have added a set of my own: what is next? And, in this country I’ve come to call home, what really is possible? Maybe that’s why I’m here: I want answers, and I retain the hope that this educated and thoughtful congress can offer me some.
No. I am here for the same reason I have done everything since 2012: I am looking for a vision, and though this conference will not offer me one, it may help to crystallize my own.
Roger started the conference in 2006 from a simple idea: “I want to get the twenty smartest people I know into the room and talk about the state of democracy.” Back then this was merely a philosophical practice, to consider the range of tenacity in our governing system through the work of Arendt. But in our polarly drawn ideologue age, as the system nears breaking, it has become a tangible exercise.
“No ideologues,” Roger said. This was one of the conditions. He wanted people who think. People who can have a conversation, capable of exercising Arendt’s advice for “a civil discourse between rivals instead of enemies.”
This has not grown without controversy. Last year’s conference, under the title “Crises of Democracy: Thinking in Dark Times,” received a lot of negative press when Roger invited Mark Jongen, a politician representing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a far right–leaning organization in Germany. In an open letter printed in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Roger was accused of knowingly providing a stage for an outspoken critic of marginalized communities. The letter was signed by a large contingent of professors and progressive thinkers, and though they agreed with him “that there is a need to engage with a wide range of political views, including illiberal and even neofascist ones,”2 they ultimately condemned both Professor Berkowitz and the president of Bard, Leon Botstein, for not significantly denouncing Jongen and his views, to which Roger replied that the denouncement is clearly implied in the mission of the Hannah Arendt Center and the work and writing it has produced.
Roger says he lost many friends in the controversy, and yet he has also gotten to witness who of his contemporaries is fully committed to Arendt’s mandate on civil discourse and to the possibility of politics within a public sphere, rising above the bubble-making of ideological encasement. Since then, the Hannah Arendt Center has become a sober source in contemporary political analysis and the defense of free speech. Their newsletter has replaced the New York Times as my Sunday reading, a source I trust to help me consider all the madness of American politics. So I wanted to witness nonpartisan dialogue in action. That too is why I’m here.
For those reading this who are not living in America, I have to state something that is at times challenging to explain without metaphysical considerations. We, here, have entered a time in which the political has become deeply personal, and vice versa. We are, quite frankly, losing our minds. Even my meditation app has a political package option. At times it can feel like even our psychic space is becoming partisan, blue or red to different degrees of intensity. Whatever one may think of President Trump, in his ugly and terrible way he has perfectly played his role, that of a trickster, revealing the most damning and unpleasant, but quite real and far too long ignored, tumors in our society. He is corporate hierarchy, as expressed by his sympathies with the Saudis: “I make a lot of money from them. . . . Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.” His loyalties lie with those who pay, he states clearly. If we define the genesis of fascism as the recognition of dignity by social hierarchy alone, and thus those with superior means are superior to those who do not, then Trump is merely the ultimate expression of this American way, one that has always trended toward recognizing humanity along hierarchical constructs. The Constitution and its Bill of Rights work to protect us from this construct, but the architecture of our society still functions along these lines. I am not claiming that hierarchy always ends in fascism; rather, that fascism is impossible without it, and we have always existed along its borders. Of course, it being rubbed in our face like this, so blatant and clear, agitates the most-tender insecurities of our personhood—that dignity is measured primarily by financial worth. To summarize: dignity is the product of class, class is the product of wealth, and wealth is the product of legacy and ownership. Trump has simply made clear what was once covered by the veneer of political decency, and thus made conscious a basic and unsavory tenet of our country. Contradiction, exposed. Now we deal with it.
And so, if at first it seemed like it was the political that was drawing me back to Bard, I must admit it was the personal too.
In truth, the conference is a return for me, the accidental completion of a journey I began in 2012. That summer I was living in Brooklyn, teaching at a CUNY college and bartending in the West Village to subsidize my adjunct pay. It was a reasonable life but one that left me with an irreconcilable longing. I had graduated into the recession and closely tracked Occupy and its dissipation. I sensed that something large was on the verge of our world, some incongruence bubbling to the surface, but I didn’t know how to tap into it. I wanted a better view. I wanted to find a way to articulate what was coming, and for that I needed a dramatic shift of perspective. Through a few chance encounters I received the opportunity to work on a giant political art project at Burning Man titled “Burn Wall Street,” and with the institutional cover of the Hannah Arendt Center I surrendered my jobs and my apartment, whittled my belongings down to two duffle bags and a computer, and went west to seek the future, hoping to report what I found.
My mission was to consider America at large from the fringe. The theory I sold to the Hannah Arendt Center then relied on abstracting the norm. I had considered how in many traditionalist cultures, when the dominant culture appeared to be on the verge of crisis it was necessary to journey to the fringe of the cultural landscape so as to attain a new perspective on what was broken and what could be next. I fancied myself an immersive journalist, connected both to academia and to the real world on the ground. I wanted to be a bridge. Roger Berkowitz agreed that this was a thread worth following and provided me with a platform.
A part of my plan was to return to the Hannah Arendt Center for its 2012 conference, the title of which was Does the President Matter? A Conference on the American Age of Political Disrepair, and to find a way to contribute my findings to the academic discourse.
But I didn’t return. I kept going, for six years. In the interim, I have written about alternative communities, movements, ritual and ceremony in American life, Burning Man, sustainability practices in one’s life and business, and the agreements of Standing Rock. This year, I finally made it back.
So again I ask, why am I here? And, six years later, who am I now?
I am here because I am one of a certain growing class in this America, educated and capable, seeking a purpose and caught between the old American Dream and its reimagining. I am here because life has disappointed me. I have chased neither the profiteer’s nor the activist’s dream. I have been in between them. I want to see what the panelists have to say to a person like me. Even today, after years of seeking stability, consolidating my student loans, upping my credit utilization, and buffering my FICO scores, as my girlfriend and I begin shopping around for a house in a small city that is only next to the city where we want to live, I feel some strange pang in my stomach. It is a sort of survivor’s guilt, urging me to admit that something is not right even as my position in the hierarchy becomes more assured. Something’s not right in the structure of things. Can I let go of that? I want to move on, build a house, a family, a community. I want to take vacations, but I feel like I am abandoning something, some struggle that still feels personal and far from complete.
I am an Eastern European immigrant. A naturalized American. I want to feel like what this country once vaguely promised still matters. And this promise was not solely individualistic. It was in the new structure of things, some allusion to equality in its founding charter.
I am a skeptic, seeking something that can move me to meaning, and once I admitted that I too am a part of this country, so too has the political become personal for me, and the rising decibel of rage all around me—a new voice taking a turn to scream out, seemingly every week, some other injustice of inequality—normalized day after day, will not let me disentangle the personal from the political again. But sometimes I just want to lay my head down on a soft surface and sleep.
Drawn out from the fringe into a room of thoughtful and institutionalized radicals, here I am. I want to know how these experts are faring in the confusion. If they sleep comfortably. If it is all still theory, or if we can be moved to act.
And so this essay is meant to examine a large void in America today, a void I witness on the ground every day. The conference simply helps to examine the void. This is a case study of the America in between, a consideration of the possibility of movement. If the conference asks whether we are in a revolutionary situation, where the legitimacy of the government is no longer trusted by the governed, I reply that we are in an existential situation, where the ideal of the American Dream no longer seems achievable, or more so, believable, as even many of those who achieve it do not feel content in the reality of their dream. Our suicide rates are up, as are our opioid abuse numbers. A whole generation now enters college having lived only against the backdrop of a vague war. The family unit has been driven further and further apart, and our state of aloneness is enhanced by the virtual tools that promised to unite us. Institutional mistrust is only rivaled by an escalating sense of competition, and we no longer even believe in facts. If an emaciated polar bear began making house calls, many Americans would still doubt global warming because Fox News told them so. We are seeking refuge across tribal lines, and no candidate but Trump has offered an inspiring alternative vision. And his vision is based on an assembly of lies to activate rage and fulfill his personal ambitions, and drive us farther away from nuance and toward our polar fronts. But we have bread. The saying goes that the people will only revolt when there is no bread. This is our unique situation, that we will always have bread. Something else has to move us to action. Another form of hunger maybe. In this lecture hall, I ask what.
***
I am not sure if this was intentionally done but the conference itself appears to have an arc and a structure. It begins with an examination of the resistance, comparing its mechanisms to that of the Tea Party, those who were “the resistance” nine years ago. It moves on to examine the role of art in politics; critical activism and if such a thing can be taught; and the patriotic duty of whistleblowing and leaks. It moves on to the more extreme considerations of movement: violence versus nonviolence; grassroots organizing and the legitimacy of the constitution; a consideration of citizenship in a postdemocracy world; and finally, Martin Luther King Jr. and the legacy of civil disobedience, which ends up, of course, more a conversation on the personal semantics of identity politics than civil disobedience. This structure closely mirrors the conversational arc of everyday American discourse. This arc, I sense, is alive and activated in everyone living in America today, and so of course a conference wishing to address this quagmire is going to reflect its arc. Like I said, even our psychic space is political. We need a vision out of this place.
Any good story needs tension, and again, straight from the pool of our most private thoughts, the conference reflects one: reform versus revolution. Very few in our country are debating the need for change; rather, we are at odds about its form. You will see that the numbers confirm that the majority of our country believes that something has to change. We just lack agreement on how to go about this.
***
“It is fair to say,” Berkowitz continues in his opening remarks, “that we are today in at least some version of a revolutionary situation, one in which large numbers of citizens reject the legitimacy of our established institutions.” The irony is that this is a universal dissatisfaction, across seemingly diametrically opposed interest groups. Berkowitz sites recent poll numbers that state that “47 percent of Trump supporters feel like strangers in their own country. At the same time, 44 percent of those who disapprove of Trump report they feel like strangers in their own country. It is not simply that people disagree; an overwhelming majority of Americans — people in power and people out of power, persons of color and white people, women and men — all feel alienated, rootless, and powerless in their own country.”
At times it can feel like it is only the diametrical opposition of our dissatisfaction that keeps up the illusion of balance and stability. Any individual organism would break under such tension. If we appear nuts from afar, it’s because we are. Differing factions literally see different things and facts.
“We are,” Berkowitz continues, “at one of those rare moments at which the country sits on a pivotal point amidst a conflict of fundamental values.”
Thus we are asked to consider how we engender change without outward violence, as the history of violence is such that it breeds only more violence. I would suggest that the imbedding of our institutions is so deep that the prospect of an old-school revolution is now impossible. The numbers just don’t add up, and, of course, we still have bread. And so we are left to reconsider the role of civil disobedience as a potential expression of citizenship itself.
The question animating this conference, Berkowitz states, is whether “civil disobedience is the kind of active citizenship that has, and might again, bring about revolutionary change without a civil war.” For this we would need to learn how to share again, how to talk and how to listen. We need to reestablish the dominance of the public sphere, where disagreements can be aired. And in this duty, we are failing.
In an article published just prior to the conference, Berkowitz admits how Arendt would answer this question: “Hannah Arendt thinks it is possible to share a world with your adversary. And she saw the first step to such a shared world to be talking. . . . In talking with one another we create the kinds of shared experiences and common points of connections that might, over time, become the building blocks of a new shared world. In talking about the world, we also make judgments and decisions about the world. Those decisions, Arendt admits, ‘may one day prove wholly inadequate.’ But even absent agreements on the nature of a crisis and how to solve it, the act of speaking with one another about the crises of our times will, she argues, ‘eventually lay the groundwork for new agreements between ourselves as well as between the nations of the earth, which then might become customs, rules, [and] standards that again will be frozen into what is called morality.’”
This is the mandate that ushers us into a vital expression of theater as conference, where conversations among trained and thoughtful adversaries model for us the consideration of dialogue.
I can’t help but wonder, though, can we be moved toward action or is this just another one of those academic exercises I fled six years back? I just don’t know if dialogue is enough of an action for me now.
10:45 a.m. Saving America Once Again: Comparing the Anti-Trump Resistance to the Tea Party
The first to present is Theda Skocpol, a decorated political researcher out of Harvard. She has spent the last two years examining the tactics of Indivisible, a countermovement to Trump, launched right after the election by some of President Obama’s staffers. The more popular moniker for this countermovement is Pantsuit Nation. It is a reaction to Clinton’s defeat.
Professor Skocpol brings a careful study of the actions and makeup of the “other” imbedded political party, describing Indivisible as a guide for resistance that learns from and adopts the Tea Party’s tactics, activated on the grassroots level and nationwide. As was the case for the Tea Party, the movement is led mostly by women (90 percent). Mostly white women in their fifties and sixties, heavily college educated. Men are mostly husbands or partners. But while the Tea Party was largely funded by the Heritage Foundation, Indivisible is built out primarily from individual donors.
As she describes the makeup of the “countermovement,” I study the room. So many of them are here. Located just hours from New York City and Boston, and populated by liberal arts colleges every 30 miles, the Hudson Valley is an oasis for progressive retirees, many of whom bought summer homes here sometime in the 1980s and ’90s, and later moved to the region to retire. The geographic makeup is almost a prototype of the rural liberal class. The election brought them out, away from brunch, as the vision of the America they supported, and which benefited their educated and merit-based vision of mobility, was endangered. I doubt that many of them risk anything more tangible than their ethical high ground. Sure, they have a soft spot for people like me, the immigrants, minorities, and service industry employees who their kids brought home for dinner. And they lend a hand where they can. But the struggle of my class, to which they are deeply sympathetic, is theoretical to them. Their sense of “rightness,” a mostly nonreligious righteousness, is born out of their ideals. Their homes are paid for and their kids attend college courtesy of their parents’ smart investments. Before Trump, they saw an America birthing into their egalitarian ideals, the symbols of which were the New York Times, brunch, and donkey blue. And then it happened. The enemy, the savages, won. Many of the Pantsuit Nation, though not all, believe that had Hillary taken office, everything would still be heading toward equality and prosperity. That’s why their rallying call is “If Hillary had won we’d be at brunch.” No wonder they elicit so much animosity, or, at the least, only lukewarm fellowship. They are, rightfully so, fighting against Trump, but like Clinton they fail to articulate a vision beyond protecting the gains of the Obama era and painting Washington blue again. I don’t resent them, but I can’t follow them. Skocpol states that they organize “as much out of fear and loathing, I would say, as out of hope.” I already know loathing and fear. I knew it before Trump. As one who was once a second-class citizen in this country, I am not moved to panic by loathing and fear. I do need hope though.
Both sides, Skocpol states, the Tea Party and the resistance, began by “yell[ing] at the TV.” And while the Tea Partiers were galvanized on Meetup.com by the threat of Obamacare and the contrived narrative of an immigrant invasion, the resistance organized on Facebook to save the status quo of the Obama era, which in truth was benefiting them more than those at the bottom of the ladder. That was both the gift and the issue with Obama. He gave us hope but, maybe compromised by the quagmire of Washington politics or his own donor base, the gains were small, more theory than practice. I believe in universal health care but I can’t afford it as Obamacare, and I am challenged by the framing of the need to do so as a moral obligation.
I was in college, here at Bard, when Obama first won. I was surprised how emotional it was. I cried with the victory. We all here did. Something special was happening, and my emotional release that day was rivaled only by the tidal wave of anger at Trump’s victory, ushered in by the memories of a totalitarian state I fled as a kid. And yet, I have to admit that though Obama was a pivotal cultural victory, he did not represent my issues. I wanted radical change—true universal health care, a restructuring of our education and loan systems, the divorce of money from politics. He, for whatever reasons, just played along in the old game, though doing so with a poet’s dignity, which does align with my sensibilities. So when I see Pantsuit Nation courting my allyship, I balk. I think, “You are not enough.”
This sentiment is echoed in the Q&A period by a hand in the crowd. Mark Bray, who on a later panel will represent Antifa, an antifascist group endorsing violence, challenges Skocpol. “This [is] a group of middle-class liberal white people who think they’re the resistance,” he accuses. He reiterates the brunch motto, calling to attention how this is a slight to minorities and the disenfranchised. His affect is contemptuous. He is here to instigate.
Like an old and practiced warrior, Skocpol takes this in stride. She sits easily in her chair after thirty minutes of standing at the podium, and responds confidently. She is ready for battle, convinced in her verdict. In the United States, she says commandingly, political power “has to be won by networks of organizations that have a presence” across the country. “The Left is too tied to biographical democracy in this country,” she fires back at Bray. The Tea Partiers “were good citizens in the sense that they recognized that in America we have the right to organize, we have the right to say what we think.” The result of our loss is “a cynical, privatized, increasingly unequal country that simply continues its decline”—not civil war. She nearly barks those last words as an admonishment. I can already see that Mark Bray wants war. He is satisfied with the tenor of the exchange. And, I can see that Skocpol is willing to wrestle for a return to the illusion of peace.
Skocpol’s talk is followed by a roundtable on civil resistance, at which she is a moderator. Sitting with her are Callie Jayne, the director of Rise Up Kingston, a nonprofit across the river from Bard; Rebecca Saletan, an award-winning editor from Riverhead Books; and Judy Pepenella and Dennis Maloney, both Tea Partiers who have been brought in to play the role of the opposition. Everyone has their say. They are all passionate, and they care. I can see that this is their life—these conversations and issues define their sense of community. Maloney nervously reads a prepared manifesto on the concerns of the Tea Party, and Pepenella bubbles up with a message of neighbors and football, and the need to meet outside of politics. I like them. When I was here in college, living off campus and working a service job, these were exactly the sort of salt and mortar locals I gravitated toward when I was not studying. And now, here, I genuinely feel for them, even as I sense the show on the stage normalizing something that should evoke more outrage and passion. This feels, too much at times, like a game. And if so, then it is politics as usual, the thing we are all angry at. Later on I hear Saletan say something to the effect that getting politically involved creates community. I know what she means by that, but the statement throws me. I don’t want my politics to rise up out of my desire for company. I want my politics to pass the test of my ethics, in company as well as alone.
Jayne’s was the most educational exchange for me. Full of energy and enthusiasm, she, like me, picks her moments in this conference. A few times we shared cigarettes outside. We didn’t really talk about Black Lives Matter, even though she is an active organizer. Instead we talked about inequality, the need to change the system, and the potential of creating communities across the country that can exchange skills and knowledge and foster mutual understanding. We talked about change. And strangely enough, for the first time I could see the universal potential that Black Lives Matters has. It is a first conversation, one that leads to others—on equality, justice, and the equal redistribution of dignity. In this nation of original wounds, someone had to lead us into admitting our hypocrisy. Only by admitting our fallacies can we heal. By grabbing the issue at its root, BLM has the potential to lead that charge.
And yet, with all these passionate individuals onstage, Skocpol still comes off as the leader. “This is not a revolution,” she says. “This is political reform. Revolutions never turn out the way the revolutionaries expected.”
She’s right, as much of the wisdom of history tells us. And like a good social scientist, she does not describe a vision; rather, she describes what she sees. And I know it’s not enough for me. But then again, I am an “other,” and so I am rarely at peace with the status quo.
Who am I kidding? This isn’t why I’m here. I came here to talk about revolution. I came here to meet Micah White.
***
About a year ago I came across an article in the Guardian written by a seasoned activist, the coorganizer of Occupy Wall Street and Rolling Jubilee. This writer addressed the tactical failure of contemporary protest, highlighting the absence of a larger vision. The article also noted the role of Russia as a sort of indicator species on the potential of coopting movements. The key quote I took away was this: “To protect against fake activism in America we must insist that every protest be globally oriented.”3 As an example, what this means to me is that Nike’s support of Colin Kaepernick cannot be counted as a win because it takes for granted Nike’s sweatshops in China. By marrying the message to an ethically compromised ally, Kaepernick’s call for equality is depleted of its integrity.
The writer of the article was Micah White. I then read his book, The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolutions, where he examines the political emptiness of “clickism” and describes marching in the streets more as theater than a deliberate and ready act focused on the attainment of power. Additionally, he makes a case for four categories of activism: volunteerism, structuralism, subjectivism, and theorgism. You can do your own research on these. I highly recommend that you do. But the basic call of his theory is to consider effective activism as something larger than part-time contract work, as something that must be as agile in its tactics as is our approach to conducting our individual lives. Additionally, White makes a case for a new form of movement, involving a long view of politics and life, taking the message from the congested field of city streets to rural destinations. He and his wife attempted just such a thing when, after the “constructive failure” of Occupy, they moved to a small town in Oregon and White ran for mayor. He lost and left town, receiving a grant from the Roddenbery Foundation, and a fellowship from the Hannah Arendt Center, to build an Activist Graduate School. When I learned of this I reached out to Roger Berkowitz, who got me a seat at the conference and some access to its attendees, of whom Micah White was one.
“We have to stop targeting low-hanging fruit,” White says to me as we sit at a windowed nook of the building where I did my undergraduate studies, “turning activism into culturally educational projects—myself included—starting a school. Or really low-hanging fruit like direct action against Whole Foods—so low on the spectrum of dreaming. I think we have to focus on global campaigns on the question of governance and power.”
He is thoughtful and articulate; his responses to my questions come off as preconsidered and yet in the process of being reconsidered as well while speaking. He has an air of impatience—not with me, I don’t think, but with the pace of our subject: real, political change. Similarly, he is frustrated with the compromised mentality of progressive activism, the “shifting the conversation” slogan that many of the attendees at the conference accept as a win. Additionally, his wife, Chiara Ricciardone, who is coteaching with him at the graduate school and copresenting at the conference, is pregnant and due to give birth any day. My fiction-writer self comes out when I listen to him. His mind has the scope of an epic, multigenerational novel, while the obvious circumstances of his life suggest a depth of character any writer would wish to explore. It makes me want to know how this human conceives the future, because if there is a visionary here, it is him. I don’t have to fully accept his vision to see it.
“The reason I don’t find the Right terrifying,” White says soon after I refresh his quote from the Guardian article, “is that they hamstrung themselves because their ideology does not acknowledge global problems, therefore they can’t put forward global solutions. But obviously there are global challenges, such as climate change, and so the movements that can actually say ‘Look, there are global challenges and we need to have global solutions, and we are the movement that can do that” are the ones that can long-term win. The right wing will ultimately lose their populace.”
We dig into what went wrong in Oregon, why he left and how it could have worked otherwise. “I think someone can pull it off,” he says. “I think with more funding and I think with more people, yes. . . . It’s easier to imagine building a revolutionary movement in rural communities than it is in someplace like NYC.”
The root of the contest is sovereignty, he admits. That was the reason he moved to a small town. The question of power in America boils down to legislation, and legislation in America is, and always has been, about the power of ownership—the tactics of landownership. That resonates with me. After all, before it was “the pursuit of happiness,” it was “the pursuit of property.” I think about my recent attempts to buy a home. How until recently I couldn’t even imagine such an act and thus forbade myself from considering its political and personal repercussions.
“Power in outcome” is what the Left is missing, White says in a sober analysis. “Not just powerful, but power in actual outcome. No one on the left has power in outcome. . . . You have to conquer the legislative. . . . I think you need a social movement that can take power. It’s the only thing that matters right now.”
White is imagining flipping the practice of gerrymandering on itself. He is working backward from outcome to battlefield tactics. But he also has the feel of someone exhausted with the negotiation of it all, tired of misbranding failures into moral victories. He has been fighting all his life, and he looks to me like a tired soldier, the one that retires to a walled-up garden by the ocean after the fighting is complete. His mind, in spite of its talent for essentializing and imagination, comes off decided in its core beliefs. “They are not your friends,” he says to me, almost with pain, about his rural neighbors. “They are your opponents,” he adds as he makes the case for a rural movement that is progressively minded.
I rephrase what he is suggesting: “Political gentrification?”
“Yeah. Because they have something that’s extremely valuable. They have a small community that has sovereignty. But that’s what we need. We need to go to a place and say, “Now that we own this place we can pass laws.” That’s what it means to have sovereignty, we can now pass local laws. The nice approach doesn’t work.”
I have the urge to counter this. I am less practiced than he is, and thus I may be less jaded. Then again, I may just wear the naivete of the uncommitted. I want to believe in the power of civil discourse and Arendt’s vision for a shared public sphere. I want to believe that everyone has a seat at the table—that we are a reasonable, global tribe. I want to be neighbors, not enemies.
“I think people’s minds are so polluted,” White continues, “including myself, that I think this idea that we’re going to educate and convince people is just not true. . . . Everyone is connected to the mental pollution. . . . I don’t think I believe in changing people’s minds,” he admits, in a way that I see that maybe, once, he did.
And yet, when I circle around to his ideas on theorgism, after we’ve talked about Standing Rock, the mythology of the movement and the strange manifestation of individual dreams that brought people there, and my interpretation of that as having the potential of a linear and noncooptable movement, he replies with a piece of his own dream.
“I don’t think you can explain Occupy from a secular interpretation,” White admits. “There is some sort of spiritual interpretations of social movements. . . . There’s some sort of a spiritual component to social movements,” he says again.
I’m not sure we’re talking about God, exactly. Neither one of us fits the mold. We’re talking about connection. We’re talking about mythmaking, or myth finding, really. We’re talking about the support of life on earth, the one value that, at least theoretically, joins us all.
We are momentarily joined by Samantha Hill, a professor of politics at Bard and acting assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Center. They talk about the class White has been testing at Bard. It is the pilot for his school. Hill says she is looking forward to hearing what his students have to say. “Bard students are really good,” she says. “They’re students who go above and beyond and are genuinely curious and interested.” I remember my own experience here, in what felt to me a safe and theoretical field where one could experiment with their ideals.
“Yes, They’re so full of . . . passion,” White says. “Four of them went to the Kavanaugh protest and all four of them got arrested. I just think like, wow, this is so funny. It just reminds me of my college days.” As he says this, I believe I sense some cynical scripting come back into his voice, as if here too he is tired of the theater of it all and hungers for real change, beyond the ivory tower illusions of safe practice.
Hill asks when his wife is due. “Tomorrow. She’s at ten months now. . . . It’s like a mystical process,” White says, and I can see that he means it.
“It is a mystical process,” Hill agrees, “and pregnancy is ten months, not nine. There is so much mythology about pregnancy [that] has nothing to do with pregnancy. It’s amazing that we’re there still,” she says. And then we go our own ways.
I don’t know exactly why it matters, this last part. I should cut it from the story. But in my gut, I know it does matter. In this conversation of reform versus revolution, sometimes it feels like this is the part that we are most removed from, married to the convictions of our political theory on a process so basic and at the center of it all: life, and the mystery that urges us on without ever revealing a fully detectable position of rightness. How do we encourage the world to go forward with less harm? How do we birth our political future into being?
***
My partner and I are both in our thirties. In some ways we are traditional. She is a socially fluid extrovert who can code switch with a savant’s agility and wishes to evoke kindness in her every relation and social agreement. I like sports, am introverted everywhere but the page, and consider myself a closeted pragmatist. She has invited me into a life outside of theoretic contemplation, and I find ways to recontextualize things that may otherwise bore her into terms that may make them matterful to her—sports as a study in race and power negotiations, Russian literature as an experiment in the renegotiation of the human conditions. In other ways we are the new, modern generation, either sharing roles earlier divided by gender norms or switching entirely. Even now, as I edit this, she reads a book on effective business practices while I use an emersion blender to make soup.
We are both dreamers and hard workers, though she is slightly harder-working than I, while my love for her allows me to restructure my ethereal considerations into practical goals, and to work toward them.
Culture and its norms are being renegotiated around us all the time, and similarly, it occurs in our relationship as well. I guess, like any story, it is love that makes a thought real, the dream manifest through compromise and work. What we both know is that we want a family. We want to have kids and to give them everything that the circumstances of our families did not allow for us. And so, the political is personal here as well, as we encounter very real questions, shared by our generation: what kind of world would we be bringing kids into? What kind of world are we shaping for them?
If responsibility is the product of one’s “responsiveness” and one’s “ability,” then to become actively responsible to these questions I have to strike a balance between the obeying of history and aggressive and real-time creation. I must remember, but if I want to change something, I must also be willing to instigate, to design an alternative and put it into play. I will address what White’s students had to tell me, but the panel preceding that one directly tackles the tension I just described.
3:15 p.m. Activism through Art
Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock are German artists whose practice, they state, is devoted to “making history visible, tracing complex relationships between society, art and artifacts comprise [their] vision of institutional critique, shaped by studies about how memory functions in the social sphere and how it is reflected symbolically in the space of museums and the city.”
It only makes sense that in Germany the focus of art is remembrance. One of their projects is titled Bus Stop. Designed to commemorate the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the project uses transit as “social sculpture” to “follow the traces of National Socialism in Germany and Europe.” The project creates the sense of memorial as a map rather than a destination, a product of national narrative rather than a random episode.
Roger Berkowitz, mostly overseeing the conversation, moderates this panel along with Nelly Ben Hayoun, founder of the International Space Orchestra and the University of the Underground, a tuition-free postgraduate university based in underground urban spaces in London and Amsterdam and supporting unconventional research practices. Ben Hayoun defines herself as a designer of experiences, not as an artist. “I think through experiences and practice. I make things happen,” she says. Art is part of her arsenal, but she defines the role of design as something that “reacts to social trends.” Like art, it creates an experience, but unlike art the experience must always be directly experienced. Much of Stih and Schnock’s practice orients us to the past, toying with memory, while Ben Hayoun’s more often builds the immediate future. This match was meant to generate tension.
After giving a lengthy and rather dry presentation of their otherwise very thoughtful work, Stih and Schnock sat down for questioning. Immediately, Ben Hayoun launched into the question of biography, asking the duo how they contextualize themselves within the work. Stih brushes this off. In her view, the artist is absent from the art. She and Schnock create what is needed. In this way they are craftsmen—keepers of history rather than visionaries. I would argue that for Ben Hayoun, the creation of experience and thinking requires personal perspective, as a reaction has no velocity without the designer’s own perspective or style. Stih interprets this question as diverting the audience’s attention from the art itself, and counters by highlighting America’s obsession with identity and the overeager messaging of its art, a more common characteristic of marketing. She punctuates this by stating that the 9/11 memorial was created too soon, before reflection could take place. This argument accuses (and I am paraphrasing here) the memorial of being market art rather than art for history. Due to its eagerness, the memorial edits out the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Already peeved at what she perceives in Ben Hayoun as instigation (it is important to note here that Ben Hayoun is French and not American), Stih looks to the audience and states loudly, “They’re your refugees. Your war!”
In that moment I feel like the error of our entire foreign policy is exposed, by this less-than-graceful artist of history. It’s not that she’s right about art and the artist—that the artist only reflects the world rather than shapes it into being by the mere effect of making. But she’s right about us. We don’t reflect. Our symbols of remembrance serve us, not history itself. We don’t know how to, or do not want to, talk about the trauma we cause. We much prefer to talk only about the trauma we feel. No wonder facts have become products of opinion. To have truth one must remember history, the building blocks that have brought us to our current state. But we, here, in part because of our power and in part because we have been so isolated for so long, have been divorced from this act of accounting, reflection, and remembrance. Of course the world is ticked off with us. We are arrogant, and our vision of history is self-serving and thus globally divorced, untrue. We fancied ourselves leaders, when really, we’ve become the perpetrators of a self-serving amnesia.
4:30 p.m. Where Do We Go from Here?
With this on my mind I watch Micah White and Chiara Ricciardone’s students take the stage. The students have been enrolled in Micah’s pilot course, How to Change the World: Theories and Practices. These kids are a perfect slice of America, representative across gender and race. Ricciardone and White oversee as the kids present their solutions for the world, a theoretic practice in activist campaigning. The repercussions of “campaigning” do not escape me here. Again I interpret this conversation on activism and the building of movements as a type of marketing. In his book, White argues for the power of memes as political warfare to be adopted by the Left. I see the tactical benefit of this but it rubs up against my basic beliefs, which may, in fact, be impossible to adhere to in the real world. Again it feels like a match between elite adversaries waging a war by marketing. I feel like I am being sold a vision, my idea of democracy and equality trapped again in the abstract battlefield of designers. I wonder if these college kids sense this too, or have they been made more pragmatic than I?
The kids each take their turn at the podium and, at differing levels of excitement or public presence, articulate their campaigns. The campaigns are as follows: a call for the Twenty-eighth Amendment, to get money out of politics; a campaign to negate the practice of othering; lowering the voting age to sixteen; a guarantee to clean water access for all; education on power inequality; recycling and waste management; countering the pollutant effects of factory farming and red meat; an app to combat ICE; a campaign to tackle gender inequality.
I look for the passion Hill and White referenced earlier. If anyone is to have it, it’s these Bard kids, still protected enough from the practice of disillusionment, still innocent enough to believe in change, its complexities theoretic and thus still fixable. But there is a sense of exhaustion even to them. In the Q&A period they talk about their experiences protesting the Kavanaugh hearings. Someone from the audience addresses the scripting of protest arrests, and the kids reply in agreement, exasperated by the theater of protest in a way that reminds me of White. He and Ricciardone, their guides, watch the kids tenderly, White offering them the stage, back-saddling his own disillusionment to the potential of these kids and their future. And Ricciardone, tender with them, proud of them as individuals, like a mother, placing the courage of their individual accomplishments above the logic of their campaigns.
I realize as I watch that most of these kids were barely conscious when we went to war. In his book, White stresses the moment the old ways of marching in the streets ceased working. On 15 February 2003, the George W. Bush administration and its conglomerate of allies prepared for war, and the world came out to protest in unprecedented numbers. That night, Bush went on television and declared, “I don’t have to listen to these protests because I don’t listen to focus groups.” And just like that, the voice of the people was reduced to a social science experiment.
These kids have never known a world without war as a backdrop. And so too they may never have known a world with a true democracy, effective in practice. How can my generation, then, help them imagine that which they have never known?
A friend of mine says this of our generation—well, actually, he got this from another friend, who may have gotten it from another friend in turn: “We were raised to believe that by the time of our adulthood we would have colonized the moon, be at war with China, and have jet packs, but are instead competing for part-time remote work with other invisible people. Where are our jet packs?”
Of course we’re opting out, be it with drugs, materialism, or the narcotic of simple cynicism. We are, at times, just too plain tired and disillusioned to imagine a future.
In my experience with activist movements, I have observed and interviewed some of those who went to Occupy and Standing Rock and have gotten involved in other time-intensive protests. I have seen many who have dropped their lives to go live for a cause. Though some of them were fully committed, others simply desired a purpose. The act of opting out was simple when the call came. In part, and ironically, this may be the greatest threat to the existing corporate institution—those who leave the infrastructure of the corporate bureaucracy state. There is a possibility, I sense, of a growing movement—an opt-out through disillusionment. It is a mass of negative potential that has yet to be tapped into and united by a collective vision. Once someone, be it an individual or a group, articulates that vision, the existentially disillusioned will move toward it. Maybe the zombie genre has tapped into this vision at its most primal state. Narrative aside, this may be the linear, and organic, generational revolution that comes next.
I talk to one of the kids outside. One who got arrested. “You planning to go to grad school? What’s next?”
“No. I’m done,” he says. “I want to travel America. I need to see.”
What will he find waiting for him there? Further impossibility of change, or some pocket of spirited resistance that helps him, one day, to imagine democracy in practice?
***
Over my two days at the conference I talked to a number of attendees. At some point they became more interesting than the speakers.
After the student panel I talk to an older man who since retiring from public service has returned to school. He is attending classes at Brooklyn College, which happens to be the place I once taught. “In my day,” he says, through a fixed and eager smile, “I took it to heart what the president said and I went into public service.” He is speaking of President Kennedy’s mandate to ask what you can do for your country. As he says this he looks around at the campus I have loved. “We used to protest war,” he says, recollecting his first round in the institution of higher education. “Now the urge in the institutions is to blow it up.”
“Like using the college campus as practice for revolution or war,” I paraphrase, realizing I am more like him now than I am like the students, that a part of me would prefer to hold on to some nostalgia rather than build what comes next.
“Exactly.”
A man who has been eavesdropping on our conversation about Vietnam chimes in: “Any world that uses a phallus for a compass needle is doomed to fail,” the stranger says.
I am struck by this, and so is the retired civil servant. We both nod, him remembering the birth of his ideals in the ’60s, and me, remembering their silencing in 2003, my thoughts between a rock and a hard place—the true reality of necessitating change, and the seeming impossibility of revolution. The structures, I think, are just too deep, and were they even to crash, the collateral—my Soviet emigrant self remembers—is just not worth it.
But then I remember something else, something another friend recently said of the world, quoting Joanna Macy: “Maybe the answer is building Gaian structures in the shell of the old.” Maybe this comes off as too ethereal to resonate, but I think of one of the houses I recently saw for sale. The bones were solid but other things were failing. To restore it one would need to rebuild parts from within and then allow for the weathered and failed components of the structure to collapse. It’s doable, I thought. Though my carpentry skills are not yet strong enough. But yes, it can be done. Though for that we would need a new breed of builders, those who have the guttural resolve to resist the mandate of an unforgiving market to put forward a compromised design, those willing to even expose the fault lines, so that when the time comes, we know where to direct the pressure. We need inspectors whose loyalty is to the integrity of a structure above all else.
5:30 p.m. Whistleblowing as Civil Disobedience: Leaks in the Era of Trump and the Deep State
The final panel for the day is headlined by Allison Stranger, a political scientist out of Middlebury College and author of One Nation under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy, where she details the rise of outside contracting in American government and makes a case for less consolidation and more good governmental practices. In her lecture, Stranger builds from the premise that “all civil disobedients are dissenters, but not all dissenters are civil disobedients.” She suggests that in a time of political crisis whistleblowers are those “who often illuminate the gap between American ideals and a fact-based world, the real world, where ideals usually are not realized.” She notes that while whistleblowing has become accepted as a shadowy instrument within the checks and balances of a booming institutional complexity, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2012 specifically prohibits the practice in the area of national security. Yet, if we admit that extreme measures are necessary in a time of crisis, then we can accept the act as a necessary diversion from the mandate of governmental cohesion.
“When the rule of law itself is threatened, whistleblowing can be necessary to defend liberal democracy as a whole. I would argue,” Stranger adds, “that illegal leaks that expose true betrayals of American democracy are neither partisan nor political; they are patriotic.” And, “until the immediate danger has passed, it makes sense, regardless of your political affiliation, to focus on the shocking substance of the information being revealed rather than the questionable means by which that information is coming to light.” So, in short: don’t shoot the messenger, listen to the message.
David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English at Yale University and the workhorse of the conference (he appeared on three separate panels), brings up two necessary points. First, that there is irony in the “left liberal side of the United States becoming so good-natured and trusting of the CIA, FBI, and NSA. . . . It ought to evoke a little suspicion, so let’s call them spies and surveillance apparatchiks,” he suggests, and not bestow upon them in these rare circumstances some level of moral objectivity they have not earned.
It strikes me here, the difference between these agencies and what in my first country was the KGB. While most members of the KGB were former soldiers, much of the American spy network is made up of lawyers. Thus, it makes perfect sense that their commitment is to the rule of law. Not rightness, or even justice, but law. And so, when an individual in power violates the legal structure, and Congress fails to act, of course these individual actors should move to expose the violation.
And here Bromwich sees the larger issue: “Is a generalized policy of leaks a legitimate method in defense of war against a chief magistrate in order to uphold a rule of law in the long-term against a chief magistrate who has declared war against the rule of law?” Basically, “Once you’ve lost it, can you get it back?” By “it” he means the equilibrium of institutional order—trust.
Stanger counters: “They are not blowing the whistle on the institution of the American presidency. They are blowing the whistle on one individual who is behaving unlike any past president.” She argues that we should not make these people heroes. Rather, we should permit an indecent act for the better good.
Coming from a country that lost its soul under the banner of “the ends justify the means,” I am naturally skeptical of such reasoning. And yet, I see the difference as well. While the Soviet Union suppressed individualism for the supposed fulfillment of the collective good, Stranger is arguing for the uncommon acts of individual dissent, in the Arendtian spirit of civil disobedience. And thus, such an act remains in accordance with America’s founding ethos.
Hers is a powerful assertion, one that should stir the mind. Yet the feeling in the room is that we are already past all of that. The governmental disorder and institutional distrust now feel accepted as part of our daily lives. It seems that we are beyond structural arguments; rather, we are seeking an extreme proposal that can set the abstract whole again.
***
A wine and cheese reception follows, but I am too tired to engage in anything more than pleasantries. I consider whether I have an answer for what the future may hold. My friends back on the West Coast are hopeful that I will bring back some news of a coming transformation. But I have nothing, so far, beyond philosophical considerations, and after day one I have no illusions that this learned class will offer me any solutions. I fall asleep that night lucidly dreaming of having a family and a home.
***
I am standing outside a house, which we may or may not be preparing to buy. I am next to a dream. My credit has been raised, my debts mostly paid or consolidated, and my employment made steady in spite of my freelance ambitions. I am ready to buy. This position is in large part the product of my girlfriend’s foresight and responsibility. She is American, tangibly aware and financially vigilant, understanding, in her body, what it takes to build a life here. She will make a great mother, in this modern age. On a very basic and primal field I know this. I want this dream. I want to cross into this dream with her. And yet something tugs at me as I make the calls to my bank and credit agency and student loan people, some sense that keeps me more connected to the realms of history and ideas than the tangible world of people and their systems, or the rules that govern them. Something akin to survivor’s guilt. In my heart . . . no, not in my heart. In my heart I want to love, I want to marry and have a home and children, I want the promised American Dream. In some chamber very near my heart, maybe the liver—there, I want a revolution. I want something radical. That is what brings me to the conference. A subtly intoxicating mix of hope, curiosity, and guilt. I want the homeless me to embrace the homeowner. I want the radical and the thinker to join the father and husband-to-be. I want to be a citizen, and I don’t want the polarity of my mind or my feelings—I want a nonpartisan life. I want for them to lead me, together.
***
Day two begins with an address by the president of Bard, Leon Botstein. Botstein notes the need for such a conference today and concurrently compliments Trump as one who “in his own way is gifted in manipulation of attention.” In the argument that the revolution has already happened, this is actually key. Our greatest resource is our attention—literally, what we lend our time and psychic space to. What we think about is the ultimate currency, and what all other currencies seek to coopt. One who can galvanize this source leads the mob. Trump has done just that.
But how does a side that ultimately does not believe in hierarchical order do the same? How do we activate and organize ourselves, linearly? That is, how do we do so without becoming the thing we abhor?
9:45 a.m. Violent and Nonviolent Protest
In the following panel, Mark Bray finally gets the floor, and David Bromwich is back opposite him. Bray is a practiced agitator, a modern resistance fighter whose experience has brought him to an A-to-B kind of logic, and he knows the arguments that are coming his way. “Civility,” he says, “is the box into which nonviolent protest is expected to fit.” Of course he argues that there are times when civility is just another mechanism of control by an illegitimate state. “There is no nonviolent way to stop fascism,” he says.
I can’t actually argue with that. As a former Jewish refugee, I am steeped in the stories of failed civility. I was brought up with the post-Holocaust slogan of “Never again,” and while I disagree with many of Israel’s positions, I recognize the quite real circumstances that brought the slogan into being. Then again, I also see Israel as a state that, by the quite real facts of its trauma, has become the carrier of the abuse it wished to protect itself from. A new issue arises when a victim assumes a position of power but still retains the impenetrable perspective of victimhood. A ruling philosophy of strength above all, and violence, seems to me like a dangerous virus we cannot allow ourselves to universally accept. But Bray is also arguing on the spectrum of privilege and legitimacy: Who has the right to be violent? Is it our government? Is it corporations? Why not the people? And he adds that this argument too often splits the resistance. That ult