Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1

Home , 1776 Commission, Ali Alexander, Basket of deplorables, Centrist Democrats, Civil Position, Dahvi Waller

eISSN 2625-2155

66 | 1 2021

A Quarterly Volume 66| Number 1 2021 66| Number Volume

CONTENTS

COMMON GROUNDS? AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AFTER TRUMP Cedric Essi, Heike Paul, and Boris Vormann (Guest Editors)

I. PROLOGUE Melba Boyd

IV. EPILOGUE Melba Boyd

Common Grounds? American Democracy Journal of the after Trump German Association for Cedric Essi, Heike Paul, and American Studies American StudiesBoris Vormann (Guest Editors) Amerikastudien | American Studies (Amst) Studies American Amerikastudien | Amerikastudien general editors Prof. Dr. Carmen Birkle Prof. Dr. Birgit Däwes Philipps-Universität Marburg Europa-Universität Flensburg FB 10: Fremdsprachliche Philologien Seminar für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Auf dem Campus 1 Nordamerikanische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft D-24943 Flensburg Wilhelm-Röpke-Straße 6 F Tel. (0049)(0)461-805-2836 D-35032 Marburg Fax. (0049)(0)461-805-2189 Tel. (0049)(0)6421-28-24-345 [email protected] Fax (0049)(0)6421-28-24-343 [email protected] Contact: [email protected] associate editors Dr. Cedric Essi (Osnabrück) Dr. Connor Pitetti (Bochum) Dr. Johanna Heil (Marburg) Johannes Schmid (Flensburg) editorial board Prof. Dr. Ingrid Gessner Prof. Dr. Heike Paul Pädagogische Hochschule Vorarlberg Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen- English and American Studies Nürnberg Institut für Sekundarbildung und Fachdidaktik Department of English and American Studies Liechtensteinerstraße 33-37 Bismarckstraße 1 A-6800 Feldkirch D-91054 Erlangen Prof. Dr. Marc Priewe Prof. Dr. Anke Ortlepp Universität Stuttgart Universität zu Köln Institut für Literaturwissenschaft Abteilung für Nordamerikanische Geschichte Amerikanische Literatur und Kultur des Historischen Instituts Keplerstraße 17 Albertus-Magnus-Platz D-70174 Stuttgart D-50923 Köln Prof. Dr. Boris Vormann Bard College Berlin Political Science Platanenstraße 24 D-13156 Berlin readers until 2022: until 2024: until 2026: Christine Gerhardt (Bamberg) Alexandra Ganser-Blumenau (Wien) Hillary Angelo (UC Santa Cruz) Ingrid Gessner (Regensburg) Andrew Gross (Göttingen) Thomas Austenfeld (Fribourg) Martin Klepper (HU Berlin) Joel Johnson (Sioux Falls, South Dakota) Nassim Balestrini (Graz) Kerstin Knopf (Bremen) Zuzanna Ladyga (Warsaw) Manfred Berg (Heidelberg) Christian Lammert (FU Berlin) Ruth Mayer (Hannover) Samuel Cohen (Columbia, Missouri) Alan Lessoff (Illinois State) Tatiani Rapatzikou (Thessaloniki) Robert Keith Collins (San Francisco Timo Müller (Konstanz) Jane Simonsen (Augustana, Rock Island, State) Greta Olson (Gießen) Illinois) Jeanne Cortiel (Bayreuth) Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez (Leipzig) MaryAnn Snyder-Körber (Würzburg) Susan Gray (Arizona State, Tempe) Ralph Poole (Salzburg) Nicole Waller (Potsdam) Carrie Johnston (Winston-Salem, North Gabriele Rippl (Bern) Simon Wendt (Frankfurt) Carolina) John Carlos Rowe (Southern California) Janne Lahti (Helsinki) Ilka Saal (Erfurt) Charlotte Lerg (München) Kerstin Schmidt (Eichstätt-Ingolstadt) Gesa Mackenthun (Rostock) Elizabeth West (Georgia State) Marc Maufort (Brussels) Jutta Zimmermann (Kiel) Sabine Meyer (Osnabrück) Heike Raphael-Hernandez (Würzburg) Michael Wala (Bochum) 66 | 1 Amst

2021 Journal of the A Quarterly German Association for American Studies

Common Grounds? American Democracy after Trump Cedric Essi, Heike Paul, and American StudiesBoris Vormann (Guest Editors)

Amerikastudien Postfach 10 Postfach Heidelberg GmbH, WINTER Universitätsverlag 2021) Jan –12 USA DC, Washington wall, border visit to House White leaves Trump Corum/UPI/Shutterstock ©Samuel Illustration: Cover https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 4.0. –NoDerivatives –NonCommercial Attribution License mons Com Creative the of terms the under distributed is publication This Access Open Typesetting: Printing and bookbinding: Memminger MedienCentrum GmbH, D-87700 Memmingen [email protected] (0049)(0)461-805-2189 Fax. (0049)(0)461-805-2836 Tel. Flensburg D-24943 1 Campus dem Auf Amerikanistik und Anglistik für Seminar Flensburg Europa-Universität [email protected] (0049)(0)6421-28-24-343 Fax (0049)(0)6421-28-24-345 Tel. Marburg D-35032 6 Wilhelm-Röpke-Straße Kulturwissenschaft und Literatur- Nordamerikanische und Amerikanistik Anglistik für Institut Amst Philologien 10: Fremdsprachliche FB Philipps-Universität Marburg offices editorial Vormann Boris Priewe Marc Paul Heike Editor) (Review Ortlepp Anke Gessner Ingrid editorial board Heil Johanna Essi Cedric associate editors Birkle Carmen editors general by Studies for American Association German for the Edited 61 τ 40, D-69051 Heidelberg D-69051 40, -le χι s, D-69115 Heidelberg D-69115 s,

Johannes Schmid Pitetti Connor Däwes Birgit

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Contents

Common Grounds? American Democracy after Trump Cedric Essi, Heike Paul, and Boris Vormann (Guest Editors)

7 Carmen Birkle and Birgit Däwes “Democracy Is Fragile”: A Foreword 9 Cedric Essi, Heike Paul, and Boris Vormann Common Grounds?—A Preface

I. PROLOGUE

17 Melba Joyce Boyd Eulogy for Detroit 1967

II. PRESENCE OF A DIVIDED PAST

25 Diane Glancy The Problem of America Is the Foundational Post on Which It Stands 31 Richard Sennett “Hold Them to Account”: Richard Sennett in Conversation with Boris Vormann 37 Siri Hustvedt Tear Them Down: Old Statues, Bad Science, and Ideas That Just Won’t Die 47 Michael Weinman Twilight of the American Idols? Statue Politics between the Movement for Black Lives and Trumpism 53 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva On the Racial Fantasies of White Liberals in Trump’s America and Beyond 59 Barry Shank The Hidden Violence of Tree-Lined Streets Common Grounds? American Democracy after Trump

67 Dylan Rodríguez No Common Ground: U.S. “Democracy” as Condition of Terror 73 Laura Bieger Committed Writing as Common Ground: Jesmyn Ward’s Poetics of Breathing while Black 81 Linda Trinh Võ Racial Disruptions: Asian American Optics in a Provisional Democracy 89 Elisabeth Bronfen Serial Politics of the Equal Rights Amendment: Revisiting a Feminist Legacy 95 Birte Meier Equal Pay Now! The “Gender Pay Gap” in Transatlantic Perspective: Birte Meier in Conversation with Heike Paul 103 Katharina Gerund Bridging the Military-Civilian Divide? Military Spouses in Post-9/11 U.S. Culture 111 Christian Lammert Dream a Little American Dream with Me: Income Inequality and Social Mobility in the United States 117 Christoph Raetzsch Disruption and Abrasion: American Social Media as Contested Infrastructures 123 Susan Stryker A Common Groundlessness: Trans Aesthetics, Ontological Pluralism, and Imaginary Warfare in the Contemporary United States 127 Simon Schleusener Again and Again and Again

III. FUTURES FORESEEN

135 Craig Calhoun Democracy, Division, and an Attempted Coup 143 Donald E. Pease The Après-Coup: President Trump’s Transfer of Power 155 Margit Mayer Deep Divides: The Fault Lines Actually Disrupting American Democracy

4 Amst 66.1 (2021): 3-6 Contents

163 Saskia Sassen Expanding the Analytical Domain: American Democracy and Its Predatory Economies 169 Aysuda Kölemen No, Your Other Left! The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party 175 Scott Kurashige Dispatches from a Dying Empire 181 Sheri Berman Interregnum or Transformation? 185 Helmut Philipp Aust Recognition Returning Home: An International Law Perspective on the Interregnum after the 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections 191 Ulrike Guérot The Three United States of Americas I Have Known: Three Eras Resulting in the Loss of “Common Ground” between the United States and Europe 197 John von Bergen 74 Million Questions 203 Sabine Broeck This Is Not a Jeremiad 209 Ramzi Fawaz Against Murderous Passivity, or Reading Hannah Arendt under Lockdown 215 Pierre-Héli Monot Maximalist Expectations in an Age of Anti-Populism 223 Matt Brim Please Send Queer Food 229 kihana miraya ross Anti-Blackness in Education and the Possibilities of Redress: Toward Educational Reparations 235 Alfred Hornung and Mita Banerjee American Democracy after Trump and the Challenges of Transnational American Studies: A Conversation 241 Vanessa E. Thompson The Transnational Dimensions of Anti-Black Policing and Black Resistance: Vanessa E. Thompson in Conversation with Cedric Essi

Amst 66.1 (2021): 3-6 5 Common Grounds? American Democracy after Trump

247 Calvin Warren Abandoning Time: Black Nihilism and the Democratic Imagination 253 Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne Radical Refusal and the Potential of Queer Indigenous Futures 259 Julie Sze Monsters in a Moment of Danger: Global Climate Justice and U.S. Obligations 265 Christine Hentschel Sense of an Ending: On Apocalyptic Maneuvers and Ethics of Collapse 271 Stefan Höhne Beyond American Dystopia: On the Rise of Apocalyptic Visions in the Contemporary United States 279 Rosemary Wakeman American Utopia and Climate Change 283 Mariana Mazzucato It’s 2023: Here’s How We Fixed the Global Economy

IV. EPILOGUE

289 Melba Boyd We Want Our City Back

REVIEW ESSAYS

293 Carmen Birkle European Perspectives on the United States in Times of Populism, Protests, and the Pandemic 302 Stefanie Schäfer The Donald, FLOTUS, and the Gendered Labors of Celebrity Politics at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue 307 Nicole Hirschfelder and Luvena Kopp Black Lives Matter: Three Key Texts 312 Betsy Leimbigler The Politics of Health: Diagnosing America’s Democracy through Social Rights, Advocacy, Inequalities, and Addiction

6 Amst 66.1 (2021): 3-6 “Democracy Is Fragile”: A Foreword

Carmen Birkle and Birgit Däwes

On January 20, 2021, when the forty-sixth president of the United States was sworn into office, millions of people around the globe followed the ceremony in their respective homes or offices, widely sharing the sense that while the moment was historic, and a new era was coming into shape, the shadow of the past four years—and possibly of a much longer development—would not be easily evaded. “Few periods in our nation’s history have been more challenging or difficult than the one we’re in now,” as President Biden put it in his inaugural address, referring not only to the global COVID-19 pandemic, but also to the economic crisis, to climate change, to racial injustice, and to an expo- nential growth of political extremism. His diagnosis that “[d]emocracy is fragile” (Biden) came as a reminder of the continuous attacks on U.S. politics from the inside, from what the previous administration had infamously termed “alternative facts” (Conway qtd. in Rutenberg) to continuous, unfounded claims—against dozens of court decisions—of election fraud. The attempted insurrection and storming of the Capitol on January 6 was only the latest in a long history of assaults on the media, in fact, on truthfulness itself, on a political system, and on a political style based on the exchange of arguments. As General Editors of a German-based American Studies journal, we share the belief that democracy relies and depends on the common interest in a society in which factuality and science matter, in which different opinions can be voiced, without pressure or terror, and in which compromises can be found for diverging opinions and interests in peaceful ways. We, therefore, believe that the following collection of position statements on the status of American democracy is timely. The present special issue continues our work of interdisciplinary, transnational academic exchange, but it is also different from other issues of Ameri- kastudien / American Studies in several ways. Instead of our usual set of peer-reviewed, 70,000-character analyses of literature, culture, politics,

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 7-8 7 Carmen Birkle and Birgit Däwes history, language, pedagogy, and society, it brings together a larger number of shorter perspectives on the current political climate within and beyond the United States. While this format is more experimental, we believe that it is aptly suited for the discussion of a complex and multifaceted historical moment. The more than forty points of view assembled here are by no means exhaustive, and we understand the variety of perspectives included here as an incentive for further conversation. As National Youth Poet Laureate and Harvard graduate Amanda Gor- man suitably put it on January 20, “we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us / but what stands before us.” In this spirit, we hope that you will find the range of positions as rewarding as we do. In any case, we welcome and appreciate your opinions. On behalf of our editorial board, this issue has been expertly curated by our guest editors, Cedric Essi, Heike Paul, and Boris Vormann. For this exceptional choreography and their tireless effort in gathering these voices, we owe them a major debt of gratitude. We would also like to thank the contributors for taking the time out of an unusually busy few months, under COVID-19 conditions, to send their thoughts. As always, this issue would not have come into shape without the hard and outstanding work of our editorial team, our associate editors, and our publisher, Universitätsverlag Winter. We are immensely grateful for our continued cooperation and applaud the benefits of teamwork, to which this issue strongly testifies.

Flensburg / Marburg, February 2021

Works Cited Biden, Joseph R., Jr. “Inaugural Address by President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.” The White House. The White House, 20 Jan. 2021. Web. 31 Jan. 2021. https:// www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/01/20/ inaugural-address-by-president-joseph-r-biden-jr/. Gorman, Amanda. “The Hill We Climb.” The Guardian. Guardian Media Group, 20 Jan. 2021. Web. 31 Jan. 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/ jan/20/amanda-gorman-poem-biden-inauguration-transcript. Rutenberg, Jim. “‘Alternative Facts’ and the Costs of Trump-Branded Reality.” New York Times. New York Times, 22 Jan. 2017. Web. 31 Jan. 2021. https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/01/22/business/media/alternative-facts-trump- brand.html.

8 Amst 66.1 (2021): 7-8 Common Grounds?—A Preface

Cedric Essi, Heike Paul, and Boris Vormann

The term “common ground” was first used to describe “a basis of mutual interest or agreement” in 1809 (“common ground”). This mutual basis can be limited, meaning that the individuals or parties who share it may not necessarily agree on much else. A common ground can thus be highly specific or of minor import, and can also be temporary, provisional, and reached for pragmatic purposes. Such common ground can be established in conversations, in relationships, and in larger-scale processes of political decision-making. It can consist of a set of shared beliefs and opinions. Often, it results from compromise. Notwithstand- ing caveats, common ground is an affirmation of commonality in the face of difference and antagonism. Common ground can be arrived at when people move away from conflicting positions and move toward each other—or when they can at least begin to agree on the terms of engagement or the lines of conflict. The notion of a common ground may be considered fundamental to the idea of democracy. Certainly, “the people” are invoked as a collective subject—a demos able to arrive at decisions through majority rule. Recently, the “will of the people” (Weale) has been instrumentalized by authoritarian populists and their parties to produce a mere fantasy of legitimacy, to silence dissent, and to create disruption. Hence, “a fundamental principle of constitutional democracy—that democracy is in- stitutionalized debate in which competing views are expressed within a set of rules” (Weale xi-xii) has been contested and, indeed, endangered. One of the tasks at hand, therefore, may be to insist on and reaffirm a basic common ground on how democracy should work. The idea of a common ground in democratic societies may be seen as contrasting with the hegemonic forms of individualism and competitiveness of the neoliberal age. Jeremy Gilbert and Wendy Brown, for instance, work through the effects of this tension of the contemporary moment, and they have offered rigorous analyses of the de- or anti-

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 9-14 9 Cedric Essi, Heike Paul, and Boris Vormann democratizing impetus of neoliberalism. By contrast, Dana Nelson’s valorization of a “commons democracy” has refocused on an alternative historical narrative of political participation, conceiving of American democracy as more than just an elite project through her emphasis on “non-elite citizens” and (often local) practices of solidarity and collaboration (17). Is this more than nostalgic revisitation or reinvention of a usable past? The narrow common ground understood to be the primary scene of U.S. democracy is clearly not as inclusive as American national mythology purports it to be. The institution of slavery continued to exist for a century after the country’s founding and has since permutated into new forms of anti-Black captivity, oppression, and surveillance. Deep fissures ran through American society in the past, and they continue to do so today—so much so, in fact, that seeking common ground can appear hopelessly naive, or even to be a form of violence itself. Is the very metaphor of “common ground” always already compromised, always already corrupt, when negotiating nationhood and statehood on stolen Indigenous land? Historically, the exclusion and disenfranchisement of large parts of the population has been a way to maintain common ground and status quo among a wealthy elite. This has often been justified through a narrow understanding of a demos defined as White, able- bodied, cis-heteronormative, and patriarchal. Throughout U.S. history, this exclusivity has been frequently challenged through myriad modes, ranging from protest and civil disobedience to more violent measures. In the twentieth century, the Civil Rights Movement fought for political, legal, social, and cultural change. And yet, even the pronounced multiculturalism of the post-Cold War era has been instrumentalized to legitimize and reproduce inequality and injustice by pitting socio-political groups against each other. Inclusion—discursive and otherwise—suggesting a broader basis in a new “commons democracy” (Nelson) has not been realized. A range of scholars, from Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., to J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, continue to remind readers that enslavement and settler colonialism persist in structuring democratic life. In all the different accentuations and applications that the phrase “common ground” invites, it constitutes an umbrella term and a heu- ristic for thinking through the current moment. This is what the contributors to this special edition of Amerikastudien / American Studies were invited to do. The concise texts in this issue address and problematize aspects of American democracy from various disciplinary perspectives and with unique emphases. Included are, among others, concerns of social justice, media, and various institutions of education and social reproduction. Many of the issue’s authors also comment on the outcomes of the 2020 presidential election, as well as the heightened state of agitation as a result of the incendiary rhetoric and actions of Donald Trump. Contributors reflect, too, on the future in a historical moment in which a major part of the U.S. electorate still apathetically looks on

10 Amst 66.1 (2021): 9-14 Common Grounds?—A Preface at the January 6 attack on the Capitol. This issue ultimately invited its authors—and now invites its readers—to move beyond the dominant, well-rehearsed rhetoric of “divisiveness” and “polarization” as description of the American status quo, in order to more closely examine how we might depart from what has been routinely described as an impasse. This issue therefore constitutes an effort to bring into conversation -di verging perspectives on this historical moment, and in doing so includes leading public thinkers and commentators from both sides of the Atlan- tic. These contributors come together in this issue to interrogate the state of American democracy: How do unacknowledged or unresolved pasts of injustice make up the current conditions of U.S. democracy? What form of reconciliation is imaginable? Can or should a “common ground” be recovered and re-invented—and at what cost? Or should “common ground” rather be abandoned altogether, in order to avoid hypocrisy and illusion? These tensions are present in many of the contributions and explain why we have decided to refer to “common grounds” in the plural, indicating that such arrangements are selective, shapeshifting, and unstable. We have further added a question mark to the title so as to prompt reflection both on whether commonalities are necessary for democracy to function in the first place, and whether, in practice, such common grounds could ever, even in minor form, be attained. Our issue begins with a “Prologue” in the form of a poem that dis- cards a linear narrative of democratic progress, in recognition of racial capitalism as a founding principle of U.S. nationhood and an ongoing logic of governance (Boyd). The “Presence of a Divided Past” (Sec- tion II) often appears overwhelming. How can there be a shared present in the face of deeply flawed foundations (Glancy) and a memorial culture that ritualistically preserves the heritage of Native American removal and slavery (Hustvedt; Weinman) to the detriment of groups inadequately represented, or even over their dead bodies? Articles in this section of this volume trace perspectives of different groups across time and various intersecting lines of race, gender, sexuality, and diaspora (Võ; Bieger; Meier). For a number of scholars, the current division and its prehistories are governed by White supremacy (Bonilla-Silva). In light of this, some of the issue’s authors fundamentally reject the notion of “common grounds,” claiming it is a problematic category, even an insult (Sennett; Rodríguez). Many of the authors in this section debate ways to engage with the divided publics of the present and the divisions that run through neighborhoods (Shank), political life (Lammert), and the media (Raetzsch). These rifts have brought the long-cherished master narrative of American liberalism to deeper ruin, and they need to be understood in the broader context of the United States’ political and military engagements in the world (Gerund). Against this broader backdrop, what does it even mean to make America great again—and again (Schleusener)—or to think about American politics in terms of serial installments (Bronfen)?

Amst 66.1 (2021): 9-14 11 Cedric Essi, Heike Paul, and Boris Vormann

Given the institutional legacies of oppression in the American political system, and given, too, the tasks ahead of the Biden administration, the question arises whether any fundamental change to address these fissures is at all imaginable. The third section of this volume addresses America’s “Futures Foreseen.” What does the coup at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, signify (Calhoun; Pease)? While most contributions were written before that event, they nonetheless all engage with various conflicts that have paved its way (Stryker; Mayer): How to engage with the 74 million Americans who aimed to give Trump a second term as U.S. president (von Bergen)? Can and should there be common ground with those who stand on the far right, outside the rule of law? Moreover, what exactly is at stake at this particular turning point? Are we witnessing the dislodging of political institutions by the predatory elements in our economic systems (Sassen) that have for a long time not been mapped in the space of the nation-state? Are we hearing the last gasps of a dying American empire (Kurashige)? The collapse of neoliberalism (Berman)? Is a return to the time before Trump possible, or even desirable? What would such a return mean for domestic politics (Kölemen) and international affairs (Aust; Guérot)? Domestically, the formula of the American jeremiad, whose utopian deliverance is always just beyond reach, seems exhausted (Broeck). The jeremiad also bespeaks a seriality that is at once nostalgic (for past greatness) and forward looking (toward a second chance). Perhaps what it means to engage politically needs to be cast in radically different terms (Warren; Mo’e’hahne). Some of this section’s contributions reflect on the more particular role of scholars and universities in addressing the grievances of the present. How to reject alienation and violent passivity (Fawaz)? On which terms to engage (Monot)? How can education be rethought so as to work against the anti-Blackness that is inscribed into and maintained by American democracy (Brim; ross)? In what ways has the current Black freedom struggle in the United States led to increased knowledge production around anti-Blackness in German democracy (Thompson)? What is the relationship between democracy and Transnational American Studies (Hornung; Banerjee)? This reflection on the role of academia culminates in a debate on how to imagine emancipatory futures in the face of apocalyptic discourses and the splintering of claims for truth (Hentschel; Höhne). How to deal with conspiracies? And how to hold political actors accountable? This also raises highly concrete questions about addressing transnational problems at a moment of renationalization. How can questions of social justice be posed in the face of climate crisis (Sze)? What new political agencies and imaginaries might arise (Wakeman; Mazzucato) for there to even be a future at all? As our issue’s “Epilogue,” a concluding poem by Melba Boyd offers one possible and powerful vision entitled “We Want Our City Back.” To be unequivocally clear: The title of this issue is not meant to ro- manticize the meaning of common ground. And it is a far cry from

12 Amst 66.1 (2021): 9-14 Common Grounds?—A Preface rehashing any notion of an American consensus. John Higham famously dismissed this in his 1959 essay “The Cult of the American Consensus,” and no plausible evidence for its reclamation has thus far arisen. Still, new narratives of the nation may be much needed, and some are already in the making. Most recently, Jill Lepore has undertaken the project to write the story of the United States as “a history of contradictions,” as one reviewer called it (Sullivan). Her magnum opus, These Truths, is in some ways concerned with common ground. As an answer to the attacks on the Capitol by Trump supporters, President-elect Joe Biden contended that “the scenes of chaos […] do not reflect true America, do not represent who we are.” Biden’s rejecting “a small number of extremists dedicated to lawlessness” (qtd. in McCarthy et al.) as aberrations in an otherwise exceptional American project is inaccurate and will not suffice to address, acknowledge, or dismantle the legacies that lie at the heart of today’s divisions and oppression. This will instead require change on the scale of a new social contract. With many nations currently facing similar illiberal threats, perhaps the questions raised in this issue must be posed and addressed at the transnational level. In keeping with this global orientation, this issue looks across the Atlantic in order to foster conversations between scholars of various dis- ciplines in the larger field of American Studies. We, the guest editors, have asked these thinkers to reflect on democracy after Donald Trump. Nearly all of the contributions were composed for this issue and appear here for the very first time. The texts by Siri Hustvedt, Sheri Berman, Ramzi Fawaz, Mariana Mazzucato, and Melba Boyd are exceptions to this, and we would therefore like to thank these authors for permission to reprint updated versions of their publications. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the General Editors, Carmen Birkle and Birgit Däwes, for their support, and to emphatically thank Andrew Wildermuth and Johannes Schmid for their diligence, precision, and commitment as the copy editors of this volume.

Works Cited

Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Poli- tics in the West. New York: Columbia UP, 2019. Print. “Common Ground.” Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, 2021. Web. 2 Jan. 2021. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/common%20ground. Gilbert, Jeremy. Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Indi- vidualism. London: Pluto, 2014. Print. Glaude, Eddie S., Jr. Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul. New York: Broadway, 2016. Print. Higham, John. “The Cult of the American Consensus: Homogenizing Our His- tory.” Commentary 27.2 (1959): 93-100. Print. Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani. Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Co- lonial Politics of State Nationalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2018. Print. Lepore, Jill. These Truths: A History of the United States. New York: Norton, 2018. Print.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 9-14 13 Cedric Essi, Heike Paul, and Boris Vormann

McCarthy, Tom, Vivian Ho, and Joan E. Greve. “Congress Certifies Joe Biden’s Win—As It Happened.” The Guardian. Guardian Media Group, 6 Jan. 2021. Web. 15 Jan. 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2021/ jan/06/georgia-election-latest-news-senate-ossoff-warnock-democrats- republicans-trump-biden. Nelson, Dana. Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. Print. Sullivan, Andrew. “The American Past: A History of Contradictions.” New York Times. New York Times, 14 Sept. 2018. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://www. nytimes.com/2018/09/14/books/review/jill-lepore-these-truths.html. Weale, Albert. The Will of the People: A Modern Myth. Cambridge: Polity, 2018. Print.

14 Amst 66.1 (2021): 9-14 I. Prologue

Eulogy for Detroit 1967

Melba Joyce Boyd

“Repression breeds retaliation” —Robert Kennedy

Cops slap, swear, shove, injure and threaten with weapons; people strike back, attack cop cars, and load guns; flames erupt, buildings explode; smoke hovers over 12th Street and Clairmont, as city and state police riddle apartment buildings with bullets, like target practice in Vietnamese villages as Army tanks plow down boulevards; mother and child huddle behind barricaded doors, fear frozen in July heat; snipers return fire into the storm.

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 17-21 17 Melba Joyce Boyd

II.

Beneath neon palm trees, flickering inside smoke clouds, police trap unarmed civilians inside the Algiers Motel, a name alluding to a desert or a scene in “Casablanca,” a film where Sam, the black piano man, plays for Bogart, the hero, fighting fascism.

Cooper, Pollard and Temple, 3 black teenagers caught crossing the color line, aspiring pimps partying with white “chicks”; caught betwixt and between the skin game and police rage emboldened by fire power and martial law; 3 unarmed men trapped in the annex of civil disobedience, like movie extras doomed in a script, or like refugees detained at the border without citizenship, restrained, beaten and murdered in an annex of city unrest.

18 Amst 66.1 (2021): 17-21 Eulogy for Detroit 1967

III.

In the aftermath, ignorant and absent of any brown peers, of family or community grief for the deceased, 12 jurors, boxed in a suburban courtroom beyond inner city view, dismiss witnesses, excuse evidence, and ignore torture, and deem murders by cops justifiable homicides of Carl Cooper, Aubrey Pollard and Fred Temple, innocent teenagers guilty only of carnal sin and dark skin.

IV.

Beneath the clay of decay, The Algiers Motel remains absent on the outskirts of city planning, while 12th Street recalls Rosa Parks, a veteran of domestic wars, symbolic renaming of hallowed grounds, and sacred spaces.

50 years since, people live with history twisted by myths brooding with untruths to justify retaking

Amst 66.1 (2021): 17-21 19 Melba Joyce Boyd

the city from survivors of ’67, repossessing homes with excessive taxes, extreme insurance rates, and soaring utility bills for water too expensive to drink; even in the City of Flint, where rusty, lead pipes funnel poison into kitchen sinks; while arsonists acquire acreage for real estate moguls to house hipsters, born-again Republicans, and capitalist investors, claiming to save us from ourselves, as white folks move back, and the mayor ain’t Black.

Peregrine falcons once soared above skyscrapers, perched on gargoyles, viewing museums with tempered memories savored for patrons on passages to yesteryears. now, we pray that the dead wake the living sons toiling in factory fields and mulatto daughters hidden between bed linen.

20 Amst 66.1 (2021): 17-21 Eulogy for Detroit 1967

they are evidence police terrorize, they are fissures in family portraits, fractures in a democracy, contradictions in the Constitution, inconveniences clotting rhetoric, like toxic smoke, choking the atmosphere.

This poem… this poem is a eulogy, a remembering of ’67, an unearthing of bloodstained graves, reopening caskets, to treat festering wounds, to enable healing after death, to retrieve breath currents of 43 lives, rising and falling with the undertow of memory, seeking full measure of human remains.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 17-21 21

II. Presence of a Divided Past

The Problem of America Is the Foundational Post on Which It Stands

Diane Glancy

I see America with an arrow in her head and a slave chain on her ankle. Sweet land of liberty. The problem of America is the foundational post on which it stands, or, one of its posts. It is situated on stolen land. America before it was America belonged to the Indian. They did not see themselves as owners, but tenants. The incoming Europeans, however, saw themselves as claimants of the land, as owners, as rightful heirs of the abundance of America. Its space and natural resources. They left the Indian in their wake. This July, 2020, I am at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, on a writing fellowship researching the effect of Christianity on the New England Indian. I have a stipend to study. A house in which to stay while I am here. I have a shaded patio behind the house on which to eat. In my research, many of the foundational members of Christianity in New England tell of their efforts to evangelize the Indian. Save their souls. I am from the Bible Belt visiting New England. I drove 1,454 miles from Kansas by myself in my Ford for two days to get here, sleep- ing in my car in a rest area because I wanted to avoid motels during the pandemic. I am on Nipmuc land though they have been long removed as occupiers of their land. I am from fundamental America with faith in God through Jesus Christ. I have gone to church all my life. My mother was English and German. My father, among other heritages, was Cherokee. I can go back to my great-great-great-great-grandfather who is on the 1835 Cherokee census. I am not a member of the Chero- kee Nation because after dispute over land, some of my father’s people left Indian Territory and settled in Arkansas and were not in Indian Territory for the Dawes Rolls of 1897 which determined citizenship.

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 25-29 25 Diane Glancy

But I am member #1255 of the First Families of the Cherokee Nation. Lewis Hall, my father. Orvezene Lewis Hall, my grandmother. Woods Lewis, my great-grandfather. Arvezena Crawford Lewis, my great- great-grandmother. Mary Waters Crawford, my great-great-great- grandmother. Michael Waters, my great-great-great-great-grandfather on the 1835 Cherokee census. It was a mean, ongoing argument over land I read about in the legal papers in the Cherokee Heritage Museum in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. There were arguments among Indians. It was not always European vs. Indian. My mother had German and English heritage. The German name was Siceloff. One of the Siceloffs made a genealogy. In 1736, three brothers and a sister came to America from Minfeld and Kandel in the Black Forest region of Germany bordering France. They made passage on the ship Harle and settled in Pennsylvania. Twenty years later, March 24, 1756, one of the brothers, Georg, with his wife and three of their five children were massacred by Indians in Schuylkill, Pennsylvania. Sev- eral generations later, part of the family migrated West. My maternal grandparents had a farm on the Missouri / Kansas border, where I went as a child. It is where I learned their fierce independence, raising four children on the prairie without electricity or running water. My parents were a mix of oppositional forces. They were different races. They belonged to different political parties. I remember my father telling my mother their votes canceled out each other. But my mother held her opinions. My father had come from Arkansas to work in the stockyards in Kansas City. My mother had come from the farm in Kan- sas. They met, married in 1933 during the Depression, and worked until they could buy a house. I was born in 1941. My brother followed in 1944. I also had the experience of starting from nothing after I was divorced in 1983. I knew the diligence and work ethic of my parents. I knew stewardship. I had a fundamental faith in God. This, after all, was America, where it was possible to start from nothing and work hard until the nothing became something. I prayed God would not abandon me, and he did not. It has happened with my two children also. But the gravy train for many never got started. Native Americans have been left in poverty and abandonment on remote reservations. In the Native part of my heart, my thinking, I think, the country has a foundational post in thievery, and it would haunt. It would come back to take from America its heroic belief in itself because the thievery has not been admitted. It has been overlooked and ignored and shoved under other concerns. Maybe it is beginning to be rectified. In July 2020, the Supreme Court gave Indian lands in Oklahoma back to the Native Tribes. They upheld a treaty that gave Indian Territory to the Indians when they were removed from the Southeast. “Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for pur-

26 Amst 66.1 (2021): 25-29 The Problem of America Is the Foundational Post on Which It Stands poses of federal criminal law. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion (qtd. in Healy and Liptak). When I wrote Pushing the Bear, a novel about the 1838-39 Cherokee Trail of Tears, I remember reading the Reclamation Claims and Spo- liation papers I found in various museums and research libraries. The Cherokee who had been driven from their lands in Georgia and North Carolina were asking for recompense for what they lost. They made note of the acreage, the hayforks and plows, the pig, the chicken, the corn- crib, the little cabin they were removed from. I copied some of them in the book. The Cherokee had been granted land west of the Mississippi where they could start again, free of White settlers who were taking their land in the Southeast. Great America with a wound in its heel that is beginning to make it limp. African Americans are getting the attention of their plight. Freed from slavery but without a way to achieve economic stability, they have remained in prejudice and poverty. Earning an income is the key. I was given time to teach and study and write and apply for grants and opportunities that would give me more information from which to write and lecture and teach, while many Indians were left in reservation poverty, isolation on land that no one else wanted, a general disenfranchisement, separation from language and culture which are backbones, and punitive boarding schools that led many to alcoholism and drug abuse. There were times I thought I should give up my post and my insular life of reading and writing and teach on a reservation, but more books and more writing projects called. I am a typical American in that I am a mix of many parts. I am part of the ones who came. A part of those who were here when the others arrived. An amalgamation of many. I have a desire to achieve. I have a self-centeredness, yet a sense of giving to others through Christian tith- ing and support of several ministries whose focus is benevolence. I have been educated. I have been an educator, teaching Creative Writing and Native American Literature for twenty years at a small liberal arts college in St. Paul, Minnesota. I still teach in a low-residency MFA program at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Next year I will take part in a new “creative approach to writing” course in a seminary. America is not the country it was. Yet its past is here. As a child, I remember the violence of labor union disputes in the stockyards where my father worked. The political upheaval. World War II. Atomic bombs dropped in another country. Differing opinions and volatility always have been with us. We are more divided now. We have riots in our cities protesting injustice, not only race, but the economy as well. Even as a child, I remember my father coming home from the barbershop outraged at some of the political views held by other men. Divisions always have been here. The Wild West transmuted. The frontier mentality. It seems our divisions

Amst 66.1 (2021): 25-29 27 Diane Glancy are more outspoken. Maybe because there are so many more of us now. Maybe because television carries the disputes day and night. Always hungry for the news that will get attention. Always looking for the disrupt- ers. America’s origins and leadership in the problematic “world system of racialized capitalism” continue (Essi, Paul, and Vormann). I am a capitalist because I have had opportunity to follow my endeavors. Because in the 1980s women and minorities were mandated in academia. Minority Studies were now required in liberal arts colleges. I was hired at an institution whose faculty had been nearly all European- descent male and now had to include “Others,” which meant women and minorities, of which I was both. Therefore, I was given a chance. I base some of it on prayer and faith. I left Oklahoma and went to a cold, northern climate in Minnesota where it was winter eight months of the year, late October to early May. I bought a snow shovel and a roof rake to pull down the heavy accumulation of snow between the eaves of the roof. I cannot say I had fun, but it was where I wanted to be. Where I was willing to work and give my all. I do not want socialism. I want individual ingenuity with everyone given a chance to do what they can. The problem is, there will be unequal outcome. But what if I had not been given a chance? I want equality for everyone to pursue their goals. But what to do with those who do not have equal vision? And what to do with those wanting to accumulate from the beginning? There is quandary in terms of socialism and social justice. Everyone starting at “Go” has its injustice also. Background, education, stability of parents, inheritance, advantages one is born with, give some a head start. Yet there is order in the Judeo-Christian heritage that has been the basis of the middle America I have known—that has been a component of American democracy. Recently, I was reading 1 Chronicles 23-27 in the Old Testament where David assembles Israel. There were duties of the priests, the governors, the captains, the stewards, the gatekeepers, the musicians (there were two hundred fourscore and eight of them [1 Chron. 25.7]). Over the camels was Obil, over the asses was Jehdeiah, over the flocks was Jaziz (1 Chron. 27.30-27.31). All these were rulers of the substance which was King David’s (1 Chron. 27.31). I think it was order that held my parents together, though not always happily—that allowed them to work and buy a house and a car, and raise two children, and take a few vacations. It was the same sense of order that caused me to leave a dysfunctional marriage that was not working, and later pursue my own goals. There is elasticity within the order of freedom and democracy. I know there are many other faiths in America. I know there is rebellion against Christianity and the Bible. Yet it is where I endure. The key to America still may be its diversity, though the struggle against one another is on a larger scale than the labor union bombings of my father’s day. There is dissent stretching the seams of American democracy.

28 Amst 66.1 (2021): 25-29 The Problem of America Is the Foundational Post on Which It Stands

Over the years, I visited Germany, Italy, Jordan, and Syria as part of an Arts America program for the USIS. I remember in particular Syria in 1994, talking with students in universities in Homs, Aleppo, Latakia, and Damascus. There was unrest even then. “We don’t want to be told what to believe,” they said. “We want to be free.” Syria now has suffered a devastating nine-year civil war and Bashar Al-Assad rules a country of rubble. I wonder what happened to those students I talked to over twenty-five years ago. How many have been killed or are refugees? It is economic inequity at the root of many troubles. The lack of freedom to pursue one’s work and earn a living. The 1874-77 Gold Rush that brought Europeans into the Black Hills of South Dakota sacred to the Native American is still with us. Those who have had four presidents chiseled on their mountain at Rushmore are speaking. No matter how significant a country those men established.

Works Cited The Bible. Introd. and notes by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford: Ox- ford UP, 1998. Print. Oxford World’s Classics. Authorized King James Vers. Essi, Cedric, Heike Paul, and Boris Vormann. “Call for Papers: Common Grounds? Transatlantic Perspectives on the State of American Democracy.” Message to Diane Glancy. 13 July 2020. E-mail. Healy, Jack, and Adam Liptak. “Landmark Supreme Court Ruling Affirms Na- tive American Rights in Oklahoma.” New York Times. New York Times, 9 July 2020. Web. 12 July 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/us/ supreme-court-oklahoma-mcgirt-creek-nation.html.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 25-29 29

“Hold Them to Account”

Richard Sennett in Conversation with Boris Vormann

Boris Vormann:

The title of this special issue isCommon Grounds? Are there such common grounds in American society? And do you even think they are a necessary condition for democracy to become possible?

Richard Sennett:

I don’t like the language of “coming together” or of “common ground.” To me, this goes back to a very old idea from the Greeks, isegoria, which is to be held accountable for your words. And I think that people on the radical right have to be held accountable for their words. We made Holocaust denial a hate crime, holding people accountable for their words. I think we have to do that for racism, which, to me, is the deep motor of Trumpism. So rather than thinking about common ground, I am thinking about how we can hold people accountable for things that do other people harm. They epitomize hate speech, and they should be punished for it. “Bringing America together” seems to me misguided. I have written a lot about the White working class over the course of my life. I’ve seen where some of these racist things come from. But in the end, treating people like adults is to say that this is not acceptable: “You cannot do that, and as much as I understand you, I do not empathize with you.”

Boris Vormann:

I don’t disagree at all with what you are saying. By “common grounds” we are not insinuating that we should reach out to the radical right. But don’t you think that there needs to be at least some common acceptance of truth, or a common political space in which to disagree with one another for democracy to work?

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 31-36 31 Richard Sennett in Conversation with Boris Vormann

Richard Sennett:

Well, it depends where you draw the line. If you say, as is now evidently the case on radical media outlets, that vaccination against CO- VID is a communist plot, that is a crime to me. There is no common ground that can be had with that. What I believe in is cooperation when you can find it, but I think the notion of a new American consensus is just taking us down the wrong path. When people are in fantasies, it is their own responsibility to work their way through them. I am not interested in why somebody believes vaccination is communism. What interests me is getting them to understand that what they say has consequences that are harmful to themselves, to their family, to their children, and so on. I don’t like this liberal rhetoric of mutuality and common ground.

Boris Vormann:

Should it then, above all, be the criminal justice system that ensures people are held accountable?

Richard Sennett:

Holocaust denial, for instance, is something that the criminal justice system punishes. Other forms of hate speech that really do harm to people, such as racial hate speech, should be punished, too. This is not a Talmudic idea on my part, but is fundamental to the operations of a polity in which words have consequences. Otherwise, why have a debate? Why have speeches? If anything goes, if you are post-truth, you don’t need a polity. Of course, I’d criminalize any kind of hate speech through the justice system. But there is also a more structural point to be made. I do not think there is any way that you can work people out of that corner of fantasy and unreality through discursive interaction. There have to be boundaries outside of which discursive relationships simply do not apply. It makes me very uneasy to hear people in Washington speak about things like “healing America’s wounds.” You can do that discursive play, but only within limits. Unfortunately, I think this is a wound that won’t heal. I think there is a bedrock of haters in America—a solid bedrock of cruelty and fantasy that goes all the way back to the Civil War, and even before that. We have to recognize this as part of what it means to be an American: that you are always tempted by the “other” America, which is intolerant, racist, and permanently angry. Something that struck me about Trump is that there was an inflec- tion of this kind of racist America which before had been more regional. What I have understood about Trump is that he found a way to dere- gionalize the American South. You find it in Massachusetts now, even though the state voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden, but there is still

32 Amst 66.1 (2021): 31-36 “Hold Them to Account” a solid core of Trumpists in a so-called liberal state. That is also true in New York City. If you go to Staten Island, you are in Trumpland. Dur- ing liberal hegemony, those were silent and passive voices. Now they are not.

Boris Vormann:

What do you think the role of fear is in producing and mobilizing these voices? There are certainly true grievances from deindustrialization, from alienation in the workplace, or, say, the lack of public goods. But isn’t there something less tangible than these insecurities that goes well beyond that? Fears that politicians like Trump have been able to stoke?

Richard Sennett:

That’s what I am writing about now: how fear on the far right is a performance. If your fear is that communists are in control of vaccines, to go back to that earlier example, that is something that you have not arrived at deductively. That is a fear that has been enacted for you and performed. We know that about Viktor Orbán in Europe, for instance. Hungary destroyed almost all of its Jewry, but he is able to perform antisemitism as something that arouses that kind of fear. I actually have to say, I don’t see this as a majority factor for the people that I interviewed over the course of my life in the working class, and from which I come myself. I would say even when they are racist, their racism is tempered by the knowledge that they work with particular Black workers whom they exempt from this kind of categorical racism. Whereas the middle class is often not exposed to the “other” in the same way. I think the working class gets a rather bad rap on this, as though this irrationality is all due to the fact that they are these poor, left-behind workers. I just think racism is generated in a completely different way. It is not simply that there is a wound suffered in the world that people are responding to by moving to the right. I just don’t believe that is true.

Boris Vormann:

I am wondering about the 74 million who voted for Trump. They would certainly not all consider themselves far right. How to deal with these 74 million voters?

Richard Sennett:

But who is speaking to them? There is really an issue about how center-right parties can detach themselves from extreme-right parties.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 31-36 33 Richard Sennett in Conversation with Boris Vormann

But if you are, like me, on the center-left or left, that is not our problem. We are not going to do that work for Chancellor Merkel. She is going to have to do it for herself. It is a kind of false empathy to say that they cannot do it for themselves—that they are not responsible for taking care of themselves, and that we, the good-hearted, tolerant, empathic left somehow have to engage and rescue them. That is not our problem. It is also something that William Kristol, an anti-Trump Republican, said: this is not a problem for Democrats. This is a problem for center-right Republicans to decide where they stand. And, again, that is something that has to come from them, not from the nation “healing its wounds.”

Boris Vormann:

Would you say that your research on changes in capitalism, and, more specifically, the world of labor, holds insights that can also be helpful in analyzing Trumpism?

Richard Sennett:

I don’t think, at least in the work I have done, that the result of alienation is extremism. It takes many different and many more compelling forms. Like the loss of hope in oneself—workers who give up trying to take care of themselves. There is a kind of politicization of people’s experience which denies its complexity. The problems for workers I have interviewed are much more pressing ones: How am I going to live a good life if the work that I am offered is oppressive? The idea that the answer to that question is that I’ll become a racist, that’s for journalists. That is not how people actually live frustration and wounds, because it doesn’t tell you what to do tomorrow morning. The academy often has an almost pornographic relation to the left- right divide. This is the kind of riveting obsession that everything falls into that dynamic. And it is just not true. When I interviewed software engineers fifteen years ago in Silicon Valley at Microsoft, they were all very right-wing, they were libertarians. But, in a sense, political ideology was so divorced from the problems that they had, thinking about getting into debt. These are the low-level programmers; they are not the poster boys, and there are thousands and thousands of them. When they’re thinking about going into debt, or why they are working twelve hours a day, tethered to their computer and not allowed to go home at night—that kind of political pornography is not a way to solve that kind of problem. It is a great temptation that we must avoid as scholars. Journalists love it: Will they turn to Trump? That’s a compartment that is separate from what, to me, seems to be the real injuries of class: a loss of direction, not knowing how to create a work narrative that orients you forward.

34 Amst 66.1 (2021): 31-36 “Hold Them to Account”

Boris Vormann:

Our everyday lives today are characterized by apocalyptic scenarios of the future. You have been working as a consultant for the United Na- tions on climate change and its implications for cities, and you are more aware than most of us about its potential, harmful consequences. De- mocracy, by contrast, seems to require a vision of abundance and possibility. In other words, does today’s so-prevalent apocalyptical discourse risk undermining the potential for democracy?

Richard Sennett:

In my work for the United Nations, this question has been very much on my mind for a very practical reason: apocalyptic thinking tends to be paralyzing. The response of many people when you declare a climate emergency, for instance—which we have seen happen in many countries—is that people think we cannot do anything about it. You are paralyzed. It is a kind of pacification. And so we have been having many discussions, particularly about how to approach COP26, the next United Nations Climate Change Conference. How do you actually mobilize people? How do you put pressure on political systems to change? Rhetoric of emergency can be disabling in its pacification. But one of the odd things I have observed is that a certain amount of individual agency does not get paralyzed, with people, for example, becoming willing to bicycle or walk or take electric cars. However, this is not translating into a form of collective action that would, for instance, hold the six big oil-producing international firms accountable. So there is a kind of glitch in democracy. You have an agent, but that agent remains at the level of individual action.

Boris Vormann:

I don’t want to urge you to look into the crystal ball, but, by way of conclusion, I’d be interested to know how you think this particular, tumultuous historical moment might be understood when we look back on it from the future?

Richard Sennett:

Well, the one thing that I hope will happen is that the majority of Americans will come to a kind of Aufklärung about the fact that we aren’t one country, and that people will move on from there. Every- thing I have said to you can be positive, in a way. Once you stop having a fantasy of common ground, then there are ways to act, ways to hold people morally and legally responsible. But this requires a kind of

Amst 66.1 (2021): 31-36 35 Richard Sennett in Conversation with Boris Vormann recognition that where we are now is reality itself, not just something gone wrong. It is something that has bubbled to the surface, like a rock that’s been exposed. That is why I hated all the journalism about what Trump did to democracy. The only thing he did was expose something that has been there since the time of slavery. He stripped away all the silences around it—but he did not do or create anything. What I hope for is sober reckoning that we have a huge criminal element in our country. And criminals have to be recognized as such. That’s my vision of the future.

36 Amst 66.1 (2021): 31-36 Tear Them Down: Old Statues, Bad Science, and Ideas That Just Won’t Die1

Siri Hustvedt

Monuments often lie. Political elites erect them in the name of one sanctioned collective narrative or another, and they come down by violence or by decree as historical winds shift. In 1776, American patriots toppled an equestrian statue of King George. Not one of the thousands of statues of Lenin that were once all over Ukraine is intact. The Lenins are now officially banned and have become the stone debris of another era. It is time to relegate all Confederate statues in the United States to the rubble heap or to commemorate them as images of a shameful, brutal, White supremacist lie. In a recent Instagram post, I wondered what an American tourist would think if while wandering in German cities and towns she was repeatedly met with statues of Hitler, Goebbels, and Göring, swastikas emblazoned on buildings, and Nazi flags flying from official buildings and sports stadiums. Would the open display of these signs not be rightly read as a celebration of genocide founded on scientific ideas of racial inferiority? The Third Reich is surely part of German history. Defend- ers of Confederate statues continually evoke “history” and “heritage” as foggy justifications for these abominations. Media outlets obediently repeat the words to explain the position as if it were self-evident. History is a story of the past, which can be told in many ways. Mer- riam-Webster defines “heritage” as 1. “property that descends to an heir” 2. “something transmitted by or acquired from a predecessor: legacy” (“heritage”). What do history and heritage mean in this context? When the South seceded from the Union, forty percent of its population was Black and regarded as legal property by the Confederacy. The words 1 Copyright © 2020 by Siri Hustvedt First Printed history and heritage are code for White glorification of an antebellum in Literary Hub; Reprinted past founded on a racial hierarchy repeatedly justified by sinister ideas of by Permission of ICM biological determinism. Partners.

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 37-45 37 Siri Hustvedt

It is hardly an accident that the Confederate battle emblem was added to the Georgia state flag in 1956 after court-ordered desegregation. The message: This is Whiteland. The very same message of White ownership of the country now comes from the top. A single bullet from the ongoing presidential tweet barrage is illustrative: “This is a battle to save the Heritage, History, and Greatness of our Country!” (qtd. in Dawsey). Imagine Angela Merkel tweeting the same message to her fellow citizens about statues of high-ranking Nazi officials left standing in her country. The parallel is worth making because it helps put the current debate about monuments and symbols in perspective. It is illegal in Germany to display the swastika. Historical parallel is not historical identity. Although the mainstream media often goes into panicked flutters whenever something “American” is tied to Hitler, I am hard-pressed to see why the buying and selling of human beings as property is not commensurate to Nazi crimes against humanity. Murder, rape, as well as physical and psychological torture were instruments of terror inherent to the institution of slavery, and they did not end with the defeat of the Confederacy. The enduring legacy of slavery in the United States is essential to the Black Lives Matter message. If George Floyd’s murder constitutes a breaking point in U.S. history it is because the image of a White man with his knee on a Black man’s neck as he slowly suffocates his victim to death is understood as part of centuries of domination and cruelty rooted in a pernicious racial ideology that has permeated all our institutions. There are sound historical reasons to make connections between American and Nazi racism. Not only were the Nazis fervent students of Jim Crow and U.S. anti-immigration laws, racist eugenics thrived in both countries. Many of the Confederate monuments went up when eugenics was flourishing in the United States. Eugenics was hugely popular, was taught in high schools and universities as a scientific discipline, and was commonly viewed as promoting clean-living and medical hygiene. “Hygiene and eugenics should go hand in hand,” said the Yale economics professor Irving Fisher, the first president of the American Eugenics Society in a 1921 speech. “They are really both hygiene—one individual hygiene and one race hygiene—and both, eugenics—one indirectly safeguarding the germ plasma and the other directly through breeding” (qtd. in Cogdell 188). Read “genes” for “germ plasma.” Fisher was adamant that “the biologically unfit” should be prevented from marrying. The word eugenic, coined by Francis Galton (1822-1911) in the nineteenth century, means “well born” (Cogdell 3). Eugenics advocated controlling human reproduction to create a superior “stock” of human being. Galton’s science, which was based on the study of twins, statistical calculations, and his cousin Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, was explicitly racist. The catchphrase he coined “nature vs. nurture” has lived

38 Amst 66.1 (2021): 37-45 Tear Them Down: Old Statues, Bad Science, and Ideas That Just Won’t Die on. Galton wanted to quantify how much nature and how much nurture went into a human trait such as genius. He always came down on the side of nature. After Gregor Mendel’s genetic research was rediscov- ered early in the twentieth century, eugenics took hold of the American imagination in earnest with ugly consequences. White, wealthy Madi- son Grant founded The Galton Society with Charles Davenport and several others in 1908, an organization that stood for “preserving racial distinctions in their purity” (qtd. in Sussman 176). Grant’s book The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916, is a classic eugenic text that warns against racial mixing and touts Nordic superiority as a fact of physical anthropology. The book so impressed Ad- olf Hitler that he wrote to Grant and pronounced the work his “Bible” (qtd. in Sussman 87). In a 1921 article in Good Housekeeping, soon-to-be vice-president Calvin Coolidge delivered the standard eugenic position: “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races the outcomes show deterioration on both sides” (qtd. in Kendi 321). An- thropology was not a bulwark of consensus. It was intellectually and ideologically split on the meanings of race, but the eugenicists were devoted to the idea of pure blood and inborn psychological differences among the “races.” Eugenics sought to prove Caucasian superiority by scientific means. American sterilization laws and Nazi sterilization and euthanasia laws in the twentieth century were born of the same genetic science. Although eugenics is now regularly referred to as a pseudoscience, this distorts the truth. Pseudoscience is a word used in hindsight to dispar- age what has come to appear abhorrent. Anthropologists, geneticists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and large parts of the medical establishment embraced the precepts of eugenics. Brilliant statisticians, who were also devoted eugenicists, rabid racists, and followers of Galton—Karl Pearson, Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, and Charles Spearman—provided elaborate models of calculation that were crucial to the scientific success of the discipline. Although it often served right-wing causes, eugenics had progressive advocates. W. E. B. Du Bois, a strong supporter of birth control, hoped to discourage breeding among “Negroes” who were the “least intelligent and fit” (qtd. in Roberts 77). He accepted Mende- lian genetics as a way to improve the “race.” Margaret Sanger advocated forced sterilization. Whether she was racist or not remains a subject of controversy. Lewis Terman, author of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, still widely used, was another devoted eugenicist, who firmly believed that intelligence was a fixed, inherited biological trait that could be quantified. Spearman devised a statistical method for calculating general intelligence or “the g factor” in 1904. Poor Alfred Binet, the Frenchman who invented the tests as a teaching tool, was horrified with the claims made for it. Study after study in the 1920s found that IQ scores fell neatly into

Amst 66.1 (2021): 37-45 39 Siri Hustvedt a racial hierarchy. A typical study conducted in Texas placed Whites at the top, Hispanics in the middle, and Blacks at the bottom, a hierarchi- cal mirror of earlier research on cranial size conducted by anthropologists in the nineteenth century that was used to prove polygenism—the idea that human beings were not descended from a common ancestor but were made up of subspecies, i. e., races, a science used as a justification for slavery. The IQ studies also followed a class hierarchy. White people of the middle and upper classes were strikingly free of the taint of feeblemindedness. Feeblemindedness, a broad term for various forms of mental inadequacy, including moral laxity, was discovered to be shock- ingly high among immigrants, especially Eastern European Jews and Italians. “Not all criminals are feebleminded,” Terman wrote, “but all feebleminded persons are potential criminals. That every feebleminded woman is a potential prostitute would hardly be disputed by anyone” (11). In the United States, IQ became a marker for feeblemindedness and subsequent sterilization. In 1914, Harry Laughlin, who had earned a doctorate in biology from Princeton and was assistant director of the Eugenics Research Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor, drafted a Model Eugenic Sterilization Law that was used as a template for the Law for the Prevention of He- reditarily Diseased Offspring passed by the Reichstag in 1933. In 1936, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg. American and German eugenicists had intimate ties. The Rockefeller Foundation funded German eugenics research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the 1920s and continued to fund it until 1939 when Ger- many invaded Poland. Nazi genetic studies are also now described as pseudoscience, but Ernst Rüdin, head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Psychiatry, architect of Germany’s euthanasia laws, is still described as the “father” of genetic psychiatry. His 1916 paper on the heredity of schizophrenia is frequently cited and lauded in the genetic literature, often with no mention of his Nazi affiliation. The Rockefeller Founda- tion gave a grant specifically for twin research at the Institute, which the organization knew used toxins on the subjects involved. After Hitler came to power, Nazi race science was hardly a world secret. In 1935, the Nazi eugenics exhibition from the Deutsches Hygiene- Museum finished its successful tour of the United States. Rather than being returned to Germany, it was welcomed by the Buffalo Museum of Science as part of its permanent exhibition and was displayed in a room called Heredity Hall. Buffalo is far from Charlottesville and far from Richmond where the monument controversies are boiling, but that is the point. Nativist racism cannot be confined to any region of the United States. For the next seven years, visitors to that museum in the North digested its message of “racial hygiene” before it was taken down in 1942. In 2006, the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden mounted an exhibition of its Nazi past, its gruesome message contextualized for

40 Amst 66.1 (2021): 37-45 Tear Them Down: Old Statues, Bad Science, and Ideas That Just Won’t Die the contemporary audience. Perhaps it is time for the Smithsonian to mount a massive exhibition on American eugenics, its racist uses, its sterilization campaign, and its ongoing legacy in the many U.S. laws enacted to control female reproduction, laws that have the greatest effect 2 on poor women and Women of Color. Forcible sterilization laws were enacted in the United States as a direct result of eugenic ideas and were implemented by U.S. policy makers. Between 60,000 and 64,000 people were sterilized in the United States before the 1960s. But the practice continued well into the 1970s and cases in California were uncovered as late as 2010. In the 1920s, hundreds of people in institutions who had been diagnosed with demen- tia praecox (schizophrenia), epilepsy, manic depression, psychosis, and feeblemindedness were sterilized. Girls viewed as immoral, loose, and unfit for motherhood, many of them poor and White, were also targets for “fixing.” The scholar Alexandra Minna Stern notes in her paper “Sterilized in the Name of Public Health” that in the 1950s and 60s—after genetic science changed—a single recessive Mendelian gene was no longer regarded as the cause of myriad mental diseases—the operation “regained a punitive edge and, preponderantly aimed at African American and poor women, began to be wielded by state courts and legislatures as a punishment for bearing illegitimate children or as extortion to ensure ongoing receipt of family assistance” (Stern). I do not think it is coincidental that these punitive policies were put in place as the Civil Rights Movement was on the rise. It is not coincidental either that monuments honoring high Confederate officials went up mostly between 1890 and 1960. They are the symbols of ferocious racist intimidation, intimidation that had teeth. The wordeugenics vanished after the Second World War, but practices of reproductive control in the United States did not. Eugenics lived on by other names. By the 1960s, “Mississippi appendectomy” had become a familiar shorthand among Black women in the South. On June 8, 1964, the civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer testified before a select panel on Mississippi and Civil Rights held in Washington, D.C.: “One of the other things that happened in Sunflower County, the North Sunflower County Hospital, I would say about six out of ten Negro women that go to that hospital are sterilized with their tubes tied. They are getting up a law that said if a woman has an illegitimate baby and then a second one, they could draw time for six months or a five hundred dollar fine. What they didn’t tell you is that they are already doing these things, not only to single women, but to married women” (qtd. in Kluchin 177). What 2 See also the special Hamer did not say in her testimony is that in 1961, she sought medical issue of Amerikastudien / attention for a uterine tumor. The White doctor performed a hysterec- American Studies on (Re) Considering American tomy without her consent. Eugenics (https://amst. Long after involuntary sterilization was banned in Germany, it con- winter-verlag.de/issue/ tinued in the United States. In 1974, with help from the Southern Pov- AMST/2019/2).

Amst 66.1 (2021): 37-45 41 Siri Hustvedt erty Law Center, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, who were sterilized in Alabama when they were just girls (14 and 12 years old), joined a class action suit, Relf vs. Weinberger. In his decision, Judge Gerhard Gesell found that an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 women had been sterilized under programs receiving federal funds per year. In his essay “Protection or Control?” Gregory Michael Dorr writes, “[a]lthough Gesell did not mention it, these sterilization rates indeed matched those of the Nazi regime in the 1930s. The only difference was that informed consent accompanied some of the American sterilizations” (180; emphasis in original). Gesell confirmed that minors, the mentally disabled, “and an indefinite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation” (qtd. in Dorr 180). A disproportionate number of those poor people, almost all of them women, were Black. The equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, was unveiled in 1924. That same year, Virginia passed the Racial Integ- rity Act, which forbade marriage and sexual relations between Whites and any person with “a trace whatsoever of any blood other than Cauca- sians” (qtd. in Cashin 96). One can only wonder how such a trace could be detected. Even the Nazis, whose eugenic campaign resulted in mass murder, had less strict laws about who was officially a Jew, Mischlinga — a person of mixed race—or an Aryan. At the same time, the Virginia legislature approved a bill legalizing sterilization of the “feebleminded.” Three prominent eugenicists in Virginia sought help from Harry Laughlin and Charles Davenport for how to draft the twin laws. Two years earlier, Laughlin had been designated the “Expert Eu- genics Agent” for the House Committee on Immigration and Natural- ization. He testified that large numbers of the new immigrants—Jews from Eastern Europe, Italians, and Greeks—suffered from “all types of social inadequacy” (750)—feeblemindedness, insanity, criminality, and dependency. And so in 1924, the year Robert E. Lee’s imposing statue was revealed for the first time, the Johnson-Reed Act was passed by Congress. It banned all immigration from Asia and established two percent quotas based on the U.S. ethnic population of 1890, not 1920, which essentially locked out Eastern European Jews, Italians, Greeks, and Slavic peoples. If the quotas were exceeded, funds and instructions were provided for court-ordered deportation. Unsurprisingly, Hitler was a great admirer of the act. The mid-1920s also represents the moment the second Ku Klux Klan reached its height in the United States with about six million members. In 1926, 30,000 Klansmen proudly marched on Washington, many of them hoodless. They included members of Con- gress and state representatives happy to confirm their membership for enthusiastic constituents. The Confederate monuments that remain standing, carefully tended by city, state, and national governments, do not represent the “Great- ness” of America. They represent its shame and the shame of White people who championed or tolerated its ideology of White supremacy.

42 Amst 66.1 (2021): 37-45 Tear Them Down: Old Statues, Bad Science, and Ideas That Just Won’t Die

They were erected during a period when White terror operations, better known as lynching, were common and tacitly endorsed by local officials. Lynchings happened in the dark of night with burning crosses and crowds of anonymous figures, but they also occurred in broad daylight. White crowds gathered to watch the gruesome murders of their fellow Americans, both men and women. They brought picnic lunches with them. They cheered and laughed. They held up their children to witness incinerations and disembowelments, and they took home body parts of the victims as souvenirs. Look up the lynchings of Sam Hose and Rich- ard Coleman. Say their names. This is American history, our history. Taking down statues of Robert E. Lee and other Confederates will not alter the past, but it will declare that an ideology of biological inferiority based on the fiction of “race” in a country supposedly founded on the fundamental equality of all human beings will not be tolerated, much less venerated. The misty nostalgia for the Confederacy kept alive in monuments to the “Lost Cause” is destructive precisely because the ideology of White supremacy lives on, and it was not and is not an ideology confined to the South. It lives on in the genetic determinism touted in books, blogs, and science journalism that are as popular now as eugenics was in an earlier era. You are not your genes. The old nature / nurture dichotomy made famous by Galton is false. In his classic 1974 paper, “The Analysis of Variance and the Analy- sis of Causes,” the evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin referred to nature versus nurture as a “pseudo question” (520). All complex human traits, including that abstract thing we call intelligence, are the result of multiple causes, and those causes intermingle. It is impossible to assign quantitative values to what is nature and what is nurture because genes and environment interact. The statistical calculations, heritability numbers that supposedly show the percentages of genetic and environmental influence on a human trait, have been severely criticized in science. In a 2018 paper, “The Paradox of Intelligence: Heritability and Malleabil- ity Coexist in Hidden Gene-Environment Interplay,” the authors write, “when estimating the heritability of IQ, those gene-environment correlations that we do not recognize or do not know will be attributed to the genetic component” (Sauce and Matzel 30; emphasis in original). This is exactly what the statistician Ronald Fisher did in the 1920s. He assigned leftovers to the genetic side of the equation. And he was criticized for it by the fervent anti-eugenicist Lancelot Hogben, who wrote in his book Nature and Nurture (1933): “There is a danger of concealing assumptions that have no factual basis behind an impressive façade of flawless algebra” (121). This remains a danger. Based on the twin studies that were so crucial to Galton and eugenics, heritability numbers are now touted by popular academics like Ste- ven Pinker whose nature trumps nurture arguments pass with the same ease in media culture that made it possible for Calvin Coolidge to mut-

Amst 66.1 (2021): 37-45 43 Siri Hustvedt ter gibberish about “biological laws” in Good Housekeeping in 1921 (qtd. in Kendi 321). Our biology is not fixed but fluid. There is no taxonomy of the “races.” There is human variation, a small part of which reflects geographic origin, but there is no dividing line between races. There are no subspecies, no grand scheme of racial differences, no hierarchy, much as some still desperately hope it exists. The civil war that supposedly freed enslaved African Americans from bondage will not be truly over until the United States confronts and atones for its crimes against its own Black citizens. Black America has been living with this history for 400 years. It is long past time for White America to stop lying about it. Casting Confederate statues onto the garbage heap or consigning them to infamy is a tiny, if symbolic, step in the right direction. There is a film of German citizens who were forced to tour Buchenwald after the war and view the atrocities in that concentration camp. Many of them covered their faces or looked away. Germany’s silence about its criminal past was not broken until the 1960s, but it was broken, and a process of atonement and memorialization of the Holocaust began. White America’s painful reckoning with its terrifying past and the reparations that must be paid one way or another lie ahead. Unlike the Nazis, we have not suspended our constitution and, despite the ugly math- ematical compromise that brought the Southern states into the Union, the word used throughout the document about constitutional rights is “person” and “people,” not “man,” not “man with property,” not “some of the people,” not “White people,” just people. We do not have to change it. We have to begin for the very first time to live up to its promise.

Works Cited Cashin, Sheryll. Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2017. Print. Cogdell, Christina. Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s. Philadel- phia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2010. Print. Dawsey, Josh. “Trump’s Twitter Feed Reads like a Local Crime Blotter as He Stokes a Culture War.” Washington Post. Nash Holdings, 1 July 2020. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-twitter- feed-reads-like-a-local-crime-blotter-as-he-stokes-a-culture-war/2020/06/ 30/2e1a48c6-baed-11ea-86d5-3b9b3863273b_story.html. Dorr, Gregory Michael. “Protection or Control? Women’s Health, Sterilization Abuse, and Relf v. Weinberger.” A Century of Eugenics in America. Ed. Paul Lombardo. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2011. 161-92. Print. “Heritage.” Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/heritage. Hogben, Lancelot T. Nature and Nurture. London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1939. Print. Hustvedt, Siri. “Tear Them Down: Siri Hustvedt on Old Statues, Bad Science, and Ideas that Just Won’t Die.” Literary Hub. Grove Atlantic, 8 July 2020. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://lithub.com/tear-them-down-siri-hustvedt-on-old- statues-bad-science-and-ideas-that-just-wont-die/.

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Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. London: Bodley Head, 2017. Print. Kluchin, Rebecca M. Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950-1980. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2009. Print. Laughlin, Harry H. Analysis of America’s Modern Melting Pot. Hearings before the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. 67th Congr., 3rd Session, Serial 7-C. Washington: GOP, 1923. Print. Lewontin, Richard. “The Analysis of Variance and the Analysis of Causes.” 1974. International Journal of Epidemiology 35 (2006): 520-25. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyl062. Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage, 2016. Print. Sauce, Bruno, and Louis D. Matzel. “The Paradox of Intelligence: Heritability and Malleability Coexist in Hidden Gene-Environment Interplay.” Psycho- logical Bulletin 144.1 (2018): 26-47. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1037/ bul0000131. Sussman, Robert Wald. The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Un- scientific Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2014. Print. Stern, Alexandra Minna. “Sterilized in the Name of Public Health: Race, Immigra- tion, and Reproductive Control in Modern California.” American Journal of Public Health 95.7 (2005): n. pag. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://www.ncbi.nlm. nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449330/. Terman, Lewis M. The Measurement of Intelligence. New York: Houghton Mif- flin, 1916. Print.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 37-45 45

Twilight of the American Idols? Statue Politics between the Movement for Black Lives and Trumpism

Michael Weinman

Delivered at the foot of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, just outside the aptly named Keystone, South Dakota, in the face of both a once-in-generations summer of street protests and a ravaging pandemic, as well as a presidential election campaign, (then-)President Donald Trump’s remarks on the occasion of Independence Day 2020 make clear the centrality of statue politics to the current political and cultural moment in the United States of America. In this brief notice, I wish to do three things: (1) draw out the main idea of the president’s speech and how it stands at the center of the electoral appeal of Trumpism; (2) set this idea into relief against the Movement for Black Lives and the focus activists within that and cognate protest groups place on public memorials; and (3) suggest, through a contrast with President-Elect Biden’s speech in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on October 6, 2020 that references the same day, why a reckoning with the widely-held national narrative concerning American exceptionalism is inextricably connected with our statue politics: for, I shall argue, the contestation surrounding both that narrative and those memorials is ultimately about idol-worship, an inescapable aspect of American civil religion.

1 Trumpism and the Idols of American Exceptionalism

In at least one key respect, the only remarkable thing about Trump’s remarks as president of the United States on the 4th of July are how un- remarkable, or more precisely how conventional, they are. Namely, like any number of speeches by sitting presidents or other U.S. officials, they call upon the audience to commemorate the “immortal” day of July 4, 1776, as a world-historical event in which the unique American experi-

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 47-51 47 Michael Weinman ment was consecrated. We can hear this, for instance, in these words: “No nation has done more to advance the human condition than the United States of America. And no people have done more to promote human progress than the citizens of our great nation.” Not only in his invocation of American uniqueness and greatness, but also in his articulation of the grounds for this exceptional “city on the hill” status of the American experiment, Trump’s words are indistinguishable from those used not only by Reagan or Bush (41 or 43) on such occasions, but also those used by Kennedy or Obama. We can see this as Trump continues: “It was all made possible by the courage of 56 patriots who gathered in Philadelphia 244 years ago and signed the Declaration of Independence.” These men, Trump says, “enshrined a divine truth that changed the world forever when they said: ‘… all men are created equal.’ These immortal words set in motion the unstoppable march of freedom.” Finally, in a conclusion that we would far more commonly associate with versions of American exceptionalism expressed in the inaugural addresses of John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, rather than that of Trump, he (in his Inaugural and in general) emphasizes strength and power, and surely not reason: “Seventeen seventy-six represented the culmination of thousands of years of western civilization and the triumph not only of spirit, but of wisdom, philosophy, and reason.” So far, so “normal” as regards American pride. In a remarkable pivot, though, these remarks become profoundly Trumpian and divisive in the very next paragraph: “And yet, as we meet here tonight, there is a growing danger that threatens every blessing our ancestors fought so hard for, struggled, they bled to secure.” What is this “growing danger” according to the 45th POTUS? “Left-wing fascism” and “Cancel Culture.” What does he mean by this? He has in mind “a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,” one in which “[a]ngry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our Founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities. Many of these people have no idea why they are doing this, but some know exactly what they are doing.” The precise contours of “what they are doing” is left hanging in the air as the president continues his remarks in a direction where I will not ask you to follow for the sake of the present argument, but the implication is clear: the tearing down of statues is tantamount to “wiping out our history” and “erasing our values.” As such, their aim—as some know and others do not, according to Presi- dent Trump—is quite simply to destroy America.

2 The Movement for Black Lives as Iconoclasm

So much for the meaning and the message of the street protests of summer 2020, as seen from the unique gloss on American exceptionalism given by a president who addresses “American people” who are “strong

48 Amst 66.1 (2021): 47-51 Twilight of the American Idols? Statue Politics between the Movement for Black Lives and Trumpism and proud, and they will not allow our country, and all of its values, history, and culture, to be taken from them.” Time prevents a robust engagement with the self-description and self-understanding of those who remove controversial memorials, most notably with the Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson memorials in Charlottesville, Virginia, which provided the pretext for the “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017, and made “Charlottesville” a metonym for the political violence and racial terror associated with the “alt-right,” Trumpism, and White nationalism in the U.S. today (Howard-Woods, Laidley, and Omidi). Nor can we seriously engage with what undergirds the attempt to rewrite the historiography of the American experiment that intersects with the legal, political, and direct action attempts to take down the statues that physically and publicly present one or another historiography, especially that found in the epochal and controversial 1619 Project, initiated by Nikole Hannah-Jones for The New York Times. 1619 has proven so influential and debatable because it seeks, in essence, to replace July of 1776 with August of 1619 as the sine qua non of the American experiment. As Jake Sil- verstein writes in (re-)introducing the Times project, it was at this date that “a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia, bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans”; while this “is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin,” he continues, “it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin.” We can, however, follow the observation of Phillip Morris that the question of “How should history be taught?” brings with it “an explosive calculus” insofar as “using contemporary values to judge the moral failings and atrocities of ancestors and to reevaluate the lives and legacies of canonized leaders” can involve the “moral deconstruction of the past to understand and improve the present.” At the bottom, perhaps, the assertion behind both forms of critical reconstruction—statue removal and retelling history in narrative form—is the belief that, again quoting Morris, the “removal of monuments and symbols to a racist past is an important step to a more just future.” It is precisely this conviction that informs the response to Trump’s view of American exceptionalism Biden aimed to provide in his speech at Gettysburg in October 2020, to which we turn now.

3 Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and the Inescapable Reckoning to Come

Like Trump’s speech at the foot of Mount Rushmore, with the stone-carved image of Abraham Lincoln literally hovering over him and looking over his shoulder, Biden’s speech and its location of delivery are an express attempt to identify with “the best of American history” while also insisting that the nation’s history is distinctly not unambigu- ously exceptional in the moral sense. Biden uses an earlier (Democratic) president’s own appropriation of Lincoln to do so: “A hundred years

Amst 66.1 (2021): 47-51 49 Michael Weinman after Lincoln spoke here at Gettysburg then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson also came here and said: ‘Our nation found its soul in honor on these fields of Gettysburg … We must not lose that soul in dishonor now on the fields of hate.’” Hate, in particular, Biden is saying is also part of the “American legacy.” For this reason, in order for “America to be America again” (as Biden puts it, reminding his audience of the title of a famous Langston Hughes poem), Americans cannot merely and passively not engage in hate. Rather, Biden insists, they must fight inequality actively: “From Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, we’re at our best when the promise of America is available to all. We cannot and will not allow violence in the streets to threaten the people of this nation. We cannot and will not walk away from our obligation to, at long last, face the reckoning on race and racial justice in the country.” With his three metonyms, Biden identifies the struggle for equality for women, for Blacks, and for LGBTQIA+ communities with Lin- coln’s own words at Gettysburg: “We cannot, and will not, allow extremists and white supremacists to overturn the America of Lincoln and Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass, to overturn the America that has welcomed immigrants from distant shores, to overturn the America that has been a haven and a home for everyone, no matter their background.” This passage strikingly places Lincoln, Tubman, and Douglass on one side of the historical ledger, with the Confederate rebels against Lincoln’s Union and defenders of slavery as an institution, alongside those who would publicly commemorate them today, clearly excluded from what Biden considers America at its best. This comes across as one attempt to rewrite history where at least Lincoln, often hailed or interpolated as the (second?) greatest president, can be held onto as some kind of hero, even as the standard narrative is, if not subverted, at least profoundly challenged. As a conscious response and rebuke to President Trump’s Inde- pendence Day remarks, and especially given its delivery on the “sacred ground” of a battlefield that has become a metonym of the Civil War, Biden’s speech makes one thing very clear. Namely, the destruction of public memorials to figures important for both the formation of the United States of America as a sovereign state and the propagation of chattel slavery and the extermination of the Indigenous peoples of North America is a crucial feature of a larger, ongoing debate about what self-image Americans have and ought to have about themselves and their regime. As Aaron Tugendhaft notes, “[t]he images the people serve are intimately connected to the political regime under which they live: to ‘serve images’ (the literal meaning of the Greek idol-latria, idolatry) is to serve the sovereign who rules through them” (12; emphasis in original). Thus, within the horizon of the Abrahamic faiths, and beginning with the example of Abraham / Ibrahim himself, the destruction of graven images of false gods holds permanent status as a fundamental trope of political prophecy and activism: bringing about the better,

50 Amst 66.1 (2021): 47-51 Twilight of the American Idols? Statue Politics between the Movement for Black Lives and Trumpism truer people through the destruction of a false sovereignty and its false religion at the same time. The relevance of this understanding of iconoclasm as a response to idolatry for the chiasm of statue politics and American exceptionalism (along one axis) and civil religion and politicized Christianity (along the other axis) in the contemporary febrile climate of culture and politics in the United States could not be clearer. The stakes are very high for the protestors and activists who wish to remove memorials, some of which commemorate segregationists, committed racists, and slave- holders while others commemorate “American heroes” whose ties to White supremacy and racial terror are far more ambiguous. They are no less pronounced for those who mobilize against their mobilization. For both groups, and for all Americans, there is no avoiding all four points of this entanglement. Insofar as public polling consistently suggests that strong majorities of American society seem to have a favorable view of both Black Lives Matter and the standard narrative of American exceptionalism, it appears that a deeply polarizing debate about the removal of memorials of all kinds is not going to end any time soon, and certainly not simply on the basis of replacing President Trump with President Biden.

Works Cited Biden, Joe. “Remarks by Vice President Joe Biden in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.” C-SPAN. 6 Oct. 2020. Web. 13 Nov. 2020. https://joebiden.com/2020/10/06/ remarks-by-vice-president-joe-biden-in-gettysburg-pennsylvania/. Howard-Woods, Chris, Colin Laidley, and Maryam Omidi, eds. Charlottesville: White Supremacy, Populism, and Resistance. New York: OR, 2019. Print. Hughes, Langston. “Let America Be America Again.” 1935. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Knopf, 1994. 189-91. Print. Johnson, Lyndon B. “Memorial Day Remarks, Gettysburg, PA, May 30, 1963.” The Gettysburg Foundation. Web. 13 Nov. 2020. https://www.gettysburg foundation.org/gettysburg-revisited/inclusivity. Morris, Phillip. “As Monuments Fall, How Does the World Reckon with a Rac- ist Past?” National Geographic. nationalgeographic.com, 29 June 2020. Web. 13 Nov. 2020. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/06/ confederate-monuments-fall-question-how-rewrite-history/. “1619 Project.” New York Times. New York Times, 14 Aug. 2019. Web. 13 Nov. 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619- america-slavery.html. Silverstein, Jake. “Why We Published the 1619 Project.” New York Times. New York Times, 20 Dec. 2019. Web. 13 Nov. 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619-intro.html. Trump, Donald J. “Remarks by President Trump at South Dakota’s 2020 Mount Rushmore Fireworks Celebration.” The White House. The White House, 4 July 2020. Web. 13 Nov. 2020. Tugendhaft, Aaron. The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2020. Print.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 47-51 51

On the Racial Fantasies of White Liberals in Trump’s America and Beyond

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

Introduction

I voted for the Democrats in the 2020 election, but not because they represented progressive change. I voted for maintaining the limited liberal democracy that workers, women, and People of Color have carved in America. My vote was against Trump (and, honestly, I would have supported a cucumber over him) and Trumpism and to defend the narrow institutional political space available to fight for a non-racist, multiracial democratic regime. Along these lines, this essay examines some of White liberals’ current racial fantasies and explains why they are dangerous. For ease of communication, I list them below in no special order.

Trump’s Racism and Trumpism Are Unique

Liberal commentators advanced this myth. However, Trump playing the “race (gender, sexual orientation, etc.) card” was not a new development in American politics. The Republican Party has been playing this game since the late 1960s with their infamous “southern strategy.” The original plan to directly focus political attention on White voters’ interests morphed in the 1980s and became subtler, increasingly relying on “dog whistles.” Nixon, for example, portrayed his opposition against school desegregation not as a racial matter, but as a way of mitigating the deleterious effects of busing on children. Reagan took the dog whistles to the next level, a practice that began with him having his first presidential campaign event in “Philadelphia, Mississippi quite near where three civil rights workers had been lynched earlier” (Davis 6). Al- though this racist strategy began with Republicans, Democrats—with their long and nasty racist history—emulated it quickly. After losing the 1984 election, the Democrats formed the now defunct Democratic

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 53-58 53 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

Leadership Council (DLC), which advocated moving the party to the center on issues of economics, race, and winning back White workers. The election of Bill Clinton as president in 1992, after having chaired the DLC from 1990 to 1991, bolstered the Democrats’ move to the right. Clintonism, as Nancy Fraser has argued, amounted to “progressive neoliberalism” and changed the “historic bloc” the Democratic Party had forged since the 1960s.

Trump Is a Psychological Aberration

It is true that there has not been any other president like Trump in American history and that he scores off the chart on the DM5 for Narcissistic Personality Disorder (Dodes), but we must appreciate that all rich folks—Ross Perot, Steve Forbes, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Cuban—are similar psychological beasts. These (mostly) men believe they are gifted people who alone can solve the problems of the 1 world using their unique talents. Therefore, their “pathological” psy- chologies are better understood as class-related products, “at least in part facilitated by the socioeconomic and political conditions of neoliberalism itself” (Tarnopolsky 110). For these billionaires, the solution to “neoliberalism’s problems (e. g., stock market bubbles which inevitably burst or social security nets with no netting left in them) is simply more neoliberalism” (Tarnopolsky 110).

The Racists Are Those People

Since Trump came down the escalator of Trump Plaza in 2015, social scientists and commentators regressed to the troublesome comfort of the prejudice problematic. They succumbed to the old narrative of racism as the problem of the “racists,” embodied exclusively in southern, “poorly educated,” rural, working-class White folks. But focusing on “the racists” prevents us from analytically and politically tackling the collective practices, mechanisms, institutions, and behaviors that reproduce racial domination (Bonilla-Silva, “Rethinking Racism”). It prevents us from realizing that Whites from all income and educational levels (except for White women with postgraduate education) supported Trump. Lastly, and most troubling, it conveniently exculpates White Democrats from racism when systemic racism, as I argue below, incorporates all actors in society.

Racism Is About “Class Anxieties”

Another problematic narrative that emerged in the 2016 campaign was that White workers’ support for Trump was an expression of their 1 On “philanthrocapi- “class anxieties.” Even though I am critical of assuming White work- talism,” see Klein. ers are the only “racists” in America (Bonilla-Silva, “Trumpamerica”),

54 Amst 66.1 (2021): 53-58 On the Racial Fantasies of White Liberals in Trump’s America and Beyond interpreting their political views as a pure expression of their class location is equally inaccurate. Unfortunately, sociologists, such as Arlie Hochschild in her book Strangers in Their Own Land, have contributed to this narrative. Hochschild, as well as other academics and commentators such as Justin Gest, J. D. Vance, Joan C. Williams, and Kather- ine Cramer, have published books urging Americans to be empathetic toward the class-based plight of White workers, a segment that clearly has lost ground in the last ten to twenty years. Although it is true that working-class Whites have lost ground and that progressives should be empathetic, all these authors say precious little about their racialized, gendered, and xenophobic consciousness. More problematic, all ask for empathy for their White brethren, but exhibit little understanding and empathy for the plight of poor Black and Brown folks, a group whose situation has worsened relative to Whites. As Paul F. Campos wrote in The New York Times: In 2015, the most recent year for which data are available, black households at the 20th and 40th percentiles of household income earned an average of 55 percent as much as white households at those same percentiles. This is exactly the same figure as in 1967. Indeed, five decades of household income data reveal a yawning and uncannily consistent income gap between black and white Americans across the economic spectrum. Fifty years ago, black upper-class Americans had incomes about two-thirds those of white upper- class Americans, while the black middle-class—those in the 60th percen- tile—earned about two-thirds as much as its white counterpart. Those ra- tios remain the same today.

Proud Boys and Boogaloo Boys Are the Worst Expression of American Racism

I have collaborated with the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks “hate groups” in the United States, because I believe we must pay serious attention to these groups. Nevertheless, I do not believe their brand of racial practices and ideology are hegemonic. Despite the fact that they grew in size and import in Trump’s America, I still believe that (1) racism as a system of practices to reproduce White privilege operates along the lines of “new racism” (Bonilla-Silva, White Supremacy), and (2) color-blind racism is the dominant racial discourse in America—even Trump has tried to express some of his views in somewhat color-blind fashion (e. g., “I love Mexicans,” “I am the least racist person you have ever met,” “I am the least anti-Semitic person you’ve ever seen” [qtd. in Scott]). The “new racism” refers to the suave, seemingly non-racial character of the practices and mechanisms responsible for the reproduction of racial privilege, and includes things such as realtors steering people into neighborhoods based on their race, clerks cleverly monitoring People of Color in stores, and relying on standardized tests to make admissions decisions in colleges (Bonilla-Silva, White Supremacy). In consonance

Amst 66.1 (2021): 53-58 55 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva with the seemingly non-racial character of the “new racism,” color-blind racial ideology relies on the abstract and decontextualized extension of the principles of liberalism to account for racial affairs. Thus, most Whites nowadays justify their opposition to affirmative action or to policies to guarantee school or neighborhood integration by claiming that they violate the principle of equal opportunity. Of course, their position would be a truly principled one if racial discrimination was not operative (which is not the case) and market choices were meritocratic (race-based networks account for as much as 85 % of labor market decisions). Accordingly, racial domination is not fundamentally the product of the actions of “the racists,” but of the actions and inactions of regular White folks who do not consider themselves racist.

We Must Return to Normal America!

Almost every day, Trump and his representatives say or do something that pundits identify as a major threat to democracy. Although I believe Trump, like most billionaires, is an authoritarian person, I am more concerned about social analysts in general, and Democrats in particular, normalizing regular power. They seem to be confusing form (Trump not following the rules of the game) with content (the fact that liberal democracy in America is “the best possible shell” [Lenin 393] for class, race, and gender rule [Domhoff]). To be clear, the question is not ignoring the authoritarianism of Trump and his followers. The issue is defending the existing limited democracy in a critical manner, with the goal of deepening it (Strickland). Otherwise, we will continue reify- ing the “good old times” of pre-Trump America where racial, class, and gender domination worked primarily in a hegemonic way and everyone (but for People of Color) was happy, happy, happy!

Systemic Racism: We White Liberals Understand It!

Since the lynching of George Floyd in May 2020, liberals have begun using the term “systemic racism.” Nevertheless, using the term does not mean having clarity about what it means or its analytical, socio- political, and even personal implications. For example, our new Presi- dent Biden used the term throughout the campaign, yet showed us he is clueless about what the term means. In a debate with Trump, he stated that police departments suffer from systemic racism, yet added immediately that most officers were not “racist.” Like most Whites, Biden does not understand that the selection, training, and culture of officers, in conjunction with the militarization of departments, the stigmatization of People of Color as “criminals,” and the elimination of community boards to monitor departments all but guarantee the hypervigilance of communities of Color, which explains why People of Color are more likely to experience disrespect, hostility, and violence from police of-

56 Amst 66.1 (2021): 53-58 On the Racial Fantasies of White Liberals in Trump’s America and Beyond ficers. The problem is so systemic that research shows that officers of Color are as likely as White officers to kill People of Color (Menifield, Shin, and Strother). We must understand that racism is systemic because it incorporates all actors into the game. We are incorporated because we are all racialized subjects, but also because we act racially in conscious and unconscious ways. If racism is systemic, we all take part in it, albeit actors’ participation is not symmetrical (People of Color are, for the most part, unwilling participants) or enacted with the same level of consciousness.

Conclusion

Most of the racial fantasies I have examined here are not new. But in Trump’s America, they all gained believability because his chaotic presidency presumably cleared up who the real racists in America were. Unfortunately, as I have suggested, because everyone participates in systemic racism, Whites’ fantasies help bolster the racial status quo. White liberals’ racial fantasies are not only self-serving, but quite dangerous, as they leave the door wide open for a return to “Whiteness as usual.” Now with a new administration in the White House, most Ameri- cans are relieved because we have returned to normality and civilized politics. But what are the implications of “normality” and “civilized politics” in terms of race? After all, current levels of racial inequality are not the product of Trump’s nasty racial politics, but rather of the normal, racialized rule in place in America from the 1970s onward, and in which both Democrats and Republicans have participated. Yet the messiness of Trump’s rule produced a truly unfortunate racial outcome. Americans are tired (rightly so) and hope anxiously for peace and tranquility. The implication of this national mood is that the Biden-Harris administration, much like the Obama-Biden team of yesteryears (Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich), will likely get a free pass. Progressives and radicals will be rebuked if they dare criticize or make demands to the current administration, as happened in the early Obama years. Already progressives are being rebuked by centrist Democrats (Goddard), and, given the narrow margin of the Demo- crats’ victory, asking for deep, structural change will be framed as an exaggerated expectation. I am afraid that in post-Trump America, White liberals will ex- alt America as “the exceptional nation” that returned, against all odds, to normality. It is incumbent on activists and progressive organizations alike to defend the space gained by Black Lives Matter in 2020. Accord- ingly, when our liberal friends ask us to be quiet, we should shout as loud as we can: “No Justice, No Peace!” and “Racial Justice NOW!”

Amst 66.1 (2021): 53-58 57 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

Works Cited Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. “Rethinking Racism: Towards a Structural Interpretation.” American Sociological Review 62.3 (1997): 465-80. Print. ---. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial In- equality in America. 5th ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Print. ---. “Toward a New Political Praxis for Trumpamerica: New Directions in Critical Race Theory.” American Behavioral Scientist 63.13 (2019): 1776-88. Print. ---. White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001. Print. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, and David Dietrich. “The Sweet Enchantment of Color- Blind Racism in Obamerica.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Po- litical and Social Science 634.1 (2011): 190-206. Print. Campos, Paul F. “White Economic Privilege Is Alive and Well.” New York Times. New York Times, 29 July 2017. Web. 11 Aug. 2017. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/07/29/opinion/sunday/black-income-white-privilege.html. Davis, Mike. “Election 2016.” New Left Review 103.1 (2017): 5-8. Print. Dodes, Lance. “Sociopathy.” The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychia- trists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Ed. Bandy Lee. New York: Thomas Dunne, 2017. 83-92. Print. Domhoff, G. William. Who Rules America? The Triumph of the Corporate Rich. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014. Print. Fraser, Nancy. “The End of Progressive Neoliberalism.” Dissent, Dissent, 2 Jan 2017. Web. 19 Sept. 2018. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/ progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser. Goddard, Taeggan. “Centrist House Democrats Lash Out at Liberals.” Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire. Goddard Media, 5 Nov. 2020. Web. 10 Nov. 2020. https://politicalwire.com/2020/11/05/centrist-house-democrats-lash-out- at-liberals/. Hochschild, Arlie. Strangers in Their Own Land. New York: New Press, 2016. Print. Klein, Naomi. No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017. Print. Lenin, Vladimir. The State and Revolution. 1917. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2014. Print. Menifield, Charles E., Geiguen Shin, and Logan Strother. “Do White Law Enforce- ment Officers Target Minority Suspects?” Public Administration Review 79.1 (2019): 56-68. Print. Scott, Eugene. “Six Times President Trump Said He Is the Least Racist Per- son.” Washington Post, Washington Post, 17 Jan. 2018. Web. 12 Apr. 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/01/17/six-times- president-trump-said-he-is-the-least-racist-person/. Strickland, Bill. “Du Bois’s Revenge: Reinterrogating American Democratic The- ory … Or Why We Need a Revolutionary Black Research Agenda in the 21st Century.” Souls 10.1 (2008): 33-41. Print. Tarnopolsky, Christina. “Melancholia and Mania on the Trump Campaign Trail.” Theory and Event 20.1 (2017): 100-28. Print.

58 Amst 66.1 (2021): 53-58 The Hidden Violence of Tree-Lined Streets

Barry Shank

During the past few months, really throughout the pandemic, our chief family outdoor activity has been walking our dog, Simone, around our neighborhood. We now know every street and alley in the surrounding 2.6 square miles, and Simone has left traces of her essence in almost every front yard. We live in Bexley, an “internal suburb” of Columbus, Ohio, one marked off from the surrounding city by its reputation for excellent public schools, high property taxes, large and expensive homes, and the official national designation as an “urban arboretum.” Two sides of Bexley are bordered by literal railroad tracks. The other two sides are marked by heavily trafficked streets. Inside is where all those trees are, where the good schools graduate well-educated young people, where almost everyone smiles at us as we walk our dog. As the summer faded into autumn and the beginnings of winter, the trees have changed with the seasons, giving us something new to look at as we stroll through our perfect little village. Each morning before our walks, I skim the headlines from The New York Times, diving more deeply into only a few of the stories. One Saturday soon after the election, an article with this headline caught my attention, “Biden Asked Republicans to Give Him a Chance. They’re not Interested” (Herndon). This was somewhat surprising to me because in my neighborhood, the yard signs that proclaimed loy- alty to Trump and Pence were significantly outnumbered by signs that read: “I might be a Republican, but I’m no fool.” As I read the article, however, I began to understand. It drew largely on interviews from people who lived in Mason, Texas, “a rural, conservative town of about 2,000 people,” where the local pastor struggles to keep politics out of his Sunday services. At the end of the piece, a sixty-six-year-old white man, who “saw this election as a battle for the country’s soul,” promised that if any Democratic or Black Lives Matter protesters came to Mason he would “guarantee you they won’t be in this town very long.

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 59-65 59 Barry Shank

We’ll string them up and send them out of here—and it won’t be the same way they came in.” I thought about that quotation during our walk that day and the rest of the weekend. Apparently, at least some in that town were promising violence if folks like me showed up there. Why would this be true? Just a bit before that closing quotation, the same man insisted that Biden was going to take his hard-earned money and give it to lazy immigrants who “don’t do nothing but sit on their butts.” Violence in the defense of racism. Here we go again, America, I thought dismissively, as I strolled along our tree-lined streets surrounded by large well-built monuments to polite, domestic bourgeois innocence. Following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, mainstream news sources searched for an explanation of how it could have happened. The New York Times and The Washington Post sent reporters to corners of Ohio and Michigan, Florida and Wisconsin, identifying and interview- ing large numbers of voters who previously voted Democratic but who had turned towards Trump. In the buildup to the midterm elections in 2018, academic researchers joined these journalists, trying to understand the partisan polarization that had come to characterize political discourse. Theories about the impact of social media, the power of Fox News, and a growing epistemic divide began to dominate popular understanding. Jonathan Rauch’s piece in National Affairs, “The Constitu- tion of Knowledge,” famously argued that the Trump era was “the first time we have seen a national-level epistemic attack: a systematic attack, emanating from the very highest reaches of power, on our collective ability to distinguish truth from falsehood.” Rauch named the consequences of the attack “troll epistemology”: [T]rolls discredit the very possibility of a socially validated reality, and open the door to tribal knowledge, personal knowledge, partisan knowledge, and other manifestations of epistemic anarchy. By spreading lies and disinformation on an industrial scale, they sow confusion about what might or might not be true, and about who can be relied on to discern the difference, and about whether there is any difference. (Rauch; emphasis in original) The purpose of these attacks was to delegitimize the very idea of expertise. Scholars, medical doctors, intelligence professionals, climate scientists, economists, and any other professionals who participated in the public debate were cast as simply self-interested peddlers of esoteric ware of no real use to anyone but themselves and their friends. A significant reason for the success of troll epistemology was its function as a backlash against the Obama administration. Barack Obama’s election had put a Black face atop the bespoke suits of twenty-first-century expertise. Decisions made early in his administration’s efforts to control the effects of the Great Recession created relief programs that exacerbated economic inequality. The inability to protect blue-collar middle-class jobs made the recovery efforts seem to have been purposely unfairly constructed. The laudable desire to develop a passable version

60 Amst 66.1 (2021): 59-65 The Hidden Violence of Tree-Lined Streets of accessible health care for millions ultimately created programs that required a sophisticated ability to access online information and analyze competing offers. These skills were unequally distributed across the country, increasing the frustration with official expertise and its expectations. Stirring in the simmering racism that is always available beneath the surface of American life created a volatile mixture. It did not take a genius of political strategy to exploit those feelings. In fact, they seemed particularly susceptible to the regular operations of our network society. In their massive volume published via open access by Oxford Uni- versity Press, Network Propaganda, Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts mounted hundreds of pages of quantitative and qualitative data to support the thesis that the current epistemic crisis could not have been caused by technological developments alone, such as the Facebook algorithm or social media tracking and targeting. Nor could the blame fall on foreign hackers. “Instead,” they suggested “that each of these ‘usual suspects’ acts through and depends on the asymmetric partisan ecosystem that has developed over the past four decades” (Benkler et al. 21). Their analysis showed that the Republican strategic efforts to extend and maintain their political coalition drove the growth of this alternate information ecosystem that nurtured, supported, and reinforced the spread of disinformation. At the end of their book, the authors of Network Propaganda turned to the work of Donald Kinder and Nathan Kalmoe to argue that the great bulk of American voters are not motivated by ideology at all. The intensity of the partisan divide, reinforced and exacerbated by two distinct epistemic systems over several decades, has created a paradoxical condition where the driving force behind the choice of information systems is an inherited partisan identity, motivated by social factors of belonging and difference. Quoting Kinder and Kalmoe, they assert that “public opinion arises primarily from the at- tachments and antipathies of group life” (Benkler et al. 305; Kinder and Kalmoe). For activists and political leaders, policy positions matter. For most people, political choices follow from a deep sense of belonging to one group and an intense dislike of others. In effect, then, we have created a political system in which internal division is intensified by a feed- back loop that grew out of an electoral strategy based initially on ideology but which has since become rooted in affect, desire, and disgust. We are disputatious tribes unwilling to bear the presence of the other. In her engagement with Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political, Chantal Mouffe highlights both the value and the danger of group-formation in a democracy. Seemingly echoing James Madison in his Fed- eralist No. 10, she writes: “The great strength of liberal democracy […] is precisely that it provides the institutions that, if properly understood, can shape the element of hostility in a way that defuses its potential [for antagonism]” (Mouffe 5). As the United States has inched closer to liberal democracy, these institutions have come under strain. While the constitutional American “we” centered on whiteness and maleness,

Amst 66.1 (2021): 59-65 61 Barry Shank other differences of identity and interest could be negotiated. With the formal expansion of the political community, which remains an incomplete project, the lines of antagonism have intensified between those wishing to retain the political dominance of whiteness and maleness and those committed to acknowledging the emerging sovereignty of intersectional differences. Following the election of Donald Trump, this antagonism hardened, approaching the extreme of Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction. Mouffe links the calcifying of that distinction to democracy’s dependency on identities: In the domain of collective identifications, where what is in question is the creation of a ‘we’ by the delimitation of a ‘them’, the possibility always exists that this we/them relation will turn into a relation of the friend-enemy type […]. This can happen when the other, who was until then considered only under the mode of difference, begins to be perceived as negating our identity, as putting in question our very existence. From that moment onwards, any type of we/them relation, be it religious, ethnic, national, economic or other, becomes the site of a political antagonism. (2-3) Even after the announcement of Joe Biden as president-elect, profound political antagonism has left us with approximately 54 million people who believe that the election was stolen and around 80 million who think that those in the first group are crazy. There is no innocent place in the United States. There is no place where this fundamental division is not felt. Here are some facts about my hometown. The median single-family home price in Ohio is $156,000. In Bexley, the median is $360,000 with approximately 10 % of the homes costing over $1,000,000. The median household income in Ohio is $58,642. In Bexley, it is $108,750. The percentage of households in Ohio where someone has a four-year college degree is 18.2 %. In Bexley, it is 77.7 %. The public schools in Bexley are among the very best in the entire nation. In 2019, 96 % of those who graduated from Bexley High matriculated at a college of their choice (cf. Bexley City, Ohio State, Bexley High School). On three separate occasions over the past twenty years, the Supreme Court of Ohio has declared that the state’s school funding system is unconstitutional, unable to equally educate the people of Ohio. With no means to enforce that decision, nothing has changed. When I shudder at the violence promised to Democrats who might visit Mason, Texas, I need also to recognize the violence that guards our streets, our dog-walks, our homes. It does not come from the point of a gun. It blends softly into the structure of the community. Our comfort is dependent on the violence of a massively unequal economic system that for almost forty years has been funneling money away from some communities and into places like Bexley. This is both a consequence and reinforcement of “the big sort,” where those who have been favored by neoliberal policies have moved to communities like ours. This is one of the gifts that neoliberal expertise has given us. State school funding

62 Amst 66.1 (2021): 59-65 The Hidden Violence of Tree-Lined Streets reinforces those advantages, ensuring that greater economic opportunity accrues to children lucky enough to grow up in those communities. Lower marginal income taxes accelerate the growing wage gap while shrinking funding for government services that had worked to reduce the costs of being poor. None of this is news. But it is worth pointing out that our quiet, charming neighborhood full of successful people and their beautiful children exists at the expense of small towns across Ohio. Those small towns voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016 and in even greater numbers this past November 3rd. Despite the existence of little villages like ours, scattered around its urban centers, Ohio is now solidly Republican. When twenty-year-old pickup trucks drive through my neighborhood, loudly belching malodorous exhaust at every stop sign, I joke to my wife that Bexley should ban those trucks. Am I really joking? Those who drive those trucks, especially pickups flaunting Trump-Pence stickers, appear to me as “the other, the stranger,” someone who is “in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien” (Schmitt 27; emphasis added). Intellectually, I know better. I know I should not feel that way. But I can smell my own disgust. Is that the end? Not quite. If we are talking about the immediacy of affect, of desire and disgust, then intellectual, fact-based arguments are pointless. To climb down off the edge of enemy confrontation, I need—and maybe you need, too—deep evidence of humanity, of fellow-feeling, of shared experience. Believe me, I am not arguing for turning the other cheek or standing bare-chested in front of someone’s misaimed AR-15. In closing, I suggest instead a musical exploration. For the past several years, Dolly Parton has climbed to the top of national recognition. Parton’s story is well-known (see, for instance, Smarsh). Her hits from the past are canonical in musical history. Features in The New York Times pair with locally written stories in The Columbus Dispatch, where her donations to vaccine research are applauded along with her long support of childhood literacy programs (Doyle; Lordi). With a stature almost as significant as Beyoncé’s, her reach extends way beyond her initial demographic. There are now dozens of young country music artists who spread Parton’s legacy, identifying the places where her work meets up with Beyoncé’s, exploring the intimate connection between personal struggles and the limits our culture—yes, our shared culture—places on all of us. Listen to Brandy Clark’s “Who You Thought I Was,” Adia Victoria’s “South Gotta Change,” or Mickey Guyton’s “Black Like Me.” Feel yourself merging into those beats and humming along with those guitars, whispering the words to yourself. And then rethink what expertise means, rethink the social obligation of knowledge production, rethink what it requires of us now. The sovereignty of expertise must meet the sovereignty of shared experience in order to destroy the common sense of neoliberalism and restore something like a common polis.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 59-65 63 Barry Shank

Postscript, after January 6, 2021

There can be no doubt that white nationalism is a cancer metastasiz- ing across the American body politic. The spread of this disease has been accelerated by the economic disruptions of the past twenty+ years, and the relentless second cancer of neoliberal market-worshipping policies that divide the country into winners and, yes, losers. It might appear that the essay that I wrote for this special issue is now simply naïve. But I still think that something in that piece is correct. As with all political coalitions, there are significant fractures and divisions within the American right. Yes, white nationalism is central. Yes, damaged white male ego drives the violence. And when not restrained, not treated as the serious illness it is, the violent anger of frustrated dominance can explode. As we saw. A few days after the insurrection, I logged into Facebook for the first time in weeks to see what people outside my intellectual / political bubble were saying. I read a lengthy thread started by a “friend” (Facebook friend only) that was devoted to fighting the censorship of conservatives on platforms like FB and Twitter. What struck me about the conversation was this sense that these otherwise pretty reasonable people could only talk about how the liberal corporations (?), the media, higher education, and so many other forces are conspiring against them to deprive them of channels of communication. Anger, yes, but distrust, fear, and uncertainty were the dominant affective modes. Aggrieved, pained, certain of the correctness of their beliefs—all of that was functioning as the political glue that kept them tied to the radical impulses of the Republican party and followers of Trump. It was as though nothing else mattered. Only that people like us were forcing people like them to go further underground in order to maintain their community. I do not think any of them would applaud the violence that took over the Capitol. But they were not talking about that. They were talking about the need to protect President Trump and what they saw as their own political futures from the inexplicable transformations that had disrupted their place in the world. Those are the people we have to reach. The maniacs who were planning to invade Congress and hang Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi are beyond redemption. They are cancerous cells that must be surgically removed. But these other folks who connect themselves to the right fringe because of their fears of no longer being able to control their lives have to be brought back into normalized democratic discourse. Maybe not these people, but their children and their friends. We have to be able to see the fractures in the Republican coalition and work away at the cracks in order to more fully expose the crazies for what they are. I do not think Trumpism will go away with him out of office. He has nurtured the spread of this cancer, and for many of the folks on that thread, he is a hero for doing so. Yes, of course, the spread of radical

64 Amst 66.1 (2021): 59-65 The Hidden Violence of Tree-Lined Streets right-wing discourse across alternative media sources has normalized this position. And we all know that rational arguments are not effective when the affective forces are so dominant. But I continue to believe that listening to those fears, taking them seriously, and responding to those feelings is a necessary step in the process.

Works Cited Adia Victoria. “South Gotta Change.” Prod. T. Bone Burnett. 28 Aug. 2020. Web. 22 Feb. 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEm0qOxhGxo. Benkler, Yochai, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. Network Propaganda. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2018. Print and Web. Bexley City, Ohio. United States Census Bureau. 2019. Web. 13 Jan. 2021. https:// www.census.gov/quickfacts/bexleycityohio. Bexley High School. “Mission Statement.” 2020. Web. 13 Jan. 2021. https://www. bexleyschools.org/Downloads/19-20%20Bexley%20Student%20Profile.pdf. Clark, Brandy. “Who You Thought I Was.” Your Life Is a Record. Prod. Jay Joyce. Warner Bros. Records. 23 Jan. 2020. Web. 22 Feb. 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cwpl-yii_w. Doyle, Céilí. “It’s Better to Give than to Receive: Dolly Parton Discusses Book Pro- gram’s Legacy.” Columbus Dispatch, 29 Nov. 2020: 1A, 6A. Web. 22 Feb. 2021. https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/local/2020/11/29/dolly-parton- discusses-imagination-library-book-programs-legacy/6226334002/. Guyton, Mickey. “Black Like Me.” Bridges. Prod. Nathan Chapman. Capitol Nashville, Forest Whitehead. 22 Sept. 2020. Web. 22. Feb. 2021. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeAhhS1Ql4s. Herndon, Astead W. “Biden Asked Republicans to Give Him a Chance. They’re not Interested.” New York Times. New York Times, 14 Nov. 2020. Web. 13 Jan. 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/14/us/politics/biden-trump- republicans.html?searchResultPosition=1. Kinder, Donald R., and Nathan P. Kalmoe. Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public. Chicago IL: U of Chicago P, 2017. Print. Lordi, Emily. “The Grit and Glory of Dolly Parton.” New York Times Magazine, 30 Nov. 2020. Web. 22 Feb. 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/30/t- magazine/dolly-parton.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20201202& instance_id=24620&nl=todaysheadlines®i_id=13882223&segment_ id=45839&user_id=4cca801162717a12d418960ae852d7f6. Mouffe, Chantal. The Return of the Political. New York: Verso, 1993. Print. Ohio State, United States Census Bureau. 2019. Web. 13 Jan. 2021. https://www. census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/OH/INC110218. Rauch, Jonathan, “The Constitution of Knowledge.” National Affairs, Fall 2018. Web. 13 Jan. 2021. https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the- constitution-of-knowledge. Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1996. Print. Smarsh, Sarah. She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs. New York: Scribner, 2020. Print.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 59-65 65

No Common Ground: U.S. “Democracy” as Condition of Terror

Dylan Rodríguez

“Common Ground” as Insult

Suspicion and accusation are a minimal disturbance to a force that spills endless violations of spirit, memory, and flesh. There is no state of exception, just a grinding normal that concedes reform in the demand, inventing and refurbishing a civilizational imperative. White supremacy is but a minimal term for this extended order of things. Its dangers become refined and acute under changing protocols of recruitment, re- tention, expulsion, and elimination. The White nationalist imperative surges and retreats. Contrary to liberal narratives of the reaction’s periodic and exceptional rise on waves of mobilized xenophobia, misogyny, and populist racialized “hate,” the White national form is constantly in evidence, everywhere, shaping the multiculturalist diversity initiatives that re-embody the inheritances of 1619 and Manifest Destiny. The depth of this condition reaches beneath the semi-literacies of phobia and violent entitlement because it is enmeshed in the nervous system of inheritors as well as the disinherited and the owned—it is epigenetic, socially induced, though no less physiologically bound than the epidermis itself. My conspiratorial pseudoscience is a late response to their eugenics, but they cannot acknowledge this linkage: doing so would reveal their allegiance to the sociologics of eugenics, even as they selectively condemn its scientific fraudulence. The genealogy of these sociologics are available, accessible, and bare. A tracing of the archive shows how the U.S. “common ground” is made, imagined, and enforced— it is not a static geography, it is a modality of political (and state) planning that is structural, paradigmatic, and persistent in its world-altering ambition / audacity. As Lee Atwater (political strategist, advisor to Presidents Reagan and Bush I, Chair of the Republican National Com- mittee) stated in 1981:

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 67-71 67 Dylan Rodríguez

[Y]ou have to analyze the nature of Southern politics since the 1940s. […] Race didn’t become an issue in the South, again, until 1954. […] [E]very- one was operating within the framework of a segregated society. So race never became an issue. […] I’ll say this, my generation […] we’re the first generation of Southerners that’s not been racist. Totally […]. Now once you start out, and now you don’t quote me on this, you start out in 1954 by saying “nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger,” that hurts you, backfires, so you say stuff like “forced bussing, states’ rights” and all that stuff. […] Now you’re talking about cutting taxes and all these things. What you’re talking about are totally economic things, and the by-product often is Blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it […] but I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract and that coded, that we’re doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. Do you follow me? (qtd. in Perlstein)

The periods of revival—in 1877, 1968, 2016, and many other times—are transitional moments of transparency. The force of White Being scripts and revises the stories of good intentions while the hopeful liberal nar- rations of the supremacist episode sprinkle capsulized condemnations of hate, “mean spiritedness,” “bullying,” and “brutality” across the political text. These optimistic, hopeful narratives accompany the effusions of belief in the redemptive capacities of galvanizing the better folks around the nobilities of democracy, equality, respect, tolerance, dignity, and common peoplehood. This refurbished patriotism rings hollow with most inhabitants of democracy’s underside: they know such noble words are not meant for their ears; liberal dreams are attributed to their bodies only after significant contortions and wardrobe changes. Against the populist reactionaries’ energetic planning for a post- Black, post-queer, anti-feminist world, the respectable liberal-progressive position busily summons a gravity of consensus: the exceptional nation must be the exemplar of the modern humanist promise, which pivots on the obligation to extend an assimilating generosity to the involuntary bearers of the modern Human’s imperial-chattel legacies. A circuit of debate is thus fabricated, periodically electrified by spectacles of mass protest and framed by public contestations of the parameters of belonging and the ornaments of respected personhood. This is the ceremony of U.S. “democracy” and the primary archival evidence of its most fraudulent allegation, “common ground.” Exclusions are refuted by invitations, and while the reactionary elements push the limits of common sense further toward the slave plantation and genocidal colonial frontier, the liberals find partnership with the left-progressives under the militant aegis of reform. Another future vision is at stake, the fate of the children is in “our” hands, and the nation must be rescued from the wrinkled, clammy hands of the dead-eyed plutocrats and megalomaniacs. It is a generic case study in the unifying premises of a multiculturalist White supremacist disagreement, because there is a common investment in the integrity of a nation’s futurity (that is, its capacity to assume a tomorrow after tomorrow, rather than stare into oblivion’s possibility).

68 Amst 66.1 (2021): 67-71 No Common Ground: U.S. “Democracy” as Condition of Terror

White Being

“Whiteness” changes over time, but White Being is the flesh-borne imagination of a worldly access to power that presides over every possible shift in the social narrative, racial or otherwise. White Being is a fiction more powerful than social or juridical truth, in its way. Truth, in the cultural and legal sense, can be fathomable and immediate, with consequences that bear on the limits of a community (its borders, members, and normative conduct) and shape interpretations of what is good, rational, and collectively life-sustaining. Subjected to the governing narratives of White Being, the truth can never again be neutral, fair, or just—if it works for the wretched, it is only because of accident or rebellion. What we are dealing with, then, is a template for the species that neither tolerates nor apprehends any other modality of human being— in White Being, there is nothing less than an authoritarian universal, a compulsory call to war that leverages extermination of other human species against the alternative of those same others’ de-speciation and categorical inclusion (momentary or otherwise) in the only human family that thrives on the correct side of the Darwinian evolutionary chain. The indispensable thought of Sylvia Wynter refers to this as the rise of Man2 and wonders aloud whether humans will be able to survive that Man’s ascendancy through different iterations of the very-same logic of deadly universality (see Wynter). Man3, Man4, ManX is the real end of days. The ascendancy rests on a torrent of keywords: mankind, Civi- lization, nation-state, rational, progress, peace, humanitarian, democracy, the free world, security, missionary, mobility, development, private property, presumed innocence, nonviolence, for the good of humanity. White Being’s ascendancy is always tangible if you are on the wrong side of its force: for example, when you are in violation because you cannot (or refuse to) be humanized despite their aggressive humanitari- anism, or when they massage you with symbols and tokens of White Being’s luxurious trappings of worldly thriving (clean surroundings, nontoxic breathing, responsive institutions, protective police) in order to remind you of your species-difference (you are a world away from them, but maybe you can get a little closer).

White Reconstruction

I humbly offer “White Reconstruction” as a dense shorthand for the historical present. The long post-1968 half century—often referenced as the “post-civil rights” era—has been defined by an onslaught of consistently militarized institutional protocols and cultural significations of White life’s ascendancy, assembled in response to a latter-twentieth century (global as well as U.S.-specific) abolition and reforming of racist / apartheid state and cultural regimes. Yet, White Reconstruction is not merely a revival of White reactionary nationalism or refurbishing of

Amst 66.1 (2021): 67-71 69 Dylan Rodríguez racist state violence: as a totality of state-sponsored pedagogies, national narratives, and political performances, the reconstruction fashions itself as a broadly respectable, civilized, rights-respecting enterprise at the very same time that it martials the material-imaginative capacities of state and cultural regimes to produce and normalize a sociality structured in gendered anti-Blackness and perpetual conditions of racial- colonial violence. In this sense, we are dealing with White Reconstruction as a racial-political complex—a dynamic interaction of institutional protocols, jurisprudence, policy, popular and state cultural productions, and public discourses—that coheres through a relatively symbiotic (though sometimes apparently chaotic and contentious) ensemble of liberal reform, prima facie institutional inclusion / accommodation of rights and disfranchised identity claims (diversity, multiculturalism, et al.), capital accumulation, hetero-patriarchal dominance, industrialized expro- priations of ecology and nature, occupation of territories, and criminalization of profiled bodies and targeted geographies. This complex encompasses the unfolding, quaking, and convulsive reactions to the threshold of liberationist rebellions and social-political transformations that defined the mid-to-late twentieth-century Western order, from the U.S.-based Black freedom and anti-apartheid Civil Rights movements to revolutionary anti-colonialist struggles and feminist insurgen- cies worldwide. The crystallization of this ensemble of transformation, reform, and reaction raises epochal questions: How does the terror of gendered White supremacy, the violence of anti-Black sociality, and the civilizational order of conquest, colonialism, and militarized occupation (e. g., gentrification, settler colonial nationalism) outlive the formal abolition of specific racist and anti-Black state and social regimes? How do the living, collective, accumulated experiences of such terror, violence, and colonial occupation toxify and constitute once-excluded peoples’ access to rights, civil subjectivity, and other forms of political recognition within the reconstructing civilizational order?

End of Hope

The end of hope is a morbid thing. When the fiction of a better -fu ture, a revived present, a shared anticipation of life—good life—fades, a certain wildness ensues. Well, it looks like wildness to them anyway. The wild ones may consider themselves to be something beyond the excluded, marginalized “minority.” Among them, there is a creeping sen- sibility that aggressive, violent neglect is the structuring principle of the modern world, interrupted only by the acute attention of the police and their analogues. The unwild, respectable ones most invested in hope, common ground, democracy, and the reformist promise of the United States are, in their own way, attuned to the sensibilities of the terror- ized, occupied, incarcerated, criminalized wild people in the manner of

70 Amst 66.1 (2021): 67-71 No Common Ground: U.S. “Democracy” as Condition of Terror owners feeling the primal species-needs of their domestic animals—the dog is hungry, it is lonely, the pace of its wagging tail shows it is antsy; it needs to go outside and piss. Yet, the continuum of responses to wildness from liberal promise makers and right-wing proto-fascists alike is less generous and nurturing. The investors know the wild species are upset over the always-bare fact of their naked disempowerment, but they are equally perturbed that the wild ones cannot appreciate how far their people have come, for after all, a few of the domesticated wild ones are here sitting at the conference table with them, drinking coffee and being ritually treated as classmates, peers, and colleagues. When i was young, this was called “multiculturalism.” Today, it is praised as “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion.” None of the terms remotely hides the choke of entitlement that guides such engulfing “anti-racist” maneuvers. These are the ways the investors go about congratulating themselves on allowing the wild species to live, in fact, encouraging the most endangered (targeted, criminalized) to live under the investors’ caring missionary-carceral-philanthropic watch, in the investors’ carefully appropriated and gentrified land, under the domain of their undeniably racial authority (White Being). Despite severe differences of person, Barack Obama and Donald Trump are first cousins who share a blood of belief in The American Dream. They are products (and architects) of White Reconstruction’s most recent, mutually reinforcing phases. A current generation is accelerating the obsolescence of White supremacy as we once knew it. One could say it is a generation that both created Obama and invented, necessitated Trump. Hold this generation responsible, as it celebrates both. We are the ones who have become the non-White / non-Black model minorities of all flavors, and chances are, many who read these words (regardless of generation) fit the profile despite their best intentions. We were born in the artificial afterglow of the now-canonical, mythical time of U.S. apartheid’s abolition, and have inhabited a renaissance of celebration that commends the vindication of the United States as a place where Civilization self-corrects, reforms, thrives. We are in denial of both the imminent death of this nation and its morbid rebirth in the templates of diversity, neither of which forecloses the transition from White supremacy to the ascendancy of White Being.

Works Cited Perlstein, Rick. “Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strat- egy.” The Nation. The Nation Company, 13 Nov. 2012. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being / Power / Truth / Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument.” The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003): 257-337. Print.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 67-71 71

Committed Writing as Common Ground: Jesmyn Ward’s Poetics of Breathing While Black

Laura Bieger

After the death of George Floyd under the knee of a White police officer on May 25, 2020, the words “I can’t breathe” may never sound the same. Over the course of the summer, they became a rallying cry in anti- racism demonstrations across the U.S. and around the globe, prompting Black Lives Matter activists to remind White protesters that they can indeed breathe just fine. This demarcation of difference among those united against racism is what makes “I can’t breathe” such a striking expression of the present devaluation of Black lives—an expression to bang against, and potentially crack open the suffocating realities of anti- Black racism in the United States today. In this essay, I want to consider what literature can bring to this task. To this end, I will turn to Jesmyn Ward, a contemporary African American writer who uses her success in the literary realm (as the first woman to ever receive the National Book Award twice) to intervene in public discourse on race and racism—by writing fiction and non-fiction, editing a bestselling collection of essays and poems, contributing to newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Vanity Fair, appearing on podcasts, and using the social media platform Twitter to share her views. In other words, Ward fully embodies Jean-Paul Sartre’s ideal of the committed writer: a writer who works across different genres and media to engage her readers with the pressing problems of her time (see Sar- tre). For Ward, the number-one problem is the structural conjunction of racial injustice and social inequality. And in her most recent novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, breath and breathing play a crucial role in engaging her readers with this problem. The novel was published in 2017, but its concern with “breathing while Black” gained new urgency in the face of mass protests fueled by frustration with the structural ties between

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 73-79 73 Laura Bieger racism and classism, which the COVID-19 pandemic had so ruthlessly exposed in the disproportionately high infections and deaths among Black Americans by the time the video of Floyd’s killing went viral. In approaching Ward’s novel along these lines, it is worth remembering that “I can’t breathe” were also Eric Garner’s last words when he was strangled to death by a White police officer on July 17, 2014. It is also worth remembering that Black writers including Frantz Fanon, Tony Medina, Claudia Rankine, Fred Moten, Ashton T. Crawler, and, more recently, Imani Perry “have developed a repertoire of breathing modali- ties in their criticism and poetry” to “show the somatic repercussions of racism while conveying an impulse to create and sustain human relationships under this condition” (Tremblay). This is precisely how breath and breathing are featured in Sing. The novel is set in present-day Mississippi, the place to which Ward recently returned to be close to the people she writes and cares about, and which, for her, means “addiction, ground-in generational poverty, living very closely with the legacy of slavery, of Jim Crow, of lynching and of intractable racism” (Ward qtd. in Allardice). One can imagine that breathing while Black is difficult in such a place. In Sing, it is a Black woman who has the most trouble breathing, suffocated by the grief over her brother who was killed in a lynch crime dubbed “hunting accident” when both were teenagers, and by nightmares of “being marooned on a deflating raft” at high sea, trapped in a futile battle to keep herself, her White husband, and their two children afloat: “I am failing them. We are all drowning” (Ward, Sing 50, 195; emphasis in original). In a pivotal scene, this woman, Leonie—who is just over thirty, a drug addict, and living with her parents in dire poverty—has trouble breathing after swallowing a bag full of crystal meth. She, her mixed- raced family, and her White friend are stopped by the police on their way home from Parchman, the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary, where they have just picked up Leonie’s husband after a drug-related three-year sentence. The story told in Sing is the story of this road trip. One may, indeed, read this road trip structure as a tribute to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, especially since the trip is also a journey into the past: Parchman, a prison established in 1901 in the Mississippi Delta that operated like a plantation until the early 1970s, links Ward’s novel to the forms of slavery and systemic oppression practiced at this site as well as to present-day realities of mass incarceration, “slavery by another name” (see “Mass Incarceration”). Not only Leonie’s husband but also her friend’s Black boyfriend is at Parchman as they take the trip. And her father and his brother spent time there as teenagers, in the 1940s, when Parchman was still a work farm, and many of the (predominantly Black) inmates were children. In the logic of the narrative, it is no coincidence that the Black woman is the one who instinctively swallows the bag to protect the others. “I snatch the small white baggie. I shove it in my mouth. I work up some

74 Amst 66.1 (2021): 73-79 Committed Writing as Common Ground: Jesmyn Ward’s Poetics of Breathing While Black spit, and I swallow” (Ward, Sing 161). Note the lyricality of the repeated “I” and the hissing sound of sharp breath created by the repeated s. Note further how powerfully the present tense drives the action in this first- person narrative, the type of narration that creates the most personal and intimate bond between a narrator and a reader. For this narrator there is too much at stake: her life and the lives of her children, going to jail for drug possession, having her husband Michael locked up again before even bringing him all the way home. And as she forces the bag— which she knows is leaking—down her throat, risking another kind of suffocation—that of an overdose—she watches the officer handcuff her thirteen-year-old son. “Just breathe,” Michael says. It’s easy to forget how young Jojo [the son] is until I see him standing next to the police officer. It’s easy to look at him, his weedy height, the thick spread of his belly, and think he is grown. But he is just a baby. And when he starts reaching in his pocket and the officer draws his gun on him, points it at his face, he is nothing but a fat-faced, bowlegged toddler. I should scream, but I can’t. (Ward, Sing 163) Reading how this woman, this mother, is muted and mutilated, when forced to watch this harrowing scene gives me a physical sensation of breathlessness. But at the same time, reading these lines makes it painfully clear to me how little I know. In fact, it gives me the humble sense that this kind of writing—through the lyrical force of its first-person narrative and the immediacy of a voice that seems to directly convey the mother’s agonizing thoughts—is perhaps as close as I can get. And yes, my reading displays the lure of sentimental identification, invoked through the trope of universal motherhood (everyone has a mother). Using this trope has a long and conflicted history in the works of committed women writers, which goes back to key texts of the aboli- tionist movement, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Ward’s hyper- realism runs the risk of engaging this lure. But her polished style can also function like a mirror that makes me see myself as I read these lines; and, as a result of this self-encounter in and through the act of reading, makes me feel how my feelings for this woman collide with the White privilege that separates me from what I read.

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The passage speaks back to Ward’s introduction toThe Fire This Time, which is dedicated to Trayvon Martin, another victim of racist violence in the not so distant past. Reminiscing about how she “returned often to the photo of [him] wearing a pale hoodie,” which was omnipresent in U.S. media after the killing, she writes: He “was a seventeen-year-old child, legally and biologically; George Zimmerman [the man who killed him] was an adult. An adult shot and killed a child while the child was

Amst 66.1 (2021): 73-79 75 Laura Bieger walking home from a convenience store where he’d purchased Skittles and a cold drink.” Note the powerful choice of detail here: the neighborhood store, the Skittles, the cold drink. “How could anyone look at Trayvon’s baby face,” she goes on, “and not see a child? And not feel an innate desire to protect, to cherish? How?” (2). The baby-faced boy in Sing is younger than Trayvon Martin, yes. But how Ward writes about him is animated by the desire expressed here to protect and cherish the life of a child. A bit earlier she mentions being “pregnant [at the time of editing the book] and […] revising a memoir about five young black men [she]’d grown up with, who all died young, violent deaths”—one of them being her brother, who (like Tray- von Martin and Leonie’s brother) was seventeen when he died (Ward, Fire 1). And when Ward discusses her memoir, Men We Reaped, in a podcast by the National Endowment for the Arts, she mentions finish- ing a first draft of Sing when editing The Fire This Time—which is, of course, a tribute to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, one of the most influential pieces of protest writing in the 1960s. In creating links between fact and fiction, current and historical events, her life and the lives of her characters, Ward follows in the foot- steps of committed writers such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, who used the authorities of their personal lives to add weight to their fictional works while using their success in the literary world to raise their voice in the public sphere and make audible the voices of other Black writers. And this shows us that committed writing is still the most effective in engaging readers with contemporary problems when combining fiction and non-fiction, especially if the latter draws on the life of the writer. It needs to be stressed, however, that fiction remains essential to this practice in at least two ways: First, it tends to establish the position from which a writer can effectively speak. Second, since it does not have to do justice to the lives of real living and breathing people, it is especially free to stage and explore such pressing problems as anti-Black racism. And yes, Sing makes tangible some strong somatic repercussions of racism, most dramatically through the fear of the Black mother for her son. Yet it also stages and explores this mother’s powerful impulse to save her loved ones—by swallowing the leaking bag and risking her own life for them. But in the course of the narrative we also learn how strained Le- onie’s relationships are. She has trouble taking care of her children, who belong more to each other and their grandparents than to their self- absorbed parents. She suffers from being a disappointment to her own parents while completely depending on them. She has an obsessive and at times abusive relationship with her husband, whose family does not accept them as a mixed-race couple—and is responsible for covering up the murder of Leonie’s brother, which was committed by a cousin of Michael’s. In the end, Leonie fails to seize the opportunity that Mi- chael’s release from prison might mean for her and her family, slipping

76 Amst 66.1 (2021): 73-79 Committed Writing as Common Ground: Jesmyn Ward’s Poetics of Breathing While Black back into addiction, dragging her husband along. And yes, her flaws and weaknesses are clearly linked to the loss of her brother, who appears to her as a ghost when she gets high. Even so, Leonie’s failure is portrayed as not being caused by personal trauma alone. It is firmly tied to the structural conjunction of racial (and environmental) injustice and social inequality: the crystal meth epidemic, the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe that costs Michael his job and prompts him to cook meth, the lack of employment opportunities for both him and Leonie, combined with the lack of generational wealth in Leonie’s family and the deep-seated racism in Michael’s. Moreover, and crucially, the death of Leonie’s brother is depicted as closely entangled with a social structure in which Black men either end up in prison or die young, violent deaths—the very structure that Ward lays bare in her memoir.

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Creating the troubled and troubling Leonie—“a woman who will buy herself a Coke at a gas station when her children are so thirsty they will drink the rain” (Allardice)—is the most daring thing about Sing. One may think of this character as a distant relative of Bigger Thomas, the unsympathetic protagonist of Native Son who revolutionized Afri- can American literature and forever changed the perception of Black life in the United States through its impact on the reading public. A native daughter about whom her own son says: “Leonie”—he calls her by her first name out of disappointment—“kills things” (Ward, Sing 108). And one may use the link between these characters to ask: Is Leonie, like Bigger, mainly the symptom of a racist society? Or does she have agency? She is trapped, yes. But she makes real choices, like deciding to keep her baby even though she is still in high school and the child will bind her for life to the family that killed her brother. Leonie may also bring to mind another problematic mother in African American literature: Sethe, the mother who kills her child to save her from slavery in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, which vastly inspired Ward. But Leonie only has a relation to Sethe or Bigger if readers make this connection. If they do, a fictional character assumes a life beyond the text in and through which it exists; becomes a “linking element,” a “bonding agent” in a web of relations knitted by readers engaging with texts, and through texts with one another—a dynamic web created and maintained through people reading the same texts, being moved by the same stories, growing attached to the same writing styles and characters, with the potential to change the shape of the world in which they live and breathe and interact with each other (Bourriaud 21; see also Bieger). Invoking this change by changing a reader’s sense of reality is the business of the committed writer. But note the proactive role of the reader in this scenario: As I have tried to show in my truncated reading

Amst 66.1 (2021): 73-79 77 Laura Bieger of Ward’s novel, making sense of it involves relating and comparing it to other texts, evaluating and judging it based on those relations and in dialogue with other texts and other readers. And this brings me back to the question I started with: What can literature bring to the task of grappling with the suffocating realities of anti-Black racism in the United States today? I think that it can engage us in the collective, reflective, interactive practice of defining what it means to be human. I take this seemingly overwhelming idea from the neo-pragmatist philosopher Georg Bertram, for whom literature is a practice we use to reflect upon what it means to be human. And because “we always have to define what we are anew,” engaging in this collective, reflective practice is an exercise in becoming rather than being human (Bertram 3). I conclude on this note because I believe that we are living through a moment in which we have to define anew what it means to be human. And I suggest that we let that effort be guided by a question raised by Achille Mbembe in Critique of Black Reason: “how can we think through difference and life, the similar and the dissimilar, the surplus and the in-common?” (Mbembe 8; emphasis in original). In a world still significantly shaped by the crippling effects of White supremacy, the current health crisis has been such a powerful catalyst for social unrest because it makes manifest that some of us are still viewed and treated as lesser human beings than others. The conjunction of racial injustice and social inequality, responsible for splitting humanity into those who are more or less vulnerable to the pandemic as a result of inhabiting a position of relative privilege, is a vital threat to our survival as a species. In this situation our collective efforts to become human hinge, perhaps more than ever, on using one’s privilege to do the work of suturing that split. Jesmyn Ward’s committed writing provides guidance for this task—which concerns us as scholars, teachers, and global citizens.

Works Cited Allardice, Lisa. “Jesmyn Ward: ‘Black Girls Are Silenced, Misunderstood, and Un- derestimated.’” The Guardian. Guardian Media Group, 11 May 2018. Web. 26 Jan. 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/11/jesmyn-ward- home-mississippi-living-with-addiction-poverty-racism. Bertram, Georg W. Art as Human Practice: An Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Print. Bieger, Laura. “Jean-Paul Sartre, Richard Wright, and the Relational Aesthetics of Literary Engagement.” The Return of the Aesthetic in American Studies. Ed. Johannes Voelz, Rieke Jordan, and Stefan Kuhl. Spec. issue of REAL Year- book of Research in English and American Literature 35 (2019): 169-88. Print. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002. Print. “Mass Incarceration: Slavery by Another Name.” Nommo: Power of the Word. Nommo Magazine. 28 Feb. 2014. Web. 26 Jan. 2021. https://nommomagazine. com/?p=2144.

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Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Transl. Laurent Dubois. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2017. Print. National Endowment for the Arts. Interview with Jesmyn Ward. Art Works Podcast. National Endowment for the Arts, 4 June 2020. Web. 22 Feb. 2021. https://www.arts.gov/stories/podcast/jesmyn-ward-0. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Har- vard UP, 1988. Print. Tremblay, Jean-Thomas. “Being Black and Breathing: On ‘Blackpentecostal Breath.’” Los Angeles Review of Books, 19 Oct. 2016. Web. 26 Jan. 2021. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/being-black-and-breathing-on-black pentecostal-breath/. Ward, Jesmyn. Introduction. The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race. Ed. Jesmyn Ward. New York: Scribner, 2016. 1-8. Print. ---. Sing, Unburied, Sing. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Print.

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Racial Disruptions: Asian American Optics in a Provisional Democracy

Linda Trinh Võ

America’s democracy is fractured as the nation faces manifold crises of epochal and surreal proportions. Among them are political polarization, a deadly pandemic, an unraveling recession, a racial reckoning, and perilous climate change. As the leader of the free world, Donald Trump revealed the foundational flaws upon which U.S. democracy is built and now Joe Biden is tasked with repairing it. Trump rose to power demonizing immigrants and refugees and championing White supremacy, paradoxically following the election of the nation’s first multiracial Black president and as the U.S. population has become more racially diverse. Focusing the optics on Asian Americans disrupts the master narrative of American democracy and provides a pathway for dissecting the emergence of Trumpism.

Transformations

Barack Obama’s 2008 election raised hopes of meaningful racial transformation. However, his presidency was not a panacea for the nation’s racial woes. For some, his victory embodied the nation’s democratic ideals and they considered events like the 2014 Ferguson protests during his second term as an anomaly. For others, he symbolized the decline of White cultural dominance, and the “whitelash” was palpable with the election of Trump in 2016. Trump infamously announced his campaign by overtly appealing to White nationalists and the “heartland” of America as he strategically tapped into intransigent racist ideologies and xenophobic anxieties by castigating immigrants as “killers,” “rapists,” and “terrorists” (qtd. in Schleifer). Currently in the United States, 45 million people, or 14 %, are foreign-born, which is slightly lower than the highest peak reached in 1890 when the nation, alarmed by the influx

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 81-88 81 Linda Trinh Võ of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, passed the Immi- gration Act of 1924, establishing a national origin quota to preserve a White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant majority (Budiman, “Key Findings”). The Immigration Act of 1965 removed the racist quotas and prioritized family reunification and occupational preference, which unexpect- edly resulted in a majority of immigrants arriving from Asia and Latin America. Trump’s nativist invectives came at a time when the non-His- panic White population hovers around 60 % in 2020, down from 89 % in 1960. In the last decade, for the first time since the earliest census in 1790, the number of Whites has declined, whereas, in the last ten years, the Latinx (20 %), Asian American (29 %), and Black (8.5 %) populations have grown. At over 20 million people, Asian Americans are the fastest- growing group in the nation with the largest representation by those of Chinese, Filipinx, and Asian Indian ethnicities. Another U.S. mile- stone was reached in 2019 during Trump’s presidency with more than half of those under age 16 identifying as BIPoC: Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (Schneider). Trump’s “America First” tactic can be read partly as a response to China and Asia’s rise in economic power challenging U.S. dominance (Wike et al.). This anti-Chinese imagery resonates with historical ap- prehensions that Chinese laborers, recruited by American capitalists, were outcompeting and stealing jobs from White workers. This led the U.S. Congress to pass the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the only immigration legislation to explicitly specify an ethnic group. This is also reminiscent of the 1980s, when Japanese fuel-efficient compact cars out- paced the sales of American cars and the struggling U.S. auto industry responded by launching an anti-Japanese “Buy American” campaign. The White nationalist ethos is troubled by U.S. imperialism and Manifest Destiny being emasculated by “Third World” nations they indirectly and directly “civilized,” colonized, invaded, or exploited. Pres- ently, in addition to the outsourcing and offshoring of “American” jobs to Asia along with the unease over Asian bodies permeating the nation and Asian manufactured goods and technologies pervading the U.S. market, there is the perception of an encroachment of Asian cultural products, such as Asian foodways and K-Pop. When Parasite, a transnational production, won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2020, Trump bemoaned that they should have received Best Foreign Film instead: “What the hell was that all about? We’ve got enough problems with South Korea, with trade” (qtd. in Levenson).

Unmasking the Pandemic

To detract from his reckless mismanagement of containing COVID-19, which by January 2021 has killed more than 380,000 and infected over 23 million Americans, including Trump, he used inflam- matory anti-Chinese rhetoric, referring to it as the “Chinese virus” or

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“kung flu.” He proudly reiterates how he blocked flights from China, although early U.S. cases can be traced to Europe. Since the outbreak, hate incidents and crimes against Asians in the United States and in other Western nations have increased at alarming rates, in which they have been taunted as disease carriers or been told to “Go back to China” (“One Nation”). Many frontline medical care providers are Asian Amer- icans, some confronted by racist patients who refuse treatment by them, and Filipinx American nurses, immigrants who as an outcome of U.S. colonization were recruited to fill labor shortages, are dying in excessive numbers due to contracting the coronavirus as essential workers (Shio- chet). Additionally, the pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on BIPoC populations with higher death rates and also reveals the systemic racial inequities in education, health care, housing, employment, and incarceration rates. The pandemic reminds Asians Americans that they live in a conditional democracy that treats them as perpetual foreigners and suspect citizens (Siu and Chun). In the late 1800s and early 1900s, “Yellow Peril” racialism stereotyped Chinese immigrants as rat eaters and carriers of contagious diseases, which contributed to their being murdered and attacked and the destruction of their Chinatowns. Dur- ing World War II, the U.S. government incarcerated 120,000 Japanese Americans (the majority were U.S.-born citizens), falsely claiming that they were inherently unpatriotic and posed a security risk. This anti-Jap- anese fervor culminated in dropping the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, with 150,000 perishing. The Persian Gulf wars and post- 9/11 U.S. War on Terror has intensified Islamophobia and contributes to racial profiling as well as hate crimes against Muslim Americans and South Asian Americans, including Asian Indian Sikhs who are mistaken for Muslims (Lee).

Reckoning with Racial Injustice

On May 25, 2020, the recorded execution of George Floyd over a counterfeit $20 bill sparked outrage and ignited massive protests nationally. It was another stark reminder of how Black men, women, and children are brutally killed or maimed by the militarized police and White supremacists, who act with impunity because of the collusion of the judicial system. As Floyd pleaded for his life while officer Derek Chauvin had his knee on his neck, onlookers urged officer Tou Thao, a Hmong American, to intervene; instead he showed no compassion (Chanen). Unbeknownst to average Americans, the U.S. military recruited Hmong subsistence farmers in Laos to assist them during the Viet Nam War, part of U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia and their Cold War strategy against communism (Vang). At war’s end, the United States abandoned its allies, and the Hmong were viciously persecuted and forced to flee. Placed in low-income, inner-cities like Minneapolis-Saint Paul, which has the largest urban concentration of Hmong refugees in the

Amst 66.1 (2021): 81-88 83 Linda Trinh Võ country with around 66,000, they endured racism, post-traumatic stress disorder, and high poverty rates at 30 %. Acknowledging these predica- ments does not excuse Thao’s inaction; it contextualizes how Asians are positioned as both oppressed and oppressor, colonized and colonizer, and anti-racist and racist. Hmong and other Asian American activists promptly denounced Thao for his callousness and also spoke of their experiences with police brutality. As allies they joined and raised funds for the Black Lives Matter movement and launched educational campaigns to counter anti-Blackness in their ethnic communities. The authoritarian president of law(lessness) and (dis)order responded by sending the national guard to squash the Black Lives Matter protests, tear-gassed peaceful marchers for a photo op, incited right-wing militia groups, and refused to say the names of those unjustly killed. In September 2020, his administration prohibited federal agencies from conducting diversity or cultural sensitivity trainings and rejected the existence of implicit bias, stating these programs are “divisive, false, demeaning, un-American propaganda” (Trump). Trump demanded a colorblind society while concurrently denigrating groups by using insidious stereotypes and enacting policies that reinforce systemic insti- tutionalized racism.

Weaponized (Un)Belonging

To appease White nationalists, Trump made concerted efforts to cage asylum seekers and ban travelers from Muslim-dominated countries at the border, while also removing and excluding the “enemy” within. He threatened to end birthright citizenship in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, although it would have been challenged by the 1898 precedent case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which confirmed that a U.S.-born child with non-citizen Chinese parents was entitled to citizenship. Not only did Trump attempt to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, which has increased health insurance coverage for Asian Ameri- cans, but starting in 2019 also sought to enforce the Public Charge rule to deny permanent residency status or a green card to legal immigrants who received or might need public assistance. Trump fought against sanctuary city protections for undocumented immigrants and attempted to exclude them from the 2020 U.S. Cen- sus. There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, the majority of which are from Mexico with 1.3 million from Asia, and in total they pay approximately $12 billion annually in taxes, without receiving taxpayer benefits (Gee et al.). Under the Obama presidency in 2016, there were 110,000 refugee admission slots, whereas in 2020 under Trump, there were 18,000 and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has continued to inhumanely deport Cambodian and Vietnamese Americans who arrived as legal refugees but are not U.S. citizens (“Fact Sheet”).

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Without justification during the pandemic, Trump announced an ICE directive that international students could not stay in the United States if they were taking all their classes online, which would have affected over one million students. Universities filed lawsuits and within a week the order was rescinded. Striking is that these foreign students contribute $45 billion to the U.S. economy and in 2020 China (35 %) and India (18 %) were the largest source of students followed by South Korea (5 %) (“Open Doors”). Notably, Vice President Kamala Harris, born in Oakland, California, is the child of parents raised in countries under British colonialism—her father from Jamaica and her mother from India—who originally came to the United States as international students. Trump has denigrated Harris by intermixing misogynist, anti- immigrant, and anti-miscegenation tropes to depict her as “angry” and “nasty,” calling her a “monster” and a “communist,” while also ridiculing her first name and questioning her U.S.-born citizenship status (qtd. in Summers). Dehumanizing her and undermining her qualifications is aligned with his efforts to diminish the political power of BIPoC and immigrants to reinstate White political hegemony. This also echoes Trump’s persistent birtherism conspiracy theories meant to humiliate and delegitimize Hawaiian-born Barack Obama, whose Kenyan father and Indonesian stepfather were both international students when they met his White mother (Rogers).

Politicized Electorate

The 2020 election was unprecedented with Trump holding super- spreader rallies and voters turning out in record numbers, even during a raging pandemic. At a time when more U.S. voters are non-White, Jim Crow-style voter intimidation and suppression persists, from threats of sheer violence to hindering the U.S. Postal Service’s delivery of election ballots. The president’s lawyers insidiously tried to prevent citizens from voting, refused to concede the election by using “alternative facts” to make baseless accusations of wide-spread voter fraud, and declared the election was stolen, of course, implicating voters of Color. The 1790 Naturalization Act declared that as non-Whites, Asian immigrants could not become naturalized citizens, and it was not until 1952 that all Asian immigrants were finally granted the rights to citizenship and voting. Currently, Asian Americans are the fastest growing segment of eligible voters, the majority are naturalized citizens, increasing by 139 % from 2000 to 2020 and comprising 11 million or 5 % of the nation’s eligible voters (Budiman, “Asian Americans”). There are high Asian concentrations in California, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Washington—many of which are key battleground states. They are easy targets as untrustworthy voters, since over 60 % of Asian Americans are foreign-born. Although they lean towards the Democratic Party, they are also registered as Republican and

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No Party Preference, and as relatively new voters, they are wooed for their malleability as swing voters in close elections. In 2020, the majority of Asian Americans joined African Americans, Latinx, and Native Ameri- cans in voting against Trump (“2020 Asian American Voter”; Zhou).

Forwards and Backwards

These past four years of disinformation and vilification have intensified distrust, violence, and chaos. In 2016, it could be explained that Trump’s unexpected ascent to the presidency was merely an aberration, but even after his litany of transgressions and an impeachment, the expected buyer’s remorse barely materialized, and in fact, more Ameri- cans voted for him in 2020, with over 74 million votes or almost half the popular vote. Without his missteps regarding COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter, it is possible we would have an incumbent president serving a second term. The announcement of a Biden-Harris victory led to spontaneous jubilancy in the streets and many who felt unsafe in Trump’s America could momentarily breathe again, cognizant of the daunting tasks ahead. What remains are his emboldened cult followers who participated in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, including the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) base, QAnon adherents, and “stand back and stand by” militia, as well as the wealthy donors and conservative judicial appointments who are expected to erode the rights of BIPoC, immigrants, women, and LGBTQ+. To solely blame a narcissistic, corrupt, unhinged charlatan who lacks empathy and his complicit cronies for the nefarious regressions would be misplaced. We built a republic based on the original sin of slavery and the myth of the Statue of Liberty; hence, the nation was created as a provisional democracy that serves the privileged and Trump’s rise to the presidency is simply representative of those racial hauntings. We want to believe in the optimism of the 1960s that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” (King), then again maybe America’s democratic experiment of exceptionalism is a “hoax.” Will the nation restore its institutions of capitalism by merely rehabilitating its racial hierarchy with President Biden’s “Build Back Better”? Is the United States able to leverage a moral compass based on basic principles of human decency and embrace an inclusive and equitable plurality in a transactional world? Or will it enable another demagogue to rise to power?

Works Cited “2020 Asian American Voter Survey (National).” APIA Vote, AAPI Data, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice, 15 Sept. 2020. Web. 10 Nov. 2020. https://aapi data.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/aavs2020_crosstab_national.html. Budiman, Abby. “Asian Americans Are the Fastest-Growing Racial or Ethnic Group in the U.S. Electorate.” Pew Research Center, 7 May 2020. Web. 10 May 2020. https://pewrsr.ch/2WBvxf6.

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---. “Key Findings about U.S. Immigrants.” Pew Research Center, 20 August 2020. Web. 10 Oct. 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/?p=290738. Chanen, David. “Trouble Signs Showed up Early in the Career of Fired Min- neapolis Police Officer Tou Thao.” Star Tribune, Star Tribune Media, 26. Sept. 2020. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://www.startribune.com/trouble-signs- showed-up-early-in-the-career-of-fired-minneapolis-police-officer-tou- thao/572551651/. “Fact Sheet: U.S. Refugee Resettlement.” National Immigration Forum. National Immigration Forum, 5 Nov. 2020. Web. 27 Nov. 2020. https://immigration forum.org/article/fact-sheet-u-s-refugee-resettlement/. Gee, Lisa Christensen, Matthew Gardner, and Meg Wiehe. Undocumented Immigrants’ State & Local Tax Contributions. The Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy, Feb. 2016. Web. 3 Mar. 2017. https://itep.sfo2.digitalocean spaces.com/immigration2016.pdf. King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Address at the Conclusion of the Selma to Montgom- ery March.” 1965. King Papers. The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, n. d. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://king institute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/address-conclusion-selma- montgomery-march. Lee, Erika. The Making of Asian America: A History. New York: Simon & Schus- ter, 2015. Print. Levenson, Michael. “Trump Denounces Oscar Winner Parasite.” New York Times. New York Times, 20 Feb. 2020. Web. 21 Feb. 2020. https://www.nytimes. com/2020/02/20/us/trump-parasite-academy-oscar-south-korean.html. “One Nation AAPIs Rising to Fight Dual Pandemics: COVID-19 and Racism.” One Nation Commission. One Nation Commission, Oct. 2020. Web. 1 Nov. 2020. https://www.onenationcommission.org/the-commission-report-ii. “Open Doors 2020 Report on International Educational Exchange.” U.S. Depart- ment of State. IIE Books, 2020. Web. 18 Oct. 2020. https://opendoorsdata. org/annual-release/. Rogers, Kate. “Trump Encourages Racist Conspiracy Theory about Kamala Har- ris.” New York Times. New York Times, 13 Aug. 2020. Web. 9 Dec. 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/us/politics/trump-kamala-harris. html?searchResultPosition=1. Schleifer, Theodore. “Trump: Mexican ‘Rapists’ Coming Now, Middle East ‘Ter- rorists’ Coming Soon.” CNN.com, Cable News Network, 25 June 2015. Web. 11 Dec. 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/25/politics/donald-trump- mexicans-terrorists-immigration-2016/index.html. Schneider, Mike. “Census Shows White Decline, Nonwhite Majority Among Youngest.” The Associated Press News. Associated Press, 25 June 2020. Web. 14. July 2020. https://apnews.com/article/a3600edf620ccf2759080d 00f154c069. Shiochet, Catherine E. “Covid-19 Is Taking a Devastating Toll on Filipino Ameri- can Nurses.” CNN.com, Cable News Network, 24 Nov. 2020. Web. 30 Nov. 2020. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/24/health/filipino-nurse-deaths/ index.html?fbclid=IwAR2uTl1sOpIGKwrKD09DWnHAbTNq4of4LZX80t 9g9Mp7Hh2VCdH_7k823NU. Siu, Lok, and Claire Chun. “Yellow Peril and Techno-Orientalism in the Time of Covid-19: Racialized Contagion, Scientific Espionage, and Techno-Economic Warfare.” Journal of Asian American Studies 23.3 (2020): 421-40. Project MUSE. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. Summers, Juana. “Trump Calls Harris a ‘Monster,’ Reviving a Pattern of Attack- ing Women of Color.” NPR, 9 Oct 2020. Web. 11 Dec 2020. https://www. npr.org/2020/10/09/921884531/trump-calls-harris-a-monster-reviving-a- pattern-of-attacking-women-of-color.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 81-88 87 Linda Trinh Võ

Trump, Donald. “Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping.” Whitehouse.gov. The White House, 22 Sept. 2020. Web. 23. Sept. 2020. Vang, Chia Youyee. Hmong America: Reconstructing Community in Diaspora. Urbana-Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2010. Print. Wike, Richard, et al. “Globally, More Name U.S. than China as World’s Leading Economic Power.” Pew Research Center, 13 July 2017. Web. 20 Aug. 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2017/07/13/more-name-u-s-than- china-as-worlds-leading-economic-power/. Zhou, Li. “Most AAPI Voters Backed Former Vice President Joe Biden while a Segment Supported President Donald Trump.” Vox.com. Vox Media, 14 Nov. 2020. Web. 15 Nov. 2020. https://www.vox.com/21561408/asian-american- voters-presidential-election.

88 Amst 66.1 (2021): 81-88 Serial Politics of the Equal Rights Amendment: Revisiting a Feminist Legacy

Elisabeth Bronfen

Invoking the lack of a common ground is not new in American politics. Neither is conceiving this national division in terms of a battle of opposing visions of what democracy should look like. In his “Tale of Two Cities” speech, held at the Democratic National Convention on July 16, 1984, New York Governor Mario Cuomo took President Reagan to task for describing the country as “a shining city on a hill.” Such a comparison necessitated, according to Cuomo, overlooking the fact that a significant part of the American population lived in conditions far removed from the splendor and glory implied by the Puritan ideal. By offering, instead, the image of a country split into two separate cities— one for the lucky and the other for those left out or left behind—Cuomo sought to drive home to his Democratic audience that it was essential that they unite as a party, as only they could bring the country together again. One of the issues Cuomo’s Democrats stood for at the time was gender equality, concretized in the legal text of the Equal Rights Amendment: “We speak for women who are indignant that this nation refuses to etch into its governmental commandments the simple rule ‘thou shalt not sin against equality.’ […] It’s a commandment so simple it can be spelled in three letters: ERA” (Cuomo 415). We now know that in November of that year the incumbent Ron- ald Reagan won in a landslide. For a majority of the American people, Reagan’s narrative about a shining prosperity for the fittest was the one they preferred. Nevertheless, gender equality has remained a compelling issue in the United States, again becoming clear when Joe Biden asked Kamala Harris to join his ticket in the 2020 election. At the same time, this highly vetted choice drew into focus how politics brings feminist issues back in waves, or, to use a different model, in serial installments, thereby producing a general effect of seriality. One might speak of a

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 89-94 89 Elisabeth Bronfen déjà-vu effect. As certain political issues keep resurfacing, what also returns are the tropes used in speeches and news coverage to appeal to the political emotions of the audience. Back in 1984, Walter Mondale had already chosen a prominent female lawmaker as his running mate. Only three decades later, however, would the hope that Mario Cuomo’s speech placed in the Italian American Geraldine Ferraro come to be fulfilled: “We will have America’s first woman Vice President, the child of immigrants, and she will open with one magnificent stroke a whole new frontier for the United States” (Cuomo 421). In 2020, Cuomo’s dreamt-of scenario finally seems to be realized with a female candidate in the second highest office of the nation. By contrast, the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) still remains unfinished business. Proposed as an amendment to the constitution, it had passed both houses of Congress in 1972. When it came to ratification by the individual states, however, it fell short of three states, even after the deadline was extended to June 1982. While that meant that the ERA had failed, feminist politicians have revitalized it in the last few years. Yet part and parcel of what I am calling serial politics is that the traction, which the revival of this amendment as a powerful sentimental narrative for national unity has gained since the early twenty-first century, is something that television drama, a favorite American genre for political re- and pre-enactments, had already tapped into in the meantime. Margaret Tally has described the “priming effect of popular culture” and, indeed, television shows have experimented with women as presidents over the last two decades. Precisely because concerns like women’s equal rights return in waves, the serial format of TV drama is particularly appropriate for putting serial politics on display. The first TV drama to put a woman in the Oval Office was Rod Lurie’s Commander in Chief (2005-2006). After the president, who chose his female VP solely because of her popularity with women, dies of a stroke, Mackenzie “Mac” Al- len (Geena Davis), an Independent, finds herself attacked on two fronts. The Republican Speaker of the House does not recognize her legitimacy, while her husband has difficulties reconciling himself to his new subor- dinate role. Allen, however, is able to confront all obstacles with poised self-confidence. In the final episode, she is the one to receive a standing ovation at a townhall meeting after her impassioned call for a revival of the ERA, not the Congressman who has just decided to challenge her re-election. Initially, the camera draws out a parade of women’s faces. Then, while Allen continues speaking about the differences this amendment would make, the camera pans across the audience to also include both young and old men. The conviction that this shared vision might be a unifying force finds its apotheosis in the final sequence. A multitude of people has gathered outside the townhall and is cheering the president as she descends the stairs to greet them. As the camera moves back, Allen remains standing at the center of the crowd, a tiny grey-clad figure in the midst of a hybrid body politic. Cultural climate, however, is key to the

90 Amst 66.1 (2021): 89-94 Serial Politics of the Equal Rights Amendment: Revisiting a Feminist Legacy workings of serial politics—and Lurie’s vision was both too late and too early, failing to speak to its historical moment. ABC canceled the show after one season. Yet, not much later, more shows featuring female presidents would follow and would continue to pre-enact female leadership in (or at least close to) the White House, among them House of Cards, Homeland (season 6), Scandal, Veep, and Madam Secretary. The final season of Madam Secretary (2019) eventually succeeded in speaking to its zeitgeist. When Elizabeth McCord (Téa Leoni), who, like her predecessor, is an Inde- pendent, ascends to the Oval Office, she, too, is confronted with a series of crises inside the government and inside her family, which serve to illustrate her command on both fronts. Although she was actually elected by the American people, she, too, must ward off the threat of impeachment, spearheaded by a vindictive Republican senator. Her legitimacy is restored when a ten-year-old girl from Atlanta asks her mother to drive through the night so she can hold a sign up in front of the White House that reads “She’s my President.” Picking up the story, cable news and social media set off a mass demonstration of support from women voters. Taking to the streets, as real-life women did after Donald Trump’s election, albeit with the opposite rallying call, the women of the show stage the largest public protest in their history. While this feminist fantasy—we could also call it wishful thinking—leaves open whether McCord will win re-election, it is this show of solidarity that emboldens her to undertake a whistle-stop tour to help ratify the ERA. In the final sequence, President McCord and her husband embrace before a cheering crowd on the open platform of the observation car, as their train is about to depart from one of the many small towns on their trip. As a sentimental trope, this public performance of their marital union plays to the hope that achieving gender equality might itself be the common ground in a divided America. In the following spring, the mini-series Mrs. America (FX 2020) countered this hopeful speculative fabulation by looking back to the past. In her revisitation of the 1970s battle for the ERA, Dahvi Waller again draws into focus the women who bonded together in this struggle: primarily real-life Democratic feminists Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and Shirley Chisholm, but also the Republican Jill Ruck- elshaus. If this is political melodrama at its best, it is because Waller’s retrospective gaze recalls a moment of functioning bipartisanship, in which a motley group of second-wave feminists were fighting for rights rather than about values (Spruill). Yet the National Women’s Confer- ence in Houston in 1977 serves both as the nostalgic climax of Mrs. America and as the significant turning point in the genealogy of national division, which is Waller’s central concern in this mini-series. At the end of the final assembly, Gloria Steinem is shown to have been successful in mediating the discord between diverse factions, and a racially diverse array of women from all walks of American life come together

Amst 66.1 (2021): 89-94 91 Elisabeth Bronfen in shared song to celebrate the new sisterhood they hope to have forged against all injustice. Yet, even as they resolve not to be divided and defeated again, members of the conservative Eagle Forum, who have also attended the convention, turn their backs to the stage and walk out. The very common ground this sentimental performance sought to proclaim is shown to have been a watershed moment for the successful opposition to the ERA, as well—and, with it, the rise of the Christian Right, the Tea Party, and Trumpism. The leader of the ERA opposition, Phyllis Schlafly, brilliantly played in Mrs. America by Cate Blanchett, would become an icon of conservative womanhood and of the conservative revolution. Shortly before her death in 2016, she embraced Trump as presidential candidate and her pro-Trump book was published one day after her death. Phyllis Schlafly is the embodiment of the conservative counter-vision, dividing the women of America into two cities—those committed to gender equality, including issues of sexual orientation, and those who see an equal rights amendment as an attack on their family values (Spruill). In the title sequence of Mrs. America, we see this battlefront between feminists and housewives as a cartoon indicating a fight for rights versus privileges and lifestyle. Gloria Steinem’s face on the cover of the women’s magazine McCall’s, in the hands of a woman sitting under a hair dryer in a salon, is replaced by a poster that reads “ERA. Now,” held up by another woman at a demonstration. She and her fellow activists then morph into the cherries in a pie with a lattice pie crust, which a resolute Phyllis Schlafly is dragging behind her in a cart as she faces her own troops with a megaphone in hand. Out of this megaphone Shirley Chisholm’s campaign bus emerges, leaving a yellow female sign in its trail, which, tossed upwards by a disembodied woman’s hand, transforms into a cross—the two insignia of the competing vision of feminine values. In a final visual morphing, Schlafly’s supporters are shown vacuuming up the sentences of the amendment, which a woman, cigarette in hand, is in the process of typing up. A bird’s-eye view captures a second squad of women marching forward alongside the resolute housewives, before both camps are absorbed by multicolored waves that turn into the stripes on the American flag. What this title sequence encapsulates is not only how one political wave engenders a counter- wave with which it is also entangled, but how both movements also run parallel simultaneously. If Waller’s historical revisitation draws on the simultaneity of these contradictory yet intertwined women’s movements, Mrs. America ends on a bitter note. In the closing sequence Schlafly speaks on the tele- phone with President-elect Ronald Reagan. He has called to thank her for her coalition but tells her he will not be appointing her to his cabinet because he cannot afford to upset the pro-ERA groups. Devastated, she puts on her apron and, sitting all alone at her kitchen table, begins to peel apples, the clock ticking in the background. We, of course, know

92 Amst 66.1 (2021): 89-94 Serial Politics of the Equal Rights Amendment: Revisiting a Feminist Legacy the consequences that this turn of events will have, and, in what has become a standard technique in historical TV drama, a chilling montage sequence splices documentary footage with title cards commenting the subsequent real-world events. The first of these reminds us that Reagan appointed Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a pro-ERA cold warrior, to be the first woman to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. A further title card, following upon images of the historic Phyllis Schlafly, reminds us that the battle over the ratification of the ERA “helped to realign the Republican and Democratic parties along a conservative and liberal divide.” A series of images of those second-wave feminists which Mrs. America paid homage to then segues into a further series of title cards, recalling the outcome of the battle between the two cities of women that the TV drama had brought to the screen: ratification in Nevada in 2017, Illinois in 2018, Virginia in 2020. Yet while each is followed by images of rallies for gender equality, culminating in the female Democratic lawmakers who arrived at Donald Trump’s State of the Union address dressed in white as a tribute to the suffragettes, the final title card once more draws into focus a refusal of the very common ground that had previously been achieved. While the House passed a resolution to re- scind the deadline for ratification, it reads: “the Republican-controlled Senate has indicated that it is highly unlikely to take up the measure.” In her speech at the victory rally in Wilmington, Delaware, on No- vember 7, Kamala Harris began by reminding the audience that democracy in America is a political project that demands to be fought for over and over again. After acknowledging her debt to her mother and the generations of women who paved the way for her, she may well have been thinking of the tedious serial installments in which women have made progress when she introduced President-elect Biden by stating “and what a testament it is to Joe’s character that he had the audacity to break one of the most substantial barriers that exists in our country and select a woman as his vice president” (Harris). He was, after all, recalling the Mondale-Ferraro ticket. Yet, as TV drama had already anticipated, what has also returned is the doubt some Republican lawmakers have cast on the legitimacy of her claim to this office. The legacy that Harris is tapping into cannot be unencumbered by a recollection of its opposition. The sentimental appeal in national division is too persistent to be overlooked.

Works Cited Cuomo, Mario. “Mario Cuomo Reminds Ronald Reagan of the Nation beyond His ‘City on the Hill.’” Live from the Campaign Trail: The Greatest Presidential Campaign Speeches of the Twentieth Century and How They Shaped Mod- ern America. Ed. Michael A. Cohen. New York: Walker, 2008. 411-34. Print. Harris, Kamala. “WATCH: Kamala Harris Speaks for the First Time as Vice Pres- ident-Elect.” PBS News Hour. YouTube.com. 7. Nov. 2020, Web. 20 Jan. 2021. https://youtu.be/5j8gGgEt2WI.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 89-94 93 Elisabeth Bronfen

Spruill, Marjorie J. Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2017. Print. Tally, Margaret. “‘Call It the Hillary-Effect’: Charting the Imaginary of ‘Hill- aryesque’ Fictional Narratives.” Politics and Politicians in Contemporary US Television: Washington as Fiction. Ed. Betty Kaklamanidou and Margaret J. Tally. New York: Routledge, 2017. 61-74. Print.

94 Amst 66.1 (2021): 89-94 Equal Pay Now! The “Gender Pay Gap” in Transatlantic Perspective

Birte Meier in Conversation with Heike Paul

Birte Meier, award-winning investigative journalist and a leading expert on all issues of equal pay for women, is currently suing the ZDF for equal pay. This interview originally took place in German for the Amerikahaus YouTube channel, first aired on Dec. 11, 2020 (Amerika- haus). This is a translated, abridged, and updated version.

Heike Paul:

What do we talk about when we talk about the gender pay gap? At the end of the day, different people earn different salaries in large part because they work different jobs. The gender pay gap points to a specific kind of imbalance. How so?

Birte Meier:

First of all, there exists what we call an unadjusted gender pay gap. This is the average wage gap between men and women across all occupations. In Germany, it is estimated to be around 19 %. This puts Germany substantially behind other EU member states. The only EU country trail- ing Germany is Estonia. Still, we can account for about three quarters of this gender pay gap with solid, factual explanations. For example, women more often work in low-paying jobs and in lower-paying industries. Of course, this begs the question: Are nurses paid less because they are over- proportionally female? Or are nurses paid less generally, regardless of gender? Notwithstanding such questions, a large part of the 19 % gap can be accounted for. Still, even if we take all factors into the equation (work experience, different industries, different educational levels, etc.), we -ar rive at the so-called adjusted gender pay gap. This is the average wage gap

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 95-102 95 Birte Meier in Conversation with Heike Paul between men and women, which we cannot simply explain away. In Ger- many, it is about 6 %. Many people have suggested that 6 % is “really not so much.” Well, of course, it IS a lot, and if you extrapolate it—say, over the course of a working life—it adds up to a huge sum of money. This is what we call pay discrimination, and this is illegal. Such discrimination has to be determined in each individual case: Is there a situation in which a woman and a man work for the same employer, perform the same or equivalent work, and yet are paid differently without this actually being justified? This can be very difficult to prove—and rarely have German women tried to argue the case.

Heike Paul:

Your article in Die Zeit in March 2020 (Meier) very pointedly argues the need for addressing pay discrimination based on gender. Moreover, you ask: “Why in Germany have we resigned ourselves to the fact that less salary is as much a part of female life as menstruation and menopause?”

Birte Meier:

Indeed, I do find this amazing, truly incomprehensible. In England, there are plenty of lawsuits. Right now, there are class action lawsuits by women who work in supermarkets and who earn less than men in comparable jobs in the warehouses. Then there are the supposedly so- conservative Swiss women, who we know got the right to vote very late, and who have yet long surpassed us in the equal pay debate by winning themselves a law for more pay transparency. Iceland has put unequal pay under penalty and has introduced a certification mechanism that obliges companies to have their salaries reviewed and adjusted when necessary. Only in Germany do we still seem to pretend that somehow women themselves are to blame for earning less than their male counterparts: First, they choose the wrong occupation; then they stay at home to raise their children for too long; then they lack ambition for a career, and, finally, they don’t know how to negotiate salaries. In the end, it is their own fault. In a country that has been governed by a female chancellor for fifteen years, where more girls graduate from high school than boys, and in a European Union that is currently headed by a woman, of all people it is German women who are unable to earn the same as men? While this might not make sense, it is where we stand right now.

Heike Paul:

In addition to the places you just mentioned, let us look at the United States, where the topic has also been discussed and where certain measures have already been introduced to remedy the gender pay gap. What does an equal pay-agenda look like in the United States?

96 Amst 66.1 (2021): 95-102 Equal Pay Now! The “Gender Pay Gap” in Transatlantic Perspective

Birte Meier:

The United States, unlike Germany, has had a legal basis on which women can successfully sue for equal pay for a very long time. There have been the Equal Pay Act since 1963 and the Civil Rights Act since 1964: over fifty years before Germany even had the Pay Transparency Act. Be- cause of these two laws, numerous lawsuits could be pursued. Carried out in public, these lawsuits maintain a role as a mode of political education, by which the public learns what works and what doesn’t, what is socially acceptable and what is not. And in the United States, we also have case law. As a consequence, decisions in the courts have a much greater influence on how laws are applied in the future than they do, for instance, in Germany. A history of case law has thus been established over decades and has been followed by a broad understanding of how to deal with this problem. The United States is simply very far ahead of Germany.

Heike Paul:

What have been some of the most important cases regarding equal pay?

Birte Meier:

There have been several big lawsuits in retail, for one thing, such as at The Home Depot and Walmart. Some lawsuits are still going on. Currently, Disney, for instance, and both Goldman Sachs and Google face equal pay claims. There is a lot of money at stake, and these lawsuits are often legally complicated. Often, they are class action lawsuits, in which a large number of women sue together so that they are better protected against acts of revenge on the part of their employers. But these cases drag on, often for many years. I talked to a female lawyer, Kelly Dermody, who represents female employees in five major equal pay discrimination lawsuits, and she says that equal pay and discrimination lawsuits are generally messier than others. There is the moral reproach that goes along with the monetary battle. This can obviously be harmful for these companies and their leadership, so they need to fight the accusations on both the economic and the symbolic level. In the meantime, some of the more progressive states, such as California, Massachusetts, and New York, have made further improvements with laws at the state level. In California, there is the Fair Pay Act (2015), which is reviewed every year, and on this legal basis women now have a decent chance of being able to assert their claims.

Heike Paul:

And all of this goes back to Lilly Ledbetter, a woman worker from Jacksonville, Alabama?

Amst 66.1 (2021): 95-102 97 Birte Meier in Conversation with Heike Paul

Birte Meier:

Lilly Ledbetter is someone who has played a major role in raising social awareness regarding pay discrimination and unjustified wage differences. She is 82 years old today and still lives in Alabama. I talked to her on the phone and found her to be a lovely lady. She worked at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company for a very long time. After 19 years or so, a note was slipped to her at work. It had the salary of a man in a comparable position on it. She ended up suing and the case went to the Supreme Court, making a lengthy and intensely arduous trial. The Supreme Court ultimately voted 5-4 to dismiss the suit, with a bit of a curious argumentation. The argument was that while Lilly Ledbetter had indeed been discriminated against by being paid far too little for many years, she would not be compensated for it, however, because of a time limit provision. According to the Equal Pay Act, you have only 180 days to claim such discrimination— and Lilly Ledbetter unfortunately missed that deadline by a long shot.

Heike Paul:

Was this case at least a symbolic victory for Lilly Ledbetter?

Birte Meier:

Certainly. There was this famous dissent at the time written by Jus- tice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, stating that “the court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious manner in which women can be victims of pay discrimination” (Barnes). Afterwards, Lilly Ledbetter got together with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and lobbied for two years for a new law, and when President Barack Obama arrived in office, the first law he passed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (2009). The law stated that the former time limit regulation no longer applied, so that with every paycheck, the time limit is triggered anew—thus ensuring a situation like that of Lilly Ledbetter would not happen again. This is absolutely something to be pleased about.

Heike Paul:

Lilly Ledbetter is a White woman, and when we look at the United States, we, of course, see that other factors play critical roles in explaining why some groups of people are privileged and why others are disadvantaged. Non-White women certainly may find themselves in more disadvantaged positions than their White counterparts.

Birte Meier:

What is striking is that the United States also breaks down the unadjusted gender pay gap along the lines of race and ethnicity. And, yes,

98 Amst 66.1 (2021): 95-102 Equal Pay Now! The “Gender Pay Gap” in Transatlantic Perspective there are significant differences. The best-off seem to be Asian-Amer- ican women, who make 90 cents on each dollar a White man makes, and who reportedly suffer from less negative bias in the labor market than other groups of non-White women. Hispanic and Native Ameri- can women, on the other hand, suffer the most inequity and the highest pay gaps in the country. The non-profit organization Time’s Up, formed in 2018 around the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment in the workplace, has taken a stand for equal pay and equal treatment of women. This organization is focused on the fact that it is not just White women in Hol- lywood who are being discriminated against. The lower someone is on the social ladder, the more vulnerable she is to discrimination and the worse her access to legal resources.

Heike Paul:

Time’s Up originates in Hollywood but is not responsible for Holly- wood alone. The location certainly helps the visibility of the movement, particularly when it can identify a glaring gender pay gap in the glamor- ous world of show business as well. There seems to be a huge difference in what actors are getting paid for lead roles in the same film.

Birte Meier:

Indeed. In one case, the actor Michelle Williams received less than one percent of the money her male counterpart received. This was a re- shoot for All the Money in the World, for which she was paid $1,000 while Mark Wahlberg was paid $1.5 million. When this became known, there was a huge outcry, and Wahlberg donated his earnings to “Time’s Up.” Earlier, as the result of a hack, more information of this kind had ended up in public, and what many had suspected for a long time had become clear: that actresses, even the stars, earn much less than their male counterparts. Patricia Arquette gave a great speech at the Oscars in 2015 and demanded: “It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women, in the United States of America.” Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez jumped out of their seats and, along with many others, applauded wildly. There was a moment. And the topic continues to be discussed.

Heike Paul:

We have now dealt with the United States and some of the prominent figures who have shaped the discourse of the pay gap there. Let’s take a look at this side of the Atlantic once again, back to Germany. Not all of the women in Germany are or have been fatalistic about the gender pay gap. There have been women who have protested and organized for

Amst 66.1 (2021): 95-102 99 Birte Meier in Conversation with Heike Paul equal pay. Are the Lilly Ledbetters of Germany perhaps the so-called “Heinze women”?

Birte Meier:

The Heinze women have gone down in the history of the Federal Republic: 29 women working at the Heinze plants in Gelsenkirchen. They received much lower wages than the men even if they themselves had trained them for the job. They took their complaint to the union: “Nobody pushes us away” was their song. They went all the way to the Federal Labor Court in a trial that received much media attention—and in 1981, they won a compensation of about 100,000 Deutsche Mark. Un- fortunately, the Heinze-Werke soon after filed for bankruptcy, so they never received their money in full. But this was the major fight for equal pay in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Heike Paul:

So it does help to get support from institutions, such as labor unions?

Birte Meier:

The unions did support the Heinze women. Equal pay for equal work. The trade unions have collective bargaining power and together with the employers’ representatives they basically determine the value of labor. If there is a new part in the bargaining process (such as gender equality), it poses the question of whether the collective agreements really are non-discriminatory. Even a collective bargain can discriminate. This, of course, questions the authority of unions. Nowadays, unions generally don’t hold as strong of a standing as they have historically. A focus on equal pay may end in pitting one goal against another, and women lose out. Institutions often play ambivalent roles in equal pay campaigns and legal motions—if they play any role at all. If you look at how the debate unfolds in Germany, it is often not about institutional politics and structural change, but about “women fixing.” According to this logic, women need to become engineers, not nurses: only then can they escape the nasty trap of the gender pay gap, finally earning as much as men. This is an illusion—and an evasive, victim-blaming strategy at best.

Heike Paul:

You mentioned “male domains” in the workforce. It seems that even when men and women are active in the same, yet gender-segregated, fields, the pay gap arises without fail. Sports may be a fitting example here—on both sides of the Atlantic, in fact. Led by Megan Rapinoe,

100 Amst 66.1 (2021): 95-102 Equal Pay Now! The “Gender Pay Gap” in Transatlantic Perspective the U.S. women’s national soccer team is involved in an equal pay fight. After yet again becoming World Cup Champions, each player received a $260,000 bonus for winning the title. If the men’s team had done the same thing, they would have each received more than $1 million.

Birte Meier:

Sure, they lost their case in the first instance and have appealed. In Germany, we have a similar situation—the women’s soccer teams earn less than the men. It is argued that it is less attractive than the male variant, draws much smaller audiences, and hence the sponsorship contracts are also less substantial. But in the United States, it’s actually the other way around. Hardly anyone knows the male players by heart, but everyone knows Rapinoe and her teammates. So, no excuse there. And it is not just about money, it also involves training conditions. If you’re not considered high potential from the start, because you’re a woman, then of course there’s less investment. From an entrepreneurial point of view, this makes no sense at all. If I want to promote the potential in a company or in a club, then of course I have to make sure that everyone is equally motivated.

Heike Paul:

Soccer is also a domain where women are making inroads in Ger- many, not so much as players but as referees. The pay grade is currently much higher when you referee a men’s top game than a women’s top game. The role of women has also been prominently discussed in the world of chess, a male-dominated sport if there ever was one. The best female player in Germany, Elisabeth Pähtz, complained in 2019 about a lack of appreciation in the German national team. She withdrew from the team when she realized that she was paid less money for her games, even as she was winning more titles and medals than many male players. The German Chess Federation (Deutscher Schachbund) came around, fixed the gender pay gap, and asked her to return to the team. She did. What can we learn from this “success story” at a time when the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit (2020-) is celebrating a young female chess player? Perhaps that, like it or not, the queen is, after all, the most powerful figure on the chessboard.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 95-102 101 Birte Meier in Conversation with Heike Paul

Works Cited Amerikahaus. “Equal Pay Now! Was Deutschland von den USA lernen kann.” YouTube. 11 Dec. 2020. Web. 20 Jan. 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=rcwhigFMS0g. Barnes, Robert. “Over Ginsburg’s Dissent, Court Limits Bias Suits.” Washing- ton Post. Washington Post, 30 May 2007. Web. 20 Jan. 2021. https://www. washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/29/AR20070529 00740.html. Meier, Birte. “Ich verdiene mehr!” Die ZEIT Online. Zeitverlag, 18 Mar. 2020. Web. 20 Jan. 2021. https://www.zeit.de/2020/13/gender-pay-gap-geschlechter gerechtigkeit-gesetze-gehalt.

102 Amst 66.1 (2021): 95-102 Bridging the Military-Civilian Divide? Military Spouses in Post-9/11 U.S. Culture

Katharina Gerund

The Familiarity Gap

The complex relationship and perceived distance between U.S. civil society and the country’s armed forces has been an ongoing issue of debate that is “as old as the American republic itself” (Golby et al. 97). It has, however, been problematized with renewed urgency in specific historical contexts, such as the end of the male draft in 1973 or in the aftermaths of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent so-called Global War on Terror (Golby et al. 98-99). In 1997, Thomas Ricks predicted in The Atlantic “that over the next twenty years the U.S. military will revert to a kind of garrison status, largely self-contained and increasingly distinct as a society and subculture.” Indeed, more recent survey findings suggest that there are “many gaps between the Ameri- can public and its military” (Mattis and Schake 4). While the overall support for the military seems to have grown, the knowledge about the armed forces amongst civilians has decreased: “[T]hough support for ‘the troops’ has become a kind of American civil religion, these ritual- ized gestures sometimes seem only to emphasize the distance between the military and civilian society” (Brooks 21-22). This “familiarity gap” (Golby et al. 102), which has been subject to diverse and sometimes conflicting interpretations, has most recently also surfaced in discourses on the 2020 election. The Trump campaign’s attacks on mail-in ballots have unsettled military communities, both those overseas and stateside, for whom absentee ballots are an established and time-tested voting practice (Keilar and Valentine). As part of their unfounded allegations of voter fraud, the Trump administration further suggested that it would be outright suspect if it turned out that the Republican incumbent did not win the military vote in a landslide

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 103-10 103 Katharina Gerund

(Lupton and Margulies; Choi). Such statements draw on a preconceived notion that members of the military are a largely homogeneous group with broadly shared conservative values and Republican political lean- ings. This, of course, does not do justice to the complexity and diversity of today’s military communities. The familiarity gap between civil society and the military constitutes a significant fault line in American society that is not limited to the Trump years—and it will certainly not simply disappear with the election of a new commander-in-chief. Active-duty personnel, veterans, and military families are not only a crucial (target) group for political campaigns and agendas, as well as consumer culture and commerce, but also central to the effort to bridge the gap because, as Cody Poplin and Benjamin Wittes point out, the “civilian-military isolation is largely a one-way street. Members of the military interact all the time with civilian society, after all” (148). As a way to analyze this gap, its ambivalent effects, and its interme- diaries, I suggest examining the lived experiences and cultural representations of military spouses more closely. They are often civilians who have only signed up by proxy for a military life; at the same time, they know military culture intimately, constantly navigate the gap, and are viewed as potential mediators in the cultural imaginary of the United States. Especially in the aftermaths of World War II and during the Cold War era, military wives have been assigned various functions ranging from providing moral guidance and motivation for their soldier- husbands to serving as “unofficial ambassadors” of U.S. culture and politics abroad (Alvah). With the shift towards an all-volunteer force, the soldiers’ families have moved further into focus, and the role of military spouses gained symbolic significance and became an important source of identification. These developments have intensified in the context of post-9/11 perpetual warfare and ongoing states of exception.

Military Spouses in Contemporary U.S. Culture

Despite considerable changes in military culture and in the make- up of military families, military spouses continue to be predominantly imagined as women and they frequently emerge as marginal(ized) figures in narratives of war, in representations of the U.S. military, and in political discourse at large. They are often cast as silent bystanders at political rallies, presidential addresses, cultural events such as sports games and concerts, or military rituals such as the homecoming: waiting wives, home front heroines, grieving widows. More generally, they appear as supporting actors in grand narratives of war and imperialism, international politics, and national identity. I argue that through (and beyond) these predictable roles, the military spouse is a figure of highly symbolic significance in the cultural imaginary of the United States and is an integral figure to its “state fantasy,” i. e., a “dominant

104 Amst 66.1 (2021): 103-10 Bridging the Military-Civilian Divide? Military Spouses in Post-9/11 U.S. Culture structure of desire out of which U.S. citizens imagined their national identity” (Pease 1). Military spouses are part of the “civil sentimental” repertoire of the United States (Paul); they stand at the center of the “melodramatic discourse” of the post-9/11 era, which imaged the United States as “victim-hero” of global politics (Anker 2-3); and they “figure” in political and cultural contexts in Rebecca Adelman’s sense. In these constellations their agency tends to be greatly limited. “Figuring,” for instance, “proceeds under the guise of attending to another being’s value, sentience, and suffering, but ultimately engenders denial or negation of their political subjectivity” (Adelman 6). Many contemporary media portrayals, political performances, and a plethora of cultural representations, however, also set out to generate empathy for the sacrifices of military families, to educate the public about military culture and life, and, ultimately, to create “affective agency” for the military spouse “to have her political and social circumstances move a populace and produce institutional effects” (Wanzo 3). The figure of the military spouse takes on an ambivalent position. On the one hand, the military spouse critically reveals the effects of war on the home front and the challenges military families face. On the other hand, she burnishes the image of the armed forces and, sometimes inadvertently, promotes militarization and imperial warfare in the name of democracy. She is frequently enlisted as guide and translator for civilian audiences unfamiliar with the everyday realities of their armed forces. A wide variety of cultural productions have explored the potential of military spouses to act as mediators between civil society and military culture over the course of the last two decades. Self-help books, magazines, social media threads and online fora, forms of life writing, and fictional portrayals offer venues for military spouses to share their experiences among each other, build communities, and enhance mutual support and self-understanding. The magazine Military Spouse, for example, has made it its mission to “empower and connect [its readers] by giving spouses a voice to share the challenges and joys of this crazy military life” (“Military Spouse”). Jenn Carpenter’s One Army Wife’s Tale was originally published as a blog and daily deployment journal: “The day after Dax left [for Iraq], I started a blog called One Army Wife’s Tale. I started it just for the two of us, but now it’s read by people all over the world” (“One Army”). While Carpenter’s texts have now appeared as a self-published book, which in part retains the diary format, her blog has been taken down. In her farewell post on January 16, 2014, Carpenter emphasizes the therapeutic aspect of writing: “[W]hile I’ve heard from hundreds (thousands? maybe…) of military spouses over the past few years about how cathartic my blog has been for them, it has been the best therapy in the world for me” (“New Year”). It may be read by readers from all walks of life, but the text ostentatiously emerges for the purpose of its author’s (and her fellow military spouses’) well-being, self-assurance, and self-understanding.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 103-10 105 Katharina Gerund

Siobhan Fallon, author of the critically acclaimed short-story collection You Know When the Men Are Gone, seeks to represent military spouses and their experiences beyond the iconic media images and cli- chés in her texts:

I wrote the stories in an attempt to say yes, it’s actually OK to feel like this sometimes, the news programs are leaving so much out when they narrow military life into images of parades with heart swelling music, or even flag draped coffins. (qtd. in Pitre)

At the same time, she states: “I hoped to show a glimpse of day to day military life to those who have never stepped inside our gates, to offer civilians more than the splashy headlines of deployments and home- comings” (qtd. in Pitre). Many representations of military spouses, like those of Fallon’s short fiction, have developed a substantial crossover appeal and explicitly or implicitly address a civilian audience. While they might offer civilian readers an introduction to military lifestyle and culture, texts by military spouses also frequently emphasize the limits of an outsider’s understanding of their situation. Lily Burana’s memoir I Love a Man in Uniform: A Memoir of Love, War, and Other Battles (2009) is a case in point. She goes to great lengths to explain “Greenspeak” to her readers, to offer definitions and explanations for acronyms as well as to outline military rules and regulations (cf. 22-24; see also, for example, 31-32, 106-07). The metaphorical and semantic analogy between U.S. warfare and the romantic love story that is indicated in the title similarly serves to link the everyday realities of readers with the experience of war on the home front and military life. Yet, Burana insists that there are things she herself and her readers cannot and should not know. She demarcates and validates two lines across which information and knowledge cannot simply be shared: one separating her from her husband, who “was part of a world that I could not—and likely would not—ever know” (63), and one dividing the extended military community and “people who are strangers to that world” (4). By further pointing out that “there was much more to being a military wife than courtesies and customs and regulations—things I couldn’t learn by simply putting my nose in a book” (124), Burana reminds her readers of the tacit and emotional knowledge that members of the military community share, but which remains inaccessible for civilians. “[W]hen some well-meaning civilian, a neighbor or someone at the gym, would say, ‘I know how you feel,’ I’d be so pissed, I was sure my brain would melt and pour out of my eyes. No, you most certainly damn don’t know how I feel” (86; emphasis in original). Such self-representations in various media and genres not only showcase the ambivalent missions of military spouses speaking out in public—regardless if they are therapeutic, community building, political agenda-setting, or generating support and sympathy for military families and thus U.S. warfare at large. They also reveal the difficulties of translating and mediating

106 Amst 66.1 (2021): 103-10 Bridging the Military-Civilian Divide? Military Spouses in Post-9/11 U.S. Culture between the parallel worlds of the U.S. military and a civilian society which perhaps does not experience immediate effects of recent military conflicts in their daily lives and can thus easily ignore the quotidian realities of fighting wars abroad.

Jill Biden and Army Wives Joining Forces

The post-9/11 era has seen a “popular cultural fascination with military wives,” most prominently evinced by the stellar success of Lifetime’s show Army Wives (Adelman 94). Its seven seasons aired between 2007 and 2013 and have been compared to the hit dramas Desperate House- wives (ABC, 2004-2012) and The Unit (CBS, 2006-2009). References to the former are prompted by the iconography, aesthetics, and women- centered narrative, while references to the latter relate to the show’s general narrative premises and themes. Set in fictional Fort Marshall, Army Wives revolves around a group of five military spouses (four wives and one husband). The prime-time soap opera indulges in generic melodramatic plot twists, dramatis personae, visuals, and musical cues, and is unapologetic in its ideological mission to rally behind “the troops.” Army Wives’ support (and control) by the Department of Defense is evident in its setting, storylines, props, and personnel. Mary Douglas Vavrus has shown how Army Wives is positioned within the “media-military-industrial complex” and how it has “naturalize[d] and normalize[d] historically specific ideologies about Army gender politics and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” (6, 31, emphasis in original). The show has engaged in ex- tensive outreach programs, such as Army Wives Gives Back: brief branded segments in which members of the show surprise military families with events, donations, and gifts, and more generally use their platform to introduce “real” military wives (alongside the show’s commercial spon- sors) to the audience. The impact of such outreach activities is, of course, disputable, and they raise the question whether such affective modes of engagement vested in consumption provide a useful framework to support the families on the home front. Though with ambivalent consequences, the show has created visibility for military spouses and has emphasized its responsibility to “get it right.” The reactions of actual military spouses watching the show range from the appreciative assertion that “some of the stories rang true” and “[i]f it gets a little out there about what Army wives go through, that’s good,” to the more critical assessment that “the plots often feel more likely to play out in Wisteria Lane (Desperate Housewives on ABC) than at [their] 107,000-acre post in upstate New York” (qtd. in Lee). In light of both the symbolic relevance of military families and Army Wives’ popularity, it is not surprising that prominent political figures sought to enlist the affective persuasiveness and popularity of the show for their purposes. In 2008, for example, then-presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain both appeared in promotional spots

Amst 66.1 (2021): 103-10 107 Katharina Gerund for the second-season debut. Dr. Jill Biden, then Second Lady of the United States, also made a cameo appearance in “Mud, Sweat & Tears” (S04 E16), which shows her meeting with and listening to the concerns of a group of Blue Star wives, including some of the show’s protagonists as well as several nameless wives who seem to function as tokens of diversity. Referencing her own identity as a “military mom,” she reas- sures them: “Let me just say that the White House appreciates all that you and your families do every day for our country.” When she calls for more support for military families at a charity event at the show’s Fort Marshall, Biden addresses a double audience of both the fictional military community and the audience of Army Wives: “Although only 1 % of Americans are fighting our wars today, we need 100 % of Americans to support them and their families.” Jill Biden herself has worked to foster this support for the military community among Americans by making military families a central priority throughout her tenure as second lady, such as through the high-profile initiative Joining Forces, which she introduced together with Michelle Obama in 2011 to support service members, veterans, and their families, as well as through publishing her first children’s book in 2012, Don’t Forget, God Bless Our Troops. The Joining Forces program has focused on “employment, education, and wellness” and has been dedicated to “[c]reate greater connections between the Amer- ican public and the military” (“About”). During her husband’s 2020 presidential campaign, Jill Biden has publicly renewed her commitment to military families. As incoming First Lady of the United States, Dr. Jill Biden stands to highlight the sacrifices of military families, to champion their causes, and to work toward closing the “military-civilian divide.” With new resolve, military spouses—real and imagined—have performed this cultural work and affective labor since the post-9/11 era. They have tried to mediate between civilian society and military culture in order to generate public sympathy and political support, at the same time that they have been enlisted in public discourses and cultural texts as a means of promoting militarization, warfare, and imperialism. Military wives’ experiences mark the continuing relevance of the “familiarity gap” and its consequences. Moreover, these women’s efforts to facilitate communication and understanding between military and civilian communities offer ideas, impulses, and inspiration toward productively navigating and potentially mitigating the effects of this significant and fraught American fault line.

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Works Cited

“About Joining Forces.” The Obama White House Archive, n. d. Web. 20 Jan. 2021. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/joiningforces/about. Adelman, Rebecca A. Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in Perpetual War. New York: Fordham UP, 2019. Print. Alvah, Donna. Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946-1965. New York: New York UP, 2007. Print. Anker, Elisabeth R. Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014. Print. Army Wives. ABC Studios / The Mark Gordon Company, 2007-2013. DVD. Brooks, Rosa. “Civil-Military Paradoxes.” Warriors & Citizens: American Views of Our Military. Ed. Kori Schake and Jim Mattis. Stanford, CA: Hoover Insti- tution, 2016. 21-68. Print. Burana, Lily. I Love a Man in Uniform: A Memoir of Love, War, and Other Battles. New York: Weinstein, 2009. Print. Carpenter, Jenn. “New Year, Big Changes.” Blog post. One Army Wife’s Tale, 16 Jan. 2014. Web. 12. Dec. 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20120308130926/ http://www.onearmywifestale.com/p/our-deployment-diary.html. ---. “One Army Wife’s Tale.” Blog post. One Army Wife’s Tale, 8 Mar. 2018. Web. 12 Dec. 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20120308130926/http://www. onearmywifestale.com/p/our-deployment-diary.html. Choi, David. “Trump Campaign Witness Says It’s ‘Odd’ that US Troops Voted for Biden in Large Numbers.” Business Insider, 12 Nov. 2020. Web. 12 Dec. 2020. https://www.businessinsider.com/military-veteran-vote-joe-biden-trump- lawsuit-2020-11?r=DE&IR=T. Golby, Jim, Lindsay P. Cohn, and Peter D. Feaver. “Thanks for Your Service: Civil- ian and Veteran Attitudes after Fifteen Years of War.” Warriors & Citizens: American Views of Our Military. Ed. Kori Schake and Jim Mattis. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 2016. 97-142. Print. Keilar, Brianna, and Catherine Valentine. “Trump Calls for Ballot Counting Sce- nario where Votes Legally Cast by Military Would Be Thrown Out.” CNN. com. Cable News Network, 7 Nov. 2020. Web. 12. Dec. 2020. https:// edition.cnn.com/2020/11/06/politics/homefront-trump-military-ballots/ index.html. Lee, Felicia R. “Watching Army Wives Watching Army Wives.” New York Times. New York Times, 28 June 2007. Web. 12. Dec. 2020. https://www.nytimes. com/2007/06/28/arts/television/28wives.html. Lupton, Danielle, and Max Z. Margulies. “Trump’s Election Fraud Allegations Suggest Military Voters Uniformly Supported Him. It’s Not So.” The Wash- ington Post. The Washington Post, 18 Nov. 2020. Web. 12. Dec. 2020. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/18/trumps-election-fraud- allegations-suggest-that-military-voters-uniformly-supported-him-its-not- so/. Mattis, Jim, and Kori Schake. “A Great Divergence?” Warriors & Citizens: Ameri- can Views of Our Military. Ed. Kori Schake and Jim Mattis. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2016. 1-20. Print. “Military Spouse.” Military Spouse: Simplifying Your Crazy, Wonderful Military Life. Victoria Media, 2020. Web. 12 Dec. 2020. http://militaryspouse.com/ neighborhood. Paul, Heike. “Public Feeling, Tacit Knowledge, and Civil Sentimentalism in Con- temporary US Culture.” Projecting American Studies: Essays on Theory, Method, and Practice. Ed. Frank Kelleter and Alexander Starre. Heidelberg: Winter, 2018. 165-79. Print.

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Pease, Donald. The New American Exceptionalism. Minneapolis: U of Minne- sota P, 2009. Print. Pitre, Michael. “The Words after War Interview with Siobhan Fallon.” Huffpost. Verizon Media, 10 Jan. 2015. Web. 12. Dec. 2020. https://www.huffpost.com/ entry/the-words-after-war-inter_4_b_8223134?. Poplin, Cody, and Benjamin Wittes. “Public Opinion, Military Justice, and the Fight against Terrorism Overseas.” Warriors & Citizens: American Views of Our Military. Ed. Kori Schake and Jim Mattis. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institu- tion, 2016. 143-60. Print. Ricks, Thomas. “The Widening Gap between Military and Society.” The Atlan- tic Monthly. Atlantic Monthly Group, July 1997. Web. 24 Nov. 2020. https:// www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/07/the-widening-gap- between-military-and-society/306158/. Vavrus, Mary Douglas. Postfeminist War: Women in the Media-Military-Indus- trial Complex. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2018. Print. Wanzo, Rebecca. The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Wom- en and Sentimental Political Storytelling. Albany: State U of New York P, 2009. Print.

110 Amst 66.1 (2021): 103-10 Dream a Little American Dream with Me: Income Inequality and Social Mobility in the United States

Christian Lammert

With Donald Trump out of the White House, the problems that brought him into office in the first place will not miraculously disappear. Trump is not the main source of the economic, social, and political crises that we can observe in the United States, but rather the result of encompassing economic, political, and social developments which had already started in the 1970s (Vormann and Lammert): massive deregulation of labor and financial markets, retrenchment of a traditionally weak liberal welfare regime, an intense exposure of the labor market to global economic integration leading to growing income and wealth inequalities, and a decline of social mobility in the United States. As a result, trust in political elites and institutions has declined massively, and the flood gates for populist and anti-establishment rhetoric and mobilization have been opened. Trust is a central source of legitimacy in representative democracies. As data show, trust in political institutions and actors has constantly declined in the United States since the 1960s. According to Pew Re- search, 70 percent of Americans trusted their government in the 1960s. By 2015, this number declined to just 25 percent (18). And this is true for supporters of both Republicans and Democrats. A deeper look into the Pew data reveals part of what is behind that declining trust: people feel less and less represented by their political elites (Pew Research Center 26). Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson already stated in their 2010 book, Winner-Take-All Politics, that public policy in the United States over the last three decades favors mainly the rich and corporations, whereas the political elites forget the middle class and lower income groups. Pew data supports this argument: 77 percent of people think that political elites have lost touch with their base, that they do not care about the

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 111-15 111 Christian Lammert interests of average Americans (74 percent), and that they care mostly about themselves and their prospects for reelection (Pew Research Cen- ter 40). Economic factors are important in order to understand this alarming decline of trust. And one of the main developments we have seen in the United States since the 1970s is massive growth in income inequality. Ac- cording to all indicators used by economists, the United States is exceptional in this regard within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Especially the super-rich—the top 1 percent in income distribution—have enjoyed fantastic times in the last 40 years. Between 1979 and 2007, just before the financial crisis and the Great Recession hit the United States, average income after taxes and transfers quadrupled for the top 1 percent of the income distribution, whereas the increases for both the middle 60 percent and the bottom 20 percent were much more marginal. It was not the market alone that contributed to the massive rise in income inequality, but redistribution via the tax and transfer system proved unable to mitigate those developments, and in some cases even further aggravated them (Seelkopf and Lierse). The financial crisis of 2007 did not change these patterns. The top 1 percent rapidly recovered and continues to achieve an even greater share of the national income. Wall Street was winning again, and Main Street was left behind. This picture becomes even more extreme if we just look at the top 0.1 percent in the income distribution. In 2018, their average annual income was $7 million. Americans at the very top of the income distribution generate over 196 times the income of the bottom 90 percent (Saez and Zucman). The U.S. income divide has not always been as vast as it is today. In response to the staggering inequality of the Gilded Age in the early twentieth century, for instance, social movements and progressive policymakers fought successfully up until the 1970s to level down the top through fair taxation and level up the bottom through increased unionization and other reforms (Goldin and Margo). But with globalization and the dominance of neoliberal economic ideas since the Reagan administration, the United States has witnessed rates of income inequality that resonate well with the times of the Gilded Age. One might argue that income inequality has been a constant feature of the United States, with its focus on individualism, the market, and self-responsibility. And, indeed, the United States is supposedly a place where everyone has the opportunity to make a good life for themselves, regardless of luck and the circumstances of their birth. Inequality in income and wealth is acceptable as long as everyone is able to participate in economic progress and demonstrates a fair chance to join the club of millionaires. “From rags to riches,” as goes the common storyline of the American Dream in a nutshell. But at least according to empirical studies, that is not how life functions. Miles Corak has shown in his studies that there is in fact an inverse relationship between income inequality and social mobility, especially with regard to intergenerational mobility

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(Corak). Countries like the United States, with high income inequality, tend to have low social mobility. Zooming into the United States, we even see dramatic regional variation. Social mobility is particularly low in regions like the Southeast, whereas there is higher mobility in cities like Salt Lake City, Utah, and San Jose, California. Yet other cities, such as Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Atlanta, Georgia, maintain lower rates of social mobility. This regional variation again confirms that high income inequality is correlated with low mobility (Chetty). Applying a longer historical perspective to the relationship between inequality and social mobility, we see that social mobility has declined in the United States since the 1940s. Raj Chetty and his co-authors find that 92 percent of children born in 1940 earned more than their parents, but only 50 percent of children born in 1980 out-earn their parents. Family background thus continues to play a strong role in determining who is upwardly mobile and who is not. Children born into poor families have a hard time making it into the middle class as adults. Furthermore, there appears to be a glass floor at the very top, protecting children from falling down the income ladder. As class gaps along the lines of family formation, education, and neighborhood quality continue to grow, the upward mobility of today’s children is increasingly at risk. Both inequality and low and even declining social mobility are threats to the American Dream; or, perhaps are indicators that it is just that, a dream. The tight correlation between the incomes of parents and those of their children looks more like the aris- tocracies of yore than a modern twenty-first-century economy. Growing inequality and changing patterns of social mobility also have consequences for the middle class in the United States, the back- bone of democracy. The hollowing of the American middle class has proceeded steadily for more than four decades. Since 1971, each decade has ended with a smaller share of adults living in middle-income households. The share of adults living in those middle-income households has fallen from 61 percent in 1971 to 50 percent in 2015 (Pew Research Center). At the same time, the share living in the upper-income tier rose from 14 percent to 21 percent, while the share in the lower-income tiers increased from 25 percent to 29 percent. As a result, the gap in income and wealth between middle- and upper-income households has widened substantially. But there is also a political dimension to the crisis of trust that brought Donald Trump into office. Economic inequalities more and more often transition into political inequalities. In part due to increasing partisan polarization, the structure of the political system itself has become a problem: built-in blocking mechanisms, which are actually supposed to guarantee democracy, have instead led to political gridlock. The legislative process is no longer working as it was supposed to do and the system of checks and balances that was implemented to safeguard democracy is starting to weaken people’s trust in the capacity of the political system

Amst 66.1 (2021): 111-15 113 Christian Lammert to find solutions to economic and social problems. So, what we see is a decline of trust on the output side of the political system. But there is another problem on the input side of the political system as well, and that is why Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page ask whether the category “oligarchy,” rather than “democracy,” might be more apt to describe the United States at this point in time. Their concerns center on the opportunities that citizens have to influence politics and to make their voices heard: for example, the extent to which elected officials, in their actions and policies, act in accordance with the interests of the people who elect them. Political scientists call this responsiveness. Gilens finds with his empirical research that in the United States elected representatives are no longer attuned to the interests of the middle class or low-income groups. They instead primarily listen to the interests of the super-rich and organized special interests, who, through campaign contributions and lobbying, succeed in influencing politics (Gilens). Under these circumstances, democracy’s prime correction mechanism—elections—is ineffective (Lammert), even without widespread allegations of voter fraud. The influence of money in politics plays a decisive role here. Elections in the United States are becoming more and more expensive, and politicians need money to run their election campaigns. In 2012, for example, according to opensecrets.org, more than 40 percent of all private election contributions came from the richest 0.01 percent. In the 1980s, this share from the super-rich was only 10 percent. It seems obvious to which voices politicians have to listen. The Trump administration, and especially Trump’s behavior upon losing the 2020 presidential election, has pushed the United States to the brink of autocracy. Trump was not able to solve the various crises that made people vote for him in 2016. The Biden administration will face huge obstacles: trust needs to be reestablished, while income and wealth inequality and declining social mobility need to be tackled. And this is only possible if Biden and the Democrats will be able to build broad coalitions across party lines to implement necessary and encompassing political reforms in the United States. These range from economic stimulus packages to reforms in the fields of campaign finance, immigration, and health care. A Herculean job which, because of gridlock and Republican obstruction, might become a Sisyphean one.

Works Cited Chetty, Raj. “Socioeconomic Mobility in the United States: New Evidence and Policy Lessons.” Shared Prosperity in America’s Communities. Ed. Susan M. Wachter and Lei Ding. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. 7-19. Print. Chetty, Raj, et al. “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mo- bility Since 1940.” Science 356 (2016): 398-406. Print. Corak, Miles. “Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 27.3 (2013): 79-102. Print.

114 Amst 66.1 (2021): 111-15 Dream a Little American Dream with Me

Gilens, Martin. Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2012. Print. Gilens, Martin, and Benjamin I. Page. “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” Perspectives on Politics 12.3 (2014): 564-81. Print. Goldin, Claudia, and Robert A. Margo. “The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-Century.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 107.1 (1992): 1-34. Print. Hacker, Jacob S., and Paul Pierson. Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010. Print. Lammert, Christian. “The Crisis of Democracy. The United States in Comparative Perspective.” The Emergence of Illiberalism: Understanding a Global Phe- nomenon. Ed. Boris Vormann and Michael Weinman. New York: Routledge, 2020. 124-39. Print. OECD. Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising. Paris: OECD Publishing, 2011. Print. Pew Research Center. “The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground.” Pew So- cial Trends. Pew Research Center, 9 Dec. 2015. Web. 20 Jan. 2021. https:// www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing- ground. Saez, Emmanuel, and Gabriel Zucman. “The Rise of Income and Wealth Inequal- ity in America: Evidence from Distributional Macroeconomic Accounts.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 34.4 (2020): 3-26. Print. Seelkopf, Laura, and Hanna Lierse. “Taxation and Inequality: How Tax Com- petition Has Changed the Redistributive Capacity of Nation-States in the OECD.” Welfare State Transformations and Inequality in OECD Countries. Ed. Melike Wulfgramm, Tonia Bieber, and Stephan Leibfried. London: Pal- grave Macmillan, 2016. 89-109. Print. Vormann, Boris, and Christian Lammert. Democracy in Crisis: The Neoliberal Roots of Popular Unrest. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2019. Print.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 111-15 115

Disruption and Abrasion: American Social Media as Contested Infrastructures

Christoph Raetzsch

In 2001, the American electronic music artist William Basinski wanted to digitize a few of his older tape recordings. As the process went on, the coating of the tapes was slowly coming off, bit by bit, second by second. The result was an eerily repetitive loop that lost its initial musical definition with every new iteration. These recordings became a spectacle of disintegration with astounding meditative and aesthetic qualities, published a year later as The Disintegration Loops (Kim). But what made this idiosyncratic musical composition travel far beyond its connoisseur audience was a video that Basinski recorded from his apartment in Brooklyn that day. It recorded the smoke coming from the empty space where the Twin Towers had fallen to the ground: the disintegrating musical score of the loops appeared as the silent hymn of a shattering moment in the history of the United States. It was 2001, September 11. This anecdote illustrates two interwoven narratives around the effects of digitization. In the first narrative, we find a simple illustration of media change, the transition from one kind of medium to another, where a process of disruption appears as a form of recoding information for a different kind of material and logical support. The second narrative concerns the social and political dimensions of this change in media, where the disruption is felt less as a sudden disintegration but more as a glacial process in which individual choices and new practices gradually change the very institutional framework of public articulation on all levels. This latter narrative is about the politics of infrastructure, and it is tightly related to the emergence of American social media as global platforms of connectivity. In this second narrative, users of social media individually and collectively contribute to two related developments: they incrementally

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 117-22 117 Christoph Raetzsch weaken the institutional power of journalism and the press, and they decide against a vision of the Internet as a non-proprietary, inclusive, and widely accessible resource of information and communication. By becoming infrastructural in many communicative processes, social media platforms enable citizens and businesses to communicate with each other in all kinds of flexible and new ways. But they also shape a proprietary logistical and political space beyond the control of nation states or public scrutiny. There is a glacial dimension of this change, where platforms become infrastructures through their ability to gradually change how practices of communication are imagined and performed today. I want to discuss this change as a form of abrasion, the gradual grinding away at the conditions in which public articulation and contestation take place, a process in which value orientations and infrastructural choices collide. Looking back at the period between 2001 and the present, it is astounding how much social media have become embedded in everyday practices of individuals, institutions, politics, and the economy at large. There is now a generation of people coming into adulthood whose use of social media platforms shapes their understanding of relating to society in general. This development may be individually motivated, but it has collective effects of scale: “The choices of individuals by themselves are unlikely to have much of an impact. But networked technologies serve to aggregate and amplify individual decisions” (Hermida 4). In light of this amplification and growing popularity, there are also increasing political and cultural contestations over social media, because they serve as infrastructures of public articulation without being subject to public governance. The dominant data-driven business model of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs relies on integrated platforms for social interaction in order to micro-target and capture attention for advertising with unprecedented analytic and predictive capabilities (Seaver; Fisher and Mehozay). The data that users generate is used by social media platforms to train algorithms, to predict and steer attention and behavior. Due to the high potential of abusing this power, social media are increasingly a target of regulators—both in the U.S. and in Europe. The demand that “cooperative responsibility” (Helberger, Pierson, and Poell) needs to govern social media platforms is getting louder. They are perceived to be global infrastructures under corporate governance without functioning as “media of integration,” as van Laak described the historical origin of the concept of infrastructures in relation to train networks (“Infra-Strukturgeschich- te” 370). From the perspective of the platform society, the big players in the market are, apart from their equally large Chinese counterparts, clustering around sets of integrated services and resources that reinvent the open Internet as a corporate product for connectivity, merging and disrupting existing social and political frameworks at a faster rate than regulation can keep apace (van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal). Many current developments—such as increasing political polarization, fake news, and the amplification of fringe opinions—expose how

118 Amst 66.1 (2021): 117-22 Disruption and Abrasion: American Social Media as Contested Infrastructures the disruption of social media and messenger services challenges established institutional frameworks of how public opinion is formulated. There is an “infrastructural uncanny” (Gray, Bounegru, and Venturini) lingering in the designs of data analysis and processing, of interfaces and the pervasive individualization of news and entertainment repertoires available to many audiences around the world. The perspective of infrastructure focuses on this lateral and invisible dimension of resource provision, the taken-for-grantedness of everyday media, precisely in the sense that “infrastructures are first-rate means to execute politics” (van Laak, “Technological” 55). In the case of social media, these means include both a monopoliza- tion of the interfaces and gateways of public connection, as well as the manifest built networks of transatlantic cables and “dark fiber” embedded in urban fabrics (Halegoua and Lingel). In the wake of Western modernity, content creation and distribution came to be dissociated and relegated to separate institutions. The net neutrality principle upholds this by not prioritizing particular data packets sent over the Internet. Now we see social media as environments of content creation, communication, and interaction, which build their own material infrastructures beyond data centers. In 2016, Facebook teamed up with Microsoft and Telefonica to lay a high-capacity Internet cable from Virginia Beach, VA, to Bilbao, Spain, allowing the consortium to prioritize their own traffic and to maintain full control over a gateway that serves hundreds of millions of users (Metz). The disruption caused by the “platformization of infrastructures” (Plantin et al. 295) points towards a new understanding of what the In- ternet is. Conventionally, the story of the Internet is still told from the perspective of a military technology becoming used in research institutions and later civic contexts: starting with technical agreements around parameters of protocols and network architecture of the ARPANET, and ending with cloud computing and global connectivity (van Sche- wick; Abbate; Hu). This is foremost an American tale of technological innovation, intimately tied to particular political and geographical conditions that are likewise tied to the designs of American, and later global, information networks (Starosielski; John). But there is another angle to the story of the Internet as a space of information and communication, based on Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal for “MESH” at the Eu- ropean Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva in the 1980s. Back in 1988, in his work at CERN, Berners-Lee was confronted with a host of different systems for computing, filing, and archiving, which all lacked a common metalanguage with which they could connect. Instead of inventing a new system for all of their users, Berners- Lee came up with a basic set of standards which applied across a range of systems. As he summarized his idea: “I would have to create a system with common rules that would be acceptable to everyone. This meant as close as possible to no rules at all” (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 15). The

Amst 66.1 (2021): 117-22 119 Christoph Raetzsch initial proposal led to design principles for hypertext markup of websites (the common “hypertext transfer protocol” or HTTP), and ultimately helped build the World Wide Web and instate the international World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as its governing body. What was initially only a solution to a fairly specialized problem of information management ultimately became a building block for a global communication infrastructure. As it stands, these two versions of the Internet (counting out the Chinese third path) stand as two political choices about how infrastructures serve the common good, how they can be “media of integration” for the whole of society. In 2017, Mark Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to “develop the social infrastructure […] to build a global community that works for all of us.” Certainly, Facebook and other platforms contribute to a form of global community that emerges from enhanced networking and everyday connectivity. Yet, it is a community for which platforms set the terms of service and where the specific business model empowers actors quite differently—with both beneficial and disastrous effects for societies. The debates about fake news have amply shown that there is an infrastructural dimension to political polarization, which rests on the optimization of content delivery, analyzing user behavior, and collective incentives for undemocratic purposes (George; Benkler, Faris, and Roberts). With every click and like, an abrasive force grinds at those institutions through which the formation of public will has, with its own inequities and shortcomings, until now been organized and structured. How democratic values can or should be embedded in technological designs is an emerging subject for debate (Helberger; Pickard, “Restructuring”). For different reasons there is now a realization on both sides of the Atlantic that public articulation is in need of infrastructures that have models of public governance embedded in, rather than added to, them. The rationale of public service broadcasting in many European societies is, however, antagonistic to the market-driven rationale of entertainment and the media that is typical of the United States: “In its paltry support of public media, the United States is in a league of its own,” writes Victor Pickard, “an outlier among democracies, providing a case study by which scholars can observe the effects of largely unmitigated commercial pressures on journalistic practices” (Democracy 137). In a search for a common ground, transatlantic perspectives on how to address the fallout of digital innovation on public discourse will necessarily differ. As Ulrich Beck once wrote, “[t]he continuance of an institution is based on its social recognition as a permanent solution to a permanent problem” (57). The problem of having to enable public discourse may be seen as permanent in individualized societies. How this is organized is in no way necessarily tied to any particular institution, like the press or the electoral process, alone. The strong political support for public media in Europe may serve as an inoculation against a too-quick disintegration of common sense here. But it is also time to come up with

120 Amst 66.1 (2021): 117-22 Disruption and Abrasion: American Social Media as Contested Infrastructures alternatives to the detrimental effects of “citizen journalism” gone rogue through the networked affordances of social media platforms. Other- wise, the abrasive work of algorithmically optimized divisiveness will grind away at the grounds on which European democracies can renew themselves.

Works Cited

Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Print. Beck, Ulrich. “Subpolitics: Ecology and the Disintegration of Institutional Power.” Organization & Environment 10.1 (1997): 52-65. Print. Benkler, Yochai, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. Network Propaganda: Manipula- tion, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Oxford: Ox- ford UP, 2018. Print. Berners-Lee, Tim, and Mark Fischetti. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor. San Francisco, CA: Harper Business, 2000. Print. Fisher, Eran, and Yoav Mehozay. “How Algorithms See Their Audience: Media Epistemes and the Changing Conception of the Individual.” Media, Culture & Society 41.8 (2019): 1176-91. Print. Dijck, José van, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal. The Platform Society. Public Values in a Connective World. Oxford UP, 2018. Print. George, Cherian. Hate Spin: The Manufacture of Religious Offense and Its Threat to Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Print. Gray, Jonathan, Liliana Bounegru, and Tommaso Venturini. “‘Fake News’ as Infra- structural Uncanny.” New Media & Society 22.2 (2020): 317-41. Print. Halegoua, Germaine R., and Jessa Lingel. “Lit Up and Left Dark: Failures of Imagi- nation in Urban Broadband Networks.” New Media & Society 20.12 (2018): 4635-52. Print. Helberger, Natali. “The Political Power of Platforms: How Current Attempts to Regulate Misinformation Amplify Opinion Power.” Digital Journalism 8.6 (2020): 842-54. Print. Helberger, Natali, Jo Pierson, and Thomas Poell. “Governing Online Platforms: From Contested to Cooperative Responsibility.” The Information Society 34.1 (2018): 1-14. Print. Hermida, Alfred. “Post-Publication Gatekeeping: The Interplay of Publics, Plat- forms, Paraphernalia, and Practices in the Circulation of News.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 97.2 (2020): 469-91. Print. Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Print. John, Richard R. Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2010. Print. Kim, Michelle. “How William Basinski’s Masterpiece, The Disintegration Loops, Captured a World Crumbling around Us in Slow Motion.” Crack Magazine. crackmagazine.net, 23 Sept. 2019. Web. https://crackmagazine.net/article/ long-reads/how-william-basinskis-masterpiece-the-disintegration-loops- captured-a-world-crumbling-around-us-in-slow-motion/. Laak, Dirk van. “Infra-Strukturgeschichte.” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 27.3 (2001): 367-93. Print. ---. “Technological Infrastructure, Concepts and Consequences.” Icon 10 (2004): 53-64. Print. Metz, Cade. “Facebook and Microsoft Are Laying a Giant Cable Across the Atlantic.” Wired. wired.com, 26 May 2016. Web. https://www.wired. com/2016/05/facebook-microsoft-laying-giant-cable-across-atlantic/.

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Pickard, Victor. Democracy without Journalism: Confronting the Misinformation Society. New York: Oxford UP, 2020. Print. ---. “Restructuring Democratic Infrastructures: A Policy Approach to the Journal- ism Crisis.” Digital Journalism 8.6 (2020): 1-16. Print. Plantin, Jean-Christophe, Carl Lagoze, Paul Edwards, and Christian Sandvig. “In- frastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Face- book.” New Media & Society 20.1 (2018): 293-310. Print. Schewick, Barbara van. Internet Architecture and Innovation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Seaver, Nick. “Captivating Algorithms: Recommender Systems as Traps.” Journal of Material Culture 24.4 (2019): 421-36. Print. Starosielski, Nicole. The Undersea Network. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2015. Zuckerberg, Mark. “Building Global Community.” Facebook. facebook.com, 16 Feb. 2017. Web. https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building- global-community/10103508221158471/.

122 Amst 66.1 (2021): 117-22 A Common Groundlessness: Trans Aesthetics, Ontological Pluralism, and Imaginary Warfare in the Contemporary United States

Susan Stryker

A feasible path existed for popular-vote-loser Donald Trump to overturn the recent U.S. presidential election results. He could sow misinformation about non-existent fraud and then persuade partisan state legislatures to select pro-Trump slates of electors to the Electoral Col- lege in defiance of the voters’ will, thereby throwing the outcome of the election to Congress and provoking a constitutional crisis whose outcome would be a political free-for-all verging on civil war. This was not possible due to some bug in a creaky and antiquated U.S. system of government; it was due to a deliberate feature. The anti-democratic ani- mus that the Constitution encodes into the arcane rituals of the Elec- toral College, which could have allowed a Trumpian autogolpe given a sufficiently Machiavellian political will to bring one about, was intentionally designed by slaveholding Founding Fathers bent on preserving the basis of their political and economic power at the outset of their novel and somewhat anxious experiment with republican forms of governance. The Electoral College, the equal representation of each state in the Senate regardless of population, and the now-rescinded three-fifths clause all conspired to give slave-holding planter elites disproportionate influence in the composition of the new government. This structural bias was in turn rooted in the racial imaginaries that still inform Whiteness in the wake of the nation’s history as a settler- colonial slaving society. For centuries, being able to claim Whiteness has been the consolation prize for the bulk of the non-elite non-Black and non-Indigenous masses, who have largely settled for racial privilege and the often-illusory promise of geographical and class mobility for themselves, rather than throwing down and throwing in with the rest of

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 123-26 123 Susan Stryker the oppressed to build a just and sustainable social order for all. It takes a lot of psychical work on the part of the White citizenry, as well as discriminatory state apparatuses and practices of extrajudicial violence, to ward off the threatening return of all that is repressed and suppressed in order for White people to enjoy lives lived on stolen land, undergirded by the legacies of stolen labor, while maintaining a sense of entitlement and innocence. Before race becomes the caesura, as Foucault called it, that divides the population and maldistributes life-chances, it is a fantasy that guides where the lines are drawn, the cuts are made, and the decisions are taken on questions of life and death among the “imagined community” of the nation and those it excludes from the body politic. The common wisdom of the current day is that amidst unprecedented political polarization we in the United States have somehow lost the common sense of a shared reality—that we can, in fact, no longer agree on what is fact and what is not in this era of Birtherism and QAnon, of climate change and pandemic denialism, of cable news siloes, deep fake videos, and AI-driven social media disinformation campaigns. But to believe there is some consensus reality that we have lost and must regain is to believe in yet another fiction. “We” have never been “we,” let alone one, in the land of e pluribus unum. This ontological pluralism is arguably the rule of human life, not the exception, given the incommensurable secular, religious, and sectarian worldviews espoused by the seven billion homo sapiens now living on planet Earth and all of our ancestors. Sometimes people have found ways to share space with others who do not share their fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality—we could call that cosmopolitan- ism—but at least as often this ontological pluralism has bred a struggle where one person’s truth flows from the barrel of a gun pointed at the head of someone rooted in another Real. Invasion, conquest, genocide, enslavement, territorial expansion, and empire are but theaters of operation in the overarching reality war in which a Eurocentric onto- epistemic grid has worked to ground itself in the material world at the expense of Indigenous American, African, Asian, and Pacific cosmolo- gies, cultures, and political economies. Trans and non-binary gender-identity claims have become hot- button issues amidst the current social polarizations so evident in our recent presidential election since at least 2014—and arguably long before that—when Time magazine put Laverne Cox on its cover and proclaimed the United States to be at a “transgender tipping point.” The perennial subterranean imaginary warfare of phantasmatic racial struggle that had already surfaced in the reactionary opposition to Barack Obama’s political ascendency became even more inflamed and acute when directed at trans Women of Color, with then-unprecedented spikes in the level of fatal violence. A harbinger of things to come arrived late in 2015, when right-wing opponents of minority rights overturned HERO—the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, an expansive piece of municipal leg-

124 Amst 66.1 (2021): 123-26 A Common Groundlessness islation creating more than a dozen categories of minority status to be protected from discrimination—by reductively framing it as a “bath- room bill” that would allow male sex predators claiming to be women to stalk the public ladies’ room. Trans issues became a pervasive issue in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, with Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee waving trans rights as bloody shirt to exemplify the splutter- ing ludicrousness that four more years of a Democrat regime would visit upon the populace. The existence of trans people has been weaponized in the current political climate not only because we are “problem” bodies and populations that jam the biopolitical gears of the administrative state and trouble its smooth functioning. Our existence also asserts a counter-hegemonic sense of reality. The cis-centric world too often imagines us as denying the facticity of our specifically sexed biological reproductive capacities whenever we begin to tell new stories about what our bodies—indeed, any body—can mean. It does not see the manifestation of transness as a refutation of the biocentric ordering principles for fixing social hierarchy into the flesh that are perhaps the most pernicious and pervasive extant consequence of the transatlantic chattel slave trade. It does not see transness as a promise that flesh can come to signify otherwise and anew. Rather, we are reduced to caricatures. Hapless, hoodwinked poster- children for an emperor-with-no-clothes narrative about a delusory “gender ideology” that falsely teaches us that men can be women and women men (just ‘cuz we wannabe!). Or worse: a preternaturally powerful trans lobby bent on harming women and girls. Worse still: part of a plot by a Jewish billionaire (or extraterrestrial lizard people, if you’re more partial to Alex Jones’s reality than Viktor Orban’s) out to destroy Christian civilization by convincing us to sterilize ourselves so that right-thinking White worshippers of a blue-eyed Jesus can be replaced by the dysgenic hordes. Transphobia really does boil down, at the end of the day, to just another variant of the racialist fantasies that under- pin modern ethnonationalism, in the United States and elsewhere (no American exceptionalism here). Sometimes, of course, in one of the other dominant realities, we transfolx get to play the role of a newly discovered minority on the frontier of neoliberal social inclusion—or even a woke vanguard of the coming revolution. As foundational Transgender Studies scholar Sandy Stone noted long ago, the trans body is a “meaning machine for the production of ideal type” (294), one assigned the cultural function of confessing contested truths about the inner mysteries of identity, and, as such, an epistemological battlefield. But mostly we are simply this: people who have discovered, for the sake of our own survival, that deep change is truly possible, and that it emerges at the interstice of subjec- tive and societal transformation. We know in our bones that we can become other, individually and collectively. Our radical potential—to the extent that it actually exists—lies in the witness we bear that such

Amst 66.1 (2021): 123-26 125 Susan Stryker deep transformation is a capacity within us all. This is the dark gift we bear. Accepting it will change you. The question remains: what do we wish to become, with whom? The path beyond the current impasse of our politics will not be se- cured simply by Trump exiting the White House. The path will not run through better policies and practices in a Biden administration. It will not be illuminated by rational debate based on evidence and data, nor will it turn on free and fair elections to come. Because the current impasse of our politics is rooted in an intractable ontological pluralism, it will end only when the grid of one reality is imposed upon another, or else a new reality is forged. The path beyond the current impasse of our politics requires the conjuration of “imagined communities” that do not yet exist but which our actions can make real. I testify as trans that such change can come. In the absence of common ground we must sink into a common groundlessness and arise together as something new. It is that or war.

Works Cited Stone, Sandy. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity. Ed. Julia Epstein and Kris- tina Straub. New York: Routledge, 1991. 280-304. Print. Time. 9 June 2014. Web. 30 Oct. 2020. https://time.com/magazine/us/135460/ june-9th-2014-vol-183-no-22-u-s/.

126 Amst 66.1 (2021): 123-26 Again and Again and Again

Simon Schleusener

There is something revealing about Donald Trump’s update of his original campaign slogan—which itself is an imitation of a phrase used by Ronald Reagan—for his reelection campaign: “Make America Great Again Again.” Given all the absurdities the Trump administration produced in the last stage of its stay in power, it could have been easy to miss this linguistic oddity. With its bizarre temporal structure—echoing academic idiosyncrasies such as “post-postmodernism” (Nealon)— the phrase seems more like a Dadaist prank than a legitimate campaign slogan. And yet, although Trump initially registered the phrase “Keep America Great” for his reelection bid (Tumulty), he eventually stuck to the original MAGA slogan and frequently used the variation with the two agains. The task that Trump set up for himself for his desired second term was thus to do what had already been done during his first term. But one more time. The logic of this repetition—of twice chanting again—paradoxically seems to imply that there is unfinished business while simultaneously suggesting that any potential political problem has already been solved in the past. This, of course, is what is asserted in the original MAGA line, a slogan that is proudly displayed on millions of red hats in the so-called “heartland” and beyond: the greatness of America has already been achieved; Trump’s mission is merely to restore it. And the task of his anticipated second term was thus to restore the restoration. In this regard, it is noteworthy that Trump consistently struggled when asked what, precisely, he aimed to do after his reelection. In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump came up with the following answer: “Well, one of the things that will be really great—you know, the word ‘experience’ is still good. I always say talent is more important than experience. I’ve always said that. But the word ‘experience’ is a very important word. It’s in a very important meaning.” Important as the word “experience” may be, Trump’s articulation of his top priorities for a

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 127-31 127 Simon Schleusener second term, for which Hannity asked him, is not exactly bursting with clarity here. The confusion is instructive, though. For if one’s overall mission is to restore the past greatness of America, and, as Trump has it, this task had already been achieved during the first term (“Promises Made—Promises Kept”), then what could one possibly do during a second term? Build the wall again? To be sure, the whole idea of America’s past greatness becomes increasingly flimsy the more one reflects on it. Even Trump’s diehard fans are often evasive when pressed to say when, exactly, America was great. During slavery? The Jim Crow era? Under McCarthyism? At the time of the Indian Removal Act? Or does the MAGA slogan instead refer to the more recent past, to the years preceding the Obama presidency— years, that is, which were marked by 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the financial crisis? What becomes obvious here is that the reference to America’s past greatness is typically less grounded in historical particularities than in an exceptionalist mythology that continues to inform American political discourse. Trump’s base embodies this tendency in the most obvious and seemingly pure manner: Make America Great Again denotes an imaginary orientation toward a non-existent past, and thus an essentially reactive or—in the words of Zygmunt Bauman— retrotopian desire (Schleusener, “You’re Fired!”). Of course, this phenomenon existed long before Trump. Especially among the right, the rhetoric of “again” is frequently employed to mobilize the cultural and affective force of a nationalist semantics that buries the future in an imagined continuity of an endless American present, while simultaneously diagnosing that the heartland is under attack, that America is moving closer to cultural chaos and destruction. A case in point is Jim DeMint’s 2014 book, Falling in Love with America Again, which redefines the financial crisis of 2008 as a crisis of “big government” and American values (Schleusener, “Neoliberal Affects” 322-23). While effectively calling for a continuation of the neoliberal policies that led to the crisis—thus countering the crisis of American capitalism by paradoxically demanding more capitalism—the book eventually suggests that the solution to economic hardships and social insecurity can only be an affective one: “Let’s fall in love with America, again and again and again” (DeMint 275; emphasis added). What this threefold repetition of “again” implies is that the danger of falling out of love with America has (for many) already become a reality, and that such instances of disaffection will continue to occur. The book, then, not only offers a solution to the crisis at hand, but also offers that same solution to all the crises it anticipates—crises that will inevitably (as is suggested here) occur in the future. This reasoning seems to imply that since America lacks the instruments to effectively abolish the economic conditions that facilitate crises such as the one of 2008, the solution will always already be an affective one: the idea (and sentiment) of a continuous romance with America (read: capitalism).

128 Amst 66.1 (2021): 127-31 Again and Again and Again

In the context of a different emotional register—one based less on love and affection than on anger and resentment—Trump has perfected this strategy with his own brand of “affect politics.” While addressing his predominantly White working-class followers in strictly affective terms, he has simultaneously suspended any prospects for a material bet- terment of their situation (with regard to social security, health care, housing, education, or debt). Hence, what matters at Trump’s rallies are not specific policy proposals, but what Arlie Russell Hochschild has described (with reference to Durkheim) as a kind of “collective efferves- cence” (225). In other words, Trump’s rallies manifest themselves as the sites of both an affective transformation and a concrete retrotopia. At these ritualistic events, “Making America Great Again” means, above all, feeling great—or, in a famous variation of the slogan, “Making Lib- erals Cry Again.” The kind of enjoyment (or jouissance) that is collectively expressed here is one of transgression—in particular, a transgression of the boundaries of both political correctness and a conventional political discourse that is deemed elitist. But the affective and symbolic recognition that Trump’s supporters receive (which both the liberal and conservative establishments have consistently denied them) is also a substitute for what they will not receive: that is, any form of material compensation or economic redistribution. Here, what perhaps best sets the tone is the title of the Rolling Stones song continuously played at Trump’s rallies: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” While it may appear as if retrotopian desires and a post-political orientation toward the past are specific to conservatism and the right, the phenomenon is in fact much more widespread. Indeed, the message on which the Democrats ran during the 2020 campaign—after donors and the party establishment decided that a Bernie Sanders nomination must at all costs be prevented—had nostalgic and backward-looking under- pinnings, too. For instance, Joe Biden consistently called for a “return to normalcy” and boasted about his commitment to “restore decency.” The idea that America’s greatness lies in the past was thus one of the points that the Trump and Biden campaigns effectively agreed on. Of course, this centeredness on the past and the related unwilling- ness of imagining a future that differs from both the past and the present are not entirely new trends—and are not limited to U.S. politics alone. Ever since the idea of the “end of history” (Fukuyama) started to circulate upon the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent quasi- totalization of the neoliberal model, the sense that we are living in a “broad” (Gumbrecht) or “absolute” present (Quent) has become a dominant structure of feeling. As much as the neoliberal model seems to be characterized by permanent change and acceleration—as anticipated in the well-known Marxist dictum that under capitalism “all that is solid melts into air” (Marx and Engels 223)—it all the while fos- ters a unique feeling of stasis. This is what Mark Fisher has described as “capitalist realism,” meaning “the widespread sense that not only

Amst 66.1 (2021): 127-31 129 Simon Schleusener is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Capitalist Realism 2). Relatedly, Fredric Jameson has famously stated that today it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” (76). In his 1990 book Polar Inertia, Paul Virilio approached the temporality of this constellation—that is, the virtual indiscernibility of acceleration and stasis, flux and stagnation—in a way that is best expressed by the title of the German edition of the volume: Rasender Stillstand (“frenetic standstill”). In a sense, this image corresponds to the temporal condition of the GIF, as theorized by Mark Fisher: “The GIF is an image of trapped time, of bad infinity […]: The figures in GIFs are locked into a purgatorial condition, part of which consists in their inability to recognise that they are caught in a loop. They repeat, endlessly, not aware that they are doing so” (Fisher, “Touchscreen Capture” 20-21). Hence, the GIF seems to embody the more sinister side of the “end of history” thesis, a condition that is in many ways still characteristic of our present. This is not a situation of triumph, but one that is marked by never-ending crisis, the “dystopian imagination” (Berardi 17), and “the slow cancellation of the future” (Fisher, Ghosts of My Life 2). With the means to move ahead lacking, it seems that for many Americans today a convenient way out is to wallow in (and repeat) an imaginary past: Again and again and again … Now, what does all of this have to do with the state and fate of “American Democracy”? The structural deficiencies of the U.S. political system were clear long before this last election. Among others, these include the role of money and corruption in American politics; the weakness (and underfunding) of public institutions; the effects of the nation’s increasing socioeconomic inequalities; the weaponization of the courts; the lack of trust in the democratic process; an invective and oftentimes “post-factual” style of political communication (most apparent in the recent proliferation of far-fetched conspiracy theories amplified by social media); continuing racial tensions and racial inequities; systematic attempts at voter suppression; and the absurd discrepancy between the rhetoric of “American exceptionalism” and the country’s obvious inability to effectively deal with its manifold problems. What my essay means to draw attention to is that there is also the temporal aspect, upon which I have focused here, and with which many of the aforementioned problems are entangled. While American democracy has often been characterized by its future-orientation—its “trust in the future”—this seems to be a thing of the past. In the twenty-first century, with “futures” being associated more with financial derivatives than with political prospects or utopian impulses, democracy appears to be in a state of exhaustion. Against this backdrop, what could be the task for the humanities and, in particular, American Studies? Is there a possibility to contribute not just to a better understanding and description of said exhaustion, but

130 Amst 66.1 (2021): 127-31 Again and Again and Again also to the production of new political imaginaries? To be sure, this is not meant in the sense of a reanimation of the corpse of the American Dream, but rather in terms of an actual “(re-)invention of the future” (Srnicek and Williams)—beyond the neoliberal imagination and beyond the rhetoric of American exceptionalism.

Works Cited Bauman, Zygmunt. Retrotopia. Malden, MA: Polity, 2017. Print. Berardi, Franco “Bifo.” After the Future. Ed. Gary Genosko and Nicholas Tho- burn. Oakland, CA: AK, 2011. Print. DeMint, Jim. Falling in Love with America Again. New York: Center Street, 2014. Print. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero, 2009. Print. ---. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero, 2014. Print. ---. “Touchscreen Capture.” Post-Online. Spec. issue of Noon: An Annual Journal of Visual Culture and Contemporary Art 6 (2016): 12-27. Print. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 2006. Print. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 2014. Print. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: New, 2016. Print. Jameson, Fredric. “Future City.” New Left Review 21 (2003): 65-79. Print. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. London: Penguin, 2002. Print. Nealon, Jeffrey T. Post-Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2012. Print. Quent, Marcus, ed. Absolute Gegenwart. Berlin: Merve, 2016. Print. Schleusener, Simon. “Neoliberal Affects: The Cultural Logic of Cool Capitalism.” REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 30 (2014): 307-26. Print. ---. “You’re Fired! Retrotopian Desire and Right-Wing Class Politics.” Right-Wing Populism and Gender: European Perspectives and Beyond. Ed. Gabriele Dietze and Julia Roth. Bielefeld: transcript, 2020. 185-206. Print. Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work. London: Verso, 2016. Print. Trump, Donald. “Remarks by President Trump in a Fox News Town Hall, Green Bay, WI.” The White House, 25 June 2020. Web. 30 Dec. 2020. Tumulty, Karen. “How Donald Trump Came up with ‘Make America Great Again.’” Washington Post 18 Jan. 2017: n. pag. Print. Virilio, Paul. Polar Inertia. 1990. London: Sage, 2000. Print.

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III. Futures Foreseen

Democracy, Division, and an Attempted Coup

Craig Calhoun

On January 6, 2021, a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, incited by the recently defeated president. Inside, a majority of Republican representatives plotted to overturn legitimate election results. Of course, the attempted coup was partly theater. Few of its protagonists expected to take power at one blow. Some saw this as more an expression of their anger and perceived rights than an instrumental tactic. Others saw it as part of a longer struggle. The subversion of democracy has been underway for years. It did not originate with Donald Trump, nor is it limited to his attempt to cling to power. It is a project of White Christian Nationalists, neo-Nazis, and a broader range of racists and Republicans seeking power even at the expense of legitimacy. It has moved from the margins to center stage because of broader and deeper degenerations of democracy. For fifty years, inequality has grown more extreme, social solidarity has eroded, and institutions have been undermined. Citizens have laid claims to their essential freedom all the more vehemently as they have felt disempowered and vulnerable. Local communities have been disrupted; America’s once-rich fabric of voluntary associations has de- teriorated. Shared political identity has faded and fractured along with the idea of sharing in a public good more than the sum of private benefits. The polarization of politics has been intensified by social divisions, dysfunctional parties, and media easily manipulated and split into silos. But only when Trump tried to cling to power after losing an election was there an attempted coup.

Arguably the events of January 6 were not sudden or secret enough to be called a coup. But using the word highlights what is at stake. A coup d’état is a “great change in the government carried out violently or

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 135-42 135 Craig Calhoun illegally by the ruling power” (“Coup d’état”). It would indeed be a great change for the loser of a presidential election to be maintained in power by any combination of mob violence and legislative manipulation. This coup came in two parts. One was attempted by men (overwhelmingly) in business suits and backed by money and official status. The other came from an anti-elitist crowd. Both failed in the short term, but the larger insurrection continues. First, a soft coup was attempted by Republican legislators voting in line with Trump to disqualify the duly certified electors of several U.S. states. Trump’s claims that the election was stolen from him involved delusions, of course, but not just private delusions on the part of the wounded narcissist in the Oval Office. The delusions were widespread, given viral circulation in social media, supported by alleged eyewitness accounts and claims of specific violations turned into ostensible facts by repetition and the precision of their formulation. Trump picked up and repeated many of these specious claims. When he called on Janu- ary 2 to bully the Georgia Secretary of State into changing the official vote tally, he offered a range of examples: “it’s 4,502 who voted, but they weren’t on the voter registration roll,” he claimed. Or again, “you had 18,325 vacant address voters” (Trump, “Call”). Neither was true but both very concrete. Trump claimed throughout the election that efforts were underway to rig it or steal it. He repeatedly attacked use of postal ballots despite the COVID-19 pandemic. He questioned the hours polls were open, what identification was required, the ways electors were chosen. Trump’s charges were reviewed by state officials, many of them Republicans, and found lacking in merit and involving insufficient votes to change the outcome. They were litigated in dozens of courts, with lawsuits so mer- etricious that many were thrown out and none succeeded. The charges were raised in state legislatures; debates were sometimes raucous, but in all cases electors confirmed in line with officially reported electoral results. Yet, despite their oaths to uphold the U.S. Constitution, 147 Re- publicans persisted in an attempt to reverse the election results in order to change the outcome. Then a hard coup was attempted when a mob stormed the U.S. Capi- tol. The mob broke off from a larger rally Trump had announced as soon as it became clear he would not win the normal, official vote. He drummed up enthusiasm in speeches and in a barrage of tweets: “Be there, will be wild!” (qtd. in Holland, Mason, and Landay). Trump’s loyalists fanned enthusiasm through “alt-right” websites, subreddit threads, the social networking platform Parler, and a range of chat apps. Behind the rally lay years of building far-right networks, months of drumming up anger, weeks of claiming the 2020 election was stolen. The history goes back to the Southern struggle against Reconstruction and racial justice and, more recently, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. There is a direct line from the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottes-

136 Amst 66.1 (2021): 135-42 Democracy, Division, and an Attempted Coup ville—with its deadly violence and defense of the Confederacy. Trump refused to condemn that event or any of the ensuing unruly rallies, mobilizations of armed militia members, attacks on peaceful protesters, or even the attempt to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Yet, Trump’s “Save America” rally also drew thousands who barely knew that history and proclaimed they were fighting just for Trump and America. Trump fans came from around the country. Some may have thought their calls to “stop the steal” could actually keep Trump in office. Some wanted simply to express their devotion to him, their patriotism, or their anger at what they understood to be happening in America. But many were mobilized through networks of White supremacists, highly politicized Evangelical Christians, Proud Boys, and followers of QAnon (the bizarre conspiracy theory that Democratic leaders are part of a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles). These have longer-term agendas. Trump began his speech by telling the crowd that it was big, hundreds of thousands he claimed, though “media will not show the magnitude of this crowd” (Trump, “Transcript”). Still smarting over published pictures of the less than huge crowd at his inauguration, he demanded that this time participants take their own photos and post them to prove the scale of the protest. He thanked his fans. He stoked their fury, and he told the crowd to march to the Capitol. “Stop the steal,” he said, and demanded that the “weak” and “pathetic” Republicans in Congress show more courage and boldness by voting to keep him president. You are smarter and stronger than they are, he said, but “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” (Trump, “Transcript”). The crowd was at once belligerent and jubilant. It was not tightly managed, but there was planning. One group erected gallows. Some chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” in reference to the Vice President’s indi- cation that he could not unilaterally reverse the election result. Some prayed to Jesus Christ. Some shouted “We love the Proud Boys!” Some of those Proud Boys called out “Storm the Capitol!” (Weigel). And the crowd became more clearly a mob. Hundreds pushed their way into the Capitol, many wearing protective gear and some armed. They broke windows, knocked down doors, looted art, fatally hit one policeman over the head, and ransacked offices. One was shot, part of a larger group breaking into the House Chamber, but for the most part police offered only token resistance. The 2000 officers of the Capitol police were at best unprepared. Some were brave; some cowered; others helped older protesters on the stairs. Most avoided confrontation. During 2020, more peaceful Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests were met with vastly more force. Trump and his followers were quick to claim BLM protests amounted to lawless anarchy, and Trump sent federal troops into cities against the will of mayors and local law enforcement. Marchers were pre-emptively “kettled,” tear-gassed, shot with rubber bullets and sometimes live ammunition. More effort was made

Amst 66.1 (2021): 135-42 137 Craig Calhoun to guard the Portland federal courthouse from minor vandalism in July than to guard the U.S. Capitol from being stormed in January. Despite recurrent violence from Trump crowds, despite a fight between Proud Boys and police just the night before, despite published threats of violence, despite statements of concern from law enforcement experts, there seems to have been little serious preparation for dealing with the Trump crowd. The Capitol Police asked for the National Guard to be on standby and were refused. This may result from simple incompetence; it may reflect sympathy or tacit bias; there may have been complicity or political interference. The mob included people committed to White Christian National- ism and other ideologies, people just looking for a confrontation, people caught up in various conspiracy theories, and Trump fans aggrieved on his behalf. There were off-duty cops, veterans, and others in military costume; aggressive masculinity was a prominent theme. Others seemed caught up in performing the role of “the people” and taking pleasure in being insurgents. After storming the Capitol, protesters posted selfies, sat in the chairs of dignitaries like the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and threw about papers ransacked from files. Many tried to take souvenirs, like a grinning man photographed making off with the House Speaker’s lectern. Some shouted “1776!” and seemed to see a revolution underway. What that meant to them was unclear. Consider Elizabeth from Knoxville, Tennessee, filmed during the attack with tears in her eyes. “We’re storming the Capitol,” she proclaimed, “it’s a revolution!” But she complained with obvious shock and hurt feelings that when she “made it like a foot inside,” the police “pushed me out and they maced me!” (@kirkwrites79). Others were engaged in street theater, but with a sinister edge. Jake Angeli, a far-right conspiracy theorist from Arizona, appeared, as he often does, bare-chested with a fur headdress; sporting red, white, and blue face paint; and carrying a six-foot spear with an American flag. Styled the “QAnon shaman,” he also has a record as an agent provoca- teur seeking to incite violence at BLM protests. This was not a cross-section of Americans who voted for Trump, nor even of those who wore red MAGA hats and shouted “lock her up” at his rallies. Trump had mobilized much larger masses, including workers who lost out to deindustrialization, suburbanites nervous to defend their property, men feeling loss of status, and people who felt simply that the long-dominant political elites did not care much about them. But he also gave license to extremists. The mass of his supporters sought not to subvert democracy but to claim it. Still, they felt enough common cause to rally behind those engaged in sedition. Trump himself tried to combine inciting seditious extremists with speaking for a broader, less radical majority. For a long time after the storming of the Capitol started, he said nothing. Then, late in the day he

138 Amst 66.1 (2021): 135-42 Democracy, Division, and an Attempted Coup sent a video telling protesters he loved them, but they should go home in peace. His refusal to condemn the mob action alarmed some of his erstwhile allies. Over the next two days White House staff and Cabinet members began to resign. It is not clear how many were really concerned about the state of American democracy and how many simply saw Trump’s ship sinking and did not want to go down with it. A week after the coup attempt, on January 13, Trump was impeached by Con- gress for “incitement of insurrection.” Only then did he issue a statement that violence and breaking laws was wrong. Trump has not abandoned his charge that the election was stolen. As I write on January 14, his followers plan protests at state capitols to coincide with the Biden inauguration and upheavals and confrontations are not likely to end then. Groups that helped turn the Trump protest into a mob storming the Capitol will continue to fight for White supremacy, fascism, neo-Medieval Christianity, or their other particular causes. And protagonists of the “soft” attempted coup vow to continue their overlapping fights in Congress and state legislatures. They may dress in suits and ties and keep their distance from outright violence, but they are no less dangerous.

As President, Joe Biden promises to “bring Americans together,” to unify the country. The goal is worthy. It is wrong to dismiss it as inevitably meaning only repression of differences or papering over of divides. It is wrong to think the United States does not need unity and solidarity if it is to rebuild democracy and confront its many practical challenges. But it is right to worry the new administration will not pursue changes deep enough to overcome the sources of division and disunity. These are not mere quirks of the terrible Trump era. They will not be addressed simply by decency, moderation, and centrism. Undermining elections, for example, has a long history in the United States, especially in securing White rule of the post-Reconstruction South. Sowing doubt about the legitimacy of results is just one tactic of voter suppression, complemented by gerrymandering, mass challenges to voter registration, reducing the number of polling places, requiring more and different identification documents, and blocking the restoration of ex-prisoners’ voting rights. At times, these tactics of voter suppression have been combined with others including outright violence. Ending voter suppression was a major purpose of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As the U.S. Supreme Court became more conservative, it gutted this in 2013. This encouraged renewal of voter suppression tactics, especially by state-level Republican parties. Democratic response was uneven. In Georgia, however, Stacey Abrams led a campaign so successfully that on the very morning before the Capitol was stormed, it was confirmed that Georgia had elected two Democratic Senators, heirs to

Amst 66.1 (2021): 135-42 139 Craig Calhoun the great Civil Rights tradition: a celebrated Black preacher, and a Jew- ish journalist and liberal political activist. Democrats will have control of the Senate, however tenuous, only because historical injustice was confronted not ignored. There is no moderate middle ground on voter suppression. It must be ended. Racism remains a basic issue in the United States. In 2020, graphic evidence of police violence brought tens of thousands into the streets to assert that Black lives matter. The protests were impressively multiracial. But they too were harnessed into political polarization. For many on the right, they were evidence of a break-down in law and order. Some protesters took up the ill-chosen slogan “defund the police,” making it easier for Trump to fan suburban fears. Fear of Black people was entangled with fear of a nebulous force called “Antifa.” This took the rhetorical place that communism had occupied in American politics during the Cold War, a threat from within as well as abroad. Right-wing demagogues skilled in manipulating conspiracy theories vastly exaggerated the organization behind that name. A brief wave of paranoia followed among residents of suburbs and small towns around the country who were sure that Antifa was coming to attack their communities next. Of course, Donald Trump stoked the fear. But the incidents reveal a pervasive sense of anxiety as well as specific manipulations and delusions. America was and is on edge, worried about the future because the present is so unsettled. And America is a divided country. Both anxiety and social divisions have been politicized. This is part of the meaning of extreme polarization—not just that parties and ideological positions are far apart, but that every bit of news is interpreted in terms of partisan division. Media ecology reinforces this. Sources have multiplied. The “mainstream,” with its common denominators and fact-checking, has weakened. The label “post-truth” is misleading, though there has been erosion in capacities for collective judgment. But this does not issue in relativism. Rather, citizens confront each other convinced of competing truths. Claiming factual bases remains rhetorically basic. Trump repeatedly asserts a claim to have won the election “by a landslide” that he says was “borne out by the facts.” Summoning followers to the “Save Ameri- ca” rally, he tweeted: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Elec- tion” (qtd. in Holland, Mason, and Landay). Conspiracy theories are sustained by people who think of themselves as actively “doing their research” by consulting multiple websites like enthusiasts for a particular diet or vitamin supplement, or players in a complex online game (see discussion in Thompson). Americans do not just disagree; they live in different realities. In both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, the vote split almost equally. This happened again in the Georgia Senate runoffs two days before the Capitol was stormed. Conspiracy theories circulated partly

140 Amst 66.1 (2021): 135-42 Democracy, Division, and an Attempted Coup because the races were so close. Moreover, the American population has been sorted by geography, class, race, and religion into different resi- dential neighborhoods, workplaces, and social networks. Most people have only weak connections to those in a different political camp. Some are genuinely surprised and perplexed when it seems the overwhelming majority in their social field is a minority nationally. This is true not only of “populists” on the right but of liberals who for decades before the 2016 election largely forgot that America included people like those populists. This is a central meaning to the much discussed rural / urban split in voting behavior. That label can be misleading. Many lined-up on the rural side have no engagement with farming, but rather drive trucks, install air conditioners in suburbs, or run small businesses. The split is also cosmopolitan from local, professional elites from workers in other occupations, those who benefit from asset appreciation and those who suffer stagnant incomes and difficulty ever buying a house. Different circumstances encourage some to see globalization, technological innovation, and cultural change with a sense of optimism that others do not share. But economics and occupations are hardly the whole story. Self- identified women voted very differently from self-identified men, but part of the division is over the very idea that one should say “self- identified” about a category some see as natural and obvious. Trans identities are but one of many unsettling cultural changes. But change can also obscure continuity in sexism. Women still earn less than men, still do more unpaid labor. And assertions of women’s equal rights have made men anxious. COVID-19 has increased anxiety, but the pandemic has been so easily politicized because the country was already polarized. This will not be overcome by argument, persuasion, or evidence. The underlying social reality needs to change. We cannot have the solidarity we need without drastically reducing inequality, for example, or without increasing employment and improving working conditions. Without ending racist police violence. Without universal healthcare and greater educational opportunity. These all have costs and opponents. Democracy is not dead in the United States. For all the divisions, the elections also demonstrated a remarkable enthusiasm for voting, with record turnouts, and citizens willing to wait in line. But for democracy to thrive it will take social transformation, not just new policies and technical fixes. This demands an enormous amount of work— and working together. It is not clear that enough people are committed to either. But it is possible.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 135-42 141 Craig Calhoun

Works Cited

“Coup d’état.” Oxford English Dictionary. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://www.oed. com/view/Entry/43112?redirectedFrom=coup+d%27etat#eid8113166. Holland, Steve, Jeff Mason, and Jonathan Landay. “Trump Summoned Supporters to ‘Wild’ Protest, and Told Them to Fight. They Did.” Reuters. Reuters, 6 Jan. 2021. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election- protests/trump-summoned-supporters-to-wild-protest-and-told-them-to- fight-they-did-idUSKBN29B24S. @kirkwrites79 (Kirk A. Moore). “Maam what happened to you?” “I got maced.” 6 Jan. 2021, 10:47 am, Tweet. https://twitter.com/KirkWrites79/status/134693 6420997292038. Thompson, Clive. “QAnon Is Like a Game—a Most Dangerous Game.” Wired. Wired, 22 Sept. 2020. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://www.wired.com/story/ qanon-most-dangerous-multiplatform-game/. Trump, Donald J. “Here’s the Full Transcript and Audio of the Call between Trump and Raffensperger.” Washington Post. Washington Post, 5 Jan. 2021. Web. 14. Jan. 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raffensperger- call-transcript-georgia-vote/2021/01/03/2768e0cc-4ddd-11eb-83e3- 322644d823 56_story.html. ---. “Transcript of Trump’s Speech at Rally before US Election Riot.” AP News. Associated Press, 7 Jan. 2021. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://apnews.com/ article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-trump-capitol-siege-media- e79eb5164613d6718e9f4502eb471f27. Weigel, David. “Watching the Riot at the Capitol Unfold from the Ground.” Washington Post. Washington Post, 7 Jan. 2021. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/07/trailer-watching-riot- capitol-unfold-ground/.

142 Amst 66.1 (2021): 135-42 The Après-Coup: President Trump’s Transfer of Power

Donald E. Pease

On November 5, 2020, President Donald J. Trump claimed that at polling stations throughout the United States large-scale and possibly centrally organized electoral fraud had happened, was happening, and that, without an intervention, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., would illegally be declared president-elect of the United States. “If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us” (Trump, “Deflated”). In April, presidential candidate Biden said: “I view myself as a transition candidate” (qtd. in Martin and Burns). Upon announcing his intention to continue his election campaign into the post-election interim, Trump took Biden, quite literally, at his word. Rather than making preparations to take up the next episode in his career, Trump turned the interlude between the reported election results and Inauguration Day into a space for a battle with Biden over control of the transition’s procedures and outcomes: “Frankly, we did win this election” (qtd. in Chalfant and Samuels), “The concept of losing to this guy!” (qtd. in O’Toole). Trump received 11 million more votes in the 2020 election than he did in 2016 and a greater number of votes (74 million) than had any other Republican candidate in history. Yet, over the next two days, with each new tally, the votes from the battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsyl- vania, and Michigan were slowly but purposively building back the Blue Wall Trump had toppled in 2016. With prospects of the likely addition of Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia (which Democrats had not won since 1992), Biden was expected to run up in 2020 the exact same number of electors, 306-232, in the Electoral College as had Trump in 2016. Following his November 5 remarks, Trump set up post-election teams with marching orders to saturate the media and political and juridical landscape with charges of rigged elections, fraudulent votes,

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 143-53 143 Donald E. Pease and secret algorithms, along with instructions to ignore, shout down, or trample every evidence-based response. Trump divided his teams into units that operated on legal, extra-legal, and paramilitary fronts. The close to sixty cases his lawyers have presented before judges, some of whom Trump appointed to serve, in local and federal districts as well as state and United States Supreme Courts have, with unusual consistency, been defeated for lack of credible evidence, dismissed for the omission of a coherent legal argument, or refused a hearing altogether. Trump’s contestation of election results was built on the infrastructure of an entrenched culture of minority rule buttressed by an insurrectionary populist movement whose members considered the 2020 election results a theft of their country. Trump based his claim that the election was stolen on the fact that Republican state legislatures in the swing states he won in 2016 had purged voter rolls, passed “use it or lose it” rights to vote laws, authorized retroactive signature checks, reduced or eliminated ballot boxes and drive-in registration sites, and enforced other voter suppression legislation that supposedly should have made it impossible for him to lose the 2020 election. Trump’s accusation of widespread voter fraud targeted the increase in the time period for casting and counting absentee ballots that state courts in the battleground states had put into place to address the problems that COVID-19 posed to in-person voting. For reasons I will take up shortly, Trump also declared that millions of the votes counted in Atlanta, Georgia; Detroit, Michigan; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin were cast by illegal voters. Initially, I thought Trump was modeling his post-election maneuver- ings on a scenario drawn from Henry Kissinger’s Vietnam War playbook of withdrawal through escalation: an aggressively prolonged deferral of the concession of election loss conducted slowly, aggressively, and compli- catedly enough as to make it seem unrecognizable as defeat. I soon realized that his ambitions leapt high above my horizon of expectations. Pundits have described Trump’s actions in this time of the transition as comparable to the behavior of a petulant child, or a mad king, or a sore loser. He was also working quite methodically and on multiple fronts to transmute the 2020 election into a reprise of his 2016 victory. Rather than conceding defeat Trump made clear his intention to turn what happened in the 2020 election into the portal for the uncanny return of previously unacted upon promises—to refuse to concede, to challenge the legality of the votes cast, to mount a populist revolt—he made during his successful 2016 campaign. The remarks that follow constitute a preliminary effort to explain how and why Trump turned the interim between the declaration of Biden as president-elect on November 7 and his inauguration on Janu- ary 20 into the stage-setting for the multi-pronged campaign he waged to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The rules and norms governing presidential candidates’ behavior during “the transition” customarily require that a defeated head of party “put on his nation hat” and concede that the will of the American people

144 Amst 66.1 (2021): 143-53 The Après-Coup: President Trump’s Transfer of Power has spoken to mark the official inception of a peaceful transfer of power. However, after Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, self-declared rule-keepers of the interregnum all but weaponized customary protocols when they over-idealized “the concession speech” and “the peaceful transfer of power” as the foundational tropes of U.S. liberal democracy and exceptionally good examples for countries all over the world to emulate. Critics and political commentators joined a chorus of bipartisan voices to express indignation at Trump’s adamant refusal to conform his illiberal behavior to the normative procedures adhered to by the entire slate of his twentieth-century predecessors. Trump proceeded to conduct unconventional warfare of his own by re-purposing the protocols with which his critics attacked him into weapons of his own design. His counter-attack involved the inversion of the concession speech into ongoing acts of aggression, the radical revision of the conventional understanding of the transfer of power, the refashioning of the latter into a warrant to disqualify the votes of millions of African Americans, and the convoking of an insurrectionary force in Washington, D.C., to overturn the results of the 2020 election. A defeated incumbent’s concession speech usually precedes an op- ponent’s victory address and customarily includes as key elements the acknowledgement of defeat and the expression of a willingness to assist the incoming administration. Rather than composing such a speech, Trump devised a series of what might be called anti-concessionary devices targeting the aspirations that Biden articulated in his victory speech. After major news networks called the election for Biden on No- vember 7, the president-elect stated the American voters had “given us a mandate for action on COVID, the economy, climate change, and systemic racism” (qtd. in Martin). In response, Trump used executive orders and directives to department heads with provenance over these matters to construct “delayed-action” political devices that would, if Biden should become president, implant intransigent impediments to the accomplishment of each mandated aim. Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, installed bureaucratic stumbling blocks sure to delay the Biden administration’s access to economic and budget-related information needed to finalize its COVID-19 plans (Breuninger). On the economic front, Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin completed paperwork for the future shut-down of the temporary lending programs the Federal Re- serve Commission allotted to assist mid-sized businesses and municipal governments. With the assistance of the Heritage Foundation, Trump devised a legislative instrument that would make it impossible for the Senate to approve Biden’s rejoining the Paris climate accords (Garber). Trump engaged Biden’s resolve to end systemic racism by expanding the ban on racial sensitivity training in the nation’s military divisions, federal construction programs, and police departments. Calling it a web of lies, Trump replaced the 1619 Project with the 1776 Commission.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 143-53 145 Donald E. Pease

Days after the election, Trump directed Attorney General William Barr to expedite the executions of Orlando Hall, Brandon Bernard, Alfred Bourgeois, Cory Johnson, and Dustin Higgs, the five African American men imprisoned on death row (Major). On December 24, he refused to sign the defense budget until the Pentagon abandoned the policy of renaming military bases that presently bear the names of Confederate officers (O’Brien). This includes commanders like General Henry -Ben ning, who, in the course of arguing that the abolition of slavery would lead to the destruction of the White race, declared, “I say give me pesti- lence and famine sooner than that.” The norm of “the peaceful transfer of power,” to turn now to the topic of Trump’s more dangerous unconventional weapon, resembles the concession speech, in that both conventions presuppose a modicum of continuity between the incoming presidential administration and the preceding regime. It also assumes that the defeated incumbent understands time in office as an effort to safeguard what The New York Times describes as the foundational premise of a democratic republic: “A republic works only when the losers of elections accept the results and the legitimacy of their opponents” (Editorial Board). Trump had made clear why he could neither offer such an assurance nor undertake a peaceful transfer of power years earlier, when he added the following passage to the Inaugural Address that he delivered on January 20, 2017: Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another—but we are transferring power from Washing- ton, D.C., and giving it back to you, the American People […]. This is your day. This is your celebration. And this, the United States of America, is your country […]. What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people. January 20th, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. (Trump, “Inauguration”) The 2017 inauguration ceremony might have accomplished the official work of legally recognizing Donald J. Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America. But Trump gave the occasion a “very special meaning” when he stipulated the recipient (“you, the American People”) of this transfer of power (rather than the election), as what authorized his taking up the office of the president. Upon making this statement Trump acted as a usurper, a person who performs an action— the transfer of the sovereign power of president to the American people—that he has no legal authority to enact. Trump intends the phrase “[t]his, the United States of America, is your country!” to place the Make America Great Again movement in a position of minority rule over the U.S. political order. In 2016, Trump did not run as the head of the Republican Party and he did not govern as a president whose actions and policies were authorized by the guardians of the sacred epistemes of U.S. liberal democracy. Trump campaigned

146 Amst 66.1 (2021): 143-53 The Après-Coup: President Trump’s Transfer of Power and governed as the delegated voice of an insurrectionary movement whose members are contemptuous of the liberal democratic values upon which the notions of a concession speech and the peaceful transfer of power are based. Trump would never, not even if he could, transfer the sovereign power of the American People to a man who represents what they and he find abhorrent in U.S. liberal democracy. Members of the MAGA movement viewed Trump’s 2016 election as the result of a successful, non-violent, populist insurrection that enabled their chosen leader to usurp the sovereign power of the president to transgress the norms and rules of the liberal elites responsible 1 for making them feel “strangers in their own country” (Tabachnik). Throughout his illiberal presidency Trump went out of his way to set up a non-traversable barrier between his practices of governance and the liberal motifs, principles, and norms that political elites used to criticize him (Levitz). Participants in his movement regard what Trump’s critics consider impeachable offenses as evidence of his successful usurpation of the executive power needed to enact the sovereign will of the authentic American people, a. k. a. the MAGA populist movement. In the name of the sovereign power Trump transferred to them at his 2017 inauguration, “the American People” thereafter endowed their president with a “legitimacy so profound that his rule-breaking has the effect of rule- making” (O’Neill). The MAGA movement is not about citizens of the United States, and its members do not primarily identify as Republicans. Members of Trump’s populist movement fancy themselves the well-spring of nation- making power out of which the United States emerged, and believe in their bones that the bedrock America they inhabit constitutes the sacred homeland of true nativist belonging. America’s elect, the American people Trump represents, do not describe themselves as citizens of the United States, but real Americans first—and last. The Trump movement’s “populism” has always been about the construction of an internal border distinguishing who belongs and who does not; who counts and who should not; who can wield power and who must be subject to it. It is they, and not the liberal elite, who are the Americans who set the rules and model the behavior to which immigrants who wish to become citizens of the United States must conform and who are ever-ready to take up arms against every threat—foreign and domestic—to the American Way of Life (O’Neill). Trump appealed to this White supremacist strain in his populist base when he aligned his 2016 presidential candidacy with what is popularly known as the “birtherism” fantasy, which falsely claimed that Barack

Obama’s supposed birth in Kenya made him an illegal president. 1 For an elaboration of The claim that Barack Obama lacks the identification papers to Trump’s role as a usurper, see Pease. For an elabora- serve as a legal president of the United States can be readily falsified, as tion of the MAGAers’ President Obama did when he put his birth certificate on public display. affective disposition, see However, the ingrained belief on which “birtherism” is based cannot be Hochschild.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 143-53 147 Donald E. Pease falsified because it is entangled in the conviction held by a hard core of Trump’s supporters who are convinced that no African American pos- sesses the identity credentials required to make them a legitimate candidate for the office of president of the United States. Trump and the participants in the Make America Great Again movement believe that Obama’s election constituted a breach of what the African American political philosopher Charles W. Mills calls the U.S. racial contract. In the U.S. political order, the racial contract works by distinguished (White) persons who are full contractual parties to the U.S. social contract from (non-White) sub-persons who are not. Ac- cording to Mills, race regulates the American social contract by dividing the contractual parties into two asymmetrical incompatible groups: the persons who comprise the party to whom the social contract assigns its rights and liberties are white, unmarked citizens, the sub-persons who lack complete contractual identification with the rights and liberties of White U.S. citizens are racially marked. To the members of the Trump populist movement, the election of Barack Obama meant that a sub-person who lacked the full contractual rights and liberties of White U.S. citizens was now in charge of enforcing the U.S. social contract. In The Racial Contract, Mills defines the racial contract as that “set of formal or informal or meta-agreements (higher level contracts about contracts, which set the limits of the contract’s validity) between one subset of humans henceforth designated as White and coextensive with the class of full persons, and that categorizes the remaining subset of humans as non-White and of a different and inferior moral status, sub- persons” (11). The “full persons” referenced in this definition are contra- puntal ensembles that require their differentiation from sub-persons to achieve self-identity. In other words, no matter how universal the ap- plicability of this category, the figure of the person necessarily requires its distinction from the necessary and related category of the sub-person. Although the racial contract that underwrites the modern social contract is constantly being rewritten, it invariably establishes epistemological norms of cognition along racial lines. It prescribes for its signatories an epistemology of ignorance, a resilient combination of disavowal and nonknowledge that guarantees that Whites “will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made” (45). In his monograph White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, the Lebanese anthropologist Ghassan Hage lays out, with admirable succinctness, the inequivalent practices of “national belonging” pertaining to persons and sub-persons in the U.S. racial contract: “The (white) nationalist who believes him or herself to ‘belong’ to a nation, in the sense of being part of it,” means that he (it is always he) inhabits the nation at the level of “active” governmental belonging, a sovereign expression of the “state’s will” (45). White nationalists, who perceive themselves as the enactors or the agents of the state’s will believe they are entitled to give expression to this sovereign will by violent-

148 Amst 66.1 (2021): 143-53 The Après-Coup: President Trump’s Transfer of Power ly subordinating non-Whites to the will of those who actively belong to the nation (Hage). With the racial contract as warrant, Trump extended birtherism’s jurisdiction, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, to effect the civic disenfranchisement of African American voters on the premise that they lacked the identity credentials required to render them legitimate voters in an American election. Blacks cannot belong to the America over whom MAGAers distribute the condition of national belonging, and they cannot cast genuinely legal votes because they lack the property, namely “Whiteness,” needed to belong. The fantasy through which Trump has advocated the disenfranchisement of African American voters revolved around the lurid spectacle of trucks dumping votes in the millions cast by dead—in the literal and social sense—Black people and other “illegal aliens” in unsupervised polling stations in the cities of Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia. To right this wrong, Trump’s legal team asked various courts to invalidate millions of Black votes and to continue his term in office. When President Trump’s attorneys presented briefs calling for the disqualification of African American voters in courtrooms in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, the cases were either dismissed or refused a hearing altogether. However, upon hearing decidedly different versions of the evidence concerning illegal voters, ballot tamper- ing, and hacked computers that Rudolph Giuliani and members of his extra-juridical “strike force” presented in courts of public opinion scattered across the battleground states, militantly supportive activist “ju- rists” and paramilitary groups gathered in the thousands on the steps of state legislatures and federal courthouses to demand that governors and state legislators nullify the verdicts handed down by judges. Scores of judges, governors, the Electoral College, the Justice De- partment, and the U.S. Supreme Court have repeatedly found no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Although defeated all the time in the halls of justice, the champions of Trump’s cause continued to march unbowed through the precincts of this alternative jurisdiction that Trump the Usurper co-created with his increasingly emboldened insurrectionary movement. The paramilitary wing merged with the legislative branch when leaders of the movement succeeded in persuading Republican state legislators in Arizona, Geor- gia, Nevada, and Pennsylvania to override the voters’ verdict and send alternate slates of electors for the January 6 confirmation of the result of the presidential election in the U.S. House and Senate (Gabriel and Saul). The insurrectionists, who had converged en masse to protest each in- flection point of the U.S. electoral process—from the counting of the votes in local polling stations, to their certification by the states, to the official December 14 tally in the Electoral College—planned a massive rally on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on January 6 to demand that Vice

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President Pence replace the officially certified electors with the alternate slates of Trump electors from Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and Penn- sylvania. Members of the Arizona Republican Party indicated the life and death stakes of the insurrection when they reposted Ali Alexander’s tweet stating “I am willing to give up my life for this fight” alongside a clip from the movie Rambo, highlighting “This is what we do, who we 2 are. Live for nothing, or die for something” (qtd. in Renshaw). Numerous commentators have cogently analyzed the historical, political, and psycho-social significance of the January 6 insurrection and the part Trump’s “Save America” rally at the Ellipse played in inciting it. However, in keeping with the restricted focus of these remarks, I want to explain briefly how this event coheres with Trump’s anti-concessionary and “non-peaceful transfer of power” strategies. On January 20, 2017, Trump the Usurper, whose 2016 election resulted from a non-violent insurrectionary movement, stated that he was “transferring (sovereign) power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the Ameri- can People” (Trump, “Inauguration”). On January 6, the “American People” returned to Washington, D.C., as an insurrectionary movement authorized by the sovereign power Trump had transferred to them to use whatever force necessary to keep their leader in the office he had usurped in their name. As was the case with Trump’s anti-concessionary weapons, the primary target of his movement’s insurrectionary power was President-elect Biden. Biden traveled to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the scene of one of the bloodiest battles in the American Civil War, on October 6, the day after President Trump was released from Walter Reed Hospital where he received emergency medical treatment for COVID-19, to explain what motivated his decision to campaign for the presidency: I made the decision to run for president after Charlottesville. Close your eyes, and remember what you saw. Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the KKK coming out of the fields with torches lighted, veins bulging, chanting 2 As prelude of events to come, the FBI arrested the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the ’30s. It was hate on members of Michigan’s the march, in the open, in America. Hate never goes away, it only hides. “Wolverine Watch- And when it’s given oxygen, when it’s given an opportunity to spread, when men,” a self-deputized paramilitary wing of the it’s treated as normal and acceptable behavior, we’ve opened a door in this insurrection, on October country that we must move quickly to close. As president, that’s just what I 8, 2020, before they could will do. I will send a clear unequivocal message to the entire nation, there is act on their plan to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the no place for hate in America. (Biden) governor of Michigan, and put her on “trial for Biden concluded his Gettysburg address with sentences that recalled treason” for imposing a state lockdown and refrains from Abraham Lincoln’s “A House Divided” speech and that other measures to curb would reappear in revised form in his January 20, 2021 inaugural ad- COVID-19 infections that, according to the dress: “You and I are part of a covenant, a common story of divisions brief prepared for this overcome and hope renewed. If we do our part, if we stand together, if “People’s” court, violated the freedoms and liberties we keep faith with the past and with each other, then the divisions of guaranteed by the U.S. our time will give way to the dreams of a brighter, better future. This is Constitution (Byman). our work. This is our pledge” (Biden).

150 Amst 66.1 (2021): 143-53 The Après-Coup: President Trump’s Transfer of Power

As a final anti-concessionary missive, President Trump decided to send a Colossal Charlottesville in full battle regalia to Washington, D.C., on the day the joint session of Congress officially certified Biden as the forty-sixth president. In place of a peaceful transfer of power, Trump devised a parting shot that would open President Biden’s eyes to the unforgettable spectacle of the unappeasable insurrectionary intran- sigence of “the American people” who would rather die than transfer their sovereign power to him. The 139 Republican legislators who refused to certify Biden’s election also left Biden with a divided House (and Senate) (Stevens et al.). In its prolongation of the gap between the votes cast on election night and the inauguration of the forty-sixth president of the United States, the period of transition has behaved like an incubator busily hatching as-yet-unacted-upon eventualities that had lain dormant in Trump’s 2016 election victory. “Stop the Coup!” might have been—and in some quarters was—taken as a realistic call to action during the early morning hours of November 9, 2016. Now, however, in the wake of Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party, sabotaging of the U.S. administrative state apparatus, hollowing out of key institutions of the liberal international order, shattering bedrock principles of the U.S. political system (equality under the law; impartial and independent courts and tribunals; separation of church and state; the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property; checks on the power of each branch of government), the insurrectionary pillaging of the Capitol, the assembling of the National Guard to secure the 2021 inauguration ceremony against domestic terrorist attack, and the drawing up of a second slate of Articles of Impeachment, time in the après-coup somehow makes these remainders of the Trump administration feel more REAL than the reality of Biden’s presidency.

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Editorial Board. “Trump Still Says He Won: What Happens Next?” New York Times. New York Times, 5 Jan. 2021. Web. 1 Feb. 2021. https://www.nytimes. com/2021/01/05/opinion/trump-call-georgia.html. Gabriel, Trip, and Stephanie Saul. “Could State Legislatures Pick Electors to Vote for Trump? Not Likely.” New York Times. New York Times, 5 Jan. 2021. Web. 1 Feb. 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/article/electors-vote.html. Garber, Jonathan. “Trump Wields Power to Stymie Biden on Paris Climate Deal.” Fox Business. Fox Business Network, 19 Dec. 2020. Web. 1 Feb. 2021. https:// www.foxbusiness.com/markets/trump-block-biden-reentering-paris- climate-deal. Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Sydney: Pluto, 1998. Print. Hochschild, Arlie. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: Free, 2016. Print. Levitz, Eric. “Liberal Hyperbole about Trump Was Never the Problem.” The Intel- ligencer. New York Magazine, 30 Nov. 2020. Web. 1 Feb. 2021. https://nymag. com/intelligencer/article/liberal-hyperbole-trump-coup.html. Major, Derek. “Trump Administration to Execute 5 Black People in Last Days as President.” Black Enterprise. Black Enterprise, 2 Dec. 2020. Web. 1 Feb. 2021. https://www.blackenterprise.com/trump-administration-to-execute- 5-black-people-in-last-days-as-president/. Martin, Jeffrey. “Joe Biden Says He’s Going to Win with a Mandate for Action on Racism, Climate and COVID.” Newsweek. Newsweek, 6 Nov. 2020. Web. 1 Feb. 2021. https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-says-hes-going-win- mandate-action-racism-climate-covid-1545687. Martin, Jonathan, and Alexander Burns. “Why Biden’s Choice of Running Mate Has Momentous Implications.” New York Times. New York Times, 3 May 2020. Web. 1 Feb. 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/us/politics/ joe-biden-vice-president-pick.html. Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997. Print. O’Brien, Connor. “Trump Vetoes Defense Bill, Setting up Showdown with Con- gress.” Politico. Capitol News, 23 Dec. 2020. Web. 1 Feb. 2021. https://www. politico.com/news/2020/12/23/trump-ndaa-veto-defense-bill-450286. O’Neill, Joseph. “Real Americans.” New York Review. New York Review, 15 Aug. 2020. Web. 1 Feb. 2021. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/08/15/ jill-lepore-suketu-mehta-real-americans/. O’Toole, Fintan. “At 2.23 am, the US President Launched an Attempted Coup.” Irish Times. Irish Times Trust, 4 Nov. 2020. Web. 10 Jan. 2021. https:// www.irishtimes.com/news/world/us/fintan-o-toole-at-2-23am-the-us- president-launched-an-attempted-coup-1.4400134?mode=sample&auth- failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fnews %2Fworld%2Fus%2Ffintan-o-toole-at-2-23am-the-us-president-launched-an- attempted-coup-1.4400134. Pease, Donald E. “Trump: Populist Usurper President.” Democratic Cultures and Populist Imaginaries. Spec. issue of REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 34.1 (2018): 145-74. Print. Renshaw, Jarrett. “Arizona Republican Governor Rebuffs Party Tweet Asking if Supporters Willing to Die over Election.” Reuters. Reuters, 9 Dec. 2020. Web. 1 Feb. 2021. https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-election-arizona/arizona- republican-governor-rebuffs-party-tweet-asking-if-supporters-willing-to- die-over-election-idUSKBN28J018. Stevens, Harry, et al. “How Members of Congress Voted on Counting the Elector- al College Vote.” Washington Post. Washington Post, 7 Jan. 2021. Web. 1 Feb. 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2021/politics/congress- electoral-college-count-tracker/.

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Tabachnik, David Edward. “Donald Trump’s Populist Presidency Is the Real Coup, not the Impeachment Inquiry.” The Conversation. The Conversation, 31 Oct. 2019. Web. 1 Feb. 2021. https://theconversation.com/donald-trumps-populist- presidency-is-the-real-coup-not-the-impeachment-inquiry-124972. Trump, Donald J. “Deflated Trump Says ‘If You Count the LEGAL Votes I Easily Won.’” The Sun. YouTube, 6 Nov. 2020. Web. 10 Jan. 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6moQNj3JaCA. ---. “Full Text: 2017 Donald Trump Inauguration Speech Transcript.” Politico. Capitol News, 20 Jan. 2017. Web. 1 Feb. 2021. https://www.politico.com/story/ 2017/01/full-text-donald-trump-inauguration-speech-transcript-233907.

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Deep Divides: The Fault Lines Actually Disrupting American Democracy

Margit Mayer

What is at the root of a nation apparently split into two warring camps: one rooting for an autocratic leader and a return to the golden days of a White republic, the other envisioning a multicultural centrism at home and relieved to see the United States “back at the head of the table” (as Joe Biden put it) internationally? Readers of this journal are obviously aware that answers to this question are complex (cf. M. May- er, “Wie”). Far from adding further dimensions to the ongoing efforts to diagnose the disease of polarization and division in the contemporary United States, this brief text rather proposes to reframe the question. Regarding the divisions revealed in the 2020 election (not unlike those of 2016, in spite of all that happened in those four years), I suggest that the apparent division into chauvinistic, backward looking, and possibly racist voters on the one side, and cosmopolitan, secular, and progressive voters on the other, may obfuscate more than it reveals. While such ideologies, religious beliefs, and political convictions certainly have a firm grip on various sociologically and geographically definable groups, their use to construct antagonistic camps and deepen divides may actually obscure critical tensions and more powerful splits. Furthermore, they are to a large extent the result of persistent mobilization, manipulation, and reenforcement upheld by a billion-dollar industry of think tanks, PACs, centers for policy development, various donor networks, and, particularly on the conservative side, local media and evangelical churches (J. Mayer; Nelson). Spotlighting a couple of issues that have presumably split American voters, this text reveals not only more foundational and deeper divisions just beneath their surface, but also illustrates how the politics of both Republican and Democratic elites have contributed to creating these divides. A similar exercise could be done with any of the hot issues cur-

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 155-61 155 Margit Mayer rently perceived as dividing the nation. The two discussed here—the bitter struggle over Proposition 22, which deeply split California voters, and the rural-urban divide, manifesting as a fissure between red coun- tryside and blue cities—both encapsulate and illustrate powerful trends that are shaping the future of work and the structure of society in the United States.

1 Proposition 22

This ballot measure was proposed as a reaction to a law that the Cali- fornia legislature passed in 2019, AB5, which extended employee clas- sification to gig workers (Ballotpedia). It was backed by some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful tech companies, including Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and DoorDash, which spent more than $200 million on their campaign, far outspending the union-driven opposition campaign which pulled in about $20 million (White). The companies fought tooth and nail to save their business model from the AB5 law, spending millions to plas- ter California with advertisements in support of the ballot measure and bombarding voters with dishonest claims about the amount of freedom and flexibility the measure would offer to gig workers. Rather than classifying their drivers and couriers as employees, the measure defines them as contractors, thereby undermining employee protection and benefits. Employee rights such as minimum wage, unemployment benefits, and health insurance, which the existing Califor- nia labor law provides, do not apply to such workers (Paul and Wong). The ballot measure passed with a 58 % to 42 % margin: 6.3 million people voting in favor, 4.5 million opposed. However, a survey of California voters who voted “yes” on the measure showed that 40 % of them thought they were supporting gig workers’ ability to earn a living wage—apparently a result of the massive misinformation campaign rolled out by the app companies and their political supporters (Democ- racy Now)—which outspent drivers and labor groups opposing the measure by 20:1. The political supporters come mostly from the ranks of corporate Democrats. While during the campaign Biden and Harris opposed Prop 22, and while their campaign plan specifically states they would model federal gig worker legislation on the Californian AB5, the measure was designed and heralded not by Republicans but by corporate Democrats, such as Tony West (Kamala Harris’s brother-in-law and adviser, temporarily considered for Biden’s cabinet as attorney general), who is the chief legal officer of Uber and one of the leaders of the campaign for Prop 22. Rather than ensuring workers’ minimum wage, the new law states that they are only getting paid when they have an assignment, putting them at the whim of both demand and corporations. It also prevents them from accessing the benefits of being on payroll, such as contribu-

156 Amst 66.1 (2021): 155-61 Deep Divides: The Fault Lines Actually Disrupting American Democracy tions for Social Security and Medicare benefits as well as overtime pay. What they get is: sub-minimum wage (Jacobs and Reich show it would be as low as $5.64 an hour, significantly below the state’s eventual $15 minimum), substandard health care, no family leave, no paid sick days, no access to state unemployment compensation, no workers’ compensation, and they are prevented from unionizing. Thus, the law in fact creates a new substandard category of worker under U.S. law: workers who are neither employees (with guaranteed rights and benefits) nor true independent contractors, since they cannot set their own rates, choose their own clients, or build wealth on these apps. The workers affected are low-wage and mostly People of Color. In San Francisco, 78 % of drivers are People of Color and 56 % are immigrants. As is so often the case, the Black and Brown labor force is the first to be targeted by the intense precarization trends that are pushing into more and more segments of the labor market. The companies behind this achievement have promised to roll out this model nationwide, and for good reason. The day after the ballot’s passing the San Francisco Chronicle reported: Uber saw its stock rise 14 % Wednesday, adding nearly $9 billion to its market value and all but erasing the losses it has seen this year as it battled both the coronavirus pandemic and California regulators’ attempts to rein in what has been a freewheeling gig economy. Lyft saw its value increase by nearly a billion as its shares rose 11 %. (Said) With the success of Prop 22 adding $10 billion to the valuations of Uber and Lyft’s stock prices, while workers experience the strongest dis mantling of New Deal protections, we may expect more struggles over a deepening division: On the one side, groups like Gig Workers Ris- ing that organize app-based workers and fight anti-worker laws such as those just passed in the bluest of states; on the other side, big tech companies and their bought politicians who profit from the intensifying insecurity of the U.S. labor force. If it were not for the powerful forces behind such ballot campaigns, the division would be closer to 99 % to 1 % than 42 % to 58 %.

2 A Rural-Urban Division

A growing gap between flourishing metropolitan regions and lan- guishing small towns and rural areas, overlapping with partisan affilia- tions, seems particularly pronounced in the United States, but occurs in all Western nations. Underlying this divide are macro-economic trends that have concentrated finance, tech, advanced services, culture, and entertainment industries in urban centers, while depleting the surrounding regions of significant chunks of the manufacturing and supplying industries that had kept them “in business.” With industrial and low- skill jobs vanishing, and with the disappearance of state redistributive policies, small town governments have suffered shrinking revenues—

Amst 66.1 (2021): 155-61 157 Margit Mayer and in the United States, these de-industrialized, impoverished regions of social decline and misplaced resentment have often been depicted as ground zero for “Trump Country.” On the other hand, the new global order has allowed city regions to concentrate wealth and high-value-added economic activities, thereby enabling them to expand their economic, political, and cultural weight. Additionally, powerful metropolitan actors have used their networks and alliances to influence centers of decision-making such as the World Bank, seeking to steer public policy to their advantage and thus intensify a spatially uneven model of development that neglects rural areas and small towns (Breville). In the United States, this urban-rural divide has grown since the 1980s and has taken on partisan colors as “more and more of America’s major cities have voted blue each year, culminating in 2012, when 27 out of the nation’s 30 most populous cities voted Democratic” (Kron). By 2019, a Brookings study found that the two parties speak for and to dramatically different segments of the American economy, in which “Democratic, mostly urban districts contain large concentrations of the nation’s higher-skill, higher-tech professional and digital services” whereas Republican areas “rely on lower-skill, lower-productivity ‘traditional’ industries like manufacturing and resource extraction” (Muro and Whiton). Even though the U.S. electoral system privileges rural areas, urban actors in the United States also use their clout—just as Breville noted for European cities—to spur state legislation and court rulings to create new (liberal) laws that often conflict with federal laws or with the majority of fellow state counties. Meanwhile, the states with constitutional amendments banning liberal agendas such as gay marriage are often among the least densely populated in the country, such as South Dakota and Idaho (Kron). This standard narrative, which has the Democratic Party anchored in the nation’s booming (though highly unequal) metropolitan areas, and which understands the Republican Party as based on aging, economically stagnant, and manufacturing-reliant rural and exurban communities, is too simplifying. There are too many countervailing and centrifu- gal forces at work in contemporary settlement patterns. And worse: by dividing people along racial, geographic, and ideological lines, this narrative abets the villainizing of small town and rural America in which centrist Democrats have infamously engaged, epitomized by Hillary Clinton stating, at an LGBT fundraising gala in New York City, that half of Donald Trump’s supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables” characterized by “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic” views (Reilly). Many read the 2020 election results as confirming this division, but few question the role that the Democratic Party’s electoral campaign has played in generating it. On-the-ground organizers in rural counties

158 Amst 66.1 (2021): 155-61 Deep Divides: The Fault Lines Actually Disrupting American Democracy have complained bitterly that the national Democratic Party has not offered rural voters a vision that speaks to their experiences. For instance, Bill Hogseth, the chair of the Dunn County Democratic Party in west- central Wisconsin, writes in his piece “Why Democrats Keep Losing Rural Counties like Mine” that “rural people feel our way of life is being sold off. We see the wealth of our sweat and soil being sent away to enrich executives, investors and shareholders,” and he speaks of a rural consciousness that includes “a perception that cities are where decisions are made, culture happens, and resources flow.” Nor did centrist Democrats give priority to fighting for workers. In an election when the economy was a top concern for voters, Trump led Biden in the polls on the economy, while the national Democratic Party failed to offer a coherent economic message, let alone one that would speak to working-class people (Davis). Rural towns in Texas came out strongly during the primaries for Sanders, but not for centrist Demo- crats in November. Local organizers from the border regions in Texas and from small-town Pennsylvania complained that the electoral slogans of the national Democratic Party completely missed the concerns of the workers in these regions as they were geared instead to urban and suburban upper classes—“upper” from the perspective of those living in the depleted White space around the archipelago of well-off cities (Grim). The wealth concentrated in the Twin Cities of Saint Paul and Min- neapolis, and the poverty marking Greater Minnesota, translate not just into a gap in available infrastructures but also into wage disparities. Here, in the perception of many residents of Minnesota’s poorest counties, the urban-rural gap is large enough to override the racial gap. In this context, urban Democrats’ language of equity, including charges of White privilege, is not well understood by Minnesota farmers and miners who “draw food and minerals from the earth, which then enrich pro- cessors and retailers in the Twin Cities. Most of the money made from agriculture was reaped in the Twin Cities even though the crops were grown in rural communities” (Jacobs and Reich). Their resentment of “metro privilege” has created an opening for Trump, who easily tweaked it against progressive values. Already, of course, racial and ethnic minorities in cities have the lowest paying and least stable jobs within the urban labor market, if they even manage to get jobs. And they have to deal with all the “preconditions”—poor housing, toxic environments, lack of health care— that have been laid bare in their disproportionate exposure to the effects of COVID-19. As a result, they have more in common with those left behind in the poor rural regions (including shorter life expectancies) than with the wealthy who can choose to live in scenic natural areas on large estates or in gated luxury townhouses. The actual political and economic fault lines do not run between urban and rural regions, but rather between those working and living in precarity and those able to

Amst 66.1 (2021): 155-61 159 Margit Mayer shield themselves off from the hardship and grievances that intensify for the rest of society.

3 Growing Commonalities

The commonalities among the 99 % are likely to consolidate. Look- ing into the future, the Brookings study on the different and diverging urban and rural economies of the United States does anticipate “common cause” between the “urban, diverse, tech-oriented professional party and the exurban-rural party of older white males” (Muro and Whiton). The authors see it, for example, in the spread of precarious work in offices as well as factories and warehouses. Both cases presented here illustrate that underlying the apparent divides that captivate both media and scholarly debate is a far deeper divide: the 99 % confronting the economic elites and their political class represented in both the Republican and Democratic parties. While the latter are “warring” over liberal and populist forms of neoliberal hegemony, growing social movements such as those around racial justice understand that different groups are being set up against each other (Mayer, “Amerikas Progressive Bewegungen”). Whether (sub)urban or rural, PoC or White, low-paid or professional: for all of them, the threats to employment security, decent housing, good health(care), and the threats of environmental degradation and indebtedness have risen. A more explicitly class-based and ethnically inclusive organizing strategy, therefore, will aid in overcoming the deepest divide of all.

Works Cited Ballotpedia. “California Proposition 22, App-Based Drivers as Contractors and Labor Policies Initiative (2020).” Ballotpedia. 2020. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https:// ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_22,_App-Based_Drivers_as_ Contractors_and_Labor_Policies_Initiative_(2020). Breville, Benoit. “The Return of the City State.” Le Monde Diplomatique. Groupe Le Monde, 13 Apr. 2020. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://mondediplo. com/2020/04/11cities. Davis, Mike. “Trench Warfare. Notes on the 2020 Election.” New Left Review 126 (2020). Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii126/articles/ mike-davis-trench-warfare. Democracy Now! “After Prop 22 Win for Uber and Lyft, Advocates Fear New Wave of Anti-Worker Laws Pushed by Big Tech.” Democracy Now! 8 Dec. 2020. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://www.democracynow.org/2020/12/8/prop_ 22_uber_lyft_gig_workers. Grim, Ryan. “Populism Versus the Consulting Class, Deconstructed.” The Inter- cept. The Intercept, 13 Nov. 2020. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://theintercept. com/2020/11/13/deconstructed-populism-vs-consultants/. Hogseth, Bill. “Why Democrats Keep Losing Rural Counties like Mine.” Politico. Capitol News, 1 Dec. 2020. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://www.politico.com/ news/magazine/2020/12/01/democrats-rural-vote-wisconsin-441458. Jacobs, Ken, and Michael Reich. “The Uber/Lyft Ballot Initiative Guarantees only $5.64 an Hour.” UC Berkeley Labor Center. The UC Berkeley Center

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for Labor Research and Education, 31 Oct. 2019. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https:// laborcenter.berkeley.edu/the-uber-lyft-ballot-initiative-guarantees- only-5-64-an-hour-2/#:~:text=After%20considering%20multiple%20loop holes%20in,minimum%20wage%20was%20that%20low. Jacobs, Lawrence R. “Minnesota’s Urban-Rural Divide is no Lie.” Star Tribune. Star Tribune, 26 July 2019. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://www.startribune.com/ minnesota-s-urban-rural-divide-is-no-lie/513267582/. Kron, Josh. “Red State, Blue City: How the Urban-Rural Divide is Splitting Amer- ica.” The Atlantic. The Atlantic Monthly Group, 30 Nov. 2012. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/red-state-blue- city-how-the-urban-rural-divide-is-splitting-america/265686/. Mayer, Jane. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York: Doubleday, 2012. Print. Mayer, Margit. “Amerikas Progressive Bewegungen angesichts von Pandemie und Rassistischer Polizeigewalt.” Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen 33.1 (2021). Print. ---. “Wie verstehen wir die Wahl 2020 in den USA?” Links-Netz. Links-Netz.de, 19 Nov. 2020. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. http://wp.links-netz.de/?p=469. Muro, Mark, and Jacob Whiton. “America Has Two Economies—and They’re Di- verging Fast.” The Avenue. The Brookings Institute, 19 Sept. 2019. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/09/10/america- has-two-economies-and-theyre-diverging-fast/. Nelson, Anne. Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radi- cal Right. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019. Print. Paul, Kari, and Julia Carrie Wong. “California Passes Prop 22 in a Major Victory for Uber and Lyft.” The Guardian. The Guardian Media, 4 Nov. 2020. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/04/california- election-voters-prop-22-uber-lyft. Reilly, Katie. “Read Hillary Clinton’s ‘Basket of Deplorables’ Remarks about Don- ald Trump Supporters.” Time. Time, 10 Sept. 2016. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https:// time.com/4486502/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables-transcript/. Said, Carolyn. “Lyft Plans next Gig-Work Move: Making Peace with Unions That Opposed Proposition 22.” San Francisco Chronicle. San Francisco Chronicle, 4 Nov. 2020. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/ article/Uber-Lyft-shares-soar-following-passage-of-15701236.php. White, Jeremy B. “Gig Companies Break $200M Barrier in California Ballot Fight.” Politico. Capitol News, 29 Oct. 2020. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://www. politico.com/states/california/story/2020/10/29/gig-companies-break- 200m-barrier-in-california-ballot-fight-9424580.

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Expanding the Analytical Domain: American Democracy and Its Predatory Economies

Saskia Sassen

Existing governmental policies and international agreements have generally deregulated and freed the movement of capital, goods, and information. And they have done so in order to extract greater profits. This has perhaps especially been the case in low-wage countries. The U.S.-American polity is no exception to this tendency, however; in fact, it is one of its most central political drivers. At the same time, we have increasingly limited and restricted the movement of migrants and refugees, rendering them vulnerable to greater exploitation enabled by neoliberal economic policies, with high finance also a key actor in these domains. One effect has been a massive expelling of older economies and societies. Many modest-level households and enterprises have also been displaced and expelled in the Global North given the development of new types of economies. The instability of American democracy—the dissatisfaction with the status quo so prevalent also on both sides of the Atlantic—needs to be understood in light of that larger backdrop. Trumpism, among other things, reflects deepening urban-rural divides. A major challenge we confront in today’s urban economies is the sharp rise of complex types of knowledge that may have started as admirable innovations but increasingly have also enabled predatory operations. These types of knowledge include algorithmic mathematics, some of the more complex forms of law and accounting, high-level logistics, and more. The complexity of these formations tends to camouflage the predatory character of many of them. Further, such formations are systemic in nature: specifically, they are not produced by a straightforward and highly visible seizure of power, such as land grabs or the invasions of the First and Second World Wars. In brief, today’s emergent predatory formations are often invisible to the average citizen as well as functioning (to variable extents) beyond

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 163-67 163 Saskia Sassen the reach of ordinary policy responses. This is in good part because they tend to assemble into novel configurations with greater capacities to access what are, still, mostly separate domains. This type of financialized economy is quite different from the traditional economy most people still adhere to, and it tends to be radically decoupled from democratic processes and national hinterlands (Sassen, “Global”).

High Finance as Capability?

Among these new types of formations we find high finance. Easily confused with or seen as an extension of banking, today’s high finance is radically different from those familiar, long-standing formats. My particular focus here is on high finance as a capability, both admirable in its complexity and flexibility, and also functioning as one of the more powerful predatory formations of the current period. My effort here is to make visible how even the most sophisticated financial instruments require certain elementary and brutal steps, often resulting in highly degraded socio-economic and environmental outcomes. One example is that of the subprime mortgage developed in the early 2000s: this was a brilliant innovation, quite different from the original 1970s concept of mortgages in that it was centered on an extractive mode. Its aim was not to enable access to housing, but to use the actual physical goods (houses, buildings) to develop asset-backed securities for the financial system itself. The usual way of understanding finance is through a particular set of high-end components, including some of the most advanced uses of digital technologies, the Mathematics of Physics rather than the more familiar math of standard Economics, and other powerful instruments. And it includes some of the best minds in our current period. Prefiguring today’s globalization studies, a major area of research known as “the new international division of labor theory” rose to attention in the 1970s and 1980s. Key elements were the spread of foreign direct investment in developing countries, the shift in manufacturing from North to South, the growth of export processing zones, and the increasing international fragmentation and decentralization of production. The penetration of foreign capital into Third World countries, -of ten in the form of commercial agriculture, disrupted local communities and induced internal migration from rural areas to cities, producing a cheap labor force—disproportionately young women—that could be exploited in the new export-processing zones. Thus, since the 1980s, these types of studies have been fundamental to explain the asymmetries in the U.S.-Mexico border region, and often beyond, including Central America and other border regions in the world. I take these observations a step further by linking (a) this expansion of global investment with (b) the pushing out of local communities as (c) a factor leading to the upsurge in international migration. These

164 Amst 66.1 (2021): 163-67 Expanding the Analytical Domain: American Democracy and Its Predatory Economies two processes, traditionally studied as separate phenomena, or at best as connected at their margins, are, in fact, mutually constitutive as globalization unfolds. Out of this comes the rise of a transnational space within which the circulation of workers can be regarded as one of several flows, including capital, goods, services, and information. Soaring income inequality and unemployment, expanding populations of the displaced and imprisoned, accelerating destruction of land and water bodies—these and more have led me to argue that we need added elements besides the familiar poverty and injustice. Today’s socioeconomic and environmental dislocations cannot be fully understood in these usual terms.

Predatory Economies

These innovations have changed our understanding of Economics for the twenty-first century, exposing a system with devastating consequences even for those who think they are not vulnerable. The current condition includes various types of expulsions—expulsions from professional livelihood, from living space, even from the very biosphere that makes life possible. From finance to mining, the complex types of knowledge and technology we have come to admire are used too often in ways that produce elementary brutalities. These have evolved into predatory formations—assemblages of knowledge, interests, and outcomes that go beyond a firm’s or an individual’s or a government’s project, but that exert pressures on existing democratic systems, often undercutting direct national control and thereby undoing mechanisms to ensure responsiveness and accountability. In my book Expulsions (2014), I sought to lay bare the extent to which the sheer complexity of the global economy makes it hard to understand who the major actors are. I traced the lines of responsibility for the dis- placements, evictions, and eradications it produces. One clear finding was that this complexity means, for instance, that members of Congress have a hard time following the presentations of the financiers and other authorities in charge of regulating complex economic sectors. The legislators give up at some point and basically surrender to the analysis of the experts—that is, the major financiers! This is not the way to handle an inquiry into high finance. Further, under such conditions it becomes equally hard for those who benefit from the system to feel responsible for its depredations. Migrations, wars, economic crashes, ecological crises, and other phenomena of massive scale have become usual in recent years, especially in certain areas of the world. In this regard, Central America is generally considered one of the most insecure regions in the world. And while these crises concern us because of their extensiveness and recur- rence, we tend to understand them as isolated effects. However, these are only different aspects of the same problem: the “predatory forma-

Amst 66.1 (2021): 163-67 165 Saskia Sassen tions” of contemporary capitalism that generate unprecedented levels of inequality. What is still generally understood in the language of more inequality, more poverty, more imprisonment, more environmental destruction, and so on, is insufficient to mark the proliferation of extreme versions of these well-known conditions. We are seeing the making of a context where many people end up being expelled from the economy and expelled from access to clean water. The key element shaping the expulsions that concern me here is the notion of a “systemic edge”—an edge that exists inside a country, a system, a city. Such systemic edges are proliferating across diverse domains. Further, I conceive of these systemic edges as the point in sometimes long trajectories when condition “x” becomes invisible, no matter how material it might be, and we cannot “see it” conceptually speaking. Let me illustrate briefly with a familiar case: at some point the long-term unemployed fall off the standard categories for measuring unemployment in the United States; that is, they become statistically invisible. Another example is our standard measure for economic growth, gross domestic product (GPD) per capita: increasingly, the space it measures leaves out significant numbers of people, places, and activities. Thus, it measures a shrunken economic space, and in so doing can come up with some positive growth measure, even as significant numbers of people, small businesses, and places have been expelled from “the” economy. I think of this as a kind of economic “cleansing.” The specific, tightest meaning I develop in the book Expulsions is that we entered a new phase of advanced capitalism beginning already, albeit slowly, in the 1980s. What marked this emergent condition was the reinventing of mechanisms for primitive accumulation. In contrast to earlier modes of primitive accumulation, today’s is a form of primitive accumulation executed through complex operations and much specialized innovation—ranging from the logistics of outsourcing to the algorithms of finance. And this is a modus operandi that has led to an increase in the concentration of wealth. It has little to do with the preceding period—after the Second World War and up to the 1970s—when the modest middle classes and the working classes gained recognition and saw their wages rise, facilitating approximations of (never-quite-attained) nationally embedded liberal democracies. Predatory economies challenge democratic systems of the Westphalian tradition, as they destabilize territories, authorities, and rights traditionally articulated in the national form.

In Brief

Left-wing idealization of the post-World War II order is correct as far as it goes, but it is, I argue, an incomplete account. We can also link finance with extreme degradation. For instance, corporations that outsource

166 Amst 66.1 (2021): 163-67 Expanding the Analytical Domain: American Democracy and Its Predatory Economies manual work because it lowers production costs. There is a tendency to de- link abusive practices in the actual workplace from the often admirable features of the final outcome. In the case of financial scholarship the trend is to emphasize digital capabilities and profits, and to overlook the diverse work functions that are involved. There is rarely, if ever, inclusion of all the kinds of low-paid jobs which directly and indirectly also enable the financial sector. It is simply not considered as part of the general scholarship about finance, nor is finance generally linked to degraded manual labor. Finance is also a contrast to many advanced economic sectors where we can make such links easily, notably the degraded and unhealthy moments in the actual production of electronic components. To incorporate physical degradation into the case of the financial sector requires expanding the understanding of finance. That is to say, I consider “high finance” as a far more expansive domain than is usually done. Seeing finance through the lens of such an expanded domain allows us to get at a far more inclusive assemblage of elements than is usual in studies of finance: it is not only the work of developing complex instruments, it is also the work of its high-end as well as low-wage workers. Further, such an expanded assemblage of elements can include some very simple or familiar components rarely associated with high finance. Constructing such an expanded domain for finance makes visible that even extremely complex and sophisticated financial instruments can actually include some very elementary and brutal steps in the production chain, as well as highly degraded socio-economic conditions we never associate with high finance. We must recognize that finance engages a far more encompassing operational field than is commonly understood. Yes, finance is an -as semblage of algorithmic math and advanced technologies. But it needs grist for its mill and often does so by incorporating very modest elements at the other extreme of its knowledge and technical operations. Finance is an abstract domain that depends on massive material capabilities and also on low-wage workers—from cleaners and miners to truckers. Its logics and logistics transcend the national containers in which we have usually articulated political claims for more democracy. But if we want to democratize the highly unequal social relations that predatory formations produce, we need to begin by extending our analytical domain from the institutions and actors of the American polity to the systemic edges of often brutal, but unacknowledged, realities.

Works Cited Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2014. Print. ---. “The Global City: Enabling Economic Intermediation and Bearing Its Costs.” City & Community 15.2 (June 2016): 97-108. Print.

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No, Your Other Left! The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party

Aysuda Kölemen

In 1964, a charismatic Ronald Reagan gave what came later to be known as “the speech” for Barry Goldwater’s campaign that turned him into a political star. His unwavering defense of those big ideas transformed the American political discourse after he was elected president in 1980. While the Democratic Party opposed many of Reagan’s policies, they seemed to increasingly embrace the premises upon which they were built. Bill Clinton, the first Democratic president after Reagan, promised to end the culture of welfare dependency and declared the era of big government over, while proposing individual solutions such as educational attainment and hard work as cures to poverty and inequality. The hegemony of Reaganism in America seemed to be complete by the end of Clinton’s two terms and went largely unchallenged during the Barack Obama years. However, during the 2008 crisis, the disappointment over the meager response of the Obama administration to the devastation of the masses, which contrasted sharply with its swift and massive effort to save big companies, propelled parts of the party base to join the ranks of its historically marginal left wing. After the unexpected success of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 presidential primaries and the traumatic impact of the Trump presidency on its base, the liberal and the socialist wings of the Democratic Party are currently in a fierce struggle over the future direction of the party. Such soul searching is to be expected after losses. That it is occurring after an election in which the Democrats handily won the presidency is a testimony to how deep the controversy runs. The sustained and increasingly more popular self-proclaimed socialist economic discourse by the small but vocal left wing of the Demo- cratic Party is the fire behind this moment of reckoning. Despite being unpopular among the party establishment, socialist Democrats have an

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 169-73 169 Aysuda Kölemen influence beyond their rank and numbers in American politics. Their ideas have already spilled into the larger societal discourse and caused a leftward shift in party policy proposals regarding education, climate, and health care. I argue that the fundamental reason for this is the power of their transformative discourse, which seeks to replace the Reaganite discourse that has reigned supreme since the 1980s. Here, I will elaborate on their arguments that aim to undermine the Reaganite premises of individual responsibility for poverty, the win-win view of inequality, and the undesirability of government intervention.

Structuralism

Franklin D. Roosevelt had made the case that poverty was a result of structural forces beyond the reach of individuals and, therefore, fighting poverty required a collective and concerted effort that could only be led by the government. In a brilliant reversal, Reagan shifted the perceived responsibility for poverty from structural to individual factors through the Malthusian “perversity thesis” (Somers and Block 265). According to Thomas R. Malthus, poverty relief efforts paradoxically increase poverty by divorcing sustenance from work and increasing reproduction rates among those who cannot afford to have children (Malthus ch. V). Ap- plying Malthus’s theory to the twentieth-century American context, Reagan argued that the assistance to the poor created a permanent underclass by encouraging laziness and poor family planning, which led to intergenerational poverty and continued dependence on assistance. He contended that the Democratic Party was conscious of this paradox and intentionally designed welfare programs to create a group of people dependent on benefits who would continue to vote for the party that promised to maintain and extend government assistance to the needy. Malthusian tough love requires denying help to those in need and forcing them to work harder and have fewer children. Thus, government intervention only perpetuates and exacerbates the problem of poverty. In one swoop, this line of argument resolves the tension between the moral desire to end poverty and the economic desire to decrease government spending: If poverty can only be ended by refusing to help the poor, it is morally justified to deny assistance to the needy because of its larger long-term benefits to the poor and to society, even when it causes dis- tress and suffering to the people who are deprived of help. The contemporary socialist discursive strategy is to shift the responsibility for poverty from individual to structural factors on utilitarian and moral grounds. From a utilitarian angle, emphasizing that an increasing number of people work hard, hold jobs, take responsibility, and nonetheless fail to lift themselves up from poverty illustrates why it is not individual actions but the economic system that breeds and perpetuates poverty. From a moral perspective, arguing that human suffering should not be the subject of utilitarian calculations presents human dignity and welfare

170 Amst 66.1 (2021): 169-73 No, Your Other Left! The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party as non-negotiable rights that should be guaranteed by the government. Therefore, individualist and meritocratic approaches such as improving educational attainment cannot and should not be expected to solve structural problems such as poverty. The emphasis on the structurality of poverty also aligns with the framing of the other large-scale crises that the socialist left desires to tackle, such as climate change and racism.

Power Competition

The perversity thesis arrived at the political scene bundled with Mil- ton Friedman’s libertarian economic theory, which formed the basis of Reagan’s economic policy. Friedman argues that government intervention in the functioning of the economy—with a few exceptions—creates more problems than it solves and results in the loss of political freedoms along with economic freedoms. A preoccupation with economic inequality is unnecessary because inequality is not only due to the differences in individual ability and effort but also desirable due to the positive externalities that it creates in the economic and political domain. From a classical liberal perspective, it is not a problem that the poor get a smaller share of the pie as long as the pie keeps growing and everybody’s slice of the pie grows in absolute terms. If everybody is richer than they were a decade ago in real terms, then the distribution does not matter. Democrats generally seem to have accepted this premise as they defended economic prosperity at the expense of distributive justice in the post-Reagan era. It was only after the 2008 crisis, with the grassroots protests that identified the “one percent” as the enemy of the people, that the conversation shifted back to the perils of inequality. The socialist left adheres to what I label as the power-competition view of inequality. According to this view, the relative share of a pie someone acquires is more important than the size of their slice because the rich who increase their share of wealth can buy more power in the political system and employ this power to reshape the system according to their interests. Wealth may be an absolute good, but power is a relative concept, and therefore when wealth is used to gain power, it should also be treated as a relational resource. Even if the poor get richer in absolute terms, they are left in a weaker and more precarious situation with less political resources to defend what is left of their political and economic power when wealth inequality increases. In the contemporary American context, this perspective necessitates the defense of steeply progressive taxation and a reversal of deregulation in many areas such as finance, health care, and the media to enable the government to limit the political power of the rich. This zero-sum perspective on wealth and politics applies to other areas as well. Achieving equality for disadvantaged groups necessarily comes at the expense of historically privileged groups. Hence, equality cannot be achieved without a struggle against the privileged. Having accepted the maxim that “power concedes nothing without a demand” (Douglass

Amst 66.1 (2021): 169-73 171 Aysuda Kölemen

22), the movement views conflict as a necessary and inevitable aspect of politics. In that regard, it is closer to Reagan’s spirit than it is to that of the liberal Democratic Party leadership, which has long defended that progress can be achieved through dialogue, compromise, and patience. This divergence gains particular significance when it comes to the issue of race. The popularity of Reagan was a result of many factors, one of which was his ability to position himself as the defender of the American ethos of self-reliance by wrapping arguments about the causes of poverty in coded language that evoked long-standing stereotypes and prejudices against Black Americans. He is only one in a long line of American politicians to use anti-Black rhetoric to harness votes, but he was exceptionally gifted in hiding racist arguments in plain daylight. He implied that those who were dependent on government assistance were predominantly Black men who were prone to criminality and promiscuous Black women who gave birth to many children without marrying, confident that they could lead a comfortable life on the government dole. According to this line of thinking, if poverty was an individual failure, then Black poverty was the result of Black culture and the cure was to cut off government help so that Black communities could learn to stand on their own feet. Therefore, it was the obligation of the government to weed out those who abused the system for life from the people that really deserved help, those who fell on hard times and would need assistance temporarily. The socialists strike back at racism from various angles. First, having studied decades of academic research suggesting that targeted policies lead to demonization of target groups and defunding of government programs, socialists propose universalist policies such as Medicare for All, student loan forgiveness, and Universal Basic Income that do not target any needy group. They move away from the language of assisting the poor to the language of rights: housing rights, education rights, labor rights, health care rights, and a high minimum income. Second, socialists distance themselves from the liberal argument that racial and other forms of equality can be achieved in time by changing attitudes and decreasing prejudices through education and communication. A power competition perspective reasons that racial inequalities were instituted by structural design to serve the interests of some powerful groups and can only be dismantled by fighting the contemporary holders of those interests. From this perspective, racism is not merely an attitude but a structure with many vested interests that requires drastic policy solutions such as defunding the police. These demands also communicate a sense of urgency against incrementalism.

Government Works

American socialists usually serve their arguments piecemeal around specific policy proposals, demands, and issue areas. However, these arguments revolve around a central theme: that the market economy is

172 Amst 66.1 (2021): 169-73 No, Your Other Left! The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party an unnatural construct and serves the people that hold power—be it economic, social, or political. Socialists arrive at three related conclusions: that the market economy is unjust, unfree, undemocratic, inefficient, and most importantly lethal for humankind; that the government is more efficient than the markets at delivering public goods; and that it is the obligation of democratic governments to reign in the market forces to protect the people by providing public goods when possible and regulating and taxing the markets when not. This desire to regulate and weaken the role of the market means war for them. If Reaganites wanted to drown the government in a bathtub, the socialists want to put the market in a straitjacket. Whereas Reaganism emphasized freedom as the ultimate American value, the socialists focus on another value: justice. These ideas are not new or specifically American. However, they must be interwoven to arrive at a specifically American and contemporary discourse that speaks to the American populace today. This is a challenge the liberal wing of the Democratic Party has not had to contend with because it did not develop in opposition but as an append- age to Reaganism. The socialists have not settled on their champion or a unified discourse so far; the movement is still in its infancy. There is no “the speech” yet, but as their arguments reveal, socialists already have an overarching theory of politics that focuses on structures, power competition, and the desirability of government intervention. If they can communicate these big ideas behind and beyond specific policy proposals to the voters, they just may be able to swing the Democratic Party and the American political pendulum to the left.

Works Cited Douglass, Frederick. Two Speeches, by Frederick Douglass: One on West India Emancipation, Delivered at Canandaigua, Aug. 4th, and the Other on the Dred Scott Decision, Delivered in New York, on the Occasion of the Anni- versary of the American Abolition Society, May, 1857. C. P. Dewey, printer, American Office, 1857. Print. Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2002. Print. Malthus, Thomas Robert. “An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).” The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus. Ed. E. A. Wrigley and David Souden. Lon- don: Pickering & Chatto, 1986. Vol. 1: 1-139. Print. Somers, Margaret R., and Fred Block. “From Poverty to Perversity: Ideas, Mar- kets, and Institutions over 200 Years of Welfare Debate.” American Socio- logical Review 70.2 (2005): 260-87. Print.

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Dispatches from a Dying Empire

Scott Kurashige

1. The American empire is in a state of decline, calling into question the U.S. nation-state’s ability to serve as a hegemonic or stabilizing force for the global capitalist system (and what in U.S. propaganda has been called “the free world”). This was certainly true well before Don- ald Trump became president. The Florida Republican senator known in Trump World as “Little Marco” Rubio tweeted that Joe Biden’s security team would be “polite and orderly caretakers of America’s decline” (qtd. in Niedzwiadek). Befitting a man shamelessly politicking with no sense of irony, Rubio failed to recognize the deeper truth behind his statement. The Clinton and Obama administrations sought to recalibrate (or pivot) U.S. imperialism in response to its diminished capacities and the nation’s rising competitors. By contrast, the neocons of the George W. Bush administration hastened this decline to indulge their destructive imperial fantasies. Shunning allies while kowtowing to right-wing nationalists and dictators, Trump has now obliterated much of the foreign policy that guided the so-called American century. 2. As one should expect from the oxymoronic Trump presidency, the 2020 election has delivered predictable volatility. This was predictable, first, because Trump has literally telegraphed every move he has made to advance his baseless claims of voter fraud and attempted coup, appealing to sentiments deeply rooted in the nation’s history of white 1 supremacy, settler colonialism, and McCarthyism. In this sense, he and 1 I choose not to his many followers have laid bare the longstanding Republican strat- capitalize “white,” when addressing matters egy of minority rule through voter disenfranchisement. More broadly, of race. A refusal to Trump has signaled all along that his goal was to loot the government capitalize emphasizes that whiteness should not be to the greatest degree possible, then sabotage it on his way out. Again, recognized as a culture however, the originating source of the volatility long predates Trump. but only as a reactionary formation whose originat- In the late 1960s, the United States entered into a protracted state of ing and primary purpose is polarization that has been studied from a variety of vantage points: the to produce and reproduce class stratification resulting from the shift from what David Harvey has systemic racism.

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 175-80 175 Scott Kurashige called “embedded liberalism” (11) to neoliberalism; sustained challenges to heteropatriarchy and the crisis of the “male breadwinner”; the widening racial divide in the aftermath of civil rights, urban rebellions, and the Republican Southern Strategy; the demographic and cultural divide between urban and rural / exurban areas; the xenophobic response to the non-white majority emerging from post-1965 shifts in immigration patterns, and so on. 3. I have repeatedly turned to Immanuel Wallerstein to connect the dots underlying the structural crisis of the past half-century as the demise of liberalism as the legitimating ideology of the world system (Wallerstein, After Liberalism). In many ways, Trump’s seemingly fluke election was a recognizable manifestation of the collapse of the dominant political order. While a summary cannot do justice to this work, Wallerstein (who sadly joined the ancestors in 2019) has argued that liberalism’s great success between the revolutions of 1848 and 1968 rested in its ability to offer a centrist path that co-opted the systemic challenges of the right and left. In doing so, it narrowed the parameters of debate to what liberals deemed rational thought and reasonable reform. The dominant order in U.S. politics emphasized bipartisan support for the domestic and global pillars of liberal capitalism. Despite whatever differences they may have had, Republicans and Democrats recognized that pursuing their goals and self-interests necessitated a shared dedi- cation to promote American power and preserve the legitimacy of the underlying system. As Trumpism turns the Republicans into a party of thugs and QAnon adherents, that old model of consensus is quickly fading, and it is unlikely that Biden can do much to restore it. 4. We can say “good riddance” to American exceptionalism and that national consensus rooted in white, cis-male, heteropatriarchy. But what we have now is a systemic crisis and an age of volatility that will be resolved one way or another over the next generation when a new hegemonic bloc forms and things crystallize into a new social order. Against the certainties inherent in teleological readings of historical material- ism, what must be stressed is that the collapse of capitalism and bourgeois democracy as we know it could just as likely lead to a system that is worse rather than better. The upshot of all these developments is that the era of limited choice has been ending, and the era of real, stark choices has been unfolding before our eyes. That is why every debate and conflict in front of us should be seen as a symbol of the long-range choices we now face: between constructing a new system that is rooted in participatory democracy and social justice; or one that is overtly authoritarian and magnifies inequality even further. 5. Political observers from Barack Obama to David Brooks have correctly pointed out that Trumpism has led us to an “epistemological crisis” (qtd. in Goldberg; Brooks). Liberals of the center-left and center- right variety are grappling with the collapse of a political and social order dependent on certain shared understandings of truth and expertise

176 Amst 66.1 (2021): 175-80 Dispatches from a Dying Empire along with the rules and norms extending from those common commitments. It is more than apparent now that everything is subject to partisan interest from counting votes to implementing public health measures. Yet, for those who saw through the conceits of liberalism, such observations by establishment figures are belated acknowledgments of what has been the reality for longtime casualties of the liberal order. For the wretched of the earth, liberalism has been defined by its exclusions and false universalisms. That is why American Studies should be more invested in Wallerstein’s more profound assessment from two decades ago that the impending systemic collapse marks the material and epistemological “end of the world as we know it” (Wallerstein, The End ix). 6. One must question whether most philosophers are even capable of interpreting the world at this juncture. The point is that those who are struggling to change the world are creating a new and rapidly changing reality. This places a premium on critical scholar-activist praxis for this age of transition. To conceive of both a vision of the future and the means to achieve it, our work must reunite what Wallerstein identifies as the pursuit of “knowledge, morality, and politics” that was split into “separate corners” by the liberal order (Wallerstein, The End ix). This necessitates not only transcending the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis but also “unthinking” the nineteenth-century premises of Social Science and knowledge production more generally, including the false assertions of “objectivity” and “rationality” at the core of the liberal university. 7. A new phase of resistance began in November 2016. The chaos, danger, and cruelty Trump fostered, already symbolized by his empow- ering neo-Nazis while caging innocent children, took new and pervasive form in 2020 as Trump and his followers cavalierly mocked those fighting the spread of COVID-19. The case count as of the first week of Janu- ary 2021 has shot past 21 million and deaths surpassed 361,000 and rising in the United States (“Coronavirus”). Anti-Trump sentiment brought together a broad and unprecedented alliance of over 81 million voters to put an end to this nightmare. Nevertheless, there are tens of millions of Republicans uniting behind Trump’s “Lost Cause” narrative of the election. They will continue to escalate counter-revolutionary energies to new and provocative heights until they are neutralized. 8. As of January 2021, that phase of resistance comes to a close and opens up a new phase of reconstruction. Organizing to create a better system means we cannot be stuck fighting rearguard battles against the most backward elements of society. Finding an exit to this crisis means recognizing the sources of creativity emerging from the most visionary and dynamic movements emanating from the grassroots. This also means putting a premium on methods of activism that stress long-term relationship building. In a system that fetishizes mobilization every two or four years, such forms have largely been marginalized within U.S. electoral politics, where even the most face-to-face form of outreach is

Amst 66.1 (2021): 175-80 177 Scott Kurashige given the consumerist moniker of “retail politics.” Indeed, for most voters, being a member of a political party does not even match the depth of engagement inherent in most consumer relations. One regularly receives a membership card, newsletter, and insurance discounts from Costco, airlines, and the auto club, but the Democrats cannot even muster that level of attachment and connectivity. 9. Before one is ready for a war of movement, what is needed is a deep, protracted engagement in the war of position. The Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020 drew millions of young people into politics with a deep passion, as has the meteoric rise of Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez and the Squad. We have thus seen the emergence of a new left movement bringing energy and dynamism to the U.S. political landscape and infusing it with a new sense of hope on a scale like nothing since the 1960s. However, every generation that believes it has solved the riddle of why there is no socialism in America ultimately bumps up against the reactionary persistence of whiteness, great nation chau- vinism, and anti-communism in the heart of millions of workers who identify as middle-class Americans. These are not obstacles that will be overcome through a simple change of tactics or an emphasis on what the left-leaning Justice Democrats call “an explicit multiracial, populist message” (Justice Democrats). 10. The U.S. left could greatly benefit from more transnational dialogue about the history of socialism. To reemphasize, we are in a tran- sitionary moment, when our revolutionary imagination must transcend the notion that implementing structural reform through the state or even seizing state power can bring about transformative social change. Too many elements within the alleged progressive sector of U.S. politics have written off self-help and mutual aid, seeing them as conservative measures that let the state off the hook rather than prefigurative -ac tions that model new social relations while preparing the people to exercise self-determination. As we contemplate the withering away of the welfare state under neoliberalism, I am particularly intrigued to learn more from German and European scholars about the role that self-help and mutual aid played in expanding the reach of the Social Democrats prior to the creation of the modern welfare state. Many Americans are dismayed by the politicization of everything under Trumpism, rightly fearing that our lives will now be dictated for many decades by how Amy Coney Barrett interprets religious freedom. However, activist politics are more likely to engage and invest people when oriented toward the practice of the essentials of life—at sites like education, childcare, health care, housing, and food. Representative democracy turns these sites into “issues” and sorts us out into constituencies and interest groups that work to elect politicians we hope will serve our interests: this is the form of politics that is most in crisis. The hope for democracy lies in the specific form of participatory democracy, where people (ideally, yes, with guided resources and support from the state) form cooperative and

178 Amst 66.1 (2021): 175-80 Dispatches from a Dying Empire mutualistic relationships that are deeper and more substantive than the periodic mobilizations that pass for politics. 11. Right now, there are hundreds of millions of people around the world excited by the prospect of the Trump presidency coming to an end. Most of them understand the significance of U.S. politics far better than the average American. Now is the opportunity and responsibility for U.S. residents, regardless of what the Biden administration does, to build solidarity with those movements, peoples, and nations around the world that are resisting the authoritarian trend and seeking to create an alternative to neoliberalism. I especially look for inspiration within the United States at struggles coming from majority non-white and working-class cities like Detroit with deep movement legacies. Around the world, there are outstanding models of non-capitalist structures and values that we can humbly learn from the praxis of Indigenous nations. 12. Such priorities are embodied by the statement, “Another World Is Necessary, Another World Is Possible, Another World Has Already Started” (Boggs et al.) crafted in 2005 at the International Workshop on Self-Organizing and Common Self-Reliance, Cologne, Germany, by a collective led by my comrade and mentor, Grace Lee Boggs, in partnership with Maria Mies. The statement opens as follows: We are in the midst of a great transformation, not only economically but psychologically, culturally, politically, in our relations with one another, to the Earth, to other species and to other peoples of the world, and in our concept of ourselves and of our rights and responsibilities as human beings. To an unprecedented degree, as we approach 2006, millions of us are aware that our present and impending disasters are not natural but man-made, the consequence of our limitless pursuit of capital accumulation. It closes by addressing the questions on the minds of so many who understand the depths of the crisis but are wondering, “What do we do now?” and “How do we get from here to there?”: WE can begin by restoring our relationships to each other and to the Earth. WE can create gardens, for food, health and to create a community as a basis for resistance, for learning and enjoyment of young and old. WE can create new subsistence skills to grapple with our present problems and the challenges to come. WE can transform our schools from job-and-career-oriented institutions to places where children and young people can learn the values of teamwork, serving the community, self-reliance, and the joys of creativity. WE can initiate discussions in our communities locally, nationally, and internationally on new visions, a new perspective, and the profound historical meaning of the great turning during this time in which we live. WE can share and spread the word of what people are already doing to create a better world.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 175-80 179 Scott Kurashige

Works Cited Boggs, Grace Lee, et al. “Another World Is Necessary, Another World Is Possible, Another World Has Already Started.” James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership, 3 Dec. 2005. Web. 22 Dec. 2020. http:// boggscenter.org/another-world-is-necessary-another-world-is-possible- another-world-has-already-started-michigan-citizen-nov-27-dec-3-2005/. Brooks, David. “The Rotting of the Republican Mind.” New York Times. New York Times, 26 Nov. 2020. Web. 30 Nov. 2020. https://www.nytimes. com/2020/11/26/opinion/republican-disinformation.html. “Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count.” New York Times. New York Times, 7 Jan. 2021. Web. 7. Jan. 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/inter active/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html. Goldberg, Jeffrey. “Why Obama Fears for Our Democracy.” The Atlantic. The At- lantic Monthly Group, 16 Nov. 2020. Web. 30 Nov. 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/why-obama-fears-for-our-democracy/ 617087/. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print. Justice Democrats. “New Deal Strategies, Justice Democrats, Sunrise Move- ment, Data for Progress.” Politico. Capitol News, 10 Nov. 2020. Web. 30 Nov. 2020. https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-b4b4-dc7f-a3fd-bdf 660490000. Niedzwiadek, Nick. “Rubio Calls Biden’s National Security Team ‘Polite & Orderly Caretakers of America’s Decline.’” Politico. Capitol News, 24 Nov. 2020. Web. 3 Dec. 2020. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/24/marco-rubio- biden-national-security-team-440285. Wallerstein, Immanuel. After Liberalism. New York: New, 1995. Print. ---. The End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. Print.

180 Amst 66.1 (2021): 175-80 Interregnum or Transformation?1

Sheri Berman

Over recent years, the negative consequences of neoliberal capitalism have become impossible to ignore. It contributed to such traumatic events as the 2008 financial crisis, as well as such destructive long-term trends as rising inequality, lower growth, increasing monopsony, and growing social and geographic divides. Moreover, its impact has not been limited to the economic sphere: these events and trends have negatively influenced Western societies and democracies, as well. As a result, damning critiques of neoliberal capitalism, by academics, politicians, and commentators, have proliferated. Yet, if the aim is not to chip away at the rough edges of neoliberalism, but rather fundamentally to transform it into a more equitable, just, and productive system, more than a recognition of its flaws and downsides is necessary. As the old saying goes, “you can’t beat something with nothing.”

Two-Stage Process

If we want to understand what it would take to get rid of the neoliberal ideas and policies which have negatively affected Western economies, societies, and democracies for decades, we need to recall how ideological transformations occur. The rise and fall of economic paradigms or ideologies can be conceptualized as a two-stage process. In the first stage, dissatisfaction with, or a recognition of the inadequacy of, a dominant ideology grows. These perceived failings create the potential—what political scientists refer to as a “political space”—for change. But even when such a space has opened, the question remains of whether another ideology—and, if so, which—will replace the old one. 1 This essay was previ- For an existing ideology to collapse, things must progress beyond the ously published in Social Europe on December 9, stage where it is criticized and attacked, to a second stage where a new, 2019 (www.socialeurope. more plausible, and attractive ideology rises to replace it. eu/interregnum-or-trans- This process is clearly reflected in the rise of neoliberalism itself. formation).

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 181-83 181 Sheri Berman

During the postwar period a social-democratic consensus reigned in western Europe. This rested on a compromise: capitalism was maintained, but it was a very different capitalism from its early twentieth-century counterpart. After 1945, West European governments promised to regulate markets and protect citizens from capitalism’s most destabilizing and destructive consequences, via a variety of social programs and public services. For decades, this order worked remarkably well. In the 30 years or so after the Second World War, Western Europe experienced its fastest ever economic growth, and liberal democracy became the norm across the region for the first time. Beginning in the 1970s, however, this order began running into problems, as a nasty combination of rising inflation, increasing unemployment, and slow growth—“stagflation”—spread across western economies. These problems created the potential, a political opening, for change. But for this to be exploited, a challenger was needed. That challenger, of course, was neoliberalism.

Alternative Prepared

During the postwar decades, a neoliberal right had been thinking about what it saw as the downsides of the social-democratic consensus, and what should replace it. These neoliberals did not gain much traction before the 1970s, since the postwar order was working well, and there was accordingly little demand for fundamental change. When problems and discontent emerged, however, the neoliberals were prepared—not only with critiques, but with an alternative. As Milton Friedman, intellectual godfather of this movement, put it: “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable” (Friedman xiv). That the left at the time was unable to offer distinctive explanations for, or viable solutions to, the problems facing the social-democratic order eased neoliberalism’s triumph. That triumph was also facilitated and cemented by a purposeful process of ideological diffusion. Neoliberalism’s central precepts became widely accepted within the economics profession, and think tanks and educational programs helped spread neoliberal ideas across the policy- making, legal, and other communities. So pervasive and effective was this process of diffusion that it swept over parties of the left as well. Stephanie L. Mudge has shown that by the end of the twentieth century, the Keynesian economists who dominated economic policy-making within most left parties during the postwar period had been replaced by “transnational finance-oriented economists” and products of neoliberal think tanks who viewed themselves as interpreters of markets and saw their mission in technocratic, efficiency

182 Amst 66.1 (2021): 181-83 Interregnum or Transformation? terms—urging the left to embrace globalization, deregulation, welfare- state retrenchment, and other reforms (7). In the years leading up to the 2008 crisis, voices robustly opposed to the reigning neoliberal ideology were few and far between. As Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas and Sarah L. Babb put it, during this period the triumph of neoliberalism “as an ideological force” was complete, “in the sense that there ‘were no alternatives’ simply because everybody believed this, and acted upon [neoliberal] beliefs” (Fourcade-Gourinchas and Babb 569).

Pendulum Swing

The financial crisis and growing recognition of the negative long- term consequences of neoliberalism have now caused the pendulum to swing back. A broad appreciation that many ideas and policies advocated by neoliberals since the 1970s are responsible for the economic, social, and political mess in which the West finds itself has opened a political space for transformation. But for that to occur, the left would need to be ready with an alternative—not just criticisms. It is entirely possible for growing numbers of people to become aware of problems with an existing order, weakening it, perhaps, but yet not causing its collapse and replacement. Indeed, such periods have names: interregnums. Historically, interregnums fell between the reign of one monarch and the next; lacking strong, legitimate leaders, such periods were often unstable and violent. From a contemporary perspective, an interregnum is a period when an old order is crumbling, but a new one has not taken its place. Just as in the past, however, such periods tend to be disordered and volatile. Or, as Antonio Gramsci more poetically put it—reflecting from his prison cell in 1930 on how fascism, rather than the left, had been the beneficiary of the crisis of capitalism in Italy—during interregnums “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (276). Whether the many “morbid symptoms”—economic, social, and political—characterizing our current age will be transcended depends on whether the left is able to move beyond attacking neoliberalism. It has to come up with, and then build support for, viable, attractive, and distinctive alternatives.

Works Cited Fourcade-Gourinchas, Marion, and Sarah L. Babb. “The Rebirth of the Liberal Creed: Paths to Neoliberalism in Four Countries.” American Journal of Soci- ology 108.3 (2002): 533-79. Print. Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition. 1962. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2002. Print. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971. Print. Mudge, Stephanie L. Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2018. Print.

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Recognition Returning Home: An Interna- tional Law Perspective on the Interregnum after the 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections

Helmut Philipp Aust

The days following the 2020 presidential election threw the United States—and the world watching on the sidelines—into a particular form of interregnum. For a moment in November 2020, anything seemed to be possible, even a full-blown collapse of the United States and a retreat into some kind of civil war. The world was speculating for a few wild days who would emerge as the ultimate winner of a close, yet not so close, race. Would it be necessary for foreign governments to position themselves as to whom they would recognize as the legitimate U.S. president? Let us first, however, turn to some of the substantive issues at stake for the engagement of the new Biden administration with international law, before turning to some of the potentially destabilizing consequences of those uncertain November days for the international standing of the United States. By now, it seems as if the United States—and the world—will return to “normal.” A populist president has left the White House. A committed internationalist and supporter of multilateral processes, Joe Biden, Jr., has taken over as the forty-sixth president of the United States. Hundreds of commentaries and essays on what this will mean for the international order have already been written. Thousands more will follow. Manifold hopes are projected onto the incoming Biden administration. The EU is offering a new deal for transatlantic partnership. The world has welcomed the return of the United States to the global climate change regime. Many hope for a revitalization of the Joint Comprehen- sive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or the “Iran Deal,” as it is also known. And, of course, with the world in the grips of a pandemic, it is a relief to many that the United States will not, after all, leave the World Health Organization under a President Biden.

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 185-89 185 Helmut Philipp Aust

While these expectations and hopes are shared by many, including the author of these lines, they should not distract from the fact that the end of the Trump administration does not mean things will simply return to normal. The Trump presidency was most likely a symptom of a deeper crisis of the American political system, with many dividing lines between different parts of an increasingly fragmented society (Lam- mert, Siewert, and Vormann). This fragmentation is not only a concern for the United States. Its global repercussions have been felt painfully in many countries across the world that share similar problems, but whose fault lines and internal divisions may not yet be as exposed as those in the United States (Weinman and Vormann). This deeper-lying crisis of entrenched inequalities and a lack of trust in an unresponsive government needs to be addressed urgently if a relapse into Trumpism is indeed to be avoided. That these divisions need fixing seems clear to the Biden administration, if one gives credence to his promises on the campaign trail. These internal schisms of the United States are not irrelevant to its engagement with international law. It is a longstanding trope of international relations scholarship that domestic conditions impact the attitude a state adopts towards international law (Slaughter). At the least, the internal divisions of the United States call into question its capability to lead by example. It is much more difficult today than, say, in the 1990s, for the world to look to the United States for guidance on matters of democracy, the rule of law, or the protection of human rights. The days of U.S. hegemony (Byers and Nolte) seem to be over. While domestic politics seems to be at the top of Biden’s agenda, it is an open question what the new U.S. administration will mean for international law. The Biden administration’s more open embrace of international cooperation and multilateralism will not necessarily lead to stronger structures of international law. The Obama administration was in many ways committed to international cooperation, but for different reasons its signature projects in the field of foreign affairs by no means followed established paths for international cooperation in the forms of traditional, hard, and binding international law (Aust, “USA”). Two examples help illustrate this point. The Paris Agreement on Climate Change is, of course, a binding international agreement. Yet, its structure was highly unusual—or “innovative,” as it was dubbed at the time—insofar as the agreement contained very few hard and fast rules that actually require concrete forms of action by the state parties. Its unusual content, with the requirement to nominate nationally determined contributions, was a pivot from the binding top-down structure of the Kyoto Protocol (Bodansky, Brunnée, and Rajamani 17-18). At the time, the Paris Agreement was lauded as an experiment in international lawmaking, bringing a “coalition of the willing” approach to the field of climate change and hence overcoming the deadlock of the global climate change regime (also critical in this regard, Rodiles 197-202). But this came with a price. The highly flex-

186 Amst 66.1 (2021): 185-89 Recognition Returning Home ible structure of the agreement was adopted in order to allow for U.S. participation without the process of obtaining “advice and consent” in the U.S. Senate. Although the details are debated among experts of U.S. constitutional law, its weaker formal character under U.S. constitutional law might have facilitated U.S. withdrawal under President Trump (Galbraith). This immediate damage has been remedied by the Biden administration. But the question will now always loom over U.S. participation in international treaty regimes: Will the next administration adhere to prior commitments? Or will the world have to nervously wait every four years to see which international law commitments will be respected by incoming administrations? The second example of the highly informal character of foreign policy making in the Obama administration is the JCPOA. Not a binding international agreement as such (Talmon), it has been referred to in parts in UN Security Council resolutions, thereby partially hardening its quality and making some of its components binding on Iran (Koh 61- 67). Also, here, U.S. withdrawal from this “deal” was made easier by this unusual structure. In this connection, the broader point is the following: Even if a Biden administration is very likely to embrace multilateralism to a greater extent than its predecessor, and even if U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy turns back to established standards of professionalism and reliability, it is not a foregone conclusion that this will strengthen international law. It might also lead to more informal experiments in the realm of global governance, which is, certainly, better than no global cooperation at all. But it is not necessarily traditional international lawmaking that we will see. Informal mechanisms of cooperation have many benefits. They are easier to enter into, for example. But one of their main benefits is a weakness as well: they are subject to fewer forms of internal democratic oversight. Relegating international cooperation to these realms of informal governance thus runs the risk of undermining the legitimacy of multilateralism itself, as they may contribute to the understanding that such forms of cooperation are inherently undemocratic (Aust, “Demo- cratic Challenge”). Apart from the always risky, and to some extent futile, attempt to predict future events, the 2020 U.S. presidential elections have something else to tell us. The uncertainty around the outcome of the elections has destabilized the position of the United States in the international community to a considerable extent. One might go so far as to see the hullabaloo around the elections as an unwitting attempt to “provincialize” the United States (on “provincialization,” see Chakrabarty). Even though the antics of President Trump to shatter belief in the accuracy of the U.S. voting process have proven unsuccessful in the end, they have contributed a great deal to undermining the position of the United States as a nation that sets examples for others. On social media, this played out in the tongue-in- cheek live coverage of a Kenyan journalist on mission in the United States,

Amst 66.1 (2021): 185-89 187 Helmut Philipp Aust reporting on the U.S. presidential elections in the way that the Western media usually discusses turmoil around elections on the African continent. To give just one example of the many striking comments of this coverage: “Speaking to reporters outside the Green Zone—a walled off, militarized area around the presidential palace in the U.S. capital—AU peace envoy Monica Juma urges Americans to remain calm, says strongman Donald Trump’s predictions of street violence are ‘unhelpful’” (@Gathara). The bitter truth is that this was only half as funny. For a couple of days in November 2020 and again in January 2021, it looked as if anything could happen. For international law scholars, this immediately triggered questions like “What will happen if we will have two contending governments in the United States?,“ even though the situation was quickly under control after the „storm“ on the Capitol on January 6. A situation is not unusual in international relations. It happens all the time. Governments then make up their mind as to which of the factions in a country they will recognize as the legitimate government (Aust, “Anerkennung”). The irony here is, however, that we have become accustomed to these processes of recognition being projected on states in the “Global South.” It is often the West—or states from the “Global North”—who speak out in this regard and who hence appropriate to themselves a role in determining who represents a state on the international level (Jessup 723; Peterson 350). The most recent case in which these dynamics played out is certainly the Venezuela crisis, with its still-unfolding clash between President Maduro and the opposition led by Juan Guaidó (Aust, “Anerkennung”). It was never likely, even in the early days of November 2020, that a similar scenario of different states in the international community recognizing different U.S. governments would actually unfold. But just the imagination that this could happen is something remarkable, and it remains unclear when this crack in the United States’ global image might be repaired. And it also betrays a certain irony that a doctrine of international law that was first developed in the context of the Atlan- tic revolutions, and which was then wielded powerfully by the United States in many contexts, might now be coming home.

Works Cited @Gathara (Patrick Gathara). “#BREAKING Speaking to reporters outside the Green Zone—a walled off, militarized area around the presidential palace in the US capital—AU peace envoy Monica Juma urges Americans to remain calm, says strongman Donald Trump’s predictions of street violence are ‘unhelpful.’” Twitter, 3 Nov. 2020, 5:43 a. m. Tweet. https://twitter.com/gathara/ status/1323486003731025920. Aust, Helmut Philipp. “Die Anerkennung von Regierungen: Völkerrechtliche Grundlagen und Grenzen im Lichte des Falls Venezuela.” Zeitschrift für Aus- ländisches Öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht 80.1 (2020): 73-99. Print. ---. “The Democratic Challenge to Foreign Relations Law in Transatlantic Per- spective.” The Double-Facing Constitution. Ed. Jacco Bomhoff, David Dyzen- haus, and Thomas Poole. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2020. 345-73. Print.

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---. “Die USA und das Völkerrecht: Kontinuität und Wandel in einer schwierigen Beziehung.” Handbuch Politik USA. Ed. Christian Lammert, Markus B. Sie- wert, and Boris Vormann. 2016. 2nd ed. Berlin: Springer, 2020. 609-18. Print. Bodansky, Dan, Jutta Brunnée, and Lavanya Rajamani. International Climate Change Law. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017. Print. Byers, Michael, and Georg Nolte, eds. United States Hegemony and the Founda- tions of International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Histori- cal Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007. Print. Galbraith, Jean. “The President’s Power to Withdraw the United States from In- ternational Agreements at Present and in the Future.” American Journal of International Law Unbound 111 (2017): 445-49. Print. Jessup, Philip C. “The Estrada Doctrine.” American Journal of International Law 25 (1931): 719-23. Print. Koh, Harold H. The Trump Administration and International Law. Oxford: Ox- ford UP, 2018. Print. Lammert, Christian, Markus B. Siewert, and Boris Vormann. “Die Präsident- schaft Donald J. Trumps: Krise der US-Demokratie und Potenzial zur demo- kratischen Selbsterneuerung.” Handbuch Politik USA. 2016. Ed. Christian Lammert, Markus B. Siewert, and Boris Vormann. 2nd ed. Berlin: Springer, 2020. 3-16. Print. Peterson, Martha Jean. “Political Uses of Recognition: The Influence of the Inter- national System.” World Politics 34 (1982): 324-52. Print. Rodiles, Alejandro. Coalitions of the Willing and International Law: The Interplay between Formality and Informality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018. Print. Slaughter, Anne-Marie. “International Law in a World of Liberal States.” Euro- pean Journal of International Law 6.3 (1995): 503-38. Print. Talmon, Stefan. “The United States under President Trump: Gravedigger of Inter- national Law.” Chinese Journal of International Law 18.3 (2019): 645-68. Print. Weinman, Michael D., and Boris Vormann. “From a Politics of No Alternative to a Politics of Fear.” The Emergence of Illiberalism: Understanding a Global Phenomenon. Ed. Boris Vormann and Michael D. Weinman. New York: Rout- ledge, 2020. 3-26. Print.

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The Three United States of Americas I Have Known: Three Eras Resulting in the Loss of “Common Ground” between the United States and Europe

Ulrike Guérot

It is not easy to detect or describe what—if any—“common ground” exists today between Europe and the United States—other than that the election of Joe Biden nourishes the (vain) hopes that the former transatlantic alliance will bounce back to what it was before. But the “before” (before George W. Bush? Before Trump?) evokes barely a sentimental feeling of ancient times, when “the West” described a sense of unity on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, the “transatlantic perspective” itself has been at stake ever since Pankaj Mishra prominently deconstructed “the West” in his 2017 book Age of Anger, and postcolonial debates filled American and European universities. The times in which one could naively—or proudly—state, if only the United States and Europe could work together, the world would be a better place (which I have often heard, including at the Munich Security Conference), are definitely over. These times are more about Western apologies and consequent restitution and reparation for some 500 years of colonial dominance. Moreover, the transatlantic “common ground,” with its institutional centerpiece NATO overarching the former transatlantic security architecture, can probably be written off when a French president utters that NATO is “brain dead” and talk is reduced to the two-percent goal for military spending, meaning just money, and is devoid of strategic concepts such as the “out-of-area”-turn. How did we get here? Let me map out three eras of decline in a common transatlantic agenda and a general look at the state of democracy.

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 191-95 191 Ulrike Guérot

1 The 1990s

The two Clinton legacies of the 1990s are, in retrospect, probably the last period of “common ground” between the United States and Eu- rope, not only in the field of foreign and security policy, but also in the ways that both sides of the Atlantic conceived of democracy. The United States still seem to be one, an undivided, mostly proud democracy and nation. All the cleavages that would ultimately divide the United States in the following decades—the dust belts of the old American towns vs. the lofts in the rich tech towns; flyover country vs. coastal America; discriminated Hispanic and Black communities vs. middle-class Whites; Evangelicals vs. the liberal faculties of the Ivy League; global hotspots like New York City vs. lost “Walmart-places” from Idaho to the Caroli- nas; an ever-poorer working class (real income in the United States has stagnated around $50,000 since the late 1970s) vs. “the one percent”— were perhaps nascent, but had not yet fully unfolded. The United States of the 1990s was still cozy, although those were the years in which the American Dream had already been stolen through 1 the destruction of the American middle class. And with it, the foundation of American democracy, which was built on the dream that anybody can make it from a shoeshine boy to Rockefeller (Stiglitz), began to crack. Nobody has described this better than Hedrick Smith in his book Who Stole the American Dream? Social Science has validated this impression with empirical evidence: Congress makes laws for big industry, big pharma, and big data; NGOs of all kinds never get their legal initiatives through Congress (so if democracy means that the people get the laws they want, the United States is no longer a democracy); public goods have eroded; and healthcare did not see the daylight. This is U.S. 1 Especially companies democracy expressed in the ironic insight that escaped Frank Under- like IBM fired thousands wood in the American series House of Cards: “Democracy is so over- of people in the 1990s; and big airline companies rated.” American exceptionalism had become a cul de sac, both internally like United organized and externally, but only the next decade would reveal this. bankruptcy and restarted business under a different name to get rid of retirement obligations 2 The 2000s for their employees. The best description of the societal changes and their Polarization within the United States and alienation between Eu- underlying socioeconomic rope and the United States became visible quickly after the century (and processes is probably George Packer’s The Un- the millennium) had turned. The United States of the 1990s was not 2 winding: An Inner History quite welcoming to the Euro (Feldstein), but still had a political es- of the New America. 2 An updated ver- tablishment that understood the value of Europe as the other pillar of sion was published in the transatlantic bridge and therefore did not try to hold up too much December 1998 in Foreign Affairs, where Martin against it—nor to get rid of it. After 1989, the United States brokered Feldstein even argued German and European unification. Europe whole and free was George that ultimately the Euro introduction would lead H. W. Bush’s slogan. Not so in the 2000s. Europe (and the United The first tangible loss of “common ground” came with 9/11. Although States) to war. NATO’s Article 5 was put into place for the first time in a mindset of

192 Amst 66.1 (2021): 191-95 The Three United States of Americas I Have Known transatlantic solidarity, the Alliance split over Iraq just a short time after. Today, it is hard to describe the emotions around that moment, probably the most important trigger for a reciprocal loss in confidence and trust: Europe in the state of American democracy, and America in Europe. The Blix Report; “fake news” about (never found) weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; the brutal decision of the United States to go to war at any price; the European reluctance to believe American intelligence—unforgettable in this context is Joschka Fischer’s “I am not convinced” to Secretary of State Colin Powell at the 2003 Munich Security Conference; the American invasion against all odds with “embedded journalism” and cameras on tanks; and the shameless rewriting of international law from no interference to the responsibility to protect all nurtured a growing hostility of (Western) Eu- ropean elites to the American democracy promotion plans in the Middle East, which Bush, Jr., used smartly to divide Europe into “old” (Western) and “new” (Eastern) Europe. The article “United We Stand,” published in 2003 in The Wall Street Journal by eight European leaders of state, was a slap in the face of post-1989 Europe, whole and free (Aznar et al.). Around the same time, in 2003, the European Constitution failed— precisely during the first weeks of the Iraq invasion. At some point, the archives will tell whether there is evidence for American influence in this failure—but with the European Constitution being trashed in the paper 3 bin, Europe seemed to be going down. The United States turned to the Pacific (and China), while leaving the consequences for their “democracy promotion” in the Middle East—the ongoing destabilization of Iraq and Libya, leading eventually to the Syrian Civil War—to Europe, in form of the rising numbers of refugees. The impact of 9/11 on American democracy was profound, the disruption in the transatlantic relationship widespread, and the loss of “common ground” palpable. The new slogan of “Homeland Security” changed America from an open into a protective society, gave rise to biometrical data policies with respect to passports and surveillance, and the War on Terror alienated Europe from the United States, despite some official rhetoric to the contrary. Liberal America died in its external relations and within its own democracy (Krastev and Holmes): The “security-first” turn rotted liberal America. Traveling to the United States became more pain than joy. Asked, in these years, at New York Airports during ticket control, whether security isn’t the most important thing, I answered No (thinking of liberty), and was interviewed for an hour by security staff. I was shocked. It became somehow exhausting to go to transatlantic conferences and hear men from the Institute for the New American Century, Cato, or the Enterprise Institute make their arguments about an America under attack and the responsibility to protect, while they were at the same time undermining the United Nations.

Besides that, U.S. elections were “rigged” in Florida in 2000—way 3 See the cover of The before Donald Trump would come up with this wording some twenty Economist 21 June 2003 years later—revealing a dysfunctional electoral system (leading to a cri- (“Where to File”).

Amst 66.1 (2021): 191-95 193 Ulrike Guérot

sis of representation, as in all majority voting systems, which all deepen political polarization), and already the Supreme Court was split along party lines. Al Gore or Ralph Nader—who remembers them today?— had no more chances to speak. The state of American democracy was on a downward spiral. The Tea Party began to master the country.

3 The 2010s

The subprime crisis, the erosion of American real estate, and the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008, followed by the crash of the financial system (Tooze), ushered in the third era in the spectacle of the loss of “common ground” and profound changes in the state of American democracy. The financial crisis deepened social divisions in the United States and petrified the cleavage between the one percent and the many, who were demonstrating, like in Europe, but in vain. #OccupyWallStreet energized social movements in the United States around 2011, supported by some remaining leftist intellectuals such as David Graeber, Bernie Sanders, and the Jacobin circle around the New Left Review, but the spark did not take. The United States—like Eu- rope—saw no social turn. Walter Benjamin’s saying from the 1940s, that each fascist period is the result of a failed social revolution, became a frightening reality on both sides of the Atlantic. Similar to Europe, the social unrest either turned populist or went into movements fighting racial or other discrimination, with both trends splitting American society, and consequently democracy, ever more. Re- ligious, racial, and social cleavages brought the United States close to 4 civil war. The murder of George Floyd in May 2020, putting the Black Lives Matter movement further into the spotlight, was only the most recent eruption. American democracy—perhaps more than European democracies—failed to examine the social origins of protest; and both failed (and fail) to overcome polarization between populists and the liberal mainstream by distinguishing speaker position and speech (as between an artist and their oeuvre). Not all populist arguments or poli- 4 In the past years and cies are bad; denouncing populism and finger-pointing is not enough. months, statements and Detecting the relevant social roots and shedding light on why the (often utterings about the “Sec- ond American Civil War” religiously undergirded) instrumentalization of the people by the ruling have increased in journals class works so smoothly would probably be better. and among American politicians (Dennis Prager, Carl Bernstein, Rush Lim- 4 The Path Forward baugh, and many more), all referring to the amalgam of the BLM-movement, All bets are off whether the victory of Joe Biden in November 2020 the United States’s poor will be able to heal the wounds. If nothing else, the election has shown management of the COVID-19 pandemic, what should have been clear after the developments of the past thirty the general social unrest years: America is a deeply divided country. The shocking pictures of and the acceptance of the election results in the occupation of the Capitol on January 6, where Trump defenders at- November 2020, given the tempted a sort of coup during the assumption of office by President-elect suspicions of fraud. Joe Biden, convey a dimension of the country’s profound divisions.

194 Amst 66.1 (2021): 191-95 The Three United States of Americas I Have Known

These divisions have made it difficult to meet overarching global challenges. Digitalization, artificial intelligence, and the competition with China are challenges for the U.S. economy as for the rest of the world. But the real question has to do with the recovery potential of a society that has lost its taste for liberty and democracy: a society that is profoundly changing in demographic terms and thus struggling with a nostalgia for “White Supremacy”; a society that is caught up in political correctness and struggle for form more than it trusts its intellectual freedom (the policy of “safe spaces” at universities, disclaimers before free speech, warnings before cultural consumptions, e. g., films that tend towards a recognizable infantilization of society and seem to forget Salman Rushdie’s belief that nobody has a right to be offended). A society, therefore, that somehow has left postmodernity behind without contributing to the conceptualization of a new era, other than its own withdrawal from international projects like addressing climate change and the International Criminal Court. With the United States no longer positioned as the producer of global cultural hegemony in the world, and with NATO no longer serving as an instrument for global policing in the former sense of universal values and the defense of human rights (if ever that was a serious claim), in the Trump years America’s exceptionalism has no longer been inspiring. “America First” has been inward-looking, defensive, and exclusive. If Joe Biden does not succeed in closing divisions, American democracy and society will be worse off than they were thirty years ago. And Europe will be as well. Europe still tends to imitate (for better or worse) the United States, rather than to free itself economically and socially from its influence.

Works Cited Aznar, José María, et al. “United We Stand.” The Wall Street Journal 30 Jan. 2003: A 14. Print. Feldstein, Martin. “The Political Economy of the European Economic and Mon- etary Union: Political Sources of an Economic Liability.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 11.4 (1997): 23-42. Print. Krastev, Ivan, and Stephen Holmes. The Light That Failed: A Reckoning. London: Allen Lane, 2019. Print. Mishra, Pankaj. Age of Anger: A History of the Present. London: Allen Lane, 2017. Print. Packer, George. The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. New York: Macmillan, 2014. Print. Smith, Hedrick. Who Stole the American Dream? New York: Random House, 2012. Print. Stiglitz, Joseph E. The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endan- gers Our Future. New York: Norton, 2012. Print. Tooze, Adam. The Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. London: Allen Lane, 2018. Print. “Where to File Europe’s New Constitution.” Cover Image. The Economist 21 June 2003. Web. 28 Jan. 2021. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2003/06/19/ where-to-file-it.

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74 Million Questions

John von Bergen

It seems impossible to understand how the current mechanisms of democracy can be fully trusted in the United States, despite Biden’s recent win. Of course, many of us feel very lucky that not all aspects of our government have been completely compromised during Trump’s presidency—as of writing this, we currently see court decisions striking down his bogus ballot fraud accusations, as well as the decisions by state legislators to uphold Biden’s victory. This is indeed a huge sigh of relief for many of us, but yet it still seems unfathomable that over 74 million votes went to Trump after four years of his malicious presidency. What does this tell us? Trumpism is by no means over, and perhaps better strategies by the Democratic Party are needed, and fast. Many politicians, Biden in particular, are speaking out about healing the nation—but I am not convinced that reconciliation can be a realistic move. Trump and his enablers have changed the rules of the democratic game—and Democrats must learn how to respond and act accordingly. In this respect, I would propose a radical restructuring of the Democratic Party.

The Rules Have Changed

Is our unique, complex democracy just going through a downturn, some curve that has a chance to correct itself? Or is this system, one that is under the heavy influence of social media, morphing into something catastrophic? The idea that the internet opens up the world and exposes new ideas and perspectives has clearly proven to be a myth, or only a partial truth. From Alex Jones to the Flat Earth Society to Pizzagate, we have an overwhelming amount of conspiracy theories to deal with on top of misinformation from every direction, in large part thanks to what one could call the strategic carelessness of Facebook as well as other platforms. Add to this the rise of Deepfakes—videos that surface of politicians as tech-puppets on the most disturbing level—that will soon

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 197-201 197 John von Bergen create more havoc on our system. The current divisiveness, largely fueled by this technology, is staggering. It is also one that the Founding Fathers would have never predicted. Even though our fifty states have established their own voting rules, laws, taxation systems, and social services, we still subscribe to the concept of one nation. Sure, there are a number of factors that unify these states as one: language, money, the flag, national holidays, etc. And we could argue there are advantages to this decentralization, perhaps even the ability for Biden’s win to withstand Trump’s absurd accusations as so many independent entities were involved in the process. The flip- side to this is that our scattered system has the opportunity for exploit- able cracks, such as the strange quirks in Florida’s voting system that certainly helped George W. Bush’s victory in 2000. Also consider the Electoral College system: implemented at the discretion of each state. Voter ID rules: discretion of each state. Even officially being excused from one’s job on a Tuesday voting day: discretion of each state. The list goes on and on. While these convoluted structures run the gamut from antiquated (Electoral College, Tuesday voting) to borderline corruption (gerrymandering, Super PAC lobbying), it may be a cold day in hell before any of this will change. However, responding to it effectively could be crucial to finding better ways for success—and I would argue that the fight for democracy must get more intense by the Democratic Party if the United States has a fighting chance to survive. One statement I hear or read quite often is that all of us need to find a way to come together again, that “[t]he country needs to heal… Love and empathy is the answer… The United States is better than Trumpism.” I am certainly not against this utopian gesture, it is noble in many ways, but it seems like waving a white flag during a gunfight. The plethora of votes going to Trump illustrates what an illusion that is. Maybe that is because Trump represents many things simultaneously: the joker and the king, the Archie Bunker and the anarchist, the successful celebrity and the nice guy who lives next door. He can be any character his supporters want him to be based on their fantasy system, and our culture has unfortunately allowed fantasy systems to flourish for generations. Trump has risen so far above the stature of any previous U.S. politician in this respect, crossing over into something evangelical, regardless of how nefarious. What he says is certainly some combination of disgusting, autocratic, and childish, but how he speaks to his base, the enthusiasm he can invoke, the confidence, and certainty with which the words leave his mouth does continue to inspire an enormous number of Americans. And because of this it may be safe to say that a conversation with a hardcore Trump supporter could go in many disturbing directions. When considering these supporters, I start to wonder about the large numbers of people who care about things in this country through a radically different lens than our own—and vice versa. They may worry about the things that some of us cannot imagine caring about: banning

198 Amst 66.1 (2021): 197-201 74 Million Questions abortion, owning guns, preserving a White America. But yet, all of us believe we have our own groundings in truth and perspective based on the books we read, the TV we watch, our social media feeds, and the real-life friends and family we interact with. These issues we care about play a visceral role in our decision-making, and we identify with them as a piece of ourselves. Yet, what we may consider as true may be seen by others as some distorted, fabricated contradiction to reality. On top of that, there are all the messages given by many conventional politicians that are designed for an audience under the presump- tion that voters actually inhabit some shared common sense—that we all have the time and patience to consider the long-term implications of governmental decisions, or even have the skills to discern what is in our own best interest. These presumptions baffle me as a naïve overestima- tion of how most Americans think, but especially how we feel, and what we mostly care about. To tap into this care factor (or the feel factor) can expand into many territories. Trump capitalized clearly on those who care to fear. This fear may have been one of his main driving forces to success. So at this point in time, should our collective fear of the Repub- lican Party be something we need to care more about? It is clear to many of us that after four years of Trump, whatever idea of morality that has framed our government was clearly thrown out the window. It is no surprise with him, of course, but to watch his enablers inside the GOP overwhelmingly stand by him throughout his exhausting presidency has been a whole other issue. These party-line Republicans have essentially helped advocate alternative facts, or defend statements that are disguised as facts, consistently defending poor judgements instead of actually doing their jobs. These real-life consequences have been crystallized during the government’s handling of the current pandemic. In summary, I am guessing that better attempts at connecting to the hearts—not the brains—of voters in swing states is one important key. The heart is clearly where it counts, because to assume that all American voters may be reflective, curious, and deeply engaged these days is a stretch of the imagination.

A New Playbook?

The playbook of the Democratic Party should change, but how? This leads me to consider what may be an ongoing misconception as to what the main goals should be for Democrats at this moment in time: knowing how to win, how to consistently get the critical votes needed beyond those thin margins that shocked us during this last election. But also after getting those representatives in office, they must find ways to push back harder than ever against the cantankerous Republican Party. If we can agree that the GOP has clearly sold its soul to the devil, then how can we expect a functioning democracy that would depend on their

Amst 66.1 (2021): 197-201 199 John von Bergen willingness to represent the country’s best interest? I propose an aggressive restructuring of the Democratic Party, independent of conventional moral positioning, and by any legal means necessary:

– Rebranding. The models used for speechwriting, stage design, slogan writing, sound-biting, and simply connecting where it counts have been outdated for too long. Let us consider the extreme ads made by The Lincoln Project—taking a smart, ruthless, occasional below-the-belt approach to delivering a tough message should not only be left to disgruntled ex-Republicans.

– Forget a Third Party from the Left. When possible, strategically embrace the far left to strengthen the Democratic Party. Many would argue a third party is the only answer to a better political future. I would personally love that more than anyone but would argue it has consistently failed us for generations already, showing little promise for overcoming the tradition of our (sigh) binary election system. Third-party candidates will never receive the structural support or the political clout needed for winning in the near future. Perhaps this can happen in generations to come, but at this moment in time I do not believe we can afford to support this.

– Stop Polling Our Chain! The current polling system appears consistently untrustworthy, and should probably be pushed aside in favor of the more trustworthy information now being mined by social media sources. Why not depend on data mining to offer a more accurate portrait of who exactly needs what message, where, and when? This certainly proved helpful for Trump during the 2016 campaign with no small thanks to Cambridge Analytica.

– Risk Being the Chameleon. Fine-tune messages to different factions of the American public, amplified and repeated as a mantra if needed. Stop trying to sound rational or intelligent, and start getting people’s blood worked up. Perhaps behaving less politician-like is something Democrats need to consider more closely. Think about how representing a fractured image has actually worked wonders for the Republican Party who have appealed to the rich and the poor simultaneously.

– Education… Education… Education… Find new ways to dispel ridiculous myths that hurt Democrats, such as how democratic socialism is the same as communism, or why Hillary’s emails are such a big deal. Prepare the world for a better understanding of what real fake news is. Put the rampant number of conspiracy theorists to the test, instead of waiting for others to dispel their lunacy. Find ways to get to the younger, future voters who grow up in smaller commu-

200 Amst 66.1 (2021): 197-201 74 Million Questions

nities (think sneaky educational video games?!). How can we open their minds, help them to reflect beyond the surface, to think beyond their tribe?

– Clean House. Make large, publicized efforts to hold any corrupt members of the Democratic Party accountable. Expose the structural problems from the inside out, getting the media involved. Try to take all those opinions of why the party has failed so many voters and give them a real reason to reconsider those deeply ingrained assertions.

– Ca$h Reward$. Remember those Covid-relief checks signed by none other than Donald J. Trump himself? Certainly, that was a tangible boost to directly interact with American voters, even if the money was just a drop-in-the-bucket for dealing with the economic turmoil from this past year. Let us think about ways that donations can end up as cash directly in the hands of American voters through some legitimate channel. On that note, the millions of dollars wast- ed on campaign TV ads should finally be a thing of the past and redirected towards more tangible opportunities for helping voters and/or winning.

And finally, once in office…

– Stop Compromising! It seems the Democratic Party has been way too comfortable for too long playing defense against the Republi- can Party, and way too often not taking advantage of opportunities to exploit the lies and malice they put forth. Furthermore, do not wait until a congressional seat has opened up to instill grassroots, cut-throat strategy to make sure opponents have little to no chance of success. Perhaps find a way to invoke a healthy scandal, but do whatever is needed to help boost the numbers for districts that need influence.

One could argue that this train of thought leads towards a one-party system, or anything other than a healthy democracy. I disagree—it is simply a challenge to take a more serious offensive strategy against the corruption, the enabling, and even the silence that has been on display the past four years by the majority of Republicans in office. This is a system that we are unfortunately stuck with as things stand today. We should have the courage to bring more intensity to the game of politics and also help reshape the image of the Democratic Party. I have to believe that strategically rebuilding this party is the only serious hope for the country, and that means a lot of work is ahead, and not a lot of time.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 197-201 201

This Is Not a Jeremiad

Sabine Broeck

1. This will not be about the manifold interconnected features of the settler colonial system and society that the United States has been since its inception (King), but about one of its constitutive machiner- ies: enslavism. In earlier work, I have coined this term to address the humiliate-ability, the enslave-ability, the rape-ability, the abuse-ability, and the ship-ability of Black people in the discourses and violent practices that have shaped U.S. and transatlantic histories and that contain Black existence in White collective memory as well as in contemporary repertoires of thinking Blackness in the White mind (Broeck, Gender). These discourses and practices add up to a longue durée of White abjectorship and the un-Humanization of Black being dating from the early modern period, through Enlightenment modernity, into the postmod- ern moment. 2. When we—various groups of leftist pupils and students—were in the streets demonstrating against the Vietnam War, the shouts rang out against “AmeriKKKa.” Admittedly, this did not put a fine point on the issue, but as it has turned out, we indeed have had to usher out White progressive American Studies’ dreams of multiculturalist, post-racial promises being eventually actualized. No justice has been realized. And diversity appears to have been a best-selling ruse. 3. The jeremiad that this is not, in my title, of course refers to Sacvan Bercovitch’s notorious The American Jeremiad from 1978. The text that, in its reading of American social conflicts across the board, has for decades overdetermined any intellectual address of the United States from within international American Studies. It has instructed us by way of a seductive but counterfactual magic to understand American history as a cycle of transgressions, protest, and renewal. In this model of cyclical rejuvenation, any social, cultural, political, or economic problem has come to be seen as potentially future-bound and solvable by way of making even the most radical protest against any kind of injustice, poverty, and

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 203-07 203 Sabine Broeck inequality into a necessary and perfectly containable step on the way to redemption. I am making two interrelated points against writing yet another jeremiad. One: The condition of Black life in the United States is NOT one of unequal opportunities, racist discrimination, and lesser access to economic and social wealth (even though all these features exist). The paradigms of ethnic diversity, multiculturalism, difference, and inequality to address Black existence in the afterlife of slavery are inadequate to think about what Frank Wilderson calls the structural antagonism between Human society and Black existence, or about what I have called enslavism: the abjection of Black life on all conceivable social, cultural, political, and economic levels at the hands of USAmerican society (Broeck, Gender). Human society in its USAmerican incarnation has proactively created social death as a condition within and against which Black life has to struggle, and has struggled for centuries, without any civil position from which to secure redress (Sexton). Black redress, that is, which would mean the end of White freedom to abject Black life. Therefore, two: This presents a social impasse that cannot be ame- liorated away, let alone solved, by fantasies of White redemption. 4. This dispatch will not have more facts. The evidence is available, having been stated over and over and over again. This will be an anti- redemption rant. It is written in rage against facile media remonstra- tions of “democracy has survived,” against the futile incantations of a brighter future after the outgoing president, which have been delaying justice endlessly. It is written against calls for mediation and temper- ance, against my own tiredness of, and exhaustion by, America as we know it: an enslavist state, a carceral system, and a majority White population ethically vicious or ethically bankrupt, or coward to boot; a country that has abandoned large parts of its inhabitants to public decay, excessive poverty, legalized lawlessness, and deathly illness. A nation that—yes, I hear the White liberal protest; it comes always after the fact, though, and in most cases does not result in taking down any systems of violence—deems Black life worthy of being killed without redress and enjoys the spiraling pornotropic spectacle of death and outrage and back again. These notes sit with the spirit of Jesmyn Ward’s 2017 anthology, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race. America is not redeemable, as a society founded on its production of anti-Black social death and on actual physical erasure of Black generations: from enslavement, through lynching, through never-ending waves of riot and daily violence, through the abuse of Black life by the prison industrial complex, through Katrina, through the escalation of state and fascist street killings in the years since Trayvon Martin’s murder, through COVID-19 in 2020. “The time of slavery,” by which Saidiya Hartman means “the future created by it” (Scenes 133), has reached into our present and has been a time of perpetual anti-Black war (Gaffield). The details will not be described here again. Every Black reader of this special issue knows all the details. For a White readership, the de-

204 Amst 66.1 (2021): 203-07 This Is Not a Jeremiad tails have been more than amply available for anybody who cares enough to confront themselves with enslavism and its principal purposefully created benefit for White people: in the United States, nothing bad, disastrous, monstrous, hazardous, precarious, or lethal will ever happen to White people just because they are White. 5. The amply available and much discussed election demographics show that, despite the governmental abandonment of the U.S. population—except for its most affluent micro-percentage—to the ravages of a global pandemic, Trumpism is aggressively and proactively alive. The swerve of almost half of U.S. citizens to ultra-right militancy and support of fascist interventions as a means of keeping White power IN power has demonstrated that President Trump, as excessively and out- rageously contemptuous of parliamentary democracy and its adjunct political modes as he may be, has to be seen as only the tip of the iceberg. A psycho-grammatic analysis to address White narcissism’s relentless backlash to regain unchallenged hegemony over the social, cultural, political, and economic lives and interests of American citizenry will have to look at enslavism as the salient and enduring machine of America as we know it. Extremist right-wing mobilization, with its nationalist obsessions, supplements the growth of transnationally mobile and quasi-stateless factions of capital like entertainment media, virtual communication, and international surveillance technologies that bolster re- colonial anti-Blackness internationally. 6. This America has been driven in the longue durée of legal slavery’s afterlife by Human individuals’ and institutions’ power, by its practices and discourses of making Black life fungible—in its presupposed non- Human status, in its abjected thingness—to the Human in any and all imaginable ways, as Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hart- man, Frank Wilderson, Christina Sharpe, Rinaldo Walcott, Kather- ine McKittrick, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Tiffany Lethabo King, among others, have so succinctly argued. Enslavism as a formation and a deeply ingrained civil habitus has thus over and again installed the use-ability of Black life as its own generative precondition of existence (Broeck, Gender). This Human need for Black fungibility dates back to the Human prerogative to a legal enslavement of Black people as the very foundation of present America; what I see in Trumpism is the psychic manifestation of a non-reformable will to always already maintain and secure that foundation at all cost, of a collective desire for a White freedom based on Black social and/or physical annihilation (Clark-Pu- jara and Cox). 7. I want to address this desire for freedom as an overall individual and group entitlement to get what one wants, and to do what one wants, by way of a literary example: Valerie Martin’s novel Property, from 2003 (see also Broeck, “Versklavung”). The text is centered on two White plantation-owning characters (one male, one female) vying with each other over their respective utterly violent entitlements to the abjective

Amst 66.1 (2021): 203-07 205 Sabine Broeck use of Black life, to owning Black sexuality, to taking Black mental and spiritual capacities, to destroying the very fleshly bare existence of it. What the novel reveals is an enslavist machinery that post-Freudian psychology has entirely ignored: Anti-Black enslavement and its afterlife have offered White people a mode to, as it were, have the cake and eat it, too, in the most violent way. As Spillers had already noted in 1987, the plantation orbit—in both its physical materiality and as an imaginary social, political, and cultural space, and, I argue, in its re-incarnations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—afforded White people a site of un-sublimated physical, mental, and psychic enjoyment without the bounds of Human civilization that Freud assessed as the precondition for the lives of subjects and for conviviality. White ownership of Black life enabled ample incestuous access to sexuality; it enabled a disregard for heterosexual restrictions, and it removed any constraints that Western societies had been in the process of erecting around the psychosexual and libidinal lives of subjects. This included, not to forget, securing for White people the right to kill one’s property. It thus allowed a totalizing narcissism without brakes, as it were, install- ing in the White collective psyche—across generations—a sense of their own freedom, which meant the complete absence of interdictions to any desire one might fancy or be driven by. To me, Trump is therefore the heir of an unbroken USAmerican trajectory of the entitlement to freedom as unchecked ownership, to altogether unrestrained pursuit of desire—which, in his admittedly excessive incarnation, includes the right to abandon entire populations to the killing effects of a pandemic. If Black people, as both Sharpe and Hartman have argued, have qua Par- tus Sequitur Ventrem inherited the trauma of birthing unfreedom, White people in the United States have collectively inherited the phantasma and the actual possibility of passing on the entitlement to freedom as abjectorship (Broeck, Gender). 8. For somebody like me who has been intellectually impacted by Theodor W. Adorno’s 1940s admonishment, there is “kein richtiges Leben im falschen” (43). Because of its specific syntax, this dictum has been rather awkward to translate. I thus prefer to paraphrase. What I understand Adorno to mean is that it should not be possible—in the aftermath of fascism—to reconcile oneself with bourgeois society by way of seeking a redeemable life within it. This has prepared me early on for the radical impossibility of acquiescence with enslavist capitalism: the only stance to take, at long last, is negativity. Or, to apply Aimé Césaire’s 1955 dictum about post-World War II Europe to the United States: The world as constituted by and in America is rotten to the core. Therefore, this is not a jeremiad.

206 Amst 66.1 (2021): 203-07 This Is Not a Jeremiad

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia. 1951. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997. Print. Ge- sammelte Schriften 4. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978. Print. Broeck, Sabine. Gender and the Abjection of Blackness. Albany: State U of New York P, 2018. Print. ---. “Versklavung und weiße Macht: Sexualität als ‘kindliche’ Gefräßigkeit.” Ero- gene Gefahrenzonen: Aktuelle Produktionen des (infantilen) Sexuellen. Ed. Insa Haertel. Berlin: Kadmos, 2013. 139-54. Print. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. 1955. Trans. Robin Kelley. New York: Monthly Review, 2001. Print. Clark-Pujara, Christy, and Anna-Lisa Cox. “How the Myth of a Liberal North Erases a Long History of White Violence.” Smithsonian Magazine. Smithson- ian Institution, 27 Aug. 2020. Web. 13 Sept. 2020. https://www.smithsonian mag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-myth-liberal-north-erases-long- history-white-violence-180975661/#.X8LEAaLluFU.twittert. Gaffield, Julia. “Atlantic Slavery: An Eternal War.” Public Books. Public Books, 30 Nov. 2020. Web. 3 Dec. 2020. http://www.publicbooks.org/atlantic-slavery- an-eternal-war/. Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2006. Print. ---. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Centu- ry America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Print. ---. “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors.” Souls 18.1 (2016): 166-73. Print. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York UP, 2020. Print. King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Na- tive Studies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2019. Print. Martin, Valerie. Property. London: Abacus, 2003. Print. McKittrick, Katherine. “Mathematics of Black Life.” The Black Scholar 44.2 (2014): 16-28. Print. Sexton, Jared. “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Op- timism.” InTensions 5 (2011): 1-47. Web. 10 June 2013. https://www.yorku.ca/ intent/issue5/articles/pdfs/jaredsextonarticle.pdf. Sharpe, Christina. “Black Studies: In the Wake.” The Black Scholar 44.2 (2014): 55-69. Print. ---. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016. Print. Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 65-81. Print. Walcott, Rinaldo. “The Problem of the Human: Black Ontologies and ‘the Colo- niality of Our Being.’” Postcoloniality—Decoloniality—Black Critique: Joints and Fissures. Ed. Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker. Frankfurt: Campus, 2014. 93-108. Print. Ward, Jesmyn, ed. The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race. New York: Scribner, 2016. Print. Wilderson, Frank B. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. An- tagonisms. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. Print. Wynter, Sylvia. “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism.” boundary 2 12.3 (1984): 19-70. Print.

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Against Murderous Passivity, or Reading Hannah Arendt under Lockdown1

Ramzi Fawaz

Just weeks into the coronavirus crisis, the lieutenant governor of Texas claimed on national television that U.S. Americans over seventy would gladly sacrifice their lives to COVID-19 so the rest of us could go back to business as usual. The response to this kind of murderous thinking should have been mass protest, if not revolution. Ten months later, we now know that the seemingly aberrant and barbaric idea of mass death by willful self-annihilation effectively became our national policy. The political theorist Hannah Arendt had a name for this phenomenon: “world alienation,” a situation in which mass numbers of people, despite living in plain sight of one another, have seemingly lost all sense of sharing a common world (Human 248-56). Some aspect of world alienation is on display when thousands of people sit on the beach sun- bathing during a pandemic; when people begin to hoard food and goods where no shortage exists; when the representative leader of the United States perceives the viral infection of fellow citizens as a statement on his ego. In all these instances, people are so deeply alienated from the material realities in front of them—including the vulnerability of fellow citizens and the similar needs of others for food and shelter—they cannot process that other people live on the planet, and that the value of any single life is found in its relations with others. Meanwhile, the coronavirus disaster has been unfolding while millions of us are glued to screens, desperately seeking information, taxed to the limit of our emotional and financial resources for developing networks of care in the absence of any social safety net, and feeling politically powerless. The reality quickly set in that we could not even exercise 1 A longer version of the basic freedom of assembly to revolt against official policies so reck- this article originally ap- less they look like formalized murder, since we might become unwit- peared in The Philosophi- ting killers of others by spreading a virus. The national outpouring of cal Salon (see Fawaz).

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 209-13 209 Ramzi Fawaz legitimate public rage at the murder of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, by Minneapolis police officers on May 25, 2020, signaled the moment when, for thousands of U.S.-Americans, the threat of a virus was suddenly outweighed by our furious refusal to be chocked to death by our own society’s monstrous disregard for human life. More than half a century ago, Arendt was able to see clearly where we were headed. In the final pages of her 1957 masterpiece The Human Condition, she made this terrifying prediction:

The last stage of the laboring society, the society of jobholders, demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning, as though […] the only active decision still required of the individual were to […] acquiesce in a dazed, “tranquilized,” functional type of behavior. […] It is quite conceivable that the modern age […] may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known. (322)

Arendt was acutely aware of the fact that under capitalism, every political capacity that human beings share—capacities of the imagination, of judging ethically, of acting in concert—had become less important than the basic ability to make enough money to maintain one’s biological survival. Under these conditions “man is thrown back upon himself,” and left with nothing but his own needs (Arendt, Human 322). As a result, we become murderously passive and much more easily capable of destroying the lives of others, not out of genuine wickedness or hatred but simply so that we may keep on living. Our greatest contemporary thinkers have conceived a host of compelling terms to describe this phenomenon, from Wendy Brown’s theorization of “neoliberal rationality” (200) and Elizabeth Povinelli’s description of liberal democracy’s “rotting worlds” (27) to Georgio Agamben’s chilling concept of “bare life”—yet Arendt’s idea of world alienation captures the sense of late capitalist passivity as a deep psychic condition defined by the political and interpersonal atrophying of the worldly, phenomenal, and visceral or felt sense of sharing a common world. When I first heard the phrase “social distancing” (quickly evolving into the more concrete “physical distancing”), I could not help but think of it as a symptom of world alienation. What could be a more demor- alizing analogy for the fact that we are so politically polarized and so isolated from people who think differently from ourselves, than to have to literally stand six feet apart from everyone? But as I continued to read Arendt under lockdown, I realized that the demand to physically distance from others and the sudden slowing down of the pace of work and “productive” activity might be exactly what is necessary to combat the condition of world alienation, rather than an expression of it. When we are physically distanced from one another, the effort required to reach out and connect is tremendous. That effort reminds us of the world we share since it requires us to bridge the distances dividing us in a million imaginative ways. Many have not had the luxury of time to do this

210 Amst 66.1 (2021): 209-13 Against Murderous Passivity, or Reading Hannah Arendt under Lockdown kind of examination while they sell us our groceries, treat the sick, and maintain our basic human services. The fact that some of us have been gifted this unusual, and perhaps unwelcome, freedom means we have an extraordinary opportunity to regroup on behalf of all of us. In her essay, “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship,” Arendt suggested that times of crisis—the rise of a totalitarian government, an economic crash, a pandemic—are often preceded by the moral collapse of a society. She contended that these moments reveal that by relying on the idea of a universally shared ethical standard of conduct—by assuming that everyone has been following prescribed rules like not killing, lying, or stealing—we become complacent and ignore all signs of our culture’s moral bankruptcy (“Personal” 45). This is precisely what we are experiencing now: if we are overwhelmed by the uncertainty of a global pandemic, if we feel groundless, it is because we have been waiting for a central authority to tell us how to be good, and it is not forthcoming. The fact that the American economy can collapse in the span of just two weeks under the weight of any large-scale crisis tells us just how fragile this bulwark of U.S. political might really is. What this fragility should remind us of is that there is no transcendent institution, elected official, ideology, moral code, or political party that we can rely on to provide us with universal standards of conduct on how to do and be good. Con- sider that when the economy is the measure of the collective good, mass death becomes a reasonable option to preserve its functioning. All the moral codes we thought were self-evident—like not letting people die— are overturned overnight (Arendt, “Personal” 45). Terrible as moments of large-scale crisis might be, Arendt pointed out that these instances are exactly when thinking suddenly has a renewed value and meaning. We are reminded we do not need a universal ethical code to guide us; rather we need to look at each other, see what we need, and cultivate our capacity to judge each situation that comes up while being informed by 2 each other’s perspectives. In this moment of suspension, we might ask ourselves: if we want to live so desperately, what world are we living for? Our recent collective protests against White supremacy and state violence provide one answer to this question: a world where we can pursue freedom, which is nothing less than the capacity of people to act in concert to change the conditions of their existence. Arendt argued that what we call “sovereignty,” 2 See Zerilli for one of the idea of individual liberty or agency, is the opposite of freedom, “be- the most sustained and cause not one man, but men, inhabit the earth” (Human 234). She is compelling attempts to flesh out Arendt’s argu- saying to all of us personal-liberty obsessed U.S. Americans that indi- ment for the necessity of vidual liberty is not freedom, because it is a fantasy of living in a world judging politically in the absence of universals. without others, which means being enslaved to ourselves, alone in the Zerilli recovers the value world. While we mourn the loss of our personal routines, pleasures, and of competing and mutually influencing perspec- comforts, we have not had time to think much about the more terrifying tives in the formulation loss of the public world, including our access to shared spaces for dia- of political judgement logue, protest, and collective action. We should strive to live not simply (38-39).

Amst 66.1 (2021): 209-13 211 Ramzi Fawaz because life itself—the bare fact of our ability to stay breathing—is the greatest good, but to maintain human freedom for ourselves and future generations. Because freedom cannot exist if no people remain to enact it together. Of course, the idea that some people should die so that others can financially benefit has been the devil’s bargain at the core of U.S.-Amer- ican politics since Indigenous peoples and Black Americans were sacri- ficed for the benefit of those settlers and revolutionaries who founded the country. Those betrayals have never left our national fabric but persist in the seemingly endless dehumanization of people to profit. No amount of economic success, accumulated wealth, or upward mobility for the few has been able to compensate for this collective loss of our political power, not the power to control others but the power that “springs up between men” when they act together to change the conditions of their existence (Arendt, Human 200). If real political power has ever existed in the United States, it is only in the brief flashes of social protest and government intervention to account for and resist that founding violence: the short-lived but radical redistribution of wealth during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, and the movements for Civil Rights, Black Power, women’s and gay liberation, and Third World freedom that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s were rare and potent expressions of this kind of collective action. These historical events and movements represented people coming together to found new political bodies and policies, to refuse to place the image of America above the actual living and thriving of real humans who inhabit the Earth together. In the last speech she gave before she died in 1975, Arendt lament- ed that the Watergate scandal and the fiasco of the Vietnam War had revealed the entire U.S.-American political structure to be a massive advertising firm obsessed with “image-making” over actual collective governance (“Home” 263). The United States had spent hundreds of millions of dollars, obliterated hundreds of thousands of lives, and sown global economic and political chaos merely for the sake of maintaining the image of its global political power, even in the actual absence of legitimate authority. We might today ask where all of our tax-payer funds have gone in the last six decades, if not to a substantial social safety net, strengthening our infrastructure, granting universal access to education, or building stronger local government. One answer: we have been paying for a fraudulent, global advertising campaign selling the idea of American invulnerability or immunity rather than responding to the reality that we are human and can get sick, hurt, and die. A government trying to maintain the bare image of political aliveness or health, rather than actually governing with the interest of helping its people flourish, is like the state’s version of each of us just trying to stay alive in a mad dash of grocery shopping instead of thoughtfully sharing and distributing food among ourselves. At both scales, the desperate need to survive, to maintain the image of vitality, has become more important

212 Amst 66.1 (2021): 209-13 Against Murderous Passivity, or Reading Hannah Arendt under Lockdown than any actual sense of the world as a complex network of relationships to which we belong. Most of us know this intuitively, and it is why we are all spending hours on the phone, joining video conferences, and organizing virtual dance parties, trying to make up for the temporary loss of physical proximity by maximizing the points of connection with people’s voices, faces, and imaginary presence. It is also why after months of isolation, people took to the streets to denounce Black death and celebrate collective democratic life in the company of their friends and fellow citizens, because the visceral, physical feel of being together is life itself. We should be far less terrified of a virus—a grave concern no doubt, and likely a historical trauma of vast dimensions, but ultimately one we are capable of responding to—but rather of our extraordinary willingness to give up our hold on the shared world, to give up with barely a fight our ability to think, to judge, to act in concert. If any of us for an instant think that allowing the elderly to die to float our economy is the lesser of two evils, we should remember what Arendt tells us, that “[p]olitically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil” (“Per- sonal” 37). More importantly, “the acceptance of lesser evils consciously [conditions] government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such” (“Personal” 37). Those with the means of force or violence (what Arendt saw as false power) have found a million reasons to use this crisis as a moment to reassert domination, to claim that dictatorship, tyranny, and undemocratic power are necessary for order and stability. The rest of us only need one reason to refuse them, and that is freedom itself, not in any personal liberty or sovereignty, but in our collective capacity to refuse, to judge, to decide to act together at every scale.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 1998. Print. Arendt, Hannah. “Home to Roost.” 1975. Responsibility and Judgement. Ed. Je- rome Kohn. New York: Schocken, 2005. 257-76. Print. ---. The Human Condition. 1958. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2018. Print. ---. “Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship.” 1964. Responsibility and Judge- ment. Ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken, 2005. 17-48. Print. Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone, 2015. Print. Fawaz, Ramzi. “Against Murderous Passivity, or Reading Hannah Arendt under Lockdown.” The Philosophical Salon. Los Angeles Review of Books, 11 June 2020: n. pag. Web. 12 June 2020. https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/against- murderous-passivity-or-reading-hannah-arendt-under-lockdown/. Povinelli, Elizabeth. The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Geneal- ogy, and Carnality. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006. Print. Zerilli, Linda. A Democratic Theory of Judgement. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2016. Print.

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Maximalist Expectations in an Age of Anti-Populism

Pierre-Héli Monot

The digital library JSTOR lists 786 individual results for the key- word “crisis of democracy” in items published since 2010, yet empirical studies are reluctant to confirm the “crisis of democracy” purported to be currently washing over Western societies (Kocka and Merkel 307- 37; Landemore 25-52). The phrase itself has been a central ideologeme in conservative and reactionary thought since the early 1920s, if not exclusively so. In fact, Carl Schmitt devoted one of his most brutal essays to it in 1923. Schmitt, whose popularity in the humanities is at 1 an all-time high (Figure 1), argued that as long as democracy retained what he perceived to be its core function, the “exclusion or extermination of the heterogenous,” it could not properly be said to be undergoing a crisis. The real problem was that democratic representatives were all too amenable to “relative truths” and were consequently reluctant 1 Our research to “spill blood” (Schmitt 14, 77; my translation). For Schmitt, democ- group is working on the racy was acceptable as long as it remained based on truths that were development and implementation of low-tech, absolute, that is, assertions that we would consider to be neither rela- low-threshold Digital tive nor alternative, and which could hence be mobilized to legitimize Humanities protocols. On account of their cost political violence. and technical prerequire- The reactionary implications of this conception of the “crisis of de- ments, DH tools often have exclusionary effects, mocracy” became entrenched in twentieth-century political discourse. despite (and because For instance, when Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki reintroduced of) the unprecedented amounts of funding they the phrase “crisis of democracy” for modern audiences on behalf of the mobilize. Here however, Trilateral Commission (1975), they deplored the “excess of democracy” and although the data is empirical, these illustra- of the Civil Rights Movement, rather than a dysfunctionality at the core tions draw on Google’s of the democratic system. According to them, the democratic “surges” own basic algorithms. They are akin to scholastic of the 1960s and 1970s threatened the “governability” of democratic so- graffiti and merely serve cieties: “expertise, seniority, experience, and special talents” should be illustrative, allegorical allowed to “override the claims of democracy” (113). purposes.

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 215-21 215 Pierre-Héli Monot

Figure 1. Respective Prevalence of Two Intellectuals of the German Nazi Era in Anglophone Publica- tions, 1900-2019 (Lexical frequency of and . Dataset: Entire Google Books corpus in English, smoothing factor 4).

As historians have demonstrated time and time again (Christoffer- son 27-85; Halimi 189-305; Chamayou), this second crisis of democracy was declared to have taken hold of Western societies precisely when large segments of the population began to demand not only better democratic representation (formal demands) but also that specific normative expectations be met by the democratic process (normative demands). These normative demands included better wages, a heavier taxation of financial gains, a fairer judicial system, the effective end of racial segregation, and a fairer distribution of the tangible symbolic capital granted by higher education. This “maximalist” model (Merkel 13), which included concrete outputs in its conception of democracy, was eventually contained by the amorphous mass of regressive policies which came to be known as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism was a conservative reaction to a fundamental transformation of what citizens expected of a democracy, not just a business model (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Respective Prevalence of Two Conative Phrases in Anglophone Publications, 1900-2019 (Lexical frequency of and . Dataset: Entire Google Books corpus in English, smoothing factor 4).

216 Amst 66.1 (2021): 215-21 Maximalist Expectations in an Age of Anti-Populism

Hence, I want to argue that three distinct, yet historically contigu- ous, “crises of democracy” overlap in current scholarly discourse—not in all scholarly discourse, but in a massively preeminent one. The first two “crises of democracy” have been conservative narratives all along: from Schmitt to Huntington, they were reactions to citizens’ demands for more democratic sovereignty. Liberal democracy eventually incorporated these demands by diverting attention from broader societal issues and instead proposing the sleek governmental administration of highly individualized choices. The third and most recent “crisis of democracy” has resulted from the second: the neoliberal deflection of democratic expectations has given rise to the various upheavals that have marked recent political history and has been hastily subsumed under the term “populism.” This scholarly overlap and historical contiguity, in turn, raise two pressing questions. The first concerns the nature of populism and its legitimacy from an emphatically democratic standpoint. The second concerns the background assumptions at play in dominant scholarly, journalistic, and political discourse. In fact, I want to suggest that the term “populism” is convenient for socially dominant classes precisely on account of its multiple filiations. Once dominant classes frame it as the panacea for the current “crisis of democracy,” staunch “anti-populism” kills two democratic birds with one epistemic stone: it simultaneously allows dominant classes to spearhead the fight “for democracy” within the strict limits of symbolic radicalism and to silently reject the demands for more democratic power voiced by citizens.

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In the context of the current “crisis of democracy,” the term “populism” has been used to describe an almost comically heterogenous group of either progressive or regressive political upheavals: Brexit, Trump, independentist and ecological movements around the globe, Podemos, Black Lives Matter (Tillery). While some of these upheavals are fraught with grave dangers and contradictions, they are nevertheless the expression of popular will. They also convey maximalist, output-oriented expectations of democracy, rather than merely formal ones. The dominant scholarly narratives produced in order to explain these democratic upheavals (Jan-Werner Müllerian “populism as the evil twin brother of democracy” [Ellis], “fake news,” “echo chambers,” and the like) have often failed to distinguish their own covert normative expectations (acceptable democratic “outputs”) from systemic dysfunctionalities (unac- ceptable systemic “flaws”). In other words, these scholarly narratives are often “maximalist” ones, too, and they have often failed to explain why the “crisis of democracy” is not just a “crisis of good democracy.” This distinction is crucial, however: if it is not upheld, theorizations introduce underlying normative expectations into their descriptive-interpretive apparatus (Bourdieu 49-84).

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Most importantly, these dominant scholarly narratives have not only proven ineffective against right-wing extremism and neoliberalism (a frequent pleonasm, historically speaking), but they have also had disastrous effects on progressive democratic movements around the world. Progressive movements have long put up with strident criticisms allegedly meant to fight right-wing extremism; the former have been routinely accused of discounting the complexities of modern governance, antagonizing social groups, capitalizing on objective inequalities, etc. (Müller, What Is Populism?). Simultaneously, the term “populism” has euphemized the violence of a number of current Western governments: they should be considered objectionable because they pursue extreme right policies, rather than “populist” ones. Unsurprisingly, these dominant scholarly narratives have been dismissed by an overwhelming majority of progressive interest groups and activists since 2008. I have yet to read a single progressive activist statement in which the triad “populism as the evil twin brother of democracy / fake news / echo chambers” is not derided as the ideological construct of the Euro-American bourgeoisie, if it is mentioned at all. Crucially, however, these progressive activists do not reject such ideological narratives on the grounds that they carry implicit normative expectations per se, but rather because progressive activists and interest groups pursue different normative expectations than their peer-reviewed peers. To boot, they make their normative expectations of democracy explicit, rather than inadvertently appending them to formal descriptive models. In fact, the range of normative demands put forth by these groups via books, pamphlets, and public addresses is extremely limited and nearly universally shared. Cam- paigning for the end of racial exploitation or the end of mass homelessness in Western societies, these texts also bear witness to the unprecedented humility of contemporary progressive groups in the face of power:

1. They campaign for more effective and more direct democratic sovereignty. 2. They call for a more equitable distribution of the profits, miseries, and humiliations of capitalism (but they rarely oppose income equality per se). 3. They campaign for the preservation of the possibility of bare existence (a fairer legal system, gender and racial equality, access to basic protections such as health care and minimal income, and an inhabitable planet). 4. They reject the complacent cooptation of real social progress by socially dominant classes that remain indifferent to other forms of exploitation.

The divide between activist and dominant anti-populist responses to these upheavals could not be more glaring. This divide also corre- lates with the major parameters of social inequality: dominant discourse

218 Amst 66.1 (2021): 215-21 Maximalist Expectations in an Age of Anti-Populism in the United States and in Europe (conveyed by an overwhelmingly White, male, middle- and upper-class, academically trained population endowed with a maximum amount of symbolic capital) campaigns for a democracy that is “not populist” and is based on “truth” or, at the very least, based on information that is “not fake” (see also Lordon). These objectives are laudable and good, if compatible with the most ruthless forms of exploitation and injustice. On the other hand, progressive activists (who are almost always more diverse and poorer in all forms of capital) argue that such a democracy would not guarantee social justice, a dependable livelihood, an inhabitable planet, or more political agency. Dominant scholarly, journalistic, and political responses to “populism” seem more hopeful: they invoke the golden age of “pre-post-democracy.” That hallowed time, ironically, is also that in which skilled workers, ethnic and sexual minorities, and the college-educated middle class united in global protests—the hallowed time, precisely, which raised the specter of “ungovernability” denounced by Crozier, Hun- tington, and Watanuki (30). Yet what roadmap to pre-post-democracy do the critics of current “populism” propose? The formalist leveling of progressive and regressive protest (Mudde; Mudde and Kaltwasser), the reign of epistemic expertise (Collins et al. 1-10), the support of what Huntington called “special talents” through corporate funding (see also Blair), the administration of truth in politics via the regulation of “fake news” (Deutscher Journalisten-Verband), and the delegitimiza- tion of democratic unrest (Müller, What Is Populism?). These responses to “populism” match the responses Huntington gave to his own “crisis of democracy.” These current anti-populists are at their most neoliberal when they purport to fight neoliberalism’s democratic consequences. The intellectuals of the “populist left” are just as nonchalant, however, contemplating the emancipatory potentials of Carl Schmitt and Jacques Derrida (Mouffe 41-45, 137-38), or Paul de Man and Mao Zedong (Laclau 78-88, 172), all the while demoting the modest material and judicial demands of Western populations to the symbolic construction of “a People” (Laclau 149-79).

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In any progressive framework, these conceptual models are bound to remain self-defeating. However, progressives may draw on a massively powerful institution to adjust their tactics and advance their claims. Empirically speaking, the University (capitalized, as the Church and the Army still are) is the crucial institution of democratic life in West- ern societies. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 66 % of Americans under 30 had “some college education” as of 2018—a vastly higher active engagement rate for the same age group than all other institutions traditionally considered to be the pillars of modern democracy. As a common institutional experience, as a multiplicator of cognitive disposi-

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tions (Figure 3), as a training ground for contention and consensus, the University is not only immensely powerful, it is arguably the single most powerful institution in highly developed, nominally post-industrial Western societies.

Figure 3. Privileged and/or Exploited: Shift from Socially Dominated to Socially Dominant Actant Perspective, Lexical Decorrelation After 70 Years of Parallel Growth, When Both Terms Could Be Treated Intersectionally (Lexical frequency of and . Dataset: Entire Google Books corpus in English, smoothing factor 4).

The institutional power of the University could be leveraged to pursue more constructive, more genuinely critical, and more carefully concerted goals than fulminating against “populists” left and right. We could begin by mitigating the high brutality of good intentions and getting our “crises of democracy” straight. While we are at it, we could also make a few normative, maximalist, output-oriented demands of our own, whatever they may turn out to be. Mine are as follows. Let us establish a more precise use of “populism” as a political signifier. As it stands, while it does provide some insights into certain political man- nerisms, the concept euphemizes right-wing violence, contributes little to our understanding of the present historical situation, and impedes the progressive politics that a majority of academics emphatically support. Instead, let us demand that the material preconditions of access to higher education are met for everyone, so that citizens may acquire 2 This project has received funding from the critical and reflexive tools they need in order to fight collectively, the European Research autonomously, and effectively for their rights. Casting the current his- Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon torical situation in materialist terms, rather than in rhetorical ones, and 2020 research and innova- exposing the democratic expectations sometimes conveyed by the cur- tion programme (grant agreement No 852205). rent “crisis of democracy,” would not only provide essential signposts for This publication reflects effective political action and scholarly pursuits, it would also deflect the only the author’s view, and the Agency is not risk of repeating the conservative mislabeling of crises past, present, and 2 responsible for any use future. that may be made of the information it contains.

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Works Cited

Blair, Tony. “Leader’s Speech.” British Labour Party Conference, Bournemouth, 1999. British Political Speech. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. http://www.britishpolitical speech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=205. Bourdieu, Pierre. Pascalian Meditations. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 2000. Print. Chamayou, Grégoire. Die unregierbare Gesellschaft: Eine Genealogie des auto- ritären Liberalismus. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019. Print. Christofferson, Michael Scott. French Intellectuals against the Left: The Anti- Totalitarian Moment of the 1970s. New York: Berghahn, 2004. Print. Collins, Harry, et al. Experts and the Will of the People: Society, Populism and Science. Cham: Palgrave, 2020. Print. Crozier, Michel J., Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki. The Crisis of Democ- racy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commis- sion. New York: New York UP, 1975. Print. Deutscher Journalisten-Verband. “NetzDG: DJV fordert Abschaffung.” Deut- scher Journalisten-Verband Gewerkschaft der Journalistinnen und Jour- nalisten, 8 Jan. 2018. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://www.djv.de/startseite/ profil/der-djv/pressebereich-download/pressemitteilungen/detail/news- djv-fordert-abschaffung. Ellis, Walter. “Democracy’s Evil Twin: The Triumph of Populism.” Reaction. Reac- tion, 15 Feb. 2017. Web. 29 Nov. 2020. https://reaction.life/democracys-evil- twin-triumph-populism. Halimi, Serge. Le Grand bond en arrière. Marseille: Agone, 2012. Print. Kocka, Jürgen, and Wolfgang Merkel. “Kapitalismus und Demokratie: Kapitalis- mus ist nicht demokratisch und Demokratie nicht kapitalistisch.” Demokratie und Krise: Zum schwierigen Verhältnis von Theorie und Empirie. Ed. Wolf- gang Merkel. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2015. 307-37. Print. Laclau, Ernesto. The Rhetorical Foundations of Society. London: Verso, 2014. Print. Landemore, Hélène. Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty- First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2020. Print. Lordon, Frédéric. “Politique post-vérité ou journalisme post-politique?” La Pompe à phynance. Le Monde Diplomatique, 22 Nov. 2016. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://blog.mondediplo.net/2016-11-22-Politique-post-verite-ou- journalisme-post. Merkel, Wolfgang. “Is There a Crisis of Democracy?” Democratic Theory 1.2 (2014): 11-25. Print. Mouffe, Chantal. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London: Verso, 2013. Print. Mudde, Cas. “The Problem with Populism.” The Guardian. The Guardian, 17 Feb. 2015. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/ feb/17/problem-populism-syriza-podemos-dark-side-europe. Mudde, Cas, and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. Populism: A Very Short Introduc- tion. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017. Print. Müller, Jan-Werner. “Rule-Breaking.” London Review of Books 37.16. (August 2015). Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n16/jan- werner-mueller/rule-breaking. ---. What Is Populism? Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. Print. Schmitt, Carl. Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus. 1923. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2017. Print. Tillery, Alvin B. “Is #BlackLivesMatter a Populist Movement? The View from Black Public Opinion.” Preprint. 29 Nov. 2020. Web. 14 Jan. 2021. https:// www.researchgate.net/publication/337782943_Is_BlackLivesMatter_a_ Populist_Movement_The_View_from_Black_Public_Opinion.

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Please Send Queer Food

Matt Brim

I was asked to contribute to this special issue on the state of Ameri- can democracy because I recently published a book about class stratification and race sorting in U.S. higher education institutions. The premise of the book is that, regardless of what the University claims, a thoroughgoing commitment to class and race hierarchy defines its functional mission. Sustaining social divisions is what it does best, taken as a whole system. In other words, social hierarchy is what the structure of higher education most unwaveringly reproduces. My approach to these intentional and strictly managed inequities was to view them through the lens of my home discipline, Queer Studies, to show how and where Queer Studies is implicated in the problem, and then to see what leverage Queer Studies, particularly as it is done at underclass colleges, might bring to bear on the problem. The book is titled Poor Queer Studies: Con- fronting Elitism in the University (2020). Just as Poor Queer Studies telescopes in and out between a particular academic field and the broader University world by training its eye on practices of class distinction and racial exclusion, it also shuttles between institutional tiers. The book’s queer method of holding in tension schools at the top and bottom of the rigid academic hierarchy reflects a set of rather commonplace assumptions: that class is a social relation, that an understanding of the relation between high-class and low-class Queer Studies is almost entirely absent from our Queer Studies assessments, and that race-sorting strategies are essential to the production and main- tenance of class distinction in Queer Studies, as in higher education generally. I, therefore, nominated my poor Queer Studies analysis as fundamentally, though not exclusively, a poor Black Queer Studies project. One of the difficulties of pursuing a class-based comparison of Queer Studies is that, while nothing could be easier or more endlessly shocking than comparing colleges with wildly disparate resources and reputations (the data!), seeing Queer Studies colleagues in light of our class and status

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 223-27 223 Matt Brim differences and through the lens of the material production of our queer ideas becomes a touchy subject. Building that comparative evidence into a compelling claim that Queer Studies must always be understood not only in terms of the brilliance of our queer theory luminaries, but as a materially-produced field—a field in which we must always ask what our ideas cost to make, a field underwritten by racial capitalism—risks making individual queer scholars into personifications of their institutional class locations or agents of the problem of Queer Studies’ elitisms. It risks reducing or even flattening the varied energies that circulate in and as our queer commitments to each other and to the field as a site of liberation. Exploring the relation of rich Queer Studies schools to poor Queer Studies schools therefore makes for necessary, if sometimes uncomfortable, work. But rather than merely troubling the Queer Studies waters, a larger implication of Poor Queer Studies is that class- and race-conscious assessments of all academic fields are urgently needed. In my case, I was trying to tell the story of Queer Studies as a story of class- and race-based relations, a story of a field divided from itself along class lines yet nonetheless held together by a set of ideas and a politics that continue to animate “queer.” My final symbol in the book was the Staten Island ferry (the central part of my commute to my home campus at the College of Staten Island), and my final vision of the work ahead for the field was a vision of ferrying between “non- peer” Queer Studies places and among different ranks of people in Queer Studies. However, other than several examples from my own academic itinerary, the book left undone the work of imagining the many ways such class crossings might be made. As I was finishingPoor Queer Studies, I met two scholars from the University of Strathclyde, Churnjeet Mahn and Yvette Taylor. Mahn and Taylor had long been thinking in their own ways about class, race, and gender inequities in the academy, and we decided to work together on a queer-, class-, and race-based higher education project. Fittingly, the earliest moments of our ongoing collaboration were during the days of the spring 2020 university strikes in the United Kingdom. My own school, the College of Staten Island in the City University of New York (CUNY) system, which is the largest public urban university in the United States, was simultaneously confronting the worst budget in a decade of relentless austerity measures following the 2008 recession. How, we began to ask, might we collaborate on an anti-elitist and anti- racist queer project that makes use of our own work histories and our locations in the United Kingdom and United States? We are now in the process of editing a collection that addresses this question. The volume is titled: “Queering Sharing: Redistributing Resources around the University.” The field of Queer Studies has been ingenious about sharing, theo- retically. We have theorized queerness as expansive, gorgeously exces-

224 Amst 66.1 (2021): 223-27 Please Send Queer Food sive, interdisciplinary, and ever new. Queer theory can go anywhere, unlimited by “aboutness” (Chuh), even the aboutnesses of gender and sexuality. I think it is fair to say that a certain perverse generativity, a form of sharing, lies at the heart of queer academic inquiry. Else- where I have suggested that what Queer Studies does best is respond to a universe of queer need by making and distributing ideas around the academy, and this sharing of ideas is itself an honorable form of sharing others’ needs. The provocation for Queer Studies in the class- and race-stratified academy now, I further suggest, is to turn its theoretical generativity into material generosity. Queer sharing is terribly, practically timely. Nothing has made the need to redistribute material resources around the University more urgent than the COVID-19 pandemic, which has thrust educational class and race disparities into full view. Of course, we have known that profound inequities exist across ranks of higher education institutions, including the ranks of Queer Studies. Yet this knowledge, which is not at all academic in the working-class and working- poor CUNY system, has suddenly become “new” knowledge capable of shocking even the well-informed. We have known, for example, that huge digital divides separate rich and poor schools (Gilliard and Culik). Yet in the new coronavirus-era learning environment, CUNY’s mad scramble to loan tablets and provide internet connections to its 275,000 students—80 % of whom are students of Color and almost half of whom come from families earning less than $20,000 per year—makes visible the extent of the tech deficit on this side of higher education’s class divide, where we tout “social mobility” (“New Study Confirms CUNY’s Power”). We have known that public education and public health in New York City are intimately connected. Yet, that relationship has been clarified in the most painful of ways: more community members have died from COVID-19 at CUNY than at any other university (“In Memoriam”). We have known that adjunct instructors are exploited. It is nevertheless unprecedented and bewildering that CUNY would fire almost 3,000 adjuncts and throw hundreds of them off their employer-based health insurance plan during a pandemic, while withholding federal emergency funds from the campuses (Paul). We have known that prior to the pandemic nearly one in two CUNY students experienced food insecurity (Goldrick-Rab et al. 2): a classed and racialized problem that is both magnified and brought into sharper relief by the disorienting fact that, as CUNY’s campus classrooms have closed, our campus food pantries have remained open (“CUNY Food Pantries”). Closed campuses, open food pantries. These problems are Queer Studies’ problems. The solution could not be more clear: please send queer food.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 223-27 225 Matt Brim

I am not, really, writing an essay. It is a fishing expedition. It is a shot in the dark. It is a plea. It is an S. O. S. It is a wish list. It is a grocery list.

The genre of writing I am working in here would be more recognizable if I called it a funding request, a grant application, a budget memo. These are the traditional forms of writing in the academy that self-evidently justify the act of asking for material help. But can Queer Studies not share support in more inventive ways? Can Queer Studies scholars—at both well-resourced and defunded colleges and universities—not find queer methods for fixing the inequi- table distribution of resources that makes our work-worlds livable for the privileged, and unlivable for the least privileged of our students, staff, and faculty?

As I write this queer funding request, Dr. Jill Biden, a community college professor, prepares to enter the White House. Do any Queer Studies readers of Amerikastudien / American Studies know Professor Biden? Could you ask her on CUNY’s behalf: Please send queer federal aid.

As I write this shot in the dark, my college library cannot afford books or database subscriptions. Please send queer open educational resources.

As I write this fishing expedition, my students are working full time. Please send queer child support.

As I write this S. O.S, queer theory in the Ivy League has just pronounced itself, once again, to be “cutting edge.” Please send queer bandaids.

As I write this plea, 55 % of CUNY students have experienced housing insecurity in the past year (Goldrick-Rab et. al. 2). Please send queer dorms.

As I write this grocery list, CUNY food pantries are open for business. Please send queer food.

226 Amst 66.1 (2021): 223-27 Please Send Queer Food

Works Cited Brim, Matt. Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2020. Print. Chuh, Kandice. “It’s Not about Anything.” Social Text 32.4 (2014): 125-34. Print. “CUNY Food Pantries.” Healthy CUNY, n. d. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://www. healthycuny.org/cuny-food-pantries. Gilliard, Chris, and Hugh Culik. “Digital Redlining, Access, and Privacy.” Com- mon Sense Education. Common Sense Media, 24 May 2016. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://www.commonsense.org/education/articles/digital-redlining- access-and-privacy. Goldrick-Rab, Sara, et. al. “City University of New York #RealCollege Survey.” Hope4college.com. The Hope Center, Mar. 2019. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https:// hope4college.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/HOPE_realcollege_ CUNY_report_final_webversion.pdf. “In Memoriam.” Cuny.edu. CUNY, 20 Nov. 2020. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://www. cuny.edu/memorial/. “New Study Confirms CUNY’s Power as National Engine of Economic Mobility.” CUNY Forum. CUNY, 17 June 2020. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://www1.cuny. edu/mu/forum/2020/06/17/new-study-confirms-cunys-power-as-national- engine-of-economic-mobility/. Paul, Ari. “Fighting Adjunct Non-Reappointments: A Major Union Grievance.” Clarion. PSC Cuny, Nov. 2020. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://www.psc-cuny.org/ clarion/november-2020/fighting-adjunct-non-reappointments/.

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Anti-Blackness in Education and the Possibilities of Redress: Toward Educational Reparations kihana miraya ross

In the weeks that followed police officers’ gruesome murders of 1 George Floyd and Breonna Taylor as well as the white vigilante hunting of Ahmaud Arbery, the streets erupted in sorrow and rage. Pro- testers used their voices to create a monumental shift in the national conversation in the United States and elevated the decades-long work of activists demanding divestment, defunding, and even the abolition of the police. Demonstrators also utilized their platforms to give voice to a new language, calling attention to the specificity of anti-Blackness, anti-Black violence, and anti-Black racism. These developments powerfully underscore the radical potentialities of this remarkable historical moment. Emerging from an unprecedented and ongoing pandemic disproportionately taking Black lives, as well as a national and international uprising against anti-Black police terror, is a phoenix of hope carrying newly invigorated Black dreams of freedom and resistance. Central to these dreams are theorizations and analyses of the Black condition. Activists, youth, and scholars are calling for a reckoning with anti-Blackness, as something distinct from racism, to grapple with society’s inability to recognize Black humanity (Wilder- 1 As my colleague Michael J. Dumas puts it, son, “Afro-Pessimism”; ross, “Call”). Anti-Blackness, as a theoretical “White is not capitalized tool and organizing frame, demands a sharper sensitivity to both the in my work because it […] does not describe magnitude of the injury and the extraordinary efforts required to begin a group with a sense of any process of meaningful redress. Significantly, a part of this recogni- common experiences or kinship outside of tion is a reenergized call for reparations for the descendants of human acts of colonization and beings who were legitimately owned (juridically speaking), property to terror. […] Thus, although European or French are be bought and sold, used and abused as any white owner desired. As a rightly capitalized, I see no scholar of Black education, I am particularly compelled to understand reason to capitalize white” how the intersection of increased attention to anti-Blackness in edu- (“Against” 12-13).

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 229-33 229 kihana miraya ross cation specifically (Dumas, “Against”; Dumas and ross; Wun) and the injection of new energy into the fight for reparations, is informing and inspiring these radical dreams and seeding new possibilities and visions of educational justice for Black children. This is especially exciting because despite hundreds of years of struggle, there has never been a moment in this country’s history where Black folks en masse have achieved educational equity or justice. While increased attention to anti-Blackness in the broader society has led to newly invigorated demands for reparations for centuries of anti-Black terror, the idea that the United States should provide reparations to formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants is nothing new. We often conceptualize this fight as something that began with the notion of “40 acres and a mule,” or that was championed by John Conyers, Jr., until his death. Yet, as early as the 1700s, Black people were petitioning for reparations (see Coates). Still, upon emancipation Black folks became the only race in the United States to ever start out, as an entire people, with nothing. While white families (foreign and native- born) received 246 million acres of free land through the Homestead Act (20 % of white Americans descend from homesteaders), and white enslavers were compensated in Washington, D.C., for their loss of (human) property, Black folks have never been compensated for 400 years of suffering (Hannah-Jones). Anti-Blackness provides an analysis of that suffering as connected to the idea of theft—the theft of Black bodies, the theft of anything Black folks dared to build and/or own as newly “freed” people, and critically, the theft from generations of Black families whose educational opportunities were systematically stolen from them. Interrogating this educational theft necessitates building on and extending decades of scholarship on the unremitting inequities Black students face in U.S. schools. Specifically within educational research, the language utilized to explore racialized disparities in schooling has shifted from the “achievement gap” to the “opportunity gap” to what Ladson-Billings calls the “education debt” (see Ladson-Billings). This notion of educational debt is particularly interesting as it centers what America owes to its throw- away children. Ladson-Billings argues that this debt is historical, eco- nomical, sociopolitical, and moral in nature, and must be addressed if we are to achieve meaningful educational progress. Here I want to build on the notion of educational debt in order to understand what this debt actually means for Black students specifically, and how what we might call educational reparations may serve to begin the process of meaningful redress. Still, not all debts are equal. How can we begin to assess the nature of these educational debts with respect to Black students and teachers, and their families? Anti-Blackness as an analytical tool historicizes and exposes the debts owed to Black folks as originating in the brutal system of chattel slavery and analytically attends to how those wounds

230 Amst 66.1 (2021): 229-33 Anti-Blackness in Education and the Possibilities of Redress continue to fester in slavery’s afterlives (Hartman, Scenes). Thus, any honest assessment of educational debt for Black children must also attend to questions of historical harm and injury. While many understand Black educational injury (in the broad sense) as being rooted in school segregation and remedied with the historic Brown v. Board of Educa- tion Supreme Court case decision, anti-Blackness in education compels us to question both the notion that segregation was the problem, and the potentiality of Brown (if actualized) as the solution (or an end in and of itself) to creating a liberatory educational landscape for Black children in particular. While Black students certainly deserve and are owed access to the material resources that often accompany genuinely desegregated schooling environments, many Black students have historically and contemporarily experienced integrated school settings as hostile environments. In my own work, I situate this in what I call the “afterlife of school segregation” (ross, “Black Space”), which is a more specific rendering of Hartman’s “afterlife of slavery” (Lose 6) and centers the ways in which, despite the end of legal segregation of schooling, Black students remain systematically dehumanized and positioned as uneducable. Just as Hart- man challenges a linear progress narrative of history, particularly the slavery-to-freedom paradigm, the afterlife of school segregation also refuses linear narratives of Black educational progress that fail to align with the lived experiences of Black students. Further, where Hartman questions whether the dominated can be liberated by universalist assertions that “merely dissimulate the stigmatic injuries constitutive of blackness with abstract assertions of equality, sovereignty, and individu- ality” (Scenes 123), it would behoove us to also question whether Black students en masse may achieve a liberatory educational experience in a system of “universal” public education “structured by anti-black solidarity” (Wilderson, Red 58). Hence, as we build toward a conceptualization of educational reparations, we must consider both the depth of Black educational injury and also the extent of what it will take to build toward meaningful redress. While a full explication of educational reparations is beyond the scope of this current work, I want to begin to elaborate what educational reparations may mean for Black students in the afterlife of school segregation. At minimum, a project of educational reparations must recognize the ways anti-Blackness functions in U.S. schools and that this condition is irreconcilable (ross, “Revisiting”). In recognizing how these schools are irredeemable for Black children, that “they schools” (dead prez) will never be ours, we are better positioned to conceptualize liberatory educational experiences for Black children. In the broadest sense, then, educational reparations must necessarily move beyond the notion of school “reform” for Black children and consider the potentiality in reimagining the Black educational landscape in its entirety. For example, a part of my work explores Black educational fugitive space,

Amst 66.1 (2021): 229-33 231 kihana miraya ross or the ways Black students and educators enact educational fugitivity through the social production of Black space in the margin (ross, “Black Space”). I argue Black educational fugitive space is born and created in direct response to the rampant anti-Blackness in the larger world, including U.S. public schools. In this sense, fugitive space may serve as makeshift land, and provide makeshift citizenship to people whose humanity is consistently made impossible on the outside. A project of educational reparations might consider what it would mean to build on this interstitial space toward a more robust blueprint for Black education outside of mainstream institutions of schooling. For instance, what would it mean to be able to structurally support a potential third Great Migration of Black folks—not from the South to the North, but out of mainstream institutions of U.S. schooling altogether? This may look like an optional pre-K-12 alternative system of public schooling for students and educators racialized as Black, or a collective of independent cadres where groups of students and educators enact radically different forms of education (see Nxumalo and ross). Still, while a project of educational reparations should support Black folks in our re-envisioning otherwise possibilities, it would also necessarily attend to supporting Black students, teachers, and parents in what I call the “meantime in between time,” or what it is that we can do right now to mitigate Black suffering in schools and make the educational experiences of Black students better. In other words, more immediate redress would necessarily encompass providing Black students and educators with anything they need or desire to ameliorate their current reality. This may include anything from access to material resources, advanced courses, or curricular content that does not misrepresent or erase; to protection from systems of standardized testing, discipline, and punishment, as well as from the explicit and implicit biases of teachers. At the same time, educational reparations in the “meantime in between time” may also question what it means to create spaces within schools that move beyond improving test scores or graduation rates and actually attend to Black students’ overall well-being—or what well-being looks like in the context of anti-Black schooling. In other words, what kinds of educational environments might help Black students confront, navigate, refuse, and resist anti-Black violence and anti-Black racism in the larger society and in their schools? While educational reparations are certainly not limited to these ideas, I offer these initial thoughts with the hope they may aid us in further conceptualizing educational reparations and that we may build on these initial ideas toward a more robust theorization. I offer this short musing as an invitation for further inquiry and collective thought—as an invitation to continue the collective conversation around what it means to conceptualize a liberatory educational project for Black students in particular—as an invitation to facilitate Black students’ move in the direction of genuinely being okay.

232 Amst 66.1 (2021): 229-33 Anti-Blackness in Education and the Possibilities of Redress

Works Cited Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic 313.5 (2014): 54-71. Print. dead prez. “They Schools.” Let’s Get Free. New York: Loud Records, 2000. LP. Dumas, Michael J. “Against the Dark: Antiblackness in Education Policy and Dis- course.” Theory into Practice 55.1 (2016): 11-19. Print. Dumas, Michael J., and kihana miraya ross. “‘Be Real Black for Me’: Imagining BlackCrit in Education.” Urban Education 51.4 (2016): 415-42. Print. Hannah-Jones, Nikole. “What Is Owed.” The New York Times Magazine. The New York Times, 24 June 2020. Web. 10 Nov. 2020. https://www.nytimes. com/interactive/2020/06/24/magazine/reparations-slavery.html. Hartman, Saidiya V. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007. Print. ---. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Centu- ry America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Print. Ladson-Billings, Gloria. “From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools.” Educational Researcher 35.7 (2006): 3-12. Print. Nxumalo, Fikile, and kihana miraya ross. “Envisioning Black Space in Environ- mental Education.” Race, Ethnicity & Education 22.4 (2019): 502-24. Print. ross, kihana miraya. “Black Space in Education: Fugitive Resistance in the After- life of School Segregation.” The Future Is Black: Afropessimism, Fugitivity, and Radical Hope in Education. Ed. Carl A. Grant, Ashley Woodson, and Mi- chael J. Dumas. New York: Routledge, 2020. 7-16. Print. ---. “Call It What It Is: Anti-Blackness.” New York Times. The New York Times, 4 June 2020. Web. 5 June 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/ opinion/george-floyd-anti-blackness.html. ---. “Revisiting BlackCrit in Education: Anti-Black Reality and Liberatory Fan- tasy.” CCRSE Research Brief 17.1 (2019): 1-4. Print. Wilderson, Frank B. “Afro-Pessimism and the End of Redemption.” Humanities- futures.org. Franklin Humanities Institute, 20 Oct. 2015. Web. 12 Dec. 2020. https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/afro-pessimism-end-redemption/. ---. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. Print. Wilderson, Frank B., and Saidiya V. Hartman. “The Position of the Unthought.” Qui Parle 13.2 (2003): 183-201. Print Wun, Connie. “Unaccounted Foundations: Black Girls, Anti-Black Racism, and Punishment in Schools.” Critical Sociology 42.4 (2016): 737-50. Print.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 229-33 233

American Democracy after Trump and the Challenges of Transnational American Studies

Alfred Hornung in Conversation with Mita Banerjee

Mita Banerjee:

Your work has been groundbreaking not only in life writing research, but also in Transnational American Studies. Can Transnational American Studies be related to the idea of democracy, in the United States and abroad?

Alfred Hornung:

The idea of Transnational American Studies (TAS) as a worldwide collaboration of Americanists originated in the ballroom of the convention hotel of the American Studies Association in November 2003. While Shelley Fisher Fishkin and I, as presidents of our respective national American Studies associations, were dancing, we looked forward to the next meeting in Atlanta in 2004 and discussed ways in which to engage all national associations in our common effort to counteract then-President George W. Bush’s unilateral politics by creating a multilateral forum of research. This plan was a reconnection to, and an update of, the original idea of the founders of American Studies in the 1930s to use an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the United States and to critically accompany American politics. After American colleagues at institutions in the United States had for a long time led the course of American Stud- ies scholarship, TAS intended to equally include all American Studies scholars abroad for a collaborative platform of research, as well as teaching adequate for the twenty-first century. In German politics, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Minister of Foreign Affairs Joschka Fischer challenged George W. Bush’s leadership by opposing the war in Iraq, an alternative position supported not only by the American Studies community. In scholarship, Berndt Ostendorf took up Randolph Bourne’s visionary

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 235-40 235 American Democracy after Trump and the Challenges of Transnational American Studies

1916 essay “Transnational America” in an eponymous collection of essays in 2002; Winfried Fluck, Stefan Brandt, and Ingrid Thaler followed up on Shelley’s presidential address with the REAL volume on Transnational American Studies in 2007; and Udo Hebel organized the annual convention of the GAAS on this topic in Regensburg in 2011.

Mita Banerjee:

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 as well as the continued support for him by large parts of the U.S. population seem to pose a challenge for American Studies. How can we account for this phenomenon? And what is the role that American Studies, and American Studies in Germany, might play in this context?

Alfred Hornung:

American democracy and the Constitution of the United States have existed for 232 years, and its principles have prevailed over President Trump’s disruptive antics. With the understandable and needed focus on marginalized groups, American Studies has ignored the concerns of a mostly White section of the middle class which has also suffered from the global changes and has turned to the promises of a disingenuous president. American Studies must be more comprehensive and address issues vital to all parts of the population in an effort to implement the spirit of the U.S. Constitution “to form a more perfect union.” This also applies to all American Studies associations, which have to be more inclusive and open for compromises between different positionalities and perspectives. Transnational American Studies has over the years provided a number of tools to approach current issues of a changed reality for teaching and research. The coronavirus pandemic painfully teaches us that there are no isolated national solutions to world problems. Germany has experienced the dangers arising from populism and the collapse of democracy into dictatorship. Hence, educating students to become critical thinkers and promoting a dialogue between academic knowledge and political actions is of prime importance.

Mita Banerjee:

Our Mainz-based research training group “Life Sciences, Life Writing” is based on the idea of medical humanities. Could the medical humanities also be related to discussions of American democracy?

Alfred Hornung:

Obviously, the medical humanities have an essentially democratic impetus, not only in the United States but also elsewhere. First of all,

236 Amst 66.1 (2021): 235-40 Alfred Hornung in Conversation with Mita Banerjee the transdisciplinary field of collaborative research is an egalitarian engagement of medical expertise and the human sciences in academia. It transcends the alleged primacy of the hard sciences by recognizing the limits of one’s own field of research, which are overcome by collaborat- ing in a changed environment. President Barack Obama’s long battle for the Affordable Care Act is a prime example of the need of collaboration between different parties for the health of a nation. Contrary to Ger- many’s mandatory health care plan for all people, the American system is exclusionary and privileges the well-off at the expense of the underprivileged and underrepresented. The practical cooperation of medical doctors with scholars in the social and human sciences can contribute to changing the political arena, as your book Medical Humanities in Amer- ican Studies suggests, and as our joint Narrative Medicine workshops with our colleagues at Columbia University in New York City prove.

Mita Banerjee:

The Black Lives Matter movement has also been present and much discussed in Germany. Is there a connection between Black Lives Mat- ter and Transnational American Studies?

Alfred Hornung:

The practice of Transnational American Studies shows that the Black Lives Matter movement is not just an American movement but has its equivalents in other parts of the world. While the Civil Rights movement was basically considered an American endeavor and featured as a unit in classes on American culture, BLM has propelled an awareness of visible diversity and discrimination and has drawn public and academic attention to Germans of Color, migrants from Asia and Africa in Europe, and the re-appraisal of underprivileged and underrepresented people. Early on, Heike Raphael-Hernandez took up this issue in her edited books Blackening Europe: The African American Presence (2004) and AfroAsian Encounters (2006).

Mita Banerjee:

Your biography of Al Capone is about to go into print. In this book, you uncover remarkable parallels between Al Capone and Donald Trump. Could you elaborate on some of them here?

Alfred Hornung:

During the presidency of Donald J. Trump, references to Al Capone’s illegal activities in the 1920s have increasingly been used to explain his views of politics and business transactions. Trump himself has compared

Amst 66.1 (2021): 235-40 237 American Democracy after Trump and the Challenges of Transnational American Studies the legal proceedings against his campaign manager Paul Manafort as being worse than the treatment of Capone. Granting licenses to Native Americans to run casinos, which would have threatened the income of his own casinos, was for Trump, in his own words, the worst crime since Ca- pone. When The New York Times revealed that the forty-fifth president had paid only $750 in taxes in both 2018 and 2019, and had not declared or made public his tax returns, Trump used the same argument that Capone did in court: that all citizens would seek to pay as few taxes as possible, and that he had no income. The press extended the comparison to the commonly acknowledged fact that Capone was tried and sentenced for tax evasion in lieu of his capital crimes. Not surprisingly, Trump stated in the 2016 election campaign in Iowa: “I could stand on New York’s Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Trivial by comparison seem to be the fist fights both Trump and Capone had in school with their teachers leading to Al’s expulsion and almost to that of Trump. To run their business, both men used measures on the fringes of legality and beyond. To preserve their public standing, both established an incredible system of lies accepted as alternate truths by their undeterred fans. Recently, the analogy between the Prohibition and the current pandemic has been advanced with respect to the infringement of personal rights, but also with the emergence of criminal energies and the usurpation of public services by organized crime. Little known and ignored in Trump’s ghostwritten autobiographical narrative, The Art of the Deal (1987), is the role of his German grandfather, Friedrich Trump. He started out as a barber in New York and a hotel manager in the red-light district of Seattle, with an excursion to the gold rush in the Yukon, before he established his real estate business in Queens and became one of the first victims of the Spanish flu in 1918. To what extent the creation of the Ca- pone Organization in the 1920s resembles the establishment of the Trump Organization by Donald Trump’s father, which the younger Trump inherited in 1971, and to what extent they imitated the business measures of the captains of industry or “robber barons,” is the subject of my inquiry into the correlation of the American Dream and Organized Crime and their roles as disruptors of democratic processes interfering with elections and claiming election fraud.

Mita Banerjee:

You are the founder and current speaker of the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Mainz University. What ideas are connected to creating an Obama Institute in Germany?

Alfred Hornung:

The idea for establishing the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies (OI) emerged in conjunction with the excellent eval-

238 Amst 66.1 (2021): 235-40 Alfred Hornung in Conversation with Mita Banerjee uation of Mainz American Studies in the nationwide research rating of English departments, carried out by the Wissenschaftsrat (German Sci- ence Council), alongside the re-election of Barack Obama in 2012. My colleagues and I felt that the president’s multi-ethnic, interreligious, and transnational heritage along with his transdisciplinary education and training in American Studies, Political Science, and Law, supplemented by his social work in South Side Chicago, were the necessary prerequi- sites for education, life, and empathetic politics in the twenty-first century. The demographically changing American society also embraced this in voting for him twice. His exemplary qualifications matched the principles of TAS in regard to teaching, research, and interests of our students. In addition, the OI would provide a platform of TAS for all universities in Rhineland-Palatinate, cooperate with the Atlantic Acad- emy, also in recognition of the strong presence of American troops as more than half of the 34,500 in Germany are stationed in our state. The program of the OI focuses not on Barack Obama exclusively, but also includes Michelle Obama’s engagements, the charity work of his African siblings, such as his sister Auma, who holds a Ph. D. degree from the University of Bayreuth, or his brother Mark, who lives in Shenzhen with his Chinese wife and gives piano lessons to Chinese orphans. The Johannes Gutenberg University supported the foundation of the OI with an additional professorship for American History to complement the existing Literary, Cultural, and Translation Studies expertise, further enhanced by our partners in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Mita Banerjee:

The concept of life writing has been central to your work as an Americanist. How is life writing relevant to the idea of U.S.-American democracy, both historically and in the current context?

Alfred Hornung:

In a thematic issue of Amerikastudien / American Studies 35.3 (1990) on “Autobiography and Democracy in America,” life writing colleagues and I focused on the importance of autobiographical expressions since the colonization of the North American continent. Many of the examples are connected to matters of migration and the acculturation on the American continent. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin still serves to exemplify his transatlantic life and career, as well as his gradual Americanization—mediating between the one and the many by way of a catalog of virtues, which we now know to be derived from the Chinese philosopher Confucius. In the liberating impulse of life stories, the slave narrative charts the way from bondage to freedom and creates a generic pathway practiced by all ethnic minorities. The turbulent decade of the

Amst 66.1 (2021): 235-40 239 American Democracy after Trump and the Challenges of Transnational American Studies

1960s, with the definition and recognition of identity politics, also saw the emergence of life writing, a term invented by women critics as a more comprehensive acceptance of self-expressions in all media. This opening up of the field also allows us retrospectively to discover and recognize the representation of anthropomorphic figures in the rock art of the Barrier Canon in pre-Columbian America as the earliest forms of cultural expression by Indigenous people. Obama’s just released A Promised Land is a brilliant summation of the political and cultural aspects of the genre of life writing. Just as in his previous publications, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, the first non-White American president tries to account for his own life and career, as well as to reflect on the progress of American democracy in a transnational context from the perspective of an Af- rican American whose America was not the promised land. As I have argued elsewhere, life writing is the privileged genre for the representation and recognition of diversity and for suggesting forms of inclusion. In this sense, Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, a multimedia form of life writing in which he incorporates all forms of diversity in the biosphere with the goal to achieve inclusion, serves as his democratic vista for our own time. His visionary spirit inspires the transdisciplinary topics of life writing in the areas of transnational interdependence and environmental and medical humanities.

240 Amst 66.1 (2021): 235-40 The Transnational Dimensions of Anti-Black Policing and Black Resistance

Vanessa E. Thompson in Conversation with Cedric Essi

Cedric Essi:

Over the course of 2020, you made important interventions in major German-speaking media outlets like taz, Deutschlandfunk, and SRF, by sharing your scholarly and activist insights into the transnational dimensions of anti-Black policing and Black resistance, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, George Floyd, and many more. The police killings of African Americans in 2020 and the rebellions in their wakes have led to widespread protests and debates about structural racism, including in Germany. This political moment has generated extraordinary potential but has also led to familiar impasses: the pernicious metaphor of a few bad apples, the argument that using the United States as a reference point for discussing racism in Germany is fundamentally flawed, among others. From your perspective, what has been revealed, as well as con- cealed, about racist state violence in Germany at this critical juncture?

Vanessa E. Thompson:

When we look at these global protests in 2020, it is important to emphasize that protests against racist police violence have a history. In various European countries, there is a genealogy of struggles and uprisings by Black people and communities of Color. But still, that summer has shown us how these struggles are transnationally connected. With respect to the German context, this mobilization has dismantled a pervasive myth that is also operative in other countries: the belief that the phenomenon of racism only exists as the attitude of some individuals, but no longer as systemic oppression, dehumanization, and exploitation. The Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 intervened in this European self-understanding of “white innocence,” to use Gloria Wekker’s term

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 241-46 241 Vanessa E. Thompson in Conversation with Cedric Essi for this form of denial. Germany, too, is tied to a global formation of gendered racial capitalism and what Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as “the state-sanctioned […] production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (28). What we have seen this past summer—for the first time, I would say— are massive debates about racism in the hegemonic media landscape, from newspapers to various prime time television shows. This represented an opening that was, at the same time, highly problematic. If we look closely at the kinds of discussions that unfolded, we can detect an old pattern of displacing racism. We could see how the gaze was first directed toward the United States. Racism only seems to be speakable in Germany when it is happening somewhere else. It is a powerful way of concealing racism to displace it geographically and/or temporally, most prominently in the “back then” of the Shoah. But there was also another form of displacement at work. Initially, hegemonic media organized exclusively White panels to discuss racism in the United States. When talk shows finally did invite Black and Brown speakers to engage the topic of racism in Germany— after massive interventions—one could immediately observe a dynamic of individualization. The conversation shifted from an analysis of racism as something systemic to the consumption of personal anecdotes. These speakers were asked to recite personal stories so that, in the end, racism was once again individualized. In the process, whole genealogies of Black resistance in Germany were left unaddressed when focusing on the young participants of these protests and the emergence of new groups.

Cedric Essi:

For some people, groups such as Black Lives Matter Berlin seem to appear out of the blue. But they are directly and indirectly informed by longstanding Black German associations, such as ADEFRA [afrodeutsche Frauen] and the ISD [Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland].

Vanessa E. Thompson:

Yes. Sometimes they are in direct contact with these older, more established groups and understand themselves as the continuation of their work at this specific moment in time. These earlier movements—which are still active—have paved the way for new movements to material- ize. These ascendant groups have not had to do research on cases like Christy Schwundeck, N’deye Mareame Sarr, or Oury Jalloh. This kind of work had for decades already been carried out through work that kept alive the struggle against anti-Black policing in Germany.

Cedric Essi:

Could you unpack the various dimensions of anti-Black policing that are at stake in your work?

242 Amst 66.1 (2021): 241-46 The Transnational Dimensions of Anti-Black Policing and Black Resistance

Vanessa E. Thompson:

In a narrow sense, people associate anti-Black policing with racial profiling in putatively random identification checks, where the police mainly stop Black people and People of Color, force them to identify themselves, and often search the stopped subject’s body. My work looks beyond this specific scene to take into view a larger institutional framework of the judicial realm. Federal and state laws actually legitimate such practices with seemingly race-neutral language when designating so-called Gefahrenorte (places of danger), thereby authorizing de facto racial profiling. Another way the violence of anti- Black policing extends way beyond the moment of “stop and frisk” is through its psycho-social consequences. Victims may avoid certain places altogether, develop depression, or be forced to perform the labor of decriminalizing themselves in front of bystanders, friends, teachers, or colleagues who witnessed the police check. Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” is useful in understanding how anti-Black policing ex- ceeds the particular moment of an allegedly randomized control. That violence does not stop with the search, harming, or killing of a Black body. It also affects the victim’s loved ones. We can think of Oury Jal- loh’s mother who died under psychological stress in the aftermath of her son’s death in police custody. We can think of victims of anti-Black policing who are still alive and how they have to navigate ongoing criminalization when, for instance, trying to take legal action. In fact, they often experience a continuation of racist stereotypes if they manage to bring their case to court at all. Anti-Black policing actually shapes society as a whole and constantly reinscribes Black bodies into the imaginary as criminal, deviant, and dangerous, per se, as always the perpetrator, never the victim, as bodies that should be in lack of protection. Black feminists urge us to think about this anti-Black policing in an intersectional way. People who died at the hands of the police in Germany had lived at intersections of dehumanization: gender plays a role; migration status plays a role; being a dark-skinned Black person plays a role; being in an economically precarious position plays a role; mental health plays a role. And of course, anti-Black policing in Germany cannot be detached from Euro- pean necropolitics: the policing of the Mediterranean in terms of active pushback into the sea, as well as through “organized abandonment”—as Gilmore would have it (178).

Cedric Essi:

This form of anti-Black policing, too, has a history. In the U.S. context, many critics have drawn attention to how the origin of the modern police apparatus can be tied to slave patrols. Could you tell us about the prehistory of current racial profiling in and around Germany?

Amst 66.1 (2021): 241-46 243 Vanessa E. Thompson in Conversation with Cedric Essi

Vanessa E. Thompson:

With regard to the European context, the relation between anti- Blackness and the modern police is crucial. We know from critical theory—Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and many more—that the modern institution of the police fulfilled the function of protecting property in a capitalist order. But these scholarly accounts of policing did not pay attention to race. To speak with the words of Simone Browne, we need to “draw […] a Black line” (42) through these critiques of policing to draw attention to Black people as property. We need to think about the development of the police in the modern nation- state as the emergence of an institution in imperial, colonial nations. Then we would see, with respect to Germany, how certain practices of racialized surveillance were developed in the colonies as laboratories: the surveillance of Black bodies in labor camps and on slave ships, controlling Black movement, excessive force on Black bodies in what is today Namibia. Strategies deployed in the colonial laboratories traveled back to the European metropoles to control the urban White poor, the movement of Rom*nja as well as Sinti*zze in particular, and also shaped the policing methods of Nazi Germany. For the German context, enslavement, colonialism, and National Socialism are crucial historical vectors to think through the racialized foundations of policing as an institution of gendered racial capitalism, as a regime of subjection, as a form of submission and subject interpellation.

Cedric Essi:

The history of German participation in enslavement and colonialism is usually not part of a mainstream educational curriculum in this country. The same applies to racist state violence after 1945. This reminds me of Fatima El-Tayeb’s research on our nation’s disavowed and dyscon- scious archives of racist state violence. What are the most illuminating stories in a more recent and largely repressed archive of anti-Black policing in Germany?

Vanessa E. Thompson:

There are so many important incidents. But, of course, the Ham- burg police scandal of the 1990s would be one point of departure. White police officers in the city of Hamburg were involved in the torture of primarily Black male-identified migrants and asylum seekers. These victims were disrobed, sprayed with insect spray or tear gas in closed prison cells, and/or transported to be abandoned beyond the federal city-state’s borders. Some victims even reported mock-executions. This was like a program, an anti-Black program that was rehearsed over years. What we already see in the Hamburg police scandal is this liaison between in-

244 Amst 66.1 (2021): 241-46 The Transnational Dimensions of Anti-Black Policing and Black Resistance stitutional racism and right-wing terrorism. It was said that some of the perpetrators had connections to right-wing groups. Think of the NSU 2.0 and institutional racism within the police today. I would actually say that institutional racism provides the ground for right-wing terrorism to grow. Another important incident in this archive is the killing of Christy Schwundeck, with implications for counter-hegemonic movements as well. It is important to adopt an intersectional approach when analyzing anti-Black policing because it is not only Black masculinity that is profiled and killed. Schwundeck was killed in May 2011 by a White police officer in a job center in Frankfurt after insisting on the full payment of her unemployment benefits. Schwundeck’s story involves financial precarity, mental health struggles, as well as the loss of child custody, and should remind us to look at the intersections of policing via social welfare institutions, the hospital, and the foster regime. This is an important point for activist movements, too. Black women like Schwundek or Sarr need to be kept alive in the struggle by understanding the intersectional production of premature Black death.

Cedric Essi:

Elsewhere you stated that racism is inscribed into the very system of modern democracy. In other words, the different forms of violence we talked about are not anomalies, but something else.

Vanessa E. Thompson:

When we think of the concept of modern democracy, citizenship, the notion of the liberal subject, the mechanisms that drive democratic politics, it is important to understand that they are historically based on enslavement and colonialism, projects that continue in the conjunctures of gendered racial capitalism. Think about the relation between the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution. The material construction of citizens in a liberal democracy is always related to the production of non-citizens, most prominently enslaved bodies, that need to be super-exploited, surveilled, punished, killed. For the liberal democracy to live, it needs Black bodies specifically, but also other bodies of Color, to die. The genesis of modern democracy is tied to the genesis of racial capitalism. What we still have in North America and Europe are what Angela Davis and others conceptualize as racist democracies. Many people draw on W. E. B. Du Bois’s term “abolition democracy” (ch. 7) in an effort to decolonize our political system and economy. Du Bois coined the concept in relation to the formal end of enslavement. He urges us to understand its various permutations and to keep thinking about how Black people can become free. Abolition is not only a U.S. freedom struggle for radical transformation. There are many initiatives

Amst 66.1 (2021): 241-46 245 Vanessa E. Thompson in Conversation with Cedric Essi across Europe that revolve around the abolition of prisons, policing, and refugee camps. We have to understand them from a transnational perspective because the struggles for abolition have always been connected, from the Haitian Revolution to rebellions in German colonies. This transnational movement for abolition also includes figures like Anton Wilhelm Amo, an eighteenth-century Black philosopher in Germany who wrote his dissertation on the legal status of Black people in Eu- rope. Abolition was always a global project, and it still is. On this note, Gilmore reminds us that abolition does not only mean getting rid of prisons or the police. It also involves building new institutions, new relations, and a new world in which life (human and non-human) can flourish, instead of being exploited, accumulated, abandoned, incarcerated, or killed. Abolition is what saves this world.

Works Cited Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2015. Print. Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880. 1935. New York: Free Press, 1998. Print. Davis, Angela Y. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture. New York: Seven Stories, 2005. Print. El-Tayeb, Fatima. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011. Print. ---. Undeutsch: Die Konstruktion des Anderen in der postmigrantischen Gesell- schaft. Bielefeld: transcript, 2016. Print. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: U of California P, 2006. Print. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011. Print. Wekker, Gloria. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016. Print.

246 Amst 66.1 (2021): 241-46 Abandoning Time: Black Nihilism and the Democratic Imagination

Calvin Warren

Does time heal all wounds? Or does time require certain wounds to sustain itself? Is the curative function of time an onto-metaphysical fantasy, one concealing the internecine operations of temporal subjuga- tion? What happens to existence, or life itself, once we abandon time, its unquestioned positivity, and its presumed givenness (as gift, indispensable resource, or a priori condition)? Furthermore, is the activity of imagining even possible without recourse to time, temporality, or its durative schemas? Is the imagination a temporal captive, and does abandoning (or dare I say abolishing) time liberate the imagination to perform different tasks and pursuits? Questioning time is a difficult task, since thinking requires it (to re-orient existence beyond Newtonian, post-modern, or neo-liberal time and eschatology). Questioning, as meta-commentary, would require an exceptional position, both within and without time simultaneously, a position capable of investigating the very thing that enables investigation—holding time in abeyance. But the seeming impossibility of this enterprise would require a different noetic apparatus, since thought (as questioning) depends on time as its oxygen. The imagination, then, offers the promise of liberation from temporal tyranny, an enterprise contravening the conditions of reason, knowledge, forms, and, indeed, the possible itself. The potential “transgression”—to use a hackneyed term in American Studies—of the imagination is diminished, however, when it is bound to democracy. Democ- racy tethers the imagination to time, since democracy is an elaborate schematization, instrumentalization, and defense of time. During any moment of political and social crisis, we are importuned to re-imagine democracy, as imagining the future. To consider democracy futureless, or that its time has run out, or that futurity (and progress) is its devastating temporal myth, is to open oneself up to charges of theoretical heresy,

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 247-51 247 Calvin Warren despair, hopelessness, and any other abject calumny. In times of crisis, when the authoritarian kernel of democracy is exposed, theorists call on time to hold inconsistencies, resolve contradictions, blackmail hope, and repair brokenness. Once again, we land in the terrain that “time heals all wounds,” political or otherwise. Samuel A. Chambers defines the imagination as a “synthetic power of creation and re-creation—an ability to combine the uncombinable, to surpass binaries without merely collapsing them, to fashion something new” (620). And from such synthesis, we are told that a democratic imagination is possible, since we would “think the limits (and their transgression) of democratic theory and of democracy as well” (620). Here, we see that the democratic imagination recasts limits as possibilities rather than complete failures. Limits become the resource for creation and re-creation rather than evidence of destruction and uselessness. A couture Kantianism / Hegelianism (mixed with a splash of deconstruction) salvages democracy from the perils of its absurdity, devastation, and brutality. Why this investment in democracy’s “intrinsic” creative power? Can this creativity finally bring an end to anti-Black violence and Black suffering? Or is the knowledge of democracy’s fabulousness enough to sustain Blacks through police terrorism, environmental racism, re-enslavement through incarceration, and food / housing insecurity and discrimination? I would suggest that what makes such creative synthesis possible is an unacknowledged dependence on time. For proponents of democracy, it is time that is mal- leable for creative enterprises of re-imagination, of progress fetishiza- tion, and an “ontology of change” that need not justify (or prove) itself, declaration of change seems to be enough (Badiou, “Ontology”). What if, however, democracy is clinging to a depleted resource? What if time is no longer enough to orient existence, especially for those inhabitants of an abyss—within which time, space, ethics, and law are weaponized against existence? Put somewhat differently, democracy has exhausted the imagination. It is a speculative vampire that drains the imagination of any vital resource for its own survival. This speculation is an outrageous expen- diture of energy, an enjoyment without end, a scholarly surplus-pleasure requiring an incessant (and useless) political repetition (Johnston). I would describe this speculation—the conjoining of time, democracy, and the imagination—as an interminable quest, or a certain “stuck- ness” in a scene of failure (a constant encircling of political and legal vacuity). This repetition is most dramatically demonstrated, for me, in Black political participation—voting, protesting, keeping hope alive, returning to the kernel of authoritarian violence (i. e., anti-Blackness) with unbridled hope, temporal determination, and an investment in the ontology of change (Warren; Farred). Time mocks Blacks, requiring historical déjà vu to be re-imagined, redeemed, rethought, or ignored, rather than accepting time as anti-Black enmity and democracy as the

248 Amst 66.1 (2021): 247-51 Abandoning Time: Black Nihilism and the Democratic Imagination permanence of anti-Blackness. Chants of “yes we can!” “your vote matters!” “we have power!” “we’re moving forward,” etc., serve to neglect the failure of Black political participation and to imprison the imagination within futurity. As I am writing these remarks, I am witnessing the absurdity of this democratic imagination and its unrelenting time. On one news program, I hear that police shot unarmed Andre Hill, a forty-seven-year- old Black resident of Columbus, Ohio, without cause, and rather than offering him medical assistance, decided to handcuff him (just in case the supine, dying man finds a gun, magically, I guess). On the other news program, I hear Black politicians importuning, begging, and guilting Blacks into voting for change. Black political pundits assure voters that the ontology of change is realizable if you just exercise your right to vote. “Never again!” “We will transform police practices!” “This time will be different!” Did Blacks not vote when police shot twelve-year-old Tamir Rice as he was playing with his toy gun on the playground? (By the way, no federal charges will be brought against the police officers who shot him). Did Blacks not vote when Sandra Bland lost her life in police custody? Did Blacks not vote after police deprived Eric Garner and George Floyd (and apparently 70 other people) of breath (Baker et al.)? In answer to my inquiry “why should we continue to vote if anti-Black violence is not changing?” I am told, “Just keep believing, we can vote people in that can change things!” When I then ask, “But I voted for President Obama (suspending my nihilism in an intoxication of hope- affect), I thought things were going to change for Blacks? I feel just as unsafe and endangered post-Obama as pre-Obama,” I am told, “Obama wasn’t a ‘magic Negro.’ He did the best he could.” Then I ask, “So why vote if it will take an act of magic to address the existential threat of anti-Blackness?” Time mocks the cyclical movement of such inquiries, they are, indeed, unanswerable within the creative, synthetic, and powerful democratic horizon. Voting becomes the premier instrument of the democratic imagination—supposedly, it activates the imagination with futurity, avoids paralysis with action, and can be repeated. What type of creativity will finally eradicate anti-Black brutality? And could such creativity even operate within time? Could we still call such creativity democracy? Must we abandon time to enable the imagination to perform the mystical, the magical, and the ineffable? If we have understood nihilism as the entrapment (and misery) of metaphysics, the reduction of Being to value circulation (axio-ontology) and Being’s forgottenness, and the neutralization of various hierarchies of existence and legitimacy (Vattimo), then Black nihilism would suggest that time is not a natural right or intrinsic resource. Time is a supreme onto-metaphysical value that traffics in anti-Black violence, sub- jugation, destruction, and must also be reduced to myth, fantasy, and displaced. Rather than providing the resource for creativity and power, time is a racial privilege that embeds itself in Being and metaphysics—

Amst 66.1 (2021): 247-51 249 Calvin Warren it anchors the human and engenders extreme brutality and destructive pleasure. It is impossible, then, to de-link time from the anti-Black violence saturating it. Enterprises such as Black politics and democratic imagination reproduce the “same” rather than introducing a break in violence. Put differently, the democratic imagination takes time for granted as a natural right or unquestioned condition of existence, rather than bringing this condition under investigation and suspicion; reproducing time, as a creative and synthetic activity, is its primary preoccupation. Black existence exposes time as an unreliable lure, one vested in certain onto-metaphysical fantasies. I would add to Vittorio Possenti’s remarkable anatomizing of nihilism—theoretical, moral, theological, technological, and judicial—spatio-temporal nihilism, since both space and time provide problems for Black thinking in the abyss and demand a protocol of thinking (or imagination?) that is released from the preconditions of Being and ethics. Black nihilism de-idealizes both space and time as offering anything intrinsically or potentially transformative. Thus, the limit of space and time, for Black existence, cannot be re-worked into anything life-affirming or synthesized into anything meaningful. To put a finer point on this reflection: Anti-Blackness is a problem of time and the democratic imagination. Police shootings and COVID-19 deaths, for example, foreground the failure of time to alleviate Black suffering. Time is not curative; it is a weapon of tremendous violence. Despite the optimism of Black political theorists, time entraps Black thinking in a web of contradictions, absurdities, and impasses. The pathetic theorizing of Melvin Rogers, for example in his “Between Pain and Despair: What Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Missing,” presents an incred- ibly impoverished, unreliable, and inept reading of Black pessimism and the crisis of Black existence—it links democratic action to the imagination and clings to an “ontology of change” despite all evidence to the contrary in Black life. His work, however, represents a coterie of Black political optimists so blinded by democracy’s promise that they consider Black pain a form of political possibility. It is a perverse enterprise capitalizing on what we might call black jouissance—futurity constitutes the “temporal material” for surplus-pleasure in Black suffering, travail, and political failure. If there is any hope for the imagination and its endless circulation in contemporary Black thought, it will need to abandon time and refuse its seductions. The future is but one temporal value we must de-idealize and insert into an anti-Black will to power—one wreaking havoc across the globe. In these desperate times, Black existence needs a liberated imagination, an imagination liberated from formal thought, the world, destructive transcendence and immanence, and dogmatic preconditions. So, why continue to expend energy re-imagining the future and democracy? Let us focus Black imagining on enterprises that sustain us in the abyss. Outlining and presenting such enterprises requires tremendous spiritual and intellectual energy—but such investment is all we have.

250 Amst 66.1 (2021): 247-51 Abandoning Time: Black Nihilism and the Democratic Imagination

Works Cited Badiou, Alain. “The Ontology of Change.” YouTube. European Graduate School Video Lectures, 7 Feb. 2013. Web. 1 Dec. 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3y2dqovKboU. Baker, Mike, et al. “Three Words. 70 Cases: The Tragic History of ‘I Can’t Breathe.’” New York Times. New York Times, 29 June 2020. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/28/us/i-cant-breathe- police-arrest.html. Chambers, Samuel. “Working on the Democratic Imagination and the Limits of Deliberative Democracy.” Political Research Quarterly 58.4 (2005): 619-23. Print. Farred, Grant. “A Fidelity to Politics: Shame and the African American Vote in the 2004 Election.” Journal for the Study of Race, Nation, and Culture 12.2 (2006): 213-26. Print. Johnston, Adrian. Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2009. Print. Possenti, Vittorio. “Aquinas and Modern Judicial Nihilism (and Four Other Fig- ures: Camus, Kelsen, Nietzsche, Orwell.” Vittorio Possenti, 4 Feb. 2010. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. http://www.vittoriopossenti.it/domande-sul-nichilismo/99- aquinas-and-modern-juridical-nihilism-and-four-other-figures-camus- kelsen-nietzsche-orwell. Rogers, Melvin. “Between Pain and Despair: What Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Miss- ing.” Dissent. Dissent Magazine, 3 July 2015. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://www. dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/between-world-me-ta-nehisi-coates- review-despair-hope. Vattimo, Gianni. The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmod- ern Culture. Trans. Jon R. Snyder. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988. Print. Warren, Calvin. “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope.” The New Centennial Review 15.1 (2015): 215-48. Print.

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Radical Refusal and the Potential of Queer Indigenous Futures

Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne

In recent years, I have taught more and more contemporary speculative fiction in my courses on Indigenous literature and decolonial thought. The imaginative world-making that takes shape through speculation offers vital contestations of the politics of Indigenous death which structure settler colonialism in North America, both past and present. The Métis writer Cherie Dimaline’s young-adult novel, The Marrow Thieves, for instance, powerfully maps the potential ways that anti-Indigenous violence could shift and intensify as Canadian and U.S. settler societies collapse amidst a constellation of ecological, biological, psychological, and economic catastrophes. In the novel’s not-so-distant future, Indigenous people are hunted and the contents of their bones are harvested in order to help restore the settler colonists’ abilities to dream. The macabre narrative allegorizes the violence that is inflicted on Indigenous lives and lands by Euro-American colonialism and late capitalism while settlers’ lack of respect for peoples and lands produces an embodied disconnection from the imagination. In this bleak world of terror, Dimaline also crafts forms of resistance and healing through Indigenous collectivity and cultural knowledge. Her Indigenous characters find one another, find love, and create new multi-tribal communities with the land, away from the cities. At the novel’s conclusion, the strongest keeper of knowledge is a queer Indig- enous man who is reunited with his husband after years of being separated by the violence. The man was only able to escape imprisonment with the help of two Guyanese women who were conscripted into laboring in the settler state’s institutions of Indigenous destruction. For Dimaline, the solidarities between people of African descent and Indigenous peoples can help create hopeful, resilient futures where queerness is normalized.

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 253-57 253 Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne

The dystopian futures found in Indigenous literature appear ever- more prescient, as the students in my classes throughout 2020 have at- tested. At the time of this writing, the United States North-American, settler-imperial colony has the highest number of “recorded” deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic globally. Indigenous, racialized, and migrant-origin communities are suffering the most devastating biological, political-economic, and carceral impacts of the pandemic. What is more, the other-than-human lives, waters, and lands of this continent are enduring multiple ecological and climate crises. Fires are cascading across the West, water ways are being assaulted, and the lands that are currently identified as California are facing a dire, multi-year drought. During these ongoing catastrophes, the U.S. empire is undergoing a transfer of power. And yet, there are no clear answers as to what life and death in this colony will look like over the next few months or years. On the occasion of this special issue, my essay considers how the intersections of speculation and queer futurity in Indigenous fiction offer visions of what decolonial relationships and futures might look like when they are formed through a radical Indigenous politics of refusal in the face of U.S. empire. The concerns articulated in Native speculative fiction often speak to the violence of the past and present while also constructing decolonial possibilities through alternative political modes of connection and action. The queer Lipan Apache writer and earth scientist Darcie Little Badger’s short story, “Ne Łe!,” imagines another not-so-distant future where Indigenous people across the United States have been, yet again, forcibly removed from their homelands. Twenty-first-century urban relocation programs and unnarrated cataclysms on the planet’s surface have forced some peoples, such as the Diné, to live in earth orbit, occu- pying an outdated yet sovereign space station. Within the current context, the Diné Nation has experienced severe impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic throughout 2020, like many other Indigenous nations across the United States and Canada. Little Badger’s speculative future, then, at once echoes past and present disasters that the Diné have been subjected to through the machinations of settler-colonial governmentality, such as the creation of reservations during the long nineteenth century as well as the urban relocation programs that followed the Second World War. Against this speculative backdrop of Indigenous suffering, where history is repeated, Little Badger tells the story of two middle-aged In- digenous women falling in love aboard a spacecraft that is bound for a U.S. settler colony on Mars. The protagonist, Dottie, is a Lipan Apache veterinarian who has taken work caring for the Mars settlers’ expensive pet dogs, which the ship is transporting. Cora is a seasoned Diné copilot of the vessel who lives on the Diné space station. The women’s meeting, however, is happenstance as Cora abruptly wakes Dottie from her stasis sleep because of an emergency with the dogs’ stasis pods. Dottie assumes that Cora chose to wake her simply because she was Indigenous

254 Amst 66.1 (2021): 253-57 Radical Refusal and the Potential of Queer Indigenous Futures and wanted someone to “pal around” with (Little Badger 69). Cora explains that she, in fact, selected Dottie because she was the most experienced doctor onboard. Cora recognizes the lasting imprints of Dottie’s self-doubt, molded by a lifetime of being made to feel inadequate, particularly as an Indigenous woman in the sciences. The story, for example, opens with Dottie’s professional credentials being questioned by a male, non-Native security officer as she boards the ship. Cora tells Dottie, “[w]hen enough people look down on you, doubt takes root” (Little Bad- ger 70). Cora embraces Dottie with a comforting hug and her supportive energy contrasts the challenging, and sometimes cold, professional and personal relationships that Dottie has experienced. The women form a friendship while caring for the dogs. They share soft, intimate moments as well as stories from their pasts, shaped by colonialism. The women slowly fall for one another during the interplan- etary journey. Unlike Dottie’s previous relationships formed through infatuation, she describes Cora’s “gravity” as “gradually” and “gently” pulling her closer (Little Badger 73). Their relationship is based on mutual respect, kindness, and care. Cora’s companionship leads Dottie to question a future on Mars, even with the higher pay she will earn laboring for the colonists. Dottie decides to return to live with Cora on Orbiter Diné, the Navajo Nation’s “sovereign territory” (Little Badger 69). As a guest of the Diné, perhaps Dottie’s healing abilities can be of service to the peoples and other-than-human lives that share the space station. As Dottie and Cora embrace one another, they embrace a loving future of femme-centered relationality and Indigenous collectivity that exists apart from empire: “Hand in hand, we turned our backs on Mars” (Little Badger 76). Little Badger presents a complex speculative future where Indige- nous peoples are moving through space but continue to occupy subordi- nate positions. The women’s structured agencies are entangled with U.S. settler empire and the colonization of Mars (futures that some U.S. settlers and institutions are, in fact, striving towards today). The story, thus, allegorizes a dilemma facing Indigenous peoples living through U.S. occupation: participating in settler institutions (which are animated, in part, by liberal settler “democracy”) or following paths of horizontal collectivity beyond the settler state? By participating in colonial institutions, Indigenous subjects and communities are presented with the possibility of fleeting enfranchisement (higher pay laboring on Mars) within a hierarchy of life and death that is systemically anti-Indigenous and anti-Black. Little Badger transforms contemporary structures of U.S. planetary empire into a future of forced Indigenous relocation, exile in orbit, and Mars settler colonization. However, by centering two accomplished, queer, femme subjects who successfully navigate lives shaped by empire, Little Badger imagines loving Indigenous futurities that refuse to participate in further colonial endeavors. By turning towards Indig- enous relationships and communities and away from colonialism, “Ne

Amst 66.1 (2021): 253-57 255 Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne

Łe!” embodies what Anishinaabe scholar Grace L. Dillon calls biskaabiiyang, storied acts of “returning to ourselves” (Dillon 9). Biskaabiiyang stories highlight the importance of “discarding” ways of being that are shaped by colonial oppression and “alternatively refashioning ancestral tradition in order to flourish in the post-Native Apocalypse” (Dillon 9). According to Dillon, this “healing impulse” of Indigenous speculation crucially speaks to “all peoples, whether Indigenous or just passing through” (9). Cora and Dottie return to themselves and, through refusal, choose a life of collaboration and cohabitation with other Indigenous peoples in their sovereign territory. Both Dimaline’s and Little Badger’s works were published between 2016 and 2017, near the beginning of the Trump regime’s time in office. By drawing on histories of violence in the Americas, both authors imagined potential disasters that, in some ways, parallel our current conditions. Dimaline and Little Badger illustrate how “returning to ourselves” through Indigenous collectivity, love, and care—even out of necessity— offers hope and resilience in the face of world-altering events. During the time of COVID-19, Indigenous communities are being eviscerated by systemic neglect and disenfranchisement as they suffer another colonial pandemic. Liberal settler “democracies” in North America helped inaugurate and have worked to maintain many of the structures of violence that delimit Indigenous life today. Unless drastically reformed, liberal settler democracies, such as the United States, are unlikely to produce effective solutions to the challenges facing Indigenous communities today or in the future. In these times of tragedy, loss, suffering, and sorrow, perhaps what Indigenous communities can do is re/turn to one another through loving, horizonal relationships of care. They can continue to look upon U.S. liberal settler democracy with skepticism. They can continue to ask: what does colonial participation and incorpo- ration mean and entail? Will it result in further genocide, displacement, and disconnection from the Earth? Or, does it hold the potential of empowerment, the return of life and land and healthy futures? The true loss and lasting consequences of the pandemic are yet to be seen or comprehended, both within the “boundaries” of the United States and globally. However, if we can make any assessment of the impacts of COVID-19 on American democracy thus far, it is that the inequities and violences that are foundational to U.S. settler society have been exacerbated and further entrenched—even with record-breaking voter turnouts. Before COVID-19, the Indigenous, Black, and Brown peoples who comprise internal underclasses of U.S. empire, were struggling to survive genocide, new forms of enslavement, and systemic exclusions from life. They are enduring the devastating impacts of the biological, economic, and political crises created by the pandemic. They will continue struggling to survive in the wake of COVID-19 in the coming years. As the pandemic deaths increase, ecological devastation continues, and threats of White supremacist terrorism loom in

256 Amst 66.1 (2021): 253-57 Radical Refusal and the Potential of Queer Indigenous Futures the United States, the healing impetus articulated in femme-centered and queered Indigenous speculative futures might offer paths to healing through alternative forms of collectivity and solidarity. A politics of refusal through “returning to ourselves” is not a politics of isolation, retreat, or abandonment. It is a politics of turning to our communities and to one another, through compassion, beyond the organs of the settler state. Such a politics of refusal has capacities to generate new ways of being where Indigenous and racialized futurity is not solely mediated by colonial structures. Returning to ourselves can be lived through horizonal relationships that are based on mutual respect and care among the Indigenous, racialized, and migrant-origin peoples living through U.S. empire in this hemisphere.

Works Cited Dillon, Grace L. “Beyond the Grim Dust of What Was to a Radiant Possibility of What Could Be: Two-Spirit Survivance Stories.” Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time: An Indigenous LGBT Sci-Fi Anthology. Ed. Hope Nicholson. Win- nipeg: Bedside, 2016. 9-11. Print. Dimaline, Cherie. The Marrow Thieves. Toronto: DCB, 2017. Print. Little Badger, Darcie. “Ne Łe!” Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time: An Indige- nous LGBT Sci-Fi Anthology. Ed. Hope Nicholson. Winnipeg: Bedside, 2016. 60-76. Print.

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Monsters in a Moment of Danger: Global Climate Justice and U.S. Obligations

Julie Sze

“People who shut their eyes to reality invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” —James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village” (175)

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” —Antonio Gramsci (qtd. in Žižek)

The United States is burning, flooding, and exploding. I started writing this piece during a once-in-a-century global pandemic in a week when militias supported by the police attacked protestors of police violence, and when a major hurricane hit the Southeastern United States. I write mere months after a major derecho in Iowa, and after a trauma- tizing national election that brought the United States to the brink of dictatorship. The local County Sheriff’s office, which will not enforce mask wearing, has asked for the National Guard to be called in to face “insurrection” on the street. In California, where I live, climate change has led to hotter temperatures and to earlier and more intense wildfires that have burned over 4.5 million acres this year, by far the most on historical record. The skies over most of California burned bright orange in an apocalyptic homage to Blade Runner 2049. Crises of political legitimacy and overt state or state-sanctioned violence define the United States in ways not formerly visible to the mainstream. Authoritarianism is interlinked with racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, gender violence, militarism, and corporate capitalism. That crises are interconnected— police- and state-sanctioned violence, pandemic and public health, and climate disaster—is apparent to those around the world who protest

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 259-64 259 Julie Sze against fascists and extreme economic and social inequality made expo- nentially worse under COVID-19. The climate crisis has come home in the shape of hurricanes, heatwaves, and wildfires, and the old political order is crumbling. What takes its place is under fierce struggle. The action on the streets, in classrooms, and in stories shape and are shaped by government chambers and corporate boardrooms. When Donald Trump came to California after the wildfires, he continued to spread nonsense and to put blame on Californians for not raking leaves (despite the fact that 57 % of forests in California are under federal control). In a common de- lusion that mixes weather and climate, he said, “[i]t’s […] getting cooler” (qtd. in Baker et al.). Despite a president and millions of Americans (including, apparently, the infrastructure of the Republican Party), facts still matter—from COVID-19 to climate change. COVID-19 will not magically go away due to weather changes or drinking bleach, and climate disaster will not disappear because you wish it so. It seems horrific and depressing to need to say this explicitly, but acting as if facts and science do not exist will only make problems worse. Denial is a prison, and we need freedom now. Scientifically, the world is rapidly confronting hothouse earth (a chain of self-reinforcing change, leading to extreme climate warming and sea- level rise), and those with the least culpability are hardest hit. These include global climate change refugees, most visibly island residents in the Pacific Islands and the Caribbean, as well as people battered by hurricanes in Central America and tribal communities in Alaska and Louisiana. Some have called climate change “a crime against humanity” (Wisdom). These crimes against humanity include intensifying conditions of drought, flooding, wildfires, and water acidification, as well as the wide-scale death of ocean life such as coral reefs. Climate disruption is settled science, yet politicians continue to “debate” the question of whether the planet can “afford” to deal with climate change. Social scientists and humanists focus on the social and economic systems that exacerbate environmental abuses, unsustainable extraction of nature, and inequality. The consequences are massive, potentially leading to global movement of populations and increased violence and war, most recently seen in Central American states like Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala (McKibben). The United States has much to do with the present state of the world characterized by environmental racism, injustice, and climate disasters—a world that relies on the exploitation and cheapening of nature and peoples. Consider these two facts: – A report from Carbon Brief estimates that the United States is responsible for 25 % of cumulative carbon emissions since 1750 (until 1882, the largest emitter was the United Kingdom). The United States has unique culpability and responsibility in a whole range of environmental and social inequalities, and has much to account for in its reckoning with planet Earth (Irfan).

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– The U.S. military (with over 800 military bases around the world) by itself would be the fifty-eighth highest carbon emitter if it was its own country (Crawford).

How can we, as scholars based within the United States, or scholars of the United States, face the calamity of human-induced disruptions in our present and future? What are our ethical responsibilities given our heavy weight in creating these problems, not least of all elevating climate change denial (at the behest of oil and gas corporations) at the highest level of decision-making? How can we tackle this question now in the political context of a slow-moving coup and an attack on elections and democracy itself, witnessed first in voter disenfranchisement and now in lawsuits and state and national party platforms? To tackle these largest of questions, I turn to education and then back again to activism, which often emerges out of struggles aided and abetted by the naming and framing of problems by scholars.

Education

In my “Introduction to American Studies” class, after my lectures on “Climate Change, Climate Justice and the U.S.,” I asked students: “How is climate change a particularly American issue?” There are many different ways to answer the question, all of which call into question persistent and dangerous American exceptionalism. First and foremost, the imbalance of carbon impacts and responsibilities. Second, the specific role of the U.S. military. Third, exporting systems of economic globalization led largely (although not exclusively) by U.S.- based corporations that devastate ecosystems and political systems around the world. Fourth, cultural norms, values, and materializations of freedoms of mobility and individualism (single standalone houses, freeways / automobility, etc.).

Activism

On the question of framing responsibilities, activists focus on time and its relationship to space and politics. For instance, the U.S. Climate Action Network attempts to calculate how much of the burden each country should bear based on its historical contribution to the cloud of greenhouse gases, as well as its “capacity to pay”—a reflection of how rich the nation became during the fossil fuel era. The U.S. Climate Fair Share finds “that the US fair share of the global mitigation effort in 2030 is equivalent to a reduction of 195 % below its 2005 emissions levels, reflecting a fair share range of 173-229 %” (“US Climate Fair Share”). Climate chronicler Bill McKibben writes of this attempt to quantify U.S. burdens and responsibilities, “[w]e can’t meet our moral and practical burdens simply by reducing our own emissions; we’ve already put

Amst 66.1 (2021): 259-64 261 Julie Sze so much carbon into the air (and hence reduced the space that should rightly go to others) that we need to make amends.”

Amends

These ideas—fairness and making amends—are difficult concepts to face in the United States, given, as Richard Hofstadter and other critics of the American right have described, the country’s disproportionate adherence to largely ahistorical and anti-scientific threads in the service of industry and capital. And yet, amend we must. Amends must begin with clear recognition of what systems are in place and why. Here, the environmentalist and climate justice movements are central to the project of freedom. Alliances that focus on frontline / fenceline communities are flourishing in the United States. “Frontline / fenceline” refers to those communities and tribal nations that are first and worst impacted by climate change. Examples include Native Alaskans and In- digenous nations from New Orleans who are already facing sea-level rises that have swallowed their homes and villages. Coalitions like the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), the California Environmental Justice Alliance, and the Just Transition Alliance explicitly prioritize frontline and fenceline communities. The CJA comprises over 70 urban and rural frontline organizations and supporting networks that are “locally, trib- ally, and regionally-based racial and economic justice organizations of Indigenous Peoples, African American, Latinx, Asian Pacific Islander, and poor white communities who share legacies of racial and economic oppression and social justice organizing” (“About”). Within the United States, the climate justice movement offers a transformative justice approach to climate change aligned with the decolonial and anti-capitalist critique emerging from within the Global South. In my recent book, Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger, I ask: What crossroads and moment are we in now? What does this dangerous moment mean for the environment and for justice? What can we learn from struggles for environmental justice? My argument there, and in the case of climate justice, remains deceptively simple. Environmental justice movements are freedom movements that reframe the dominant discourse around problems and solutions. Understanding what environmental justice movements are, and what they are fighting against and for, is especially significant now. Environmental justice movements offer one ideal standpoint through which to understand historical and cultural forces that produce violence and death reign upon their communities and bodies. But environmental justice movements also offer stories of principled resistance to sustained and grim violence, death, and destruction of lives and bodies through movements, cultures, and stories. By reframing unjust environments and climate catastrophes as being rooted in history and politics, environmental justice movements focus on their problem analysis and solutions. Their justice-oriented approach is fo-

262 Amst 66.1 (2021): 259-64 Monsters in a Moment of Danger: Global Climate Justice and U.S. Obligations cused less on technological and policy “solutionism” that maintains the social, economic, and political order that produces the conditions of environmental violence in wildly disproportionate ways. Rather, social movements have long understood the prevalence, indeed the necessity, of violence for People of Color, Indigenous people, and poor people in the United States and globally embedded in the current economic, political, and ideological structures in place. They also focus on how narratives can act as a resource to reframe responses to such violence. For justice movements, it is not enough to say that problems are connected. When environmental and climate justice movements narrate connections analytically, they understand them as urgently spatial, political, temporal, and moral. I ended my book with an observation that applies to the climate justice coalitions I briefly mentioned. Simply put, there is no greater illustration of the American suicide cult of the current moment than in matters of climate or the environment. The significance of the environmental justice movement is to challenge the authorities of Whiteness, extraction, and violence through diverse voices, media, and perspectives that can be leveraged in powerful ways. Environmental justice movements make links, within the United States and across borders, and create cultures of solidarity. Environmental justice and climate justice movements travel between places, groups, and past-present-future. It is in these intercon- nections that justice movements are made and remade. This framework and praxis matter, now more than ever, as a principled base from which to bracingly face our collective planetary futures. Living in denial does not make the problem—whether climate change or COVID-19—go away, notwithstanding the “shifting baselines” that normalize mass death (Roberts). Although most people in the United States would prefer to ignore our histories and our debts to each other, as well as our relations to the rest of the world (thanks to our bracing enduring nationalist parochialism), the climate science is clear and the justice activists are absolutely and resolutely right. James Baldwin writes: “People who shut their eyes to reality invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster” (175). Now is the moment of monsters and those who seek to make their monstrosity seem logical, acceptable, and normal. Justice movements always remind us in their placards, music, and stories against this logical monstrosity, in slogans such as: “People and Planet over Profits.” In 1938, Langston Hughes wrote his poem “Kids Who Die.” It opens as follows:

This is for the kids who die, Black and white, For kids will die certainly. The old and rich will live on awhile, As always, Eating blood and gold, Letting kids die. (210-11)

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Hughes, Baldwin, and climate justice activists everywhere remind us that the old and rich eat their blood, gold, and oil, while kids (usually Black, Brown, and Indigenous) die. This horror is to be recognized as a monstrosity. Our urgency now is to maximize our collective convergences towards an ethic of care, in the spirit of solidarity, and to bend the arc of justice and freedom—from oil and all forms of extraction, hierarchy, and violence. The time is now.

Works Cited “About Climate Justice Alliance.” Climate Justice Alliance, n. d. Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://climatejusticealliance.org/about/. Baker, Peter, Lisa Friedman, and Thomas Kaplan. “As Trump again Rejects Science, Biden Calls Him a ‘Climate Arsonist.’” New York Times. New York Times, 17 Sept. 2020. Web. 13 Dec. 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/14/us/ politics/trump-biden-climate-change-fires.html. Baldwin, James. “Stranger in the Village.” Notes of a Native Son. 1955. Boston, MA: Beacon, 1983. 159-75. Print. Crawford, Neta. “Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War.” Watson Institute / Brown University, 13 Nov. 2019. Web. 13 Dec. 2020. https:// watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/Pentagon%20 Fuel%20Use%2C%20Climate%20Change%20and%20the%20Costs%20 of%20War%20Revised%20November%202019%20Crawford.pdf. Hughes, Langston. “Kids Who Die.” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Ernest Roessel. New York: Vintage, 1995. 210-11. Print. Irfan, Umair. “Why the US Bears the Most Responsibility for Climate Change, in One Chart.” Vox. Vox Media, 12 Dec. 2019. Web. 13 Dec. 2020. https://www. vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/4/24/18512804/climate-change- united-states-china-emissions. McKibben, Bill. “The Climate Crisis Newsletter.” The New Yorker. The New Yorker, n. d. Web. 13 Dec. 2020. https://link.newyorker.com/view/5be9ed20 3f92a404691a00acd9dc6.giu/73cb23a7. Roberts, David. “The Scariest Thing about Global Warming (and Covid-19).” Vox. Vox Media, 4 Dec. 2020. Web. 13 Dec. 2020. https://www.vox.com/energy- and-environment/2020/7/7/21311027/covid-19-climate-change-global- warming-shifting-baselines. Sze, Julie. Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger. Oakland: U of California P, 2020. Print. “US Climate Fair Share.” US Climate Action Network, Dec. 2020. Web. 13 Dec. 2020. https://usfairshare.org/?mbid&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_ mailing=TNY_ClimateCrisis_120220&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_med ium=email&bxid=5be9ed203f92a404691a00ac&cndid=42807723&hasha =f656531053c32340491f1294ef9a8f3f&hashb=a2e1aee42899ece6102d1dc e66ff5dd6a571caaf&hashc=6f17d442eaf1c2b45a3d50fa224cb625825b0ce 94c7fe5693c06b4d904e9bc5e&esrc=no_source_code&utm_term=TNY_ ClimateCrisis%3F. The Wisdom to Survive: Climate Change, Capitalism, and Community. Dir. John Ankele and Anne Macksoud. Old Dog Documentaries, 2013. DVD. Žižek, Slavoj. “A Permanent Economic Emergency.” New Left Review 64 (2005). Web. 1 Dec. 2020. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii64/articles/slavoj- zizek-a-permanent-economic-emergency.

264 Amst 66.1 (2021): 259-64 Sense of an Ending: On Apocalyptic Maneuvers and Ethics of Collapse

Christine Hentschel

On November 5, as U.S. votes were still being counted and Trump was losing key states while declaring his victory, Judith Butler noted: “The tyrant spiraling down calls for an end to testing, to counting, to science and even to electoral law, to all those inconvenient methods of verifying what is and is not true in order to spin his truth one more time. If he has to lose, he will try to take democracy down with him.” A week later, on November 13, when the tyrant spoke out publicly for the first time after the election was called for Joe Biden, he uttered a sentence that journalists came to interpret as the first sign toward ad- mitting that he might not reign after January 2021: “Whatever happens in the future—who knows which administration it will be, I guess time will tell” (Trump). When the American people had spoken, he wanted the future “to tell”; when the end of his presidency had been declared officially, he created an air of uncertainty and chaos. I want to read the nervous public statements from the last weeks of the Trump presidency as dimensions of an apocalyptic maneuver—both by Trump himself and his supporters—of denying, divining, awakening to, or longing for “the end.” I contrast this maneuver with an apocalyptic sentiment of a very different ethical and affective investment—namely, the concern with societal collapse or even the extinction of humanity through climate catastrophe.

Apocalyptic Maneuvers: Cruel, Spectacular, and Messy Endings

After Trump’s “sign,” the cruel final acts of claiming sovereignty were accelerating: the execution of people incarcerated at federal prisons, including a female survivor of sexual violence who suffered from

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 265-69 265 Julie Sze mental illness; the diversification of methods of killing people on death row, including firing squads and poison gas; as well as the presidential pardon of some of his most prominent allies and family members involved in the business of his presidency. Trump’s cruel last acts not only incorporate the actions of a narcissist and irresponsible tyrant, but are themselves expression of an “apocalyptic populism,” which Wendy Brown identified as one of three strains of white support of Trump in the 2016 elections. Apocalyptic populism is a resentful attitude out of a sense of an ending of white male rule. It “yearns for disruption and revenge” (5). The apocalyptic populists, Brown argues, “are animated more by humiliation and rage than by fear. They responded to the boor- ishness, the bravado, the swagger, the willingness to blow things up without caring where the pieces would land” (5-6). Their impulse is to “take the world with them as their domination comes to an end,” Brown writes (24). The announcement of indoor holiday parties at the White House in the midst of record-breaking numbers of COVID-19 deaths is just one of the many cynical convergences of this spectacular version of apocalyptic populism in the last days of Trump’s reign. These maneuvers to kill, avenge, punish, or celebrate in the midst of death emphasize an underlying characteristic of authoritarian populism that Eva von Redecker conceptualizes as the aggressive defense of “phantom possession,” a logic of property in which others “figure as ‘thieves’” trying to steal allegedly rightful power from actual oppres- sors. “[Phantom-owners] feel dispossessed and want to conquer—not to have and keep, but to wreck and break. Only in turning against the ob- ject in full destructiveness, only in the moment of violence, is their full sovereignty fleetingly realized: episodic absolute dominion” (57). From the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” rallies after the election to the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, this logic of aggressively defending a phantom possession is laid bare: No matter who you have voted for, we own the power and the right to reign! (And in the meantime, we can already come and create chaos.) Apocalyptic populists, Wendy Brown writes, “seek restored white male entitlement, or at least its political affirmation, even if it can’t be materially restored, even if it’s all they’ve got as the world goes to hell and they help take it there” (8-9). While looking on with jealousy at progressive identity politics (von Redecker 55), Stop the Steal protesters made a point of inundating Black Lives Matter Plaza with bodies to eclipse the massive words “Black Lives Matter” painted on the ground, as well as tearing down the plaza’s anti-racist and anti-police-brutality artwork. At the insurrection on January 6th by an almost entirely white mob, a makeshift gallow with a ready-made noose was part of the messages installed outside the Capitol building (Borger). A final dimension of such apocalyptic maneuvering transpires via the QAnon conspiracy cosmology, which has grown rapidly during the pandemic in the United States, but also in Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Germany, and is closely interwoven with anti-lockdown protests

266 Amst 66.1 (2021): 265-69 Monsters in a Moment of Danger: Global Climate Justice and U.S. Obligations and anti-vaccination movements. Adherents of the secret figure Q claim that a “deep state” has kidnapped and tortured thousands of children, so that Hollywood actors and Democrats can ingest the rejuvenating substance Adrenochrome that is harvested from the abducted children. Trump, in this story, is secretly fighting this cabal. According to Q’s prophecies, the “destruction of the global cabal is imminent” and a “Great Awakening,” and, ultimately, salvation lies ahead, as Adrienne LaFrance notes. Ritual phrases exhorted to the Q community such as “trust the plan,” “the calm before the storm,” “nothing can stop what is coming,” and “enjoy the show,” all suggest a force bigger than any human agency and a spectacular final show at the end of our world. A QAnon supporter in Germany explained to me in an interview that a race war of cosmic proportions is around the corner, that we have already “entered a new dimension” and that vaccination is a key strategy in the attempt to kill and enslave “us” (Silke). Apocalyptic projections, feminist theo- logian Catherine Keller writes, are about “some cataclysmic showdown in which, despite tremendous collateral damage, good must triumph in the near future with the help of some transcendental power” (11). The apocalyptic maneuver here is that of divining a final war of good versus evil, of freedom versus slavery, deciphering the signs and codes by both Q and Trump, and imagining the apocalypse as an epic show. In this air of apocalyptic maneuvering, the end is many things: that which the tyrant and his supporters refuse to accept, but when facing it, that which offers a pathway of cruelty; or that which is embraced and longed for, a great awakening and a spectacular final show. In the current climate of apocalyptic nervousness, a cruel excitement for the end and the allowance to destroy everything and finally take revenge manifests itself on the streets, in chatrooms, in the White House, and it culminated in the Capitol rampage.

Apocalyptic Sentiments against the Tyranny of Denial

“Apocalypse” means “to unveil, to reveal, to disclose”; in the brutal imaginary of the last moments, “truth blinks with cosmic excitement” (Keller 1). But as a deadly disease, widespread wildfires, racist violence, and violent polarizations prevail in the United States and elsewhere, apocalyptic sentiments seem to seep in from different sides. Doctors have talked about an “‘apocalyptic’ Coronavirus surge” (Rothfeld et al.); the Californian fires have been described as “orange hellscapes” (Nijhuis); and public intellectuals, such as Jonathan Franzen, have called to stop “pretending the climate apocalypse can be stopped” (Franzen). This is a different apocalyptic sentiment, without much of an expectation of triumph, revenge, or salvation. One that is more about the saddened realization that we are facing humanity’s end by way of the devastating effects of the climate catastrophe. Both apocalyptic engagements actively work through the end, but with a dramatically different affective and

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ethical investment with regard to the urgency of the major existential and political crises we face. One is cynical, vengeful, and destructive on its way down; the other struggles to find orientation in the realization of collapse and extinction. Against the manifestation of strength, the thinkers and activists concerned with societal collapse in the face of climate change emphasize vulnerability: that of the human species, the particular vulnerabilities of long-marginalized groups, and that of all life on the planet. Against the promise to take back or reclaim a stolen future, they mourn what is lost forever: species, rainforests, polar icecaps, living environments. Instead of giving in to a “cruel optimism” (Berlant), their attitude is pessimistic, full of despair, anger, and fear, yet seeking attunement and care (Grove 233). Against the display of ultimate sovereignty, their existential statement is that “we are not in control anymore”: tipping points and cascading effects have created such unforeseeable dynamics that all we can do is find orientation for “navigating the climate tragedy,” e. g., to organize resilience in a more collective way (Bendell 22). In total contrast to apocalyptic populism’s cruel celebrations of the end, this engagement with the end is driven by an ethics of collapse—ethics as a struggle for the common values on a damaged planet, or in Jairus Grove’s words, as “the means to intervene in the vitality of becoming, not to steer its course as captains of our destiny but as attempts to drag our feet in the water in hopes of going productively off course” (232). Our time is a time when everything is ending, Catalonian philosopher Marina Garcés writes (13). Humanity has entered a “posthumous condition” in which threats and death are constantly looming and our question is no longer “where to go,” but “for how long” (Garcés 14). Needed in such dark times is not a “great awakening” but, as Garcés argues, a “new radical enlightenment”: a rethinking of the vital link between knowledge and action, and a reimagining of the consequences of our actions. “With all the knowledge of humanity at our disposition we can only brake or accelerate our fall into the abyss” (9; translation mine). Those sick of the tyranny of denial may perhaps not so much hope for a new beginning, but rather for a different—ethical—kind of apocalyptic engagement that takes the detour by way of the end, aiming toward finding orientation on a common ground of emancipatory action in the 1 midst of myriad existential crises.

1 Thanks to Susanne Krasmann, Chris Hammer- Works Cited mann, Eva von Redecker, Boris Vormann, and Heike Bendell, Jem. “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.” IFLAS Paul for their comments on an earlier version Occasional Paper 2 (2018): 1-35. Print. of this text, to Stefano Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011. Print. Maezzilli-Daechsel and Borger, Julian. “Insurrection Day: When White Supremacist Terror Came to the Andrew Wildermuth US Capitol.” The Guardian. The Guardian, 9 Jan. 2021. Web. 15 Jan. 2021. for copy editing, and Friederike Hansen for https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/09/us-capitol-insurrec- research assistance. tion-white-supremacist-terror.

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Butler, Judith. “Is the Show Finally over for Donald Trump?” The Guardian. The Guardian, 5 Nov. 2020. Web. 5 Dec. 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2020/nov/05/donald-trump-is-the-show-over-election- presidency. Brown, Wendy. “Apocalyptic Populism.” Eurozine 30. Aug. 2017: 1-30. Web. 5 Dec. 2020. https://www.eurozine.com/apocalyptic-populism. Franzen, Jonathan. “What If We Stopped Pretending?” The New Yorker. The New Yorker, 8 Sep. 2019. Web. 5 Dec. 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/ culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending. Garcés, Marina. Nueva Ilustración Radical. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2017. Print. Grove, Jairos. Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World. Dur- ham, NC: Duke UP, 2019. Print. Keller, Catherine. Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1996. Print. LaFrance, Adrienne. “The Prophecy of Q: American Conspiracy Theories Are Entering a Dangerous New Phase.” The Atlantic. The Atlantic, 14 May 2020. Web. 5 Dec. 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-nothing-can-stop-what-is-coming/610567/. Nijhuis, Michelle. “The West Coast Wildfires Are Apocalypse, Again.” The New Yorker. The New Yorker, 20 Oct. 2020. Web. 5 Dec. 2020. https://www. newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/the-west-coast-wildfires-are-apocalypse-again. Redecker, Eva von. “Ownership’s Shadow: Neoauthoritarianism as Defense of Phantom Possession.” CRITICAL TIMES 3.1 (2020): 33-67. Print. Rothfeld, Michael, et al. “13 Deaths in a Day: An ‘Apocalyptic’ Coronavirus Surge at an N. Y. C. Hospital.” New York Times. New York Times, 25 Mar. 2020. Updated 14 Apr. 2020. Web. 5 Dec. 2020. https://www.nytimes. com/2020/03/25/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus-hospitals.html. Silke, Personal Interview. 21 August 2020, Hamburg. [name changed]. Trump, Donald J. “President Trump: ‘Who Knows Which Administration It Will Be.’” BBC News. BBC, 13 Nov. 2020. Web. 5 Dec. 2020. https://www.bbc. com/news/av/election-us-2020-54937350.

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Beyond American Dystopia: On the Rise of Apocalyptic Visions in the Contemporary United States

Stefan Höhne

1 The Future’s Not What It Used to Be

According to recent media discourse, American contemporary life has finally managed to imitate art, specifically dystopian fiction.- Es pecially in recent years, countless journal articles, TV reports, books, think pieces, and op-eds have claimed again and again that the United States is presently nothing more or less than a dystopian nightmare realized. A flood of headlines—for example, “Trump’s America Is like a Dystopian Novel” (Feffer), “California Is Living America’s Dystopian Future” (LeMenager), or simply “America Is a Dystopia” (Rajendra- Nicolucci)—present grim and cynical assessments of current political, social, and economic conditions, often with fatalistic undertones. Comparing American society to a dystopian fantasy-turned-reality has also become the basis for memes on social media, as well as the topic of millions of tweets, Facebook posts, and Reddit threads. At the same time, large and small screens have been flooded with highly successful dystopian stories for all demographics, from movies like The Hunger Games and Divergent to TV series like The Walking Dead and The Hand- maid’s Tale. Along with this recent surge of tropes in both popular entertainment and political analysis, dystopian narratives have taken on new meanings and functions. While dystopianism has traditionally been employed to warn us of a grim future, often serving as a cautionary tale of possible technological, economic, and environmental dangers, in recent years it has become more exigent and urgent. It has also transformed into something else: namely, a powerful reflection of the present. Even after the 2020 elections, with the Trump administration voted out, these interpretations do not seem to be decelerating.

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 271-77 271 Stefan Höhne

Of course, at first glance, many societal symptoms in contemporary America appear to support such dark and hopeless descriptions: an out- of-control police force arrests people for any reason and regularly shoots them dead (especially if they are not White); a deeply corrupt and nihilis- tic political class operates hand in hand with a crypto-fascist administration; massive economic disparities deepen by the day; technology-driven surveillance pervades all aspects of life; a murderous deportation regime is deeply entrenched from border to border; a deadly pandemic spreads out of control; and the effects of global climate crisis are more and more severely felt each year. Reading through these often compelling diagnoses, one may well wonder: If the hellhole of despair that is the United States today does not constitute a realized dystopia, what does? However, while these diagnoses and narratives may be fitting, they are often based on a set of problematic assumptions and blind spots, especially with regard to race, that can be fatalistic and counterproductive to social change. In the following, I want to explore the conventional genealogy of White-authored dystopian thought and highlight some of its historical dynamics and themes. I will discuss some of the problems that arise from buying into the rhetoric of America as a dystopian society, and conclude by offering some alternatives.

2 Histories of Dark Futures

Dystopian thought, both in fiction and in relation to a diagnosis of the times and critique of contemporary society, is hardly a new phenomenon. While not as old as its optimistic twin, utopianism, which can be traced back at least to Thomas More’s famous 1516 book, Utopia, the genre nonetheless stretches back more than two centuries. As Gregory Claeys shows in his insightful 2017 study, Dystopia: A Natural History, it originated as a form of satire and parody of utopian ideas of the Enlight- enment, including the French Revolution. In the late nineteenth century, dystopianism became a way to comment on and critique the massive socio-political transformations erupting in Europe and North America. By the early twentieth century, it had found its defining themes in dark assessments of the impact of scientific discoveries and technology, as well as in bleak scenarios of oppressive and dictatorial social order. Despite growing in relevance and producing some seminal works that drew upon fascination with Bolshevism and fascism, such as Al- dous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), dystopianism was relatively marginal in comparison to the increasingly utopian ideals and projects that characterized the first decades after World War II, in the United States and beyond. After the widespread upheavals of the 1960s, however, this began to change, as pessimistic and apocalyptic visions of near and distant futures slowly became more prominent in both fiction and politics. Following the late David Grae- ber, we can date this turning point quite precisely. As he argues in his

272 Amst 66.1 (2021): 271-77 Beyond American Dystopia essay “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit” (2015), it was in the early 1970s that utopian thought started to fade, eventually replaced by dark dystopian imaginaries and predictions. Novels like Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) and movies like The Omega Man (1971), or Alvin Toffler’s non-fiction bestseller Future Shock (1970), each paint grim pictures of a near-future United States, with its population suffering from alienation, anomy, technological takeover, or social and environmental collapse. What becomes apparent in the White-authored hegemonic dystopian discourse from this era is a deep sense of disillusionment with the American promise of freedom, liberty, and equality. Furthermore, if their—predominantly male—creators are often motivated by a feeling of betrayal and a promise unfulfilled, one has to ask what this promise actually entailed and when exactly it was broken—and by whom. For Graeber, one crucial factor is what he calls “technological disappointment” (109). The era between the end of World War II and the 1970s was fueled by technological optimism and faith in a more just and egalitarian society brought about by innovations. While manned space travel sparked public imaginations of a limitless, expansive future for humankind, the 1950s and 1960s also witnessed a flood of advancements in medicine, such as vaccines, birth control pills, and in vitro fertilization. These advances sparked visions of abandoning traditional models of family and reproduction, potentially allowing more freedom for women. Around the same time, American consumers, especially from the White middle class, experienced a surge of new technologies promising a more comfortable and practically labor-free life, from microwave ovens to home air conditioning. In the face of these developments, science fiction and utopian thought experienced something of a media golden age, with the TV series Star Trek as its poster child. From the early 1970s onwards, however, this rapid pace of technological innovation slowed considerably, while questions of the democratic control of such new technologies took center stage, particularly with respect to nuclear power. For Graeber, the 1970s also marked a profound shift “from investment in technologies associated with the possibility of alternative futures to investment in technologies that furthered labor discipline and social control” (120), such as telecommunication networks. The relation between technological progress and social emancipation, once assumed to be reliably strong, thus became alarmingly brittle. In the decades to come, far gloomier and more hopeless prospects emerged for human society, as well as the planet itself. Influential studies of the time, such as The Energy Balloon (Udall et al. in 1974) or the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. in 1972), popularized these ideas among the American middle classes and gave these dystopian scenarios a scientific foundation. The resulting skepticism and nihilism were perhaps best vocalized in the battle cry of Europe and North America’s then-emergent punk youth movements: “No Future!”

Amst 66.1 (2021): 271-77 273 Stefan Höhne

The rise of dystopian thought from the 1970s onwards comes with a sharpened focus on themes that not only dominated late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century science fiction, but that have also become central to public discourse today: environmental collapse, the excesses of neo-liberal capitalism and corporate domination, technologies of control, and economic and social upheaval. Especially in the past decade, these dystopian tropes have increasingly transcended the realm of fiction and entertainment, entering media discourse and political analysis and eventually becoming part of the standard repertoire of journalists, pundits, and politicians. As a result, these cautionary tales transform into astute assessments of the present.

3 Three Modes of Critique

There are several ways to be skeptical of these narratives and diagnoses of a dystopian present, all of which are justified, and all of which miss the point. First, it is possible to critique apocalyptic interpretations of the present by insisting that things are not (yet) bad or grim enough. The United States does not actually have cybernetic RoboCops roaming the streets, omnipotent AI overlords controlling and enslaving its population, or a full-blown climate apocalypse. Simply put, these diagnoses tend to be overly hysterical, distorting political analysis for the sake of exaggerated polemics. A second form of critique comes from the other end of the spectrum, arguing that the current American dystopia did not newly arrive with Donald Trump or the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, from this view, the United States was rather founded as a dystopia. This point is made for example in a 2020 essay in the online journal OneZero, titled “Ameri- ca Has always Been a Dystopia: Too Many of Us just Haven’t Been Pay- ing Attention.” Author Brian Merchant postulates that for many people in North America, “the real dystopia arrived long ago,” especially for Native Americans, People of Color, the poor, and other marginalized communities. It was only in recent years, perhaps alongside the further deterioration of the middle class, that the intrinsic dystopian nature of the United States has become apparent to a wider group of people, thereby finding its way into mainstream public discourse. This brings me to a third way of responding critically to these diagnoses, probably the most thought-provoking variation, namely by stating that they present a distorted or utterly insufficiently complex analysis of the actual contemporary dystopian condition of the United States. Most prominently, as dystopian analyses render oppression primarily along lines of class or, less often, gender, they tend to downplay or ignore race as a crucial dimension of technological and totalitarian oppression. Of course, Afrofuturist visions and other traditions of Black science fiction have focused on People of Color for over a century, but until recently, they were largely ignored by mainstream culture. This

274 Amst 66.1 (2021): 271-77 Beyond American Dystopia remarkable absence of issues of race in many White-authored dystopian narratives is even more remarkable as these works usually rely heavily on existing forms of racism as inspiration for their scenarios. Following cultural critic Angelica Jade Bastién, “[t]he genre hyperconsumes the narratives of people of color—which read as allegories for slavery and colonialism—yet remains starkly white in the casting of major roles, and often refuses to acknowledge race altogether.” Furthermore, according to this third form of critique, it seems that there is not much to learn from such narratives on how to overcome, abolish, or even reform our allegedly dystopian present. The dominant way to do so, according to most films, series, and novels, would be to rely on (or become) a hero, doing all the work alone or with the help of a small group of supporters. Eventually, this one-person revolutionary force might inspire a vanguard to join the uprising—or in rare cases, even the masses—but this usually only happens after the primary vil- lain (a master tyrant, an evil computer, etc.) has been destroyed. Bastién also points out that “most dystopian films end up ignoring the thorny politics of entrenched systems of oppression in favor of signaling out one lead character who gloriously resists and somehow survives—a conservative narrative that suggests oppression can be overcome if people just try hard enough.” Combine these overly simplistic stories with almost exclusively White protagonists, who are shown as both most affected by tyranny and most able to undo it, and the reactionary, if not counter- emancipatory, nature of these narratives becomes apparent.

4 Towards a Dialectical Dystopianism

While the modes of critique briefly sketched above are all more or less valid, I want to close this short piece by offering an even more fundamental criticism of such dystopian analysis, while highlighting possible alternatives. I want to advance the argument that there is something inherently problematic about dystopian thought as a mode of social and political diagnostics. To make this point clear, we need to look at how ideas related to its optimistic counterpart, utopianism, have been laid out and mobilized in political explorations. All now-famous classic utopian visions, from Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun and Charles Fourier’s Phalanstère to Robert Owen’s New Harmony, present their ideal societies in a perfected form—so well-established that social change seems to be undesired, even unthinkable. The same holds true for the more down-to- earth visions of alternative world designs put forward by twentieth-century planners, social engineers, and activists, including Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, or Jane Jacobs’s diverse, scaled-down urban neighborhoods. Conceptualized as ideal social configurations manifest in perfected spatial form, these visions have a strong tendency to become fixed, fundamental, and timeless, thus ren-

Amst 66.1 (2021): 271-77 275 Stefan Höhne dering irrelevant the struggles that would be necessary to establish them. Any transformation towards or beyond this ideal state becomes difficult, if not impossible, to imagine, let alone to realize. David Harvey points out these inherent contradictions of utopianism in his influential study Spaces of Hope (2000). As he puts it: “Utopias of spatial form are typically meant to stabilize and control the processes that must be mobilized to build them. In the very act of realization, therefore, the historical process takes control of the spatial form that is supposed to control it” (172). Similar contradictions apply to the countless diagnoses of contemporary American society as a realized dystopia. In mobilizing an absolute “presentism” that negates the social dynamics and countercur- rents of the present order, such analyses ultimately become fatalistic and hopeless, rather than dynamically critical. In both fiction and political analysis, such perspectives tend to prime us for catharsis or resignation, while offering no possible modes of practice to prevent or reverse the real-life collapse of society. To escape such cynicism, a different, more dialectical concept of both utopianism and dystopianism might help: not a concept that aims to replace the grim and hopeless present with an alternative ideal society, but one that instead understands utopianism and dystopianism as social processes rather than as spatial formations. Understanding the various actors, historical dynamics, conflicts, and contingencies of contemporary U.S. politics would allow us to develop far deeper interpretations and possible alternatives than does simply pointing to dystopian qualities that are immediately recognizable from fictional accounts. This also entails acknowledging the different circumstances and motivations of people who aim to survive and change the current conditions of oppression and exploitations. As Brian Merchant also points out, the worst we can do right now is “glibly waving off dystopia as some always-approaching, faceless Empire without zeroing in on the nation’s institutional prejudices, its targets for violence, its specific hatreds.” If we continue to wallow in the fatalistic narratives of America as an already-realized dystopian fantasy, we guarantee complicity in turning these scenarios into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Works Cited Bastién, Angelica Jade. “Why Don’t Dystopias Know How to Talk About Race?” Vul- ture. New York Media, 4 Aug. 2017. Web. 27 Nov. 2020. https://www.vulture. com/2017/08/why-dont-dystopias-know-how-to-talk-about-race.html. Claeys, Gregor. Dystopia: A Natural History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017. Print. Feffer, John. “Trump’s America Is like a Dystopian Novel, with One Important Dif- ference.” The Nation. The Nation Company, L. P., 13 Mar. 2017. Web. 25 Nov. 2020. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/trumps-america-is-like-a- dystopian-novel-with-one-importance-difference/. Graeber, David. “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.” The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. By Graeber. New York: Melville, 2015. 105-48. Print.

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Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000. Print. LeMenager, Stephanie. “California Is Living America’s Dystopian Future.” The Conversation. The Conversation Trust, 4 Nov. 2019. Web. 24 Nov 2020. https://theconversation.com/california-is-living-americas-dystopian- future-126014. Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Beh- rens III. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe, 1972. Print. Merchant, Brian. “America Has always Been a Dystopia: Too Many of Us just Haven’t Been Paying Attention.” OneZero. Medium, 23 June 2020. Web. 22 Nov. 2020. https://onezero.medium.com/its-always-been-a-dystopia- 858ef606832f. Rajendra-Nicolucci, Avi. “America Is a Dystopia.” The Michigan Daily, 14 June 2020. Web. 28 Nov. 2020. https://www.michigandaily.com/section/opinion/ op-ed-america-dystopia. Udall, Stewart, Charles Conconi, and David Osterhout. The Energy Balloon. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. Print.

Amst 66.1 (2021): 271-77 277

American Utopia and Climate Change

Rosemary Wakeman

No place on the globe has been more crowded with “utopian longing” than the United States. From the country’s founding, countless people on both sides of the Atlantic have believed that a new and enlightened society was taking form on the North American continent. No matter that reality rarely lived up to this dream, it has still persisted. The myth of paradise has been inspirational to untold numbers of people. One reason is that the United States is world-famously individualistic. As the story goes—if you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, work hard, do your civic duty, you are free to better your lot in life. Self-determination is the prize. But this reverie is unlikely to serve American democracy all that well in the future. It has veered too far from social realities. The current pandemic has tragically illustrated the limits of individualism. When refusing a facemask is a sign of freedom, Patrick Henry’s impassioned “give me liberty or give me death” is not just a worn-out platitude. If the pandemic illustrates the need for an adjusted democratic vision, so does the climate crisis. The litany of calamities is daunting. We will see disruptions in the global food supply, biodiversity, loss, and resource depletion. Mass migrations—particularly by communities along coastal areas and floodplains as whole regions become uninhabitable— are already upending social stability. No person, no community will be able to withstand the impact of floods, droughts, fires, and storms without competent and active government assistance. So far, the federal government has been anything but capable. Each environmental crisis is treated as a “once in a lifetime” event. Individual states fumble to respond to the latest catastrophe. Climate deniers insist on their righ- teousness in the face of overwhelming evidence. Families in the path of destruction are left to run for cover and pick up the pieces on their own. Both the vector-born pandemic and the climate crisis—and indeed they are related—have exposed feckless leadership and a democracy tittering on the edge.

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 279-82 279 Rosemary Wakeman

And yet there are signs of hope. Fear and uncertainty can be a catalyst for new aspirations and collective action. Can the pandemic and climate crisis sharpen our angle of vision on American democracy and correct the failures of the past? People are asking themselves deeply philosophical questions about their role in society and the role of government. The millennial generation has grown up with betrayed promises about the good life in America. Weakened democratic institutions and few economic prospects have made them cynical about familiar narratives. Yet, they are also more utopian, more insistent on radical change. As someone who has written on past utopian visions of cities, I have often found myself facing students in a seminar asking not about the past, but about their future. What kind of cities should we design? What kind of utopia do we need? Utopian projects tend to appear exactly in times of dramatic upheaval. When things fall apart, utopian energies are released. As thought experiments, they are a provocation. The point is to imagine a hopeful future in the face of turmoil. Millen- nials and their children will live out their lives in the Anthropocene— a new epoch of ecological crises caused by the human impact on the biosphere. It will transform life as we know it. The effects will deeply impact American society and its democratic institutions. It is not clear that governmental practices as they are currently imagined can address these challenges. The scale and intensity of the environmental problems will invite no end of authoritarian fantasies. Radical geoengineer- ing solutions will be paraded by scientists willing to experiment with natural forces. Climate migration will test ideas about citizenship and human rights. And yet the narrative of catastrophe can be shifted to a more positive register. What sort of politics will we practice in the Anthropocene? I believe that a new vision is in order, one that can bust open the boundaries of creative thinking. Let us consider political geography for a moment. Climate change makes the question of settlement far more urgent. The U.S. population will increasingly coalesce around seven to ten megaregions encompassing a dense geography and kaleidoscope of cities and towns. In some cases, they will even spread across U.S. borders. This will slash through the tangle of an imagined electorate divided into liberal coasts and conservative interior, city and suburb, or typical racial and ethnic enclaves. Not when Latinos have moved far out into the hinterland of the Gulf Coast, or when South Asians have created vibrant communities on the periphery of the Northeast Corridor, to take just two examples. Not when both men and women are living and working, and commuting daily around towns in polymorphous regional constellations that have little to do with the old “hub and spoke” idea of a skyscraper metropolis surrounded by outskirts. This requires a new kind of democratic imagination. The practice of democracy will involve empowerment of a variety of identities for individual citizens and communities and a bridging of ideals about our shared commons. This is a glimpse at a different world.

280 Amst 66.1 (2021): 279-82 American Utopia and Climate Change

It is an opportunity to break down older social categories and historical inequalities and reframe a new kind of public sphere and restorative world view. It will include ethical and philosophical dimensions. Can we imagine settlements around social services and public resources, the human needs of families and communities? Can we create an American public sphere around the principles of care and repair? Even more to the point, climate turbulence will force us to think in terms of the deep ecology of these places and how communities can survive and thrive within them. Settlement patterns will be laid out in terms of watersheds, coastal and intertidal zones, rivers and estuaries. It will depend on ecological reflexivity to ongoing climate emergencies and the disruption of material resource flows. This creates entirely new geographic imaginaries. The dichotomy between nature and civilization will be broken down in a new kind of knowledge politics. It may well mean the rise of “citizen science.” Communities will monitor and share environmental data with experts and local government in the process of decision-making. This kind of shared stewardship will take shape around regenerative living patterns within local ecosystems. It will test the impact of human intervention and require a new institutional structure that circumvents ideological confrontation and encourages social pluralism and citizen expertise. This kind of radical democracy will be more inclusive and depend on diverse processes of deliberation. Inertia in the face of climate change inevitably risks some sort of eco-authoritarianism. Preventing it will entail informed public debate and referen- dums, intergovernmental and expertise exchange. It may well require plebiscites on a continental-wide or even global scale (Mert 138). Can we speculate about universal citizenship and new civic rights that respond to the Anthropocene and to the reality of climate migration? Can we envisage an entirely new scale of democracy? Population matters to democratic politics. The future will require us to think of climate migration at an entirely different magnitude. The predictions for climate-induced displacement top 250 million people worldwide by 2020. It is already taxing traditional notions of national borders and sovereignty. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina already displaced some 1.2 million people in the southern United States. Who speaks for migrants, who represents them, will be overriding questions that will require governance beyond control and regulation. The longer-term politics of reducing human vulnerability is often obscured by dealing with whatever current crisis has forced the displacement of human lives. Utopian visions about the Anthropocene entail a shared humanity that shakes off migrant camps and detention zones, spaces of exception, and states of emergency. This kind of moral politics about population and quality of life, and about environmental justice, are planetary in scale. But they will test the limits of American democracy—which has always been riddled with social and racial prejudices in any case. It raises thorny questions about both individual and collective agency (Tyszczuk 231-32)

Amst 66.1 (2021): 279-82 281 Rosemary Wakeman because ultimately, climate change decenters humanity. For whatever it is or how we have destabilized it, nature will now have the upper hand. And it is utterly indifferent to human survival. The myriad flows of peoples and their settlement will require adap- tive governance and a new institutional agility that avoids worsening geographies of inequality. The planetary canvas on which migration takes places means complex ties attached to the meanings of “home”— of origin and of relocation. The vast financial remittances already sent worldwide by migrants suggests these intricate bonds. What it means to have “nationality” and to be American will pivot along with them. Even traditional ties to regions across the United States will pale in comparison to the “right” to security and stable settlement, much less human happiness and dignity. Can we imagine a future in which repressive political boundaries are opened up? Where the bickering over responsibility and public resources between the federal government and individual states is replaced with a nimble, hospitable response to climate migration? It might mean a needed constitutional reboot. Agree- ment on a course of action will entail a large dollop of cooperation and democratic deliberation between myriad stakeholders. It will produce quick-response participatory forums and commissions. Bruno Latour argues that agency will need to be distributed and differentiated as far as possible (17). It will rely on the extraordinary capacity of Americans for bottom-up community building in the wake of disasters. Ethical concepts such as justice, equity, inclusion, and ultimately stewardship, should play prominent roles in an expanded civic landscape. This is critical for tapping into the kind of highly successful survival practices that migrants are well known for. Spinning them into regenerative strategies and mutually beneficial relationships is often a step away. Predictions about the future should always be cautious. The apocalyptic visions of anthropogenic climate change can be cautionary tales, but fear can be as much immobilizing as a spur to do something. Even the grandest utopian visions can slide into dystopia with amazing speed. Nonetheless, storytelling about possible futures is necessary for a purposeful living within the reality of climate change. The type of politics we practice in the United States is crucial to that scenario.

Works Cited Latour, Bruno. “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” New Literary History 45.1 (2014): 1-18. Print. Mert, Ayşem. “Democracy in the Anthropocene: A New Scale.” Anthropocene Encounters: New Directions in Green Political Thinking. Ed. Frank Biermann and Eva Lövbrand. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. 128-49. Print. Tyszczuk, Renata. Provisional Cities: Cautionary Tales for the Anthropocene. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. Print.

282 Amst 66.1 (2021): 279-82 It’s 2023: Here’s How We Fixed the Global Economy1

Mariana Mazzucato

The year is 2023. The COVID-19 pandemic has come to an end, and the global economy is on the path to recovery. How did we get here? How did our economy and society evolve to overcome the greatest crisis of our age? Let’s begin in the summer of 2020, when the unabated spread of disease was heralding an increasingly dire outlook for economies and societies. The pandemic had exposed critical vulnerabilities around the world—underpaid essential workers, an unregulated financial sector, and major corporations neglecting investment in favor of higher stock prices. With economies shrinking, governments recognized that both households and businesses needed help—and fast. But with memories of the 2008 financial crisis still fresh, the question was how governments could structure bailouts so they would benefit society, rather than prop up corporate profits and a failing system. In an echo of the “golden age” of capitalism—the period after 1945 when Western nations steered finance toward the right parts of the economy—it became clear that new policies were needed to address climate risks, incentivize green lending, scale up financial institutions tackling social and environmental goals, and ban financial-sector activity that did not serve a clear public purpose. The European Union was the first to take concrete steps in this direction after agreeing in August to a historic €1.8 trillion recovery package. As part of the package, the European Union made it mandatory for governments receiving the funds to implement strong strategies for addressing climate change, reducing the digital divide, and strengthening health systems.

In late 2020, this ambitious recovery plan helped the euro stabilize 1 This essay was first and ushered in a new European renaissance, with citizens helping to published in TIME on set the agenda. The European leadership used challenge-oriented poli- October 21, 2020.

Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 283-86 283 Mariana Mazzucato cies to create one hundred carbon-neutral cities across the continent. This approach led to a resurgence of new energy-efficient buildings; revamped public transport designed to be sustainable, accessible and free; and an artistic revival in public squares, with artists and designers rethinking city life with citizenship and civic life at its heart. Govern- ments used a digital revolution to improve public services, from digital health to e-cards, and create a citizen-centered welfare state. This transformation required both supply-side investments and demand-side pulls, with public procurement becoming a tool for innovative thinking that funneled through all branches of government. The United States began to change its approach after November 3, 2020, when Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the presidential election and the Democrats held the majority in both houses of Congress. Following his inauguration in January 2021, President Biden moved quickly to rebuild frayed ties between America and Europe, setting up a forum to share collective intelligence that could inform a smarter form of government. European governments were eager to learn from the investment strategies used by the U.S. government—like those led by defense research agency DARPA—to spur research and development in high- risk technologies. And the United States was eager to learn from Europe how to create sustainable cities and reinvigorate civic participation. With COVID-19 still rampant, the world woke up to the need to prioritize collective intelligence and put public value at the center of health innovation. The United States and other countries dropped opposition to a mandatory patent pool run by the World Health Organiza- tion that prevented pharmaceutical companies from abusing patents to create monopoly profits. Bold conditions were placed on the governance of intellectual property, pricing, and manufacturing of COVID-19 treatments and vaccines to ensure the therapies were both affordable and universally accessible. As a result, pharmaceutical companies could no longer charge whatever they wished for drugs or vaccines; governments made it mandatory for the pricing to reflect the substantial public contribution to their research and development. This extended beyond COVID-19 therapies, impacting the pricing of a range of medicines from cancer therapies to insulin. Richer countries also committed to increasing manufacturing capabilities globally and using mass global procurement to buy vaccines for poorer countries. When the vaccine was ready for distribution, national health authorities worked constructively with a coalition of global health actors—led by the WHO, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and others—to collectively devise an equitable global distribution plan that supported public-health goals. Low- and middle-income countries, along with health workers and essential workers, were granted priority access to the vaccine, while higher-income countries rolled out immunization programs in parallel.

284 Amst 66.1 (2021): 283-86 It’s 2023: Here’s How We Fixed the Global Economy

The end was in sight for our health crisis. But in June 2021, the global economy was still in a depressed state. As governments started debating their options for new stimulus packages, a wave of public protests broke out, with taxpayers in Brazil, Germany, Canada, and elsewhere calling for shared rewards in exchange for bailing out corporate giants. With Biden in office, the United States took those demands seriously and attached strong conditions to the next wave of corporate bailouts. Companies receiving funds were required to maintain payrolls and pay their workers a minimum wage of $15 per hour. Firms were permanently banned from engaging in stock buybacks and barred from paying out dividends or executive bonuses until 2024. Businesses were required to provide at least one seat on their boards of directors to workers, and corporate boards had to have all political spending approved by shareholders. Collective bargaining agreements remained intact. And CEOs had to certify that their companies were complying with the rules—or face criminal penalties for violating them. Globally, gold-standard bailouts were those that safeguarded workers and sustained viable businesses that provided value to society. This was not always a clear-cut exercise, especially in industries whose business models were incompatible with a sustainable future. Governments were also eager to avoid the moral hazard of sustaining unviable companies. So the U.S. oil shale sector, which was unprofitable before the crisis, was mostly allowed to fail, and workers were retrained for the Permian Basin’s fast-growing solar industry. In the summer of 2022, the other major crisis of our age took a turn for the apocalyptic. Climate breakdown finally landed in the developed world, testing the resilience of social systems. In the midwestern United States, a severe drought wiped out crops that supplied one-sixth of the world’s grain output. People woke up to the need for governments to form a coordinated response to climate change and direct global fiscal stimulus in support of a green economy. Yet, this was not about just Big Government, but Smart Govern- ment. The transition to a green economy required innovation on an enormous scale, spanning multiple sectors, entire supply chains and every stage of technological development, from R&D to deployment. At regional, national, and supranational levels, ambitious Green New Deal programs rose to the occasion, combining job-guarantee schemes with focused industrial strategy. Governments used procurement, grants and loans to stimulate as much innovation as possible, helping fund solutions to rid the ocean of plastic, reduce the digital divide, and tackle poverty and inequality. A new concept of a Healthy Green Deal emerged, in which climate targets and well-being targets were seen as complementary and required both supply- and demand-side policies. The concept of “social infrastructure” became as important as physical infrastructure. For the energy transition, this meant focusing on a future of mobility strategy

Amst 66.1 (2021): 283-86 285 Mariana Mazzucato and creating an ambitious platform for public transportation, cycling paths, pedestrian pathways and new ways to stimulate healthy living. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti successfully turned one lane of the 405 freeway into a bicycle lane and broke ground in late 2022 on a zero- carbon underground metro system, free at the point of use. Rising to the role of the “entrepreneurial state,” government had finally become an investor of first resort that co-created value with the public sector and civil society. Just as in the days of the Apollo program, working for government—rather than for Google or Goldman Sachs—became the ambition for top talent coming out of university. Government jobs became so desirable and competitive, in fact, that a new curriculum was formed for a global master in public administration for people who wanted to become civil servants. And so we stand here in 2023 the same people but in a different society. COVID-19 convinced us we could not go back to business as usual. The world has embraced a “new normal” that ensures public-private collaborations are driven by public interest, not private profit. Instead of prioritizing shareholders, companies value all stakeholders, and finan- cialization has given way to investments in workers, technology, and sustainability. Today, we recognize that our most valuable citizens are those who work in health and social care, education, public transport, supermarkets, and delivery services. By ending precarious work and properly funding our public institutions, we are valuing those who hold our society together, and strengthening our civic infrastructure for the crises yet to come. The COVID-19 pandemic took so much from us, in lives lost and livelihoods shattered. But it also presented us with an opportunity to reshape our global economy, and we overcame our pain and trauma to unite and seize the moment. To secure a better future for all, it was the only thing to do.

286 Amst 66.1 (2021): 283-86 IV. Epilogue

We Want Our City Back1

Melba Joyce Boyd

We want our city back. We want our streetlights on. We want our garbage gone. We want our children playing on playgrounds, but not with loaded guns. We want to retire by the river, and plant collard greens in abandoned fields. We want our ancestors to rest in peace. We want our city back.

We don’t want law and order. We want justice and jobs. 1 This poem was first published in The Black We don’t want small business. Scholar: Journal of Black We mean serious business. Studies and Culture in 1994, but it has evolved No more cheap Dollar Stores. as the circumstances No more Mom and Pop wig shops. of Detroit and other American cities have been No more Mickey D’s affected by gentrification rappin’ with the homies. and as growing disparities for Citizens of Color No more Dixie Colonels in unemployment and serving Kente cloth cuisine. systemic racism have undermined justice and No more taco supreme. destroyed lives. These repressive conditions have We need groceries. intensified with the rise No more indigestion of Republican regimes in governments at the local, or quick-fix politics. state, and national levels. We want our city back. This is the most recent version of the poem.

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We don’t want police harassing the homeless for being without a lease. We don’t want video cops busting crack-heads with flashlights at night. We want peacekeepers to capture the real dope men, reclining in respectable privilege. We want our taxes to track down uniformed assassins. We want our city back.

We don’t want Euro-centric or Afro-eccentric educations. We want a freedom curriculum. We want a liberated vision In history remembered. We don’t want our children worshiping the old world order in Egypt or Greece. We don’t want them crunched like computer chips to fit with GM execs, or to be rejects in labor camps. We want the Board of Education to take a lie detector test, for neglect of the intellect, for assault on our children’s senses. We want dignity, not cupidity. We want our city back.

No more text-sex mess. No more zoot-suit mayors, shuffling skeletons and abuses like gamblers losing pay checks in motor city casinos. No more ex-basketball playing, suburban, Bing-a-ling mayors, ignoring inner city citizens living next to dilapidated buildings with boarded-up windows and bolted doors, where junkies, rodents and vermin breed. We want our city back.

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We want the river dredged for distraught souls. We want our homes rebuilt. We want the guilty to pay a greed tax for the living they stole. No more poisoned water. No more Republican managers, who emerge but cannot see crumbling roads and broken trees. We want our city back.

We want our country back from this rebirth of a racist nation, back from a tyrant, who shakes hands with the Ku Klux Klan, who jails immigrant children at the border that God painted tan; we want our country back from a depraved liar who orders attacks on peaceful protests, then poses in front of a church with a Bible turned backward and upside down; from a demented narcissist who grabs vaginas and socializes with whorish dictators, plotting sabotage of presidential elections. We want our country back.

Hey! We ain’t escaping to Canada like fugitive slaves or American refugees escaping psychotic patriotism. Our backs are up against the wall. This is our clarion call!

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Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Heal the sick. Enlighten the ignorant Punish the wicked, and raise the dead!

We want our streetlights on. We want our garbage gone. We want to be rid of smack and crack. We want to retire by the river and raise collard greens in abandoned fields. We want our ancestors to rest in peace. We are seizing the hour. Cause, we mean to take our city, and our country back.

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European Perspectives on the United States in Times of Populism, Protests, and the Pandemic

Wolfgang Fach, Trump: Ein amerikanischer Traum? Warum Amerika sich verwählt hat (Bielefeld: transcript, 2020), 124 pp. Alain Badiou, Trump (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), v + 68 pp. Noam Zadoff, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Mirjam Zadoff, and Heike Paul, eds., Four Years After: Ethnonationalism, Antisemitism, and Racism in Trump’s America (Heidelberg: Winter, 2020), 200 pp.

Why the citizens of the United States picked the wrong president in 2016 is gradually becoming more obvious. In the last four years, Donald J. Trump has polarized his country more than any other president before him. He has succeeded in dividing the nation into those who are with him—his fans, mostly Republicans—and those who are against him—mostly Democrats. His self- absorbed mentality does not allow him to recognize the truth in Abraham Lin- coln’s prominent 1858 statement: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Trump’s use of social media, Twitter in particular, has not only made fake news the dangerous new way of informing people—who stay in their echo chambers protected by filter bubbles, even unwilling to communicate with others—but has also driven scientists, in the middle of a devastating pandemic, into despair because their expertise, while listened to at the beginning, is now being questioned by people who rather follow Trump’s irresponsible behavior. Publications have become myriad on both sides of the Atlantic that try to read, interpret, and understand a political phenomenon that seems to destroy U.S.-American democracy. Various German publications have pointed to the destructive effects of the Trump administration, for instance, Elmar Theveßen’s Die Zerstörung Amerikas: Wie Donald Trump sein Land und die Welt für immer verändert (2020) or Klaus Brinkbäumer and Stephan Lamby’s Im Wahn: Die amerikanische Ka- tastrophe (2020)—to name only two examples out of many books written on the other side of the Atlantic that observe and critically discuss a phenomenon that is and is not unique to the United States. The small sample of European voices reviewed below is just the tip of the iceberg that continues to grow below the surface. Wolfgang Fach’s study Trump: Ein amerikanischer Traum? Warum Amerika sich verwählt hat (2020) is a timely, even if highly provocative, analysis of a historical development in the U.S. presidential role that has led to the election of Donald Trump as forty-fifth president. Written in German and headed by a suggestive and critical title, Fach—Professor emeritus of Political Theory and the History of Ideas at the University of Leipzig—offers one of the many attempts at explaining Trump’s election. The simple answer is that we still do not really know. Some of the more complicated reasons, according to Fach, can be

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found in U.S.-American individualism, hero worship, inefficient governmental administration, the absence of a social safety net, and the subsequently emerging self-proclaimed caretakers as well as Woodrow Wilson’s “‘America first’” (10) parole. Through the German pun on the word “wählen” (vote / dial) in his title, Fach claims that the United States has chosen wrongly, that is, figura- tively, has dialed the wrong number when making Trump its president. The long essay, with its eleven chapters, centers around presidential types at a particular time in history—the dreamer, the farmer, the founder, the hunter, the savior, the teacher, the one who reigns, the doer / maker, and the leader— and is framed by a first chapter on the recognition that President Trump is an idiot (“Die Einsicht: The Idiot”) and a last chapter giving an outlook for the future (“Die Aussicht: Global Idiocy”). Fach likes to play with language. His pleasure in punning and metaphorizing as well as in alternating between academic and everyday, down-to-earth, or even gross expressions make the book easier to read but, at times, also verge on arrogance and disrespect. While this attitude seems to be somehow adequate in view of President Trump’s behavior, it does not do justice to his predecessors. In the first chapter, Fach quotes some of Trump’s former allies, who called Trump variously an eleven-year-old child, “a fucking moron,” “dumb as shit,” or simply “an idiot,” thus, an “accidental President” (11; emphasis in original), as Fach calls him. Subsequently, Fach suggests that one of the main reasons for this presidential accident seems to be U.S. Americans’ desire for heroes (18). While Hector St. John de Crèvecœur’s American farmer and Thomas Jefferson’s husbandman did not yet exhibit heroic qualities and agriculture was not really a field that needed or even produced heroes, this period was short and soon disrupted when the colonies had to stand up against England and fought for their independence with George Washington as first national leader. With an ironic undertone, Fach calls the army’s soldiers “Soldatenhaufen” (25; heap of soldiers) and Washington “begnadeter Führer” (26; exceptionally gifted leader). As Fach points out, the new nation was still mostly royalist in attitude and replaced the monarch by the president who became their “king” (32). Americans destroyed statues of George III and erected new ones of their own majesty (35). Someone even suggested to simply call George Washington “George IV” (35). According to Fach, the strong leader without a functioning form of government administration was thus born (43). It is with Andrew Jackson, whose portrait decorates Trump’s Oval Office, that the nation elects someone who does not govern systematically, but decides autocratically (55). For Fach, Trump’s choice of portrait is adequate (56). Jackson, as Fach shows, fought a war against banks to prevent the money from disappearing across the Atlantic. Fach’s label, therefore, does not come as a surprise when he calls Jackson’s policy “Purely American” (57; emphasis in original) and concludes that in no other presidents can we find so many parallels to Trump: “In keinem anderen Präsidenten steckt so viel Trump” (61). With the Great Awakening, which Fach considers to be a huge mush of intense (and maybe false) piety, “ein mächtiger ‘Brei’ intensiver Frömmigkeit” (62), the individual itinerant preacher served as an example of an activity which, in the long run, seemed to have divided U.S.-American society in religious matters. Benjamin Franklin, Charles G. Finney, Russell Conwell, and Horatio Alger, for Fach, belonged to those teacher figures who introduced positive thinking in their writings (ch. 7, 67-77). Alger’s Ragged Dick (1868), an example of the many novels he published, does not, as has been the common belief until today, present characters who rise from rags to riches but they do so from rags to respect-

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ability. As Fach shows, Alger’s novels have falsely been equated with the prominent promise of the American Dream to become rich. This myth has prevailed and is often juxtaposed with Andrew Carnegie, who rose to riches and who, in his Gospel of Wealth, openly suggests to give one’s money to public institutions, such as libraries, swimming pools, parks, universities, during your lifetime, and not to, as Fach implies, the lazy and drunk. Carnegie, Fach maintains, seems to project that there is no better politician than the businessman (77)—another feature we see in Trump. Another prominent example of a man in power is Boss Tweed (1823-1878), who seemingly rose from rags to riches as a corrupt politician and businessman, as owner of banks, property, and hotels in New York City. In his headquarters, Tammany Hall, he was able to rely on a political machinery that offered public positions for (party-) political services (81). Due to presidents and central governments who did not interfere in individual state affairs, public institutions began to decline and could only be saved by private donors, such as Carnegie, on the one hand, or by a presidential maker and hero that Fach sees emerging in Theodore Roosevelt, on the other hand. To maintain the nation’s union, strong leadership with the capacity to speak to the nation was necessary. Fach’s irrespectable insight into what a great leader needs, namely the gift of the gab because without it all is in vain, reads as follows: “Ein ‘großer’ Führer benötigt daher zuvörderst ein großes Mundwerk; fehlt es daran, ist alles Weitere für die Katz” (102-03). With the rise of the media in the early twentieth century, the president as “spokesman of the nation” (103; emphasis in original) was born. Be- cause Franklin D. Roosevelt did not change the governmental spoils system, he left much room for (verbal) attacks as is visible as well in Trump’s slogan “drain the swamp” (106; emphasis in original). For Fach, Trump has become the disrup- tor of a system that allows for arbitrary hiring and firing. As Fach summarizes, Trump keeps ignoring Washington experts, hiring questionable and incompe- tent outsiders, firing progressives, leaving positions of the so-called deep state unfilled, arguing that the nation simply does not need them. Trump’s activities are dangerous because they disrupt and destroy but do not build anything new. This devastation needs a hero who shoulders the world, and this fixer type is, of course, Trump, according to Trump himself. Trump accuses the Democrats of being responsible for this turmoil because they, as he maintains, want to take away from people their weapons, health care, suffrage, liberty, judges, everything. Thus, everything is at stake and depends on him alone, [a]lles“ steht auf dem Spiel und hängt allein von ihm ab” (Fach 110; emphasis in original). As Fach provocatively concludes, Trump is already changing his country, and, perhaps, tomorrow, he will change the whole world: “Der ‘Idiot’ verändert schon heute sein Land. Und morgen vielleicht die ganze Welt?” (111). Is “Global Idiocy” the vision of the future? Trump’s questionable “‘superi- or genes’” (qtd. in Fach 113) seem to be the only “quality” the current president, from his own point of view, can perhaps rely on since language is not his strength. Trump needs to be held accountable for the brutalization of language as well as of the etiquette of public behavior and patterns of thinking and acting. In the end, as Fach sees it, Trump triggers “‘a world of increasing disarray’” (qtd. in Fach 114) or “global idiocy” (114; emphasis in original). Wolfgang Fach’s analysis of how Trump’s election as president can be explained is erudite and offers interesting facts and occasional anecdotes from U.S.-American history and politics. That the nightmare of a Trump presidency has become true and ran the risk of being prolonged in November 2020 is the result of a desire—perhaps universal and certainly, according to Fach, Ameri-

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can—for a hero and strong leader who alone can fix everything that is broken, even if it is not broken. It seems that this longing coupled with the candidate’s gift of the gab is enough to make someone the head of a world power. The conclusions Fach draws are pessimistic and explain his own often ironic tone verging on sarcasm that more than once leaves the reader puzzled and torn between what he says and how he says it. Academic conventions are loosely adhered to; sources written in English are quoted in German without indicating a translator or even the fact that it is a translation. Surprisingly, encyclopedias such as Wikipedia are used as sources along with original and more serious works. In spite of its in-between status as academic study and a good read for a German-speaking non-academic audience, Fach’s Trump: Ein amerikanischer Traum? Warum Amerika sich verwählt hat is worth reading (in print or online) as one more—and insightful—explanation for the accidental election of Trump. The next book on Trump under review here comes from philosopher, play- wright, and novelist Alain Badiou. His slim volume consists of two lectures delivered respectively two days and two weeks after the election of Trump for president in 2016. Both were originally held in English, the first on November 9, 2016, at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the second on November 17 at Tufts University in Boston, and were then also translated into German. Badiou’s European perspective as an Emeritus Professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris finds strong and outright polemical words for the election. In hindsight and with the hope for a new and moderate president Joe Biden— inaugurated on January 20, 2021—one can only agree with Badiou when he, in his first lecture, labels the election of Trump in 2016 a “horror” (1-2), “a bad surprise” (2), and “the victory of the enemy” (2). Badiou is trying to find at least a partial explanation for why this result was possible. In contrast to the emotionally charged campaigns in both 2016 and 2020, he asks for a rational response that investigates some of the reasons for this catastrophe. From his Marxist-Leninist-Maoist perspective, as it seems to me (he is a co-founder of the Union des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste and a leading member of the French Maoist movement), he sees two interrelated reasons: the “victory of global capitalism” and “the complete failure of the great socialist states, first Russia, then China, and, more generally, the disappearance almost everywhere of the collectivist vision of the economy and of social laws, even in the form of a simple program” (3-4). He juxtaposes liberalism, for which “private property is the key factor in the organization of society” (5), and socialism / communism, which reject the focus on private property and rather favor “a collectivized organization of production and exchange” (6) and would eliminate inequalities, as he believes. The horror of Trump’s presidency, for Badiou, does not lie in Trump’s character but rather in global capitalism, which he labels a “monster” with “its inequalities, its crises, and its wars. […] And the monster becomes more monstrous every day” (9). For him, “the role of the state” currently seems to be “to protect these inequalities, to protect the monster” (10). Therefore, for him, the opposition of Republicans and Democrats is no longer a true opposition because both rely on the same economic principles. Like his more populist colleagues, he accuses “all members of the political class of today” (11) of oiling the “capitalist machine” (11) of the “monster” (11), over which, however, as he argues, they gradually seem to lose control. Badiou sees Trump in line with politicians such as Nicolas Sarkozy, Silvio Berlusconi, and Marine Le Pen, who use gangsters or mafias as models and show elitist “fascist tendencies” (13). Trump et al. use language devoid of coherence and rationality in order “to produce affects” (13). Badiou identifies several components in the Trump phenomenon as

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representative of a larger dynamic that he frames as “democratic fascism” (13). Capitalism, democratic fascism, popular frustration, and the “total absence of a political strategy” (18) converge in the lack of “a great Idea” (19) and are, therefore, at the origin of the contemporary crisis. Like many populists, Badiou sees Hillary Clinton and Trump as members of the “small worldwide oligarchy that is capitalizing its profits on a worldwide scale” (21). Granted, he does see the differences between Clinton and Trump and understands why people would favor Clinton over Trump, but, ultimately, for him, they are playing in the same league. The real distinction, as he argues, lies in Trump’s opposition to Bernie Sanders, whom he grants a different vision of the future “outside the monster” (23). Badiou proposes to return to the true dialectic of capitalism versus communism (24-25), idealizing communism as “the making in-common […] of everything concerning the great processes of production and exchange” (24). While it is possible to recognize the differences between Clinton and Sanders that Badiou points out, he does not address the fact that Sanders did not win the nomination because he did not get the majority of votes during the pre-election campaign. In other words, communism—which is actually not what Sanders proclaims—is not an alternative favored by the people in the United States. Donald Trump was, in fact, able to use the label of communism to frighten voters, reminding them of the 1920s Red Scare and the 1950s hunt for communists—not that he did this with so many words. Striving for equality is deeply anchored in the origins of the United States, that is the Declaration of Inde- pendence, but there, too, one can also find the origins of inequality. It seems to me that equality is not something that can be achieved through communism but rather via the intersection of capitalism and moderate socio-economic programs, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal did. Extreme binary opposi- tions do not overcome crises but rather polarize people even more. Badiou’s second lecture proclaims pretty much the same ideas but with a stronger focus on what could be changed in the future by taking the election of Trump “as an ugly symptom of the global situation […]” (27). Badiou emphasizes communism (and with it Sanders) as representing universality as well as equality and fascism (and with it Trump) as embodying identity and hierarchy. Badiou works with further dichotomies by equating Democrats and the left with communism and Republicans and the right with fascism as well as capitalism. This division, as he points out, if too strong, might lead to a civil war (36- 37). While this war has not happened during the Trump presidency, it is again an issue being discussed the moment Biden became president-elect. In Novem- ber 2020, the question was whether Trump and his fandom would peacefully concede the loss of the election, whether Trump would leave office with dignity (which he did not) or whether he would ask his partisans to stand by and fight if necessary, which he did. The United States is a divided and polarized nation, but not along clear-cut geographical borders, as in the nineteenth-century Civil War fought between the North and the South. The lines are now geographically, ethnically, and socially blurred so that people would have to fight in small enclaves, sometimes against their immediate neighbors, or sometimes in urban centers against small rural areas in the same state. Are people in the United States ready for this? I doubt it. Badiou’s communism is irreconcilably opposed to fascism. So how could communism be a solution to polarization? Badiou in his reasoning points to the “crisis of the political elite” (43), which then produces “strange persons” (43) exhibiting “vulgarity, sexism, complete contempt for intellectuals, and so on” (43). Some of the rather Marxist solutions to the

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crisis he proposes are the undoing of the “opposition between intellectual work and manual work” (48), the abandonment of actual borders for equality to exist across differences (49), and the dissolution of states as “separated and armed power[s]” (50), all based on the rejection of private property. Badiou’s two speeches are followed by a final Q & A section, in which he discusses questions of power, the relationship between movements and the state as well as between Marxism and race, and the possibility of “new strategic politics” (62), which cannot reside in political power to control “the effects of globalized capitalism” (66). Badiou’s simplified response to capitalism is either communism or “complete barbarism” (66); he evokes conspiracy theories that label the CIA, the NSA, and the Pentagon as the “‘permanent government’” (67) with the specter of Hitler and Mussolini in the background and, with these simplifications, plays upon people’s fears. As Sinclair Lewis in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here proclaims, these fears can enable populists to take over democratically sanctioned authority and power. Written from a Marxist perspective, Alain Badiou’s lectures proclaim communism as the true alternative to capitalism, notwithstanding the fact that practical or so-called communism in a number of countries, such as Russia and China, has collaborated with and even enhanced capitalism. Binaries never solve problems but create irreconcilable polarization. Sanders himself does not proclaim communism but, if anything, socialism. The solution, as it seems to me, can only be moderate capitalism in conjunction with social programs. Ba- diou is right in his final idea, namely that Trump is “a symptom of a bad situation,” which is “why we must look at the situation which created Trump and not be fascinated by Trump himself” (68). It seems that in January 2020, although the situation is still bad, the symptom, at least in part, had to leave. Like many other European works interrogating the Trump administration, the introduction to the collection of essays edited by Noam Zadoff et al. begins with addressing reactions of fear, here the one expressed by a group of students at Indiana University in Bloomington in November 2016. The students made a film of their initial meeting, in which they communicated their fear of “the massive outbreak of racism that was bound to sweep across the country in the aftermath of the election […]” (1). Their reactions that also point to the intersection of racism and anti-Semitism finally triggered a project that brought scholars from the United States, Europe, and Israel to Berlin in June 2017 to the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University Berlin, which collaborated with Indiana University’s Borns Jewish Studies at Bloomington with its European Gateway in Berlin. The scholars came for a conference “to discuss the first six months of the Trump presidency and its impact on universities and media channels in the Unites States, as well as the influence of Trump’s isolationist tendencies on America’s international policies” (1). In their introduction, the editors point to another phenomenon which has worried scholars and politicians alike since 2016. Europe, too, saw its populist tendencies and witnessed what could happen if a “nationalist rhetoric when uttered—and put into practice—from a position of power, in fact, the power of the highest official in the country” (1) was not prevented from being spread. Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here again comes to mind, which convincingly reveals that, indeed, it can happen anywhere when populism is on the rise. The many racist events in the United States since 2016 have justified initial fears and have led to the aforementioned conference and the present collection of essays as a collaboration between Bloomington, Berlin, and Munich (Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism and the Bavarian

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American Academy). In the wake of the killings of Black people in the United States leading to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and discussions of structural racism and a colonial past, also in Germany, the volume aims “to trace the historical roots of current events and to examine different aspects of Trump’s presidency, namely those related to questions of race, racism, and eth- no-nationalism, four years after he was elected” (2). The collection’s subdivision into five main parts offers chapters on “Politi- cal Analysis,” “Historical Perspectives,” “Global Connections,” “Race, Cul- ture, and Identity-Politics,” and a final interview conducted by Mirjam Zadoff with Khalil Gibran Muhammad. In part I, “Political Analysis,” Roger Cohen (correspondent for the New York Times, nationalized American, son of South African Jewish immigrants to Britain), Michael Kimmage (History, Catholic U of America, Washington, D.C.), and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo (both in Comparative Ethnic Studies at Washington State U in Pullman, WA) closely discuss aspects of the Trump administration such as foreign policy as well as immigration rhetoric. Cohen’s foreshadowings in 2017, updated in August 2020, are strikingly accurate in their depiction of the Trump administration when he writes: “A single Trump term has inflicted terrible damage on America. A second would undo the Republic” (8). The one hope he expresses is that “checks and balances still work” (17). Michael Kimmage focuses on elements of the Trump foreign policy that make Trump’s racism and anti- Semitism manifest, such as his conspiracy theories or “conspiratorial mindset” (23), which, as Kimmage argues, is driven by a politics of “disruption” (19) of emotionalization, chaos, and incoherence (19) as well as numerous “assault[s] on multilateral institutions” (22), which show that diplomacy is not his driving factor. Comparable to the historic Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), Trump has reduced politics to simple conspiracies, communicated through social media, especially Twitter. As Kimmage concludes, restoring “reasoned deliberation grounded in moral responsibility” (25) will be a tremendous challenge for the next U.S.-American government. Lugo-Lugo and Bloodsworth-Lugo’s contribution then discusses Trump’s metaphorical use of language to depict Mexican immigration to the United States not only as a crisis but specifically as a health crisis. This label, as they convincingly argue with reference to the cases of ty- phus in Los Angeles in 2019, is one with a history that goes back to at least the nineteenth century (30), which, in turn, makes it much easier for Trump to “deploy the trope of the ‘diseased (Mexican) immigrant’” (31) and to blame the Chinese for the spread of COVID-19 (31). Part II, “Historical Perspectives,” consists of three contributions by Richard E. Frankel (History, U of Louisiana, Lafayette) on the rise of modern anti- Semitism (1880-1914), Linda Gordon (History, New York U) on the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, and Kristoff Kerl (History, U of Copenhagen) on the racism and White supremacy of the Far Right (1970-1990s). Frankel points to the intersection of globalization and hate, which has turned the label globalist into a word with negative associations that connect it to worldwide conspiracy theories. He juxtaposes the racist reactions to Chinese laborers in the late-nineteenth- century United States to the arrival of many Eastern European Jews in West- ern Europe, often crossing Germany on their way to the United States. As Frankel maintains, Germany used the example of the anti-Chinese movement across the Atlantic as an analogy to the rising anti-Semitism in Germany that was expressed in a similar racist public discourse and exclusionary measures. In both cases, immigration is considered a threat to health for the United States and Germany respectively. Similarly, Linda Gordon studies the entanglement

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of anti-Black racism and anti-immigration activism in the Ku Klux Klan and describes it as a large populist and fascist movement. Since populism focuses on instilling fear in people, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s was highly successful in triggering not only racist attitudes but also anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic aversion in the U.S.-American population directed against the immigration of Eastern European Jews and Southern European Catholics. Gordon ends with a word of caution on the overlap of populism and fascism and on the historical contingency of these concepts: “Most important, however, is that neither label, whether populist or fascist, is adequate to illuminate current dangers. History does not repeat itself. […] We can, however, use the history of those populisms and fascisms as warnings, and as guidance in identifying fascistic trends and trajectories” (65-66; emphasis in original). Kristoff Kerl follows Frankel and Gordon in discussing the close connection between anti-Black and anti-Jewish racism by drawing on the notion of “‘minority racism’” (70) and the monthly magazine Instauration, which “was an influential actor in the (re-)shaping of white supremacist thinking” (78). Part III, “Global Connections,” features contributions by Dirk Rupnow (His- tory, U of Innsbruck) on Holocaust remembrance in the age of global Trump- ism, Jacob Ari Labendz (Judaic Studies, Youngstown State U) on Trump’s attitude toward American Jews, and Ursula Prutsch’s (American Studies, LMU Munich) comparison of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. Rupnow draws on the right-wing Austrian party FPÖ (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs) and the year 2018 as Austria’s official “‘year of communication and remembrance’” (84) to point to “growing right-wing populism, and at the same time growing racist, Islamophobic, and anti-migrant resentments” (93) on both sides of the Atlan- tic. Labendz illustrates Trump’s ambivalent attitude toward Jews as “a national minority associated with the State of Israel” (101) and the president’s claim that criticism of Israel is equivalent to anti-Semitism. Prutsch points to “antisemitic prejudices under the umbrella of symbolic pro-Israel attitudes” (124) and to far- right populism in Brazil and the United States. Both Trump and Bolsonaro, as she claims, “know perfectly well how to instrumentalize the media for their mission” (131; emphasis in original). Part IV, “Race, Culture, and Identity-Politics,” offers Sina Arnold’s (Social Sciences, TU Berlin) analysis of the American left’s urgent need for a thorough reflection of its own role in the rise of anti-Semitism to counteract Trump’s “indifference towards growing antisemitism” (158), for example, when he did not mention Jewish victims in his speech on Holocaust Memorial Day in Janu- ary 2017. Axelle Germanaz (American Studies, U Erlangen-Nuremberg) takes a close look at a White supremacist transatlantic music scene and shows that White supremacist ideas are not just a political but also a pop-cultural phenomenon with its goal “to preserve and uphold an imagined white purity” (165) by defending it against imagined shared threats. Valeria Luiselli (op-ed for the New York Times), concludes this section by focusing on the disastrous effects of Trump’s racist politics on undocumented and unaccompanied Latin and Cen- tral American immigrant children. She briefly relates her personal experiences with groups of Hispanic immigrant children in Brooklyn who actively discuss questions of belonging and not belonging in their school curricula. Her label for this “new generation of Hispanic children” as “new Quixotes” (185) seems to be more than adequate. The conversation (June 18, 2020) between Mirjam Zadoff and Khalil Gibran Muhammad concludes a volume that is dedicated to a transatlantic exchange of ideas; it is “an invitation to engage in comparative reflection, and, hope-

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fully, an incentive to cultivate a critical open-mindedness” (5), as the editors suggest. Zadoff and Muhammad discuss transatlantic racism as well as protest and memorial cultures, in particular the “1619 Project,” which commemorates the arrival of the first Black slaves in America. They point to the paradox in an understanding of the United States as a “liberal democracy” and “the way that it has profited from the exploitation and domination of its own citizens of color” (194), which the COVID-19 crisis has again brought to the fore and has connected to “the intersections of capitalism and racism,” that is, “‘racial capitalism’” (195). Moreover, Muhammad reads the “defund the police” demands as “a process that centers the people who are most proximate to the problem and who have spent time working out solutions and therefore have the highest legitimacy in our liberal democracy for shaping the outcomes” (196). What Four Years After has to offer is a productive, interdisciplinary, and transatlantic cooperation that not only sheds light on the Trump administration but, most of all, on the need for a comparative and diachronic perspective on similar phenomena that shape both sides of the Atlantic, among them the rise of populism and, in its wake, racism and anti-Semitism and their entanglement in globalization and capitalism. Scholars and journalists from Germany, Aus- tria, Denmark, and the United States use their respective disciplinary perspectives to jointly discuss four years of crises as experienced above all in the United States and Europe but also beyond these geographical limits. While the majority of contributors reside in the United States, all engage in comparative analysis and, with their European colleagues, make this collection a piece of scholarship that reminds those of us who work in American Studies that we need to think beyond the borders of the United States, including with and from European perspectives, to understand what has been happening in the four years after the 2016 U.S.-American presidential election. While I have only been able to discuss the tip of the iceberg of Trump Stud- ies, with the iceberg continuing to grow by the minute, there seems to be light at the end of the Trump presidency. New publications by Barack Obama, The Promised Land (2020), Michelle Obama, Becoming (2018), Evan Osnos, Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now (2020), and Kamala Harris, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey (2019), reveal that the outlook for the future might be more colorful and less polarized.

Carmen Birkle (Philipps-Universität Marburg)

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The Donald, FLOTUS, and the Gendered Labors of Celebrity Politics at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (New York: Picador, 2018), 327 pp. Omarosa Manigault Newman, Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House (New York: Gallery Books, 2018), 334 pp. Mary Jordan, The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020), 341 pp. Michelle Obama, Becoming (New York: Penguin, 2018), 426 pp.

When I started thinking about this review essay, I wondered how to approach the political culture of the United States, its celebrity spectacles, and the cultures of affect related to it. But I am not alone in my puzzlement, it seems. In his introduction to Trump’s America, Liam Kennedy evokes the sense of dislocation, overstimulation, and collective trauma related to the present, and the “deceptions […] endorsed as an alternative reality” by Trump himself (1-2). Carlos Lozada, a book critic and a self-professed citizen reader (7), seeks to find out “how we thought here” (1). Considering the mind warp of “alternative facts,” Elena Matala de Mazza reminds us that the deployment of what Mi- chel de Montaigne called “fictions légitimes” (qtd. in Mattala de Mazza 121-22) are longstanding technologies of governance and served the potentates’ legitimate agendas of conserving power and trust. Both Donald Trump and Barack Obama run on a kind of celebrity politics that capitalizes on “style” and “sym- bolism,” features frequently overlooked in political communication (Street 370). Obama advocates for change through a string of memoirs, with the most recent 750-page tome A Promised Land published as part one (!) of his legacy-building machine. Trump, as Georg Seeßlen has argued, amalgamates the roles of pop- star, folk hero, and politician. Meanwhile, both Michelle Obama and Melania Trump have gained cult status in catering to their husband’s presidential mys- tique. Hence, the books discussed here illustrate how gendered governance is performed in the United States nowadays. They canvas competing narratives of governance—as business or as sentimental work and what I tentatively call the gendered labors of celebrity politics. Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (2018) kicked off a genre of Trump literature: the “chaos chronicles” (Lozada 170). These books, capped off most recently with Bob Woodward’sRage (2020), offer insider reports of the hair-raising incompetence and madness of the guy on top, framing him as “Trump the mobster; the toddler; the TV star” (Lozada 184). Key to this distinct reportage is the White, masculinist positioning of the professional author himself, who provides eyewitness accounts while also living to tell the tale to a global audience projected as a corrective: Opposite the madness, rage, fire, and fury in the White House, the outside epitomizes a sanctuary of order, reason, and calm. Authors of chaos chronicles turn to different narrative frameworks to control their material. Wolff’s ordering framework of choice is theater culture. And above the theatrum mundi, Stephen Bannon looms as “auteur of the presidency” (7), embellished with pompous chapter titles such as “Bannon Agonistes” or “Bannon Redux.” Wolff’s narrator persona fuses with Bannon through inte-

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rior focalization and free indirect speech—including the masculinist truncated brouhaha replete with “contests” (302), “mortal competitions” (53), and the framing of governance as combat. Wolff even gives Bannon the last word: “It’s going to be wild as shit” (310). Judging from the epilogue, it was also Ban- non who pointed Wolff to theater when he said the Trump presidency “ma[de] Shakespeare look like Dr. Seuss” (308)—a misconstrual of the Shakespearean tragic messenger as accomplice. Fire and Fury’s revelation of the constant escalation emanating from the Trump White House is tarnished by Wolff’s sen- sationalist antics: Wolff is so busy with his own oeuvre (he calls his book a “seismic political event” [315]) and with Bannon that he overlooks Trump. Fire and Fury simply quotes insiders’ tautological redundancies (“He’s Donald” [7], “Trump is Trump” [8], “he was what he was” [20]). Omarosa Manigault Newman’s Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the White House (2018) is a remarkable example of the chaos chronicles: It capitalizes on the author’s unique intersectional view as a Black woman, and it refuses to resort to tautology: “They thought Trump was being Trump, off the cuff. But I knew something wasn’t right” (246). Instead, Omarosa gestures at care work and responsibility to save the country when she warns about Trump being “physically ill” and having “cognitive issues” (311, 313). Where Wolff sucks up to Bannon, Omarosa embarks on “Trump studies” (29) to become “the lady version of Trump” (26). Hence, Unhinged is also more Trumpist than other tell-all books, since Omarosa (as she calls herself to “reinforce the name of [her] brand” [28]) is a TV celebrity and pastoral minister who became Trump’s “director of African American Outreach” (113). The author of The Bitch Switch: Knowing When to Turn It On and Off (2008) tells her readers early on, “Believe me, I am the ultimate survivor” (xxiv) and, in best tall-tale manner, compares her birth to the arrival of a Tornado (4). Unhinged thus uses Trumpist braggadocio to pep up the narrative the author hammers home with sheer repetition: that she had a “blind spot” (e. g., xxii, 74, 75, 76, 100) when it came to Trump’s racism; that she was the African American community’s “only voice” (xxxi), but had her hand slapped away when she tried to help (114, 240, 263); that Trump is the central personality of the sectarian “cult” that is “Trumpworld” (xxvi, 88, 319), which she had been trying to leave (290, 293, 295); that she is now “free” (xviii, 319, 320, 322, 330) and sees clearly that “Trump is unhinged […], a racist, a bigot, and a misogynist” (xxviii). Her breaking point is Trump’s racism and her own agency in defining her Black womanhood. She tags “strong” female role models who have a “voice,” including Hillary Clinton, and wrestles with controlling images: “I was going for strong black woman, not angry black woman. There is a big difference.” (33; emphasis in original). For all the repetitions, the key scene plays out in a mute moment of intimate surveillance: in the 2016 election, Omarosa, a registered Democrat, fills out her absentee ballot aboard “Trump Force One” and shows Trump she voted for him. He looks pensively at the ballot, and then “[h]e saw me looking at him looking at the ballot” (153). As citizen and private person, Omarosa becomes co-opted and complicit: She signs up because she “wanted to win” (153). In Unhinged, Omarosa seeks to ingratiate herself with her readership by moving from the tall tale to her disentanglement from Trump. In the end, she turns to the ritual invocation of national resilience: “Right now, I believe we are in a deep valley, and I acknowledge my role in our being here. I also have faith that we will march upward, and out of it, very soon” (328-29). Right after being fired, she joined Celebrity Big Brother for more media hits about politics, “the biggest business of them all” (20).

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Opposite Omarosa’s self-puffery as “lady version” of Donald Trump, First Lady Melania appears deflated and evasive. When I first read Mary Jordan’s The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump (2020), I was curious to see Jordan unlock Melania Trump’s FLOTUS persona and her “work[s] at being mysterious” (6)—Jordan lists non-disclosure arrangements, control on Melania’s digital footprint, and threats from the Trump camp (27). Already on the campaign trail, this mystery inspired literary experiments such as Chi- mamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Arrangements” (2016), and after the election, #freemelania-activism, and her enigmatic fashion rhetoric (remember that jacket?) fueled it further. In this thicket of celebrity politics, Jordan, a journalist for the Washington Post, positions her biographical-cum-muckraking book. Jordan argues that Melania is neither caged princess nor shallow model; rather the Trumps work together, sometimes through opposite strategies, but mostly through “mirror[ing] each other” in their own “deal” (28). While this sounds like an equal partnership, Jordan reserves little feminist uplift for Melania. In- stead, she wonders if a former model is fit to be first lady, since she failed to “[see] the irony” (158). Jordan frames Melania’s trajectory as the “ride of her life” (113), “highly improbable” (45), and “most unconventional” (47). While she cannot believe Melania’s story, she also describes her public persona as “ghost,” “hologram,” and “woman with no history” (26, 27) who “compartmentalizes her life” (171). The Art of Her Deal professes investigative journalism, but it reiterates what Katharina Wiedlack has called the othering of Melania Trump as “white non- feminist Eastern European woman” (1063). Yet Jordan’s othering is subtler than Saturday Night Live’s parody, since she fails to call out interviewers who patron- ize Melania or mock her language skills (201-04), and she foregrounds scenes where Melania posed as sexy model and/or was ridiculed (89-92, 132-37, 140-44). The story pivots on a lavishly staged citizenship scandal (187-97), when Jor- dan reveals Melania’s dual citizenship (“very unusual for members of the first family,” [192]) and quotes the State Department, cautioning about conflicting “obligations” (192-93). Added to the paranoia of Eastern European infiltration is Melania’s unsen- timental “dealmaking”-approach to her job as first lady: Jordan bemoans that with her delayed move to the White House, Melania refused the domestic labors, left the commander in chief on edge for months, and upset the gendered spheres of the White House, with Ivanka Trump proposing to rename the First Lady Office the “First Family Office” (37). However, Melania is not incapable: she hires personnel to make Donald comfortable (45). Jordan’s conclusion (spoiler alert!) has Melania find her stride in the global COVID-19 pandemic, when she took to care work and called for wearing masks. Melania’s “deal” with Trump was “complicated,” but as first lady, “she would make this deal her own” (282). Melania’s business approach and conflicted national allegiance chip away at the sentimental allure of U.S. politics: she may have married one of the “kings of American capitalism” (176), but dealmaking is not what Jordan has in mind for America’s imaginary queen. Jordan’s narrative pits the “deal” metaphor against an implicit, desirable sentimental value attributed to the presidency. Her subject is Melania, but the frame of reference is her FLOTUS predecessor, Michelle. Essentially, the first lady role is a raced-gendered institution, as Megan Handau and Evelyn Simien have asserted: Michelle Obama’s first Black first ladyship brought to the fore the persistent effects of controlling images of White womanhood exerted on any wife who comes to this task (484). Obama’s image building

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as political partner is tethered to a romantic display of their marriage; their first date has actually been transformed into the rom-com Southside with You (2016). Against this idealized portrayal, Tammy Vigil argues, the Trump marriage appears as retrograde paternalism or “business arrangement” (48). Vigil describes the first lady’s task as a mission impossible of creating bonds of “consubstantiality with the public” (65), a feeling of physical proximity and of spiritual presence. The magic of consubstantiality casts the first lady as a pan- national mother figure, charged with the symbolic care work of heteronormative romance and supportive partnership. This problematic image of FLO- TUS has traveled across the Atlantic. During public lectures on first ladies in the last years, I heard many stereotypes reiterated by audiences who decried Melania Trump as trophy wife and sympathized with Michelle Obama’s embodied rhetoric (see Schäfer). It also seems that the sentimental separate spheres narrative is here to stay: Following her tenure as first lady, Michelle Obama keeps on building her public persona as model celebrity caretaker in a plethora of media: her autobiography Becoming, released in November 2018, was followed by Becoming: A Guided Jour- nal, a Netflix documentary, and a Spotify podcast, produced by the Obamas’ production company Higher Ground. Becoming caps off the books reviewed here as the pinnacle of celebrity politics, despite itself: it hinges on Obama’s slogan that “You know I hate politics” (repeated in her 2020 DNC speech and Barack Obama’s A Promised Land [70]). Her celebrity labor is obviously gendered: She does the emotional outreach, while Barack frames his political legacy in more presidential terms. By professing to address personal growth, not politics, Becoming and its spinoffs exercise consubstantiality: Obama becomes a spectral presence on our bookshelves, TVs, social media profiles—she is only ever a click away. Thanks to their post-presidency PR, the Obamas have become “global supercelebrities” (Kellner), personas that enhance and complement each other in a Black power couple narrative. Becoming is the perfect American autobiography. Its structure reiterates the genre and updates it to contemporary political topics, identity questions, and narrative patterns. It fits Obama’s life story into the hyperbole of U.S. exceptionalism, juggles relatability and stardom, and calls for imitation with its emphasis on voice and joining in that great chorus of American democracy. In the vein of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1791), Obama casts herself as exemplum, translating his famous 13 virtues into a subtler recipe for being or becoming like her: find the “value in your story, in my story, in the larger story of our country” (xi). The preface locates Obama in the “here and now” of post-presidency, when she finally has time to “reflect” (xiii) while making toast. In an intimate moment of individual re-assembly, she projects “life after the White House” (xiii), coupling the mundane with the transcendental moment that kicks off her post- presidency self. The smell of melting cheese is rivaled by another, even more auspicious perfume: “The air smelled like spring” (xii). Obama evokes sensual knowledges in her reader and makes her story synaesthetically palatable. Obama tells her story in three sections (a classical choice for any storytelling) that meander between the self and its transcendence, between her life story and the marriage that brought her to the White House: (1) “Be- coming Me,” (2) “Becoming Us,” (3) “Becoming More.” The second part ends with Barack’s election as first Black president of a nation built on slavery and structural racism, sending a message across the land “that change was really possible” (249). Becoming’s structure and rhetoric of rejuvenation (tethered

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to Obama’s celebrated ageless beauty) strikes that imaginary chord between Americans and their national fantasy. It replays the American jeremiad for both individual and nation, since “change” was achieved through elections (and Obama makes no mention of the electoral college, that unreformed crutch the world’s oldest democracy leans on). Becoming serves as a self-help book, as a guide for rediscovering the magic of the United States, and as a vehicle for Obama’s husband’s politics. It might well be called the first Black first lady’s political auto-ethnography. To me, the most striking metaphor in this carefully crafted narrative is the reference to the nation’s futurity via children. Their innocence forges relatability and convivial joy; they “crack me up and fill me with hope” (x). The second part, “Becoming More,” ends with Michelle’s campaign trail experience: on Independence Day 2007, she remembers the birth of their first daughter ten years before as the “most significant threshold we’d crossed” (254). Michelle’s narrative links individual care work (becoming parents) to applying for the presidential role of national caretakers. For Michelle, this meant retrograding to “full time mother and wife” (254). Obama’s futurism spells out the paternalism of the Obama marriage. While she often talks about the difficulties of “having it all,” the ultimate weight of nation-building is loaded once more on women’s shoulders. Her care work as first lady benefits her own children and the nation, as the hugging photos in Becoming illustrate, with the caption “A hug, for me, is a way to melt away pretenses and simply connect” (n. pag.). Becoming thus reaches out to, across, and for Obama’s readers in a dazzling embrace of patriarchy. The Obama’s futurism forms an antidote for the retrotopic gesturing in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” antics. Their legacy fuses U.S. political culture with the everyday, as they stay with us, as supporters of Presi- dent Joe Biden, and as relatable visionaries imploring us to keep working for “change.” Meanwhile, “Trumpism” is also here to stay—if we believe Ste- phen Shapiro, Trump’s own hints at a re-run, or rumors that Ivanka Trump might throw her hat in the ring. For American Studies scholars and academic readers, the age of celebrity politics brings a host of new questions and research agendas.

Stefanie Schäfer (Universität Wien)

Works Cited Handau, Megan, and Evelyn M. Simien. “The Cult of First Ladyhood: Controlling Images of White Womanhood in the Role of the First Lady.” Politics & Gen- der 15.3 (2019): 484-513. Print. Kellner, Douglas. “Barack Obama and Celebrity Spectacle.” International Journal of Communication 3 (2009): 715-41. Web. 11 Jan. 2021. https://ijoc.org/index. php/ijoc/article/view/559/350. Kennedy, Liam. “Introduction: Making Sense of Trump’s America.” Trump’s America: Political Culture and National Identity. Ed. Liam Kennedy. Edin- burgh: Edinburgh UP, 2020. 1-21. Print. Lozada, Carlos. What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020. Print. Matala de Mazza, Ethel. “Politik und Lüge.” Alternative Fakten. Spec. Issue of Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 9.2 (2018): 119-32. Print. Seeßlen, Georg. Trump! Populismus als Politik. Berlin: Bertz & Fischer, 2017. Print.

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Schäfer, Stefanie. “Phenomenal Woman: Michelle Obama’s Embodied Rhetoric and the Cultural Work of Fashion Biographies.” Amerikastudien / American Studies 62.3 (2015): 235-54. Print. Shapiro, Stephen. “Caesarism Revisited: Cultural Studies and the Question of Trumpism.” Trump’s America: Political Culture and National Identity. Ed. Liam Kennedy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2020. 53-71. Print. Street, John. “Celebrity Politicians: Popular Culture and Political Representation.” The Celebrity Culture Reader. Ed. David P. Marshall. London: Routledge, 2006. 359-70. Print. Vigil, Tammy R. Melania and Michelle: First Ladies in a New Era. Bloomington: Red Lightning, 2019. Print. Wiedlack, Katharina. “In/visibly Different: Melania Trump and the Othering of Eastern European Women in US Culture.” Feminist Media Studies 19.8 (2019): 1063-78. Print.

Black Lives Matter: Three Key Texts

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2016), 288 pp.

Alicia Garza, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart (New York: One World, 2020), 336 pp.

Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (New York: Random House, 2020), 477 pp.

Since its inception in 2013, the Black Lives Matter movement has impact- 1 The following small ed the discourse on race and racism and has also begun to generate profound selection of texts provides shifts in how people in the United States and beyond think about state violence, an overview of additional policing, Black livelihood, and Black liberation. Especially in the year 2020, key texts on Black Lives Matter: Charlene Car- following yet another series of severe cases of racist (police) brutality, Black ruthers, Unapologetic: A Lives Matter has successfully mobilized for mass demonstrations that have car- Black, Queer, and Femi- ried conversations on day-to-day racism and their national specificities into the nist Mandate for Radical Movements (2018); Marc mainstream. While this stark increase in public attention has led some people Lamont Hill, We Still Here: to believe that Black Lives Matter is a fairly recent phenomenon, it is crucial Pandemic, Policing, Pro- to acknowledge the movement’s gradual but constant development that has, test & Possibility (2020), Nobody: Casualties of since its very early stages, been accompanied by numerous scholarly and activ- America’s War on the ist publications. Given the sheer number of insightful articles and books either Vulnerable, from Fergu- directly about or generally related to Black Lives Matter, our selection of books son to Flint and Beyond for this review can only be considered a small glimpse at the entire body of (2016); Ibrahim X. Kendi, 1 How to Be an Antiracist work. That we have opted for three books by Black women for the following (2019), Stamped from the review of key texts is not a coincidence but seeks to reflect one of the core mes- Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in sages of Black Lives Matter which is to work against the systematic erasure of America (2016); Patrisse Black women’s contributions. We chose books from different genres that either Khan-Cullors and asha deal with Black Lives Matter in detail (Taylor; Garza) or with aspects of the bandele, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black underlying structural discrimination that the movement seeks to expose and Lives Matter Memoir eliminate (Wilkerson). (2018); Alexander S. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016) Vitale, The End of Policing is among the earliest studies of Black Lives Matter and the socio-historical (2017).

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conditions that produced the movement. Written at a time when anti-racist protests were increasing on a national scale, Taylor sets out to answer the question why a social movement stressing the value of Black lives would arise under America’s first Black president. While Barack Obama’s sweeping victory in the 2008 presidential election was interpreted by many critics as signaling the emergence of a post-racial United States, this belief was soon undermined by incessant policing brutality that revealed Black people’s vulnerability to gratuitous (state) violence. For Taylor, the question of the rise of a Black movement under Obama cannot be answered by pointing to the permanence of racism alone. Her introduction begins with a lengthy quote by Martin Luther King, Jr., which projects the vision of a Black movement beyond the parameters of anti-racism. It rejects the idea of integration into a capitalist system and aims to achieve Black liberation through fundamental structural transformation. The radical King, then, introduces the critique that Taylor’s book title implies. This critique is based on two main theses: first, that the advancement of neoliberal capitalism—including its reinforcement by the complicit, post-Black politics of the Obama administration—is key to understanding the emergence of Black Lives Matter; and, second, that neoliberal capitalism must be overcome through a social upheaval generated by the Black movement in order to truly move from #BlackLivesMatter to Black liberation. Taylor highlights four factors that contribute to Black suffering and can ultimately be read in the context of the advancement of neoliberalism and the related abandonment of Black (sub)proletarians. The first factor, the myth of a Black “culture of poverty” (8), indicates the notion of personal responsibility. Patholo- gizing Black culture, this myth both explains and naturalizes Black poverty in the so-called “land of the free” by obscuring its systemic causes. The second factor is the emergence of colorblindness which aids “politicians in rolling back the welfare state” (52) and connects to the ideology of freedom of choice. For Taylor, colorblindness characterizes the post-civil rights era in which “the absence of racism in the law meant that African Americans could not claim racial harm” (52-53). It further denies the existence of racism, alleging a free society wherein individuals’ “poor choices [are] the only real constraint […]” (64-65). The third factor, the conformist turn in Black politics, is shaped by the state’s consistent suppression of the Left. Brutality against civil rights and Black Power leaders compelled many leftist activists to pursue a less dangerous path of electoral politics. This inclusion “of Black politics into the political mainstream” concurred with the state’s “aggressive effort to cultivate a small but stable Black middle class” (80) through Black employment in federal agencies. It is, according to Tay- lor, this stratified opposition between complicit “Black faces in high places” (18) and the majority of Black (sub)proletarians that characterizes and complicates the conditions of the current Black liberation struggle (75-106). Policing, finally, is historically linked to the production of a “racialized political economy […]” (108). Modern, militarized policing has generated mass incarceration as wealth inequality exacerbated and “welfare as we know it” ended (121). The interrelation of these factors, coupled with the disillusionment over a Black president who, as Taylor argues, remained “silen[t] on the critical issues facing African Americans even as he has parroted the worst stereotypes about Black culture and irresponsibility” (19), constituted growing frustration and anger in Black communities. This was aggravated by what Taylor observes as a tendency of Blacks “to look inward instead of making demands on the state and others” (218). Taylor does not inquire into the structures that wring recognition from poor Blacks, compelling them to mainly “look inward” and accept

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ideologies and stereotypes that reinforce their oppression. However, she concludes that the continuation of oppression—even as Blacks submitted to such ideologies by “working harder than everyone else” (218)—created a tension that eventually “explode[d]” (218). It was this tension that elicited uprisings such as the one in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of Michael Brown. Yet, Taylor sees the Ferguson rebellion and concomitant birth of the Black Lives Matter movement as only two out of three necessary steps toward Black liberation. The third step is to broaden the scope of activism in solidarity with all oppressed (sub)proletarians, or in Taylor’s words, “to connect the current struggle to end police terror in our communities with an even larger movement to transform this country in such a way that the police are no longer needed to respond to the consequences of […] inequality” (219). During four years of neo-fascist law and order under Donald Trump, the call to “defund the police” was popularized by a broad transnational and cross-racial coalition led by Black Lives Matter activists. “Defund the police” rests on the idea of redistributing public funds to the social branches of the state in order to produce forms of community support that render policing obsolete. Thus, while the slogan “defund the police” resonates with Taylor’s call for systemic action against state violence, her insistence on a “much larger vision of what a different world could look like” (216) is a reminder that, in this struggle against the immediate social ills, one should not lose sight of the long-term goal: Black liberation realized in the context of a cross-racial, socialist revolution. Alicia Garza’s The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart (2020) complements Taylor’s historical analysis by providing an insider’s perspective on the Black Lives Matter movement. Stressing the insufficiency of electoral politics in bringing about sustainable change, The Purpose of Power highlights the importance of transforming power relationships. The book is in many ways a manual on grassroots organizing and the building of coalitions; but it is also a memoir about, as Garza explains, “how a movement shaped my life—and why I became determined to build a different one” (11). The subtitle bespeaks a twofold movement, the “coming together” under #BlackLivesMat- ter out of a sense of “falling apart” during a psychological crisis that Garza (and Black people at large) underwent in reaction to the acquittal of Trayvon Mar- tin’s killer, George Zimmerman. The subtitle also evokes the recent upsurge of protests in the wake of the dual crisis of police brutality during a pandemic that continues to harm Black and Brown lives in particular. Thus, capturing the two significant phases in the history of Black Lives Matter—its emergence in 2013 and upsurge in 2020—the subtitle carries one of the central lessons on movements defined by Garza as follows: “Movements are much more like waves than they are like light switches. Waves ebb and flow, but they are perpetual, their starting point unknown, their ending point undetermined, their direction dependent upon the conditions that surround them and the barriers that obstruct them” (xi). The Purpose of Power, therefore, is also about demystify- ing movements and challenging the dominant perception of them as sporadic events. It reminds readers of the continuous struggle that goes into the pursuit of freedom. Garza’s clear-eyed observations of the conditions that shape movements are informed by many factors, inter alia, her degrees in Anthropology and Sociology. Her academic training is evident especially in the first part titled “A Short History of How We Got Here” (1), wherein, in a manner of sociological reflexivity, she outlines her coming of age at a time when right-wing conservatism was ascending to power. Indeed, Garza’s extraordinary perception is shaped by her extraordinary position in social space: growing up as a Black queer

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woman in a predominantly white neighborhood and being raised2 by a Black mother (a former prison guard) and a white, Jewish stepfather. Interweaving her personal story with historical developments, she illustrates the destructive effects of Reaganism on Black people and Black women particularly. Yet, Garza found everyday resistance personified in the feminism of her late mother. Garza outlines her path to professional activism and the gradual emergence of Black Lives Matter. She meticulously lays out the hard work of organizing and provides hands-on advice as well as in-depth reflection on both the pitfalls and promises of (building and sustaining) movements: from her “First Lessons” (ch. 3) as an apprentice organizer through her “First Fight” (ch. 4) as a community activist, to the birth of Black Lives Matter. She also warns that by now all too common phenomena—such as the popularization of and capitalization on Black Lives Matter that are frequently dismissed as side effects of advancing to a mass movement—should also be considered critically regarding their potential to undermine the very goals of that movement (249-67). Garza also makes a strong case for “sustained organizing” as opposed to merely being visible or “going viral” and thus emphasizes the importance of (social) media as a tool, not an end in itself (141). The strength of her arguments for or against certain strategic efforts but also her criticism of problematic phenomena within movements also lies in the fact that she is frank about her stance. Garza makes a clear distinction between her personal views and those of the network, seizes her book’s platform to lay out her larger goals for justice and equality and is not shy to address those dynamics within movements that stand in the way of those visions. Some of her views, she acknowledges, may be surprising for those har- boring strong, absolute ideas of concepts, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw’s framework of intersectionality, a term that Garza defines as “what happens when we do everything through the lens of making sure that no one is left behind” (146). Garza’s perspective on intersectionality emphasizes the qualities of the term and highlights its potential to build alliances across groups that otherwise do not (seem to) share many commonalities. What may at first glance not fit into this higher vision of justice for all and building coalitions with people whose views differ from one’s own is Garza’s reckoning with DeRay Mckesson, whom she uses as an example of someone 2 We opted for the capitalization of “Black” who “offers a sharp lesson on pedestals, platforms, and profiles […]” (255). Her and “Brown” as political harsh, several pages-long criticism of Mckesson should not be mistaken for per- terms of self-definition sonal animosity driven by vanity or a struggle for power between two different and empowerment. This is not meant to reify the activist styles, however, it should be understood as a moment that painfully notion of biological races; confronted Garza and many other activists who do not harbor (any sort of) it is rather an acknowledg- male privilege with the realization that leadership of men still continues to be ment of the effects of social racialization and prioritized in the Black community “regardless of their actual contribution” an attempt to provide a (264). The problem with someone like Mckesson, his strong presence, and the linguistic counterbalance media’s and establishment’s infatuation with Black, gay cis-men like him is, to it, that is, to a power relation that continues to Garza claims, that it is prone to erase Black women’s work and thus does a dis- systematically privilege service to the actual, larger goals of Black Lives Matter. “Unity”—especially whiteness. Not capital- when it only serves to perpetuate century-long problems within different com- izing “white,” in turn (since the stylistic guidelines for munities—is thus not Garza’s most important goal. By addressing the question this journal recommend of Black, male privilege that also pertains to gay men, she does not shy away the capitalization of all ra- from talking about a highly sensitive issue. Yet, this allows her to confidently cial markers), constitutes an important step in this assert the original agenda of Black Lives Matter one more time towards the end context in order to avoid of her book, namely liberation for all Black people. She thus closes on a positive invoking all too common note regarding the future of Black power that she believes has the potential to “All Lives Matter” rhetoric. make America “great for the first time” (275).

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Whereas Taylor and Garza focus specifically on Black Lives Matter, Caste: The Lies That Divide Us by award-winning journalist and professor Isabel Wilkerson connects the United States, India, and Nazi Germany as “three caste systems [that] have stood out” (17) in history. She offers a much broader, but equally in- formative take with regard to Black liberation and opts for the concept of “caste” as the system that undergirds the phenomenon of racism with a relentless im- position of social hierarchies. Yet, the two words, Wilkerson asserts right in the beginning of her illuminating study, “are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other” (18-19). What makes “caste” particularly useful for the endeavor to understand the root cause of racial discrimination, however, is that it emphasizes the structural nature of discrimination that sustains race or racism, while the latter ones have by now frequently (and wrongly) been charged with subjectivity and feelings, Wilkerson claims. It is especially her structural and international approach to caste which she lays out by drawing from numerous historical and personal incidents—reaching from early, colonial American history in the sev- enteenth century to recent events, such as her stay in India—that make her book instructive in the context of Black Lives Matter. While targeting the underlying inequalities and discrepancies that also find expression as forms of racism, the system of caste has much wider repercussions. They are frequently not as easily detectable or recognized for those who are not on the receiving end of these in- justices. For Wilkerson, caste is characterized by strong social hierarchies based on “divine will” (17) or supernatural forces, mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, and the belief that each caste must remain “pure” (29). Thus, the analytical lens of caste exposes the very power dynamics that usually go unnoticed but also develop harmful racialized effects. With regard to these aspects, Wilkerson explores several facets of Black dignity and the frequent failure of whites to recognize Black accomplishment, humanity, or even presence. She offers a compelling, multi-layered account of The Lies that Divide Us as her book’s subtitle indicates. In an instructive section of the book, titled “The Euphoria of Hate” (ch. 19), Wilkerson succinctly explains what all three systems of caste have in common. Analyzing a movie scene in which Hitler is hailed by a large crowd of “ordinary Germans” (82) with great excitement, Wilkerson states that while every person would say about themselves that they “would never have attended such an event” or “a lynching” (266), the “uncomfortable truth […] [is] that evil is not one person […] [but is] lurking in humanity itself” (267). In recognition of that, Wilkerson, in her epilogue, yet ends on a fairly positive note and provides a host of ideas and advice for all those who “have hit the caste lottery,” as “[t]he price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly” (386), she writes. Besides radical empathy—that is, “to listen with a humble heart to understand another’s experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel” (385)—she also urges us to take responsibility “for what good or ill we do to people alive with us today” (387). While skillfully oscillating between the past and the present when it comes to the United States and India, the book’s argument would have further profited from also addressing contemporary racism in Germany more explicitly instead of mainly focusing on Nazi Germany. This would have provided more nuance to her very laudatory account of how Germany deals with its Nazi past. She sees Germany’s memory work as a possible role model for the United States, but unfortunately does not really elaborate on Germany’s current conflicts around caste and racism in this context. This might also be quite a telling lack in her argumentation, however, as Germany itself is still reluctant to think about the Holocaust

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when it comes to its relation to other forms of racialized caste systems, such as colonialism or different expressions of racism in unified Germany after 1989.

Nicole Hirschfelder (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen) Luvena Kopp (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg)

Works Cited Carruthers, Charlene. Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements. Boston, MA: Beacon, 2018. Print. Hill, Marc Lamont. Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond. New York: Atria Books, 2016. Print. ---. We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest, and Possibility. Chicago, IL: Hay- market Books, 2020. Print. Kendi, Ibrahim X. How to Be an Antiracist. New York: One World, 2019. Print. ---. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in Amer- ica. New York: Nation, 2016. Print. Khan-Cullors, Patrisse, and asha bandele. When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir. New York: St. Martin’s, 2018. Print. Vitale, Alexander S. The End of Policing. London: Verso, 2017. Print.

The Politics of Health: Diagnosing America’s Democracy through Social Rights, Advocacy, Inequalities, and Addiction

Gunnar Almgren, Health Care as a Right of Citizenship: The Continuing Evolution of Reform (New York: Columbia UP, 2017), 342 pp. Daniel E. Dawes, The Political Determinants of Health (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2020), 216 pp. Julia Lynch, Regimes of Inequality: The Political Economy of Health and Wealth (New York: Cambridge UP, 2019), 294 pp. Sam Quinones, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015), 368 pp.

The current state of American democracy is fraught with issues that can be examined through the lens of health policy and politics. The era of the Trump presidency has highlighted many concerning blows to health policy: from the inconsistent messaging about the pandemic, to challenges in addressing the opioid epidemic, to the contradictory partisan rallying cry to dismantle, repeal, and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or “Obamacare.” The social right to health care (Almgren), the way that health care is politically determined (Dawes), the framing of health inequalities (Lynch), and the ongoing causes and management of the opioid crisis (Quinones) are key pillars through which to critically assess the policies that are implemented, not implemented, or actively dismantled—and by extension, to assess democratic rule. This review uses the lens of health policy to make sense of American democracy through examining inequalities, policies, and crises, making a compelling case for diagnosing American democracy by first taking its pulse in terms of health policy. Some

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books, such as Dawes’s, make direct reference to the harm that the Trump presidency has done to achieving equity, whereas others such as Lynch’s empirical study provide us with tools to better analyze health issues at hand in all democracies. What is consistent is that the central role of health policy in democracies (and globally) has never been clearer than in the pivotal year of 2020. Gunnar Almgren’s Health Care as a Right of Citizenship introduces the critical question about the paradoxes of American exceptionalism in health care, comparing the United States to every other developed nation with a comprehensive health care system. His first chapter outlines the long history of health care reform in the United States, condensing what could be an overwhelming history in a chapter that is easily accessible for students of Health Policy and Political Science. He explains how the current U.S. health care system is a compromise that is ultimately unsustainable and argues “that the full realization of health care as a social right of citizenship is not something that is merely desirable on humanitarian grounds or even as a matter of global economic competitiveness, but that such a social right is inexorably linked to the structural requisites of democratic citizenship and democratic political institutions” (35). Almgren outlines how the idea of a social right to health is here to stay, while at the same time critically pointing out the flaws of the ACA as they relate to exclusion of undocumented workers and others. To understand policy and partisan ideologies, Almgren draws on T. H. Marshall’s and John Rawls’s theories of citizenship and justice. He establishes the social right to health care and highlights how the ACA, building upon path dependence of employer-based health care, does not do enough to guarantee a social right to health based on citizenship: “To the extent that either health-care access or quality is experienced or viewed as a privilege afforded to the fortunate and advantaged, the collective sense of basic social equality is undermined” (103). While Almgren provides sophisticated answers to the issues of American health care reform with excellent overviews of Marshall and Rawls on social citizenship, there is a rift between theories of democratic rights and the realities of the American policy landscape. Are presidents and policymakers ready to engage in the discourse of social rights to health care, and is it politically feasible in today’s political landscape? Or is such framing—as Lynch would argue—still a political taboo? One thing is certain: if presidents read this book, the United States might have a better chance at creating a more just health care system. Almgren’s expert analysis of the social right to health care is compelling and provides a critical appraisal of health policy and the type of health reform needed for a just society. The idea is here, but we have not yet achieved it in terms of health care policy. Daniel E. Dawes’s book The Political Determinants of Health picks up where Almgren leaves off, albeit with a different focus, away from social rights of citizenship towards policy-making and the political determinants of health: “It is not a coincidence that certain groups of Americans experience higher premature death rates than others. It is not a fluke that some groups experience poverty for generations, blocked from attaining the American Dream. […] [I]t becomes apparent that one major factor has exacerbated the disparities in health status: our political system” (41). Dawes begins his book with “The Allegory of the Orchard” (ch. 1), explaining centuries of complex health policy, institutional racism, lack of access to health care with an allegory of a farmer with trees planted in either fertile soil or rocky, infertile soil. He uses the tree metaphor to explain populations who are either afforded and provided with accessible goods and services (i. e., nutrients)

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and those who are not. In other words, health disparities could be bridged if populations were given the same access to health and services. Dawes highlights important elements of health policy that can often be overlooked in histories of national health policy, including mental health, health equity advocates, and political backlashes to such policy efforts. He takes a more hopeful and pragmatic view of the ACA than Almgren, focusing on the behind- the-scenes working groups and actors. These advocates saw the ACA as an opportunity for achieving and advancing health equity, and reframed their message in order to get their point across and into policy. Barack Obama’s health reform on March 21, 2010, is described as “a groundbreaking piece of legislation, which advocates hoped would bring coverage to more than thirty-two million unin- sured Americans. It materialized because advocates were ‘unwilling to postpone’ the creation, passage, and implementation of the country’s first inclusive and equitable health law” (127). Dawes briefly addresses the election of Donald Trump, warning that the 2016 election was a blow to health equity advocates in face of a “new government opposed to addressing racial and ethnic disparities, LGBTQ+ disparities, immigrant health issues, and climate change” (131). Dawes’s book is essential to understand inequalities and inequities: “Health equity is the great unfinished business of our society. It has eluded the United States and other countries, owing in large part to vexing political determinants undergirded by structural racism, misogyny, and other forms of inequality” (143). This important book on equity and structural barriers transcends health care. It is, at its core, a commentary on American democracy—not only on its shortcomings, but serving also as a story of hope through the tireless work of health equity advocates. In contrast to Almgren and Dawes, Julia Lynch takes a bird’s eye view of various rich democracies rather than focusing on the domestic inequalities of the United States—as Dawes does, or the philosophical argumentation of policy proposals in Almgren—and so she completes the picture with this more global perspective, allowing for an explicit commentary on the link between democracy and health inequalities: “Inequalities in health are every bit as troubling as the more familiar inequalities in income and wealth, even if they have received much less attention from political scientists” (3). Lynch’s starting point is the rise of inequalities in rich Western democracies. Lynch argues that politicians’ frames intertwine over the discussion on health inequality through interactions with neoliberalism: “These interactions shape how politicians frame the issue of inequality, the tools they use (and avoid using) in order to combat inequality, and ultimately their success or failure in combating rising inequality into the twenty-first century” (15). Lynch understands health inequalities as problems that do not simply exist, but are constructed. Her book refocuses political discourse, framing, and public debate as an integral part of understanding government responses to health inequalities. Readers interested in American democracy can draw important inferences with regards to her questions of how global covenants, reports, and dialogues make their way to domestic contexts. Lynch demonstrates how health equity frames from the WHO and EU-level impact national politicians. Surprisingly, we may learn the most from what is left out: an analysis of the United States. Lynch’s book does not have an entire case study on the United States, focusing instead on England, France, and Finland. But her chapter on France outlines some questions very pertinent for scholars of American health care policy: “why did policy elites in France in the 1980s and 1990s discuss the problem of inequalities in health in a way that differs so markedly from the international consensus?” (127). The same question can be asked in the U.S. context. Importantly, she discusses the emergence of certain

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“taboos” in how health inequality was discussed (211-12) given the contexts of neoliberalism and political taboos around redistribution or increasing public spending, and how “neoliberal politics harms health equity […]” (217). This is highly relevant in the United States, where multiple taboos around addressing health policy issues are at play. Sam Quinones’s Dreamland may seem an outlier compared to the three other books on health policy under review here. But Quinones’s style helps him deliv- er an accessible as well as heartbreaking story. In a narrative bouncing between characters in Mexico and the United States, interviews with family members touched by opioid addiction, and short historical chapters on the development of the pharmaceutical industry, Quinones’s journalism background reveals itself as he weaves together narratives converging around the current opioid crisis in the United States. This book demonstrates the multitude of actors and forces involved in the complex crisis, from drug cartels to medical industries, to aggressive marketing to neoliberal policies, to the complexity of addiction and the humanization of the many victims of the opioid crisis in the United States. Unlike the previous three books, Quinones does not structure the book around a main academic argument. Rather, he uses various forms of narrative, stories, interviews, and journalistic discovery in very short chapters to show multiple perspectives. The message built over the course of the entire book is that any one main argument about the opioid crisis would be too narrow to capture its complexity. Readers learn about how opioids came to be so heavily prescribed, learn of the need for public health perspectives to address the problem, and that it is global in scale and entrenched in decades of trade and neoliberal growth. Quinones’s book completes a review of democracy in America: telling a tale of capitalism, economic decline, and of the nostalgia of Portsmouth, Ohio’s social agora from the 1920s to the 1990s: a private swimming pool called “Dreamland.” Quinones’s narrative style and interviews on the painful subject of opioid addiction give us insights to which academic texts detailing policy or democracy cannot normally do justice. This means that the arc of health policy addressing addiction is not as developed, which many scholars of health policy, democracy, and inequality might desire: a comparison with the racialized crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s and the federal government’s overwhelming response to incarcerate rather than employ public health harm reduction measures. But instead, Quinones circles back to the main characters in this work of nonfiction, underscoring the importance of community and ending the book back in Ports- mouth, Ohio, on a note of hope, recovery, and overall resilience. Assessing the nation’s democracy by measuring a range of health policies provides us with key insights into the centrality of health and health policy to American democracy. Much work lies ahead: as then President-elect, Joe Biden, stated in his victory speech, “this is the time to heal in America” (qtd. in Reston and Collinson).

Betsy Leimbigler (Freie Universität Berlin)

Works Cited Reston, Maeve, and Stephen Collinson. “President-Elect Joe Biden Seeks to Unite Nation with Victory Speech.” CNN.com. Cable News Network, 8 Nov. 2020. Web. 30 Nov. 2020. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/07/politics/biden- victory-speech-2020-election/index.html.

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List of Contributors

Aust, Helmut Philipp; Professor of Public Law and Internationalization of Law, Fachbereich Rechtswissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin, Van’t- Hoff-Straße 8, 14195 Berlin, Germany ([email protected]) Banerjee, Mita; Chair of American Studies, Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Jakob-Welder-Weg 20, 55128 Mainz, Germany ([email protected]) Bergen, John von; Artist, Director of Studio Arts, Bard College Berlin; Platanenstraße 24, 13156 Berlin, Germany ([email protected]) Berman, Sheri; Professor of Political Science, Department of Politi- cal Science, Barnard College, Columbia University, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027-6598, United States ([email protected]) Bieger, Laura; Chair of American Studies, University of Groningen, Oude Kijk in’t Jatstraat 26, 9712 EK Groningen, The Netherlands ([email protected]) Birkle, Carmen; Professor of American Studies, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Wilhelm-Röp- ke-Straße 6, 35032 Marburg, Germany ([email protected]) Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo; James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of So- ciology, Department of African & African American Studies, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, United States ([email protected]) Boyd, Melba; Poet and Distinguished Professor in African Ameri- can Studies, Department of African American Studies, Wayne State University, 5057 Woodward, Detroit, MI 48202, USA ([email protected]) Brim, Matt; Professor of Queer Studies, Department of English, Col- lege of Staten Island, City University of New York, 2800 Victory Blvd, Staten Island, NY 10314, United States ([email protected]) Broeck, Sabine; em. Professor of American Studies, Department of English-Speaking Cultures, Universität Bremen, Bibliothekstraße 1, 28359 Bremen, Germany ([email protected]) Bronfen, Elisabeth; Professor of English and American Studies, Uni- versität Zürich, Plattenstraße 47, 8032 Zürich, Switzerland ([email protected])

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Calhoun, Craig; University Professor of Social Sciences, School of Po- litics and Global Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, PO Box 877802, AZ 85287-7802, United States ([email protected]) Däwes, Birgit; Professor of American Studies, Department of English and American Studies, Europa-Universität Flensburg, Auf dem Cam- pus 1, 24943 Flensburg, Germany ([email protected]) Essi, Cedric; Postdoctoral Researcher in American Studies, Collabora- tive Research Center “Law and Literature” (SFB 1385), Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Osnabrück, Neuer Graben 40, 49074 Osnabrück, Germany ([email protected]) Fawaz, Ramzi; Associate Professor of English, English Department, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 600 North Park Street, Madi- son, WI 53706, United States ([email protected]) Gerund, Katharina; Assistant Professor of American Studies, De- partment of English and American Studies, Friedrich-Alexander- Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Bismarckstraße 1, 91540 Erlangen, Germany ([email protected]) Glancy, Diane; author and em. Professor of English, Macalester Col- lege, 1600 Grand Avenue, Saint Paul, MN 55105-18999, United States ([email protected]) Guérot, Ulrike; Professor of European Policy and Democracy Re- search and Founder of the European Democracy Lab, Donau-Uni- versität Krems, Dr.-Karl-Dorrek-Straße 30, 3500 Krems, Austria ([email protected]) Hentschel, Christine; Professor of Criminology: Security and Resil- ience, Department of Social Sciences, Universität Hamburg, Allen- de-Platz 1, 20146 Hamburg, Germany ([email protected]) Hirschfelder, Nicole; Associate Professor for American Culture and Literature, Department of English, Eberhard Karls Universität Tü- bingen, Wilhelmstraße 50, 72074 Tübingen, Germany ([email protected]) Höhne, Stefan; Project Leader of the international HERA Research Project “Governing the Narcotic City” and Mercator Research Fel- low at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI), Goethestraße 31, 45128 Essen, Germany ([email protected]) Hornung, Alfred; Professor of American Studies and Founding Direc- tor of the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, Jo- hannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Jakob-Welder-Weg 20, 55128 Mainz, Germany ([email protected])

318 Amst 66.1 (2021): 317-21 List of Contributors

Hustvedt, Siri; Novelist and Lecturer in Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell University, 1300 York Avenue, New York, NY 10065, United States ([email protected]) Kölemen, Aysuda; Research Fellow, Politics Section, Bard College Berlin, Platanenstraße 24, 13156 Berlin, Germany ([email protected]) Kopp, Luvena; Doctoral Candidate, Department of North American Cultural Studies, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Rempart- straße 15, 79085 Freiburg i. Br., Germany ([email protected]) Kurashige, Scott; Chair of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies, Interdisciplinary Department of Comparative Race & Ethnic Stu- dies, Texas Christian University, 2800 South University Drive, Fort Worth, TX 76109, USA ([email protected]) Lammert, Christian; Professor of Political Science and Political Systems in North America, Department of Political Science, John-F.-Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Lans- straße 7-9, 14195 Berlin, Germany ([email protected]) Leimbigler, Betsy; Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science, Depart- ment of Political Science, John-F.-Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Lansstraße 7-9, 14195 Berlin, Germany ([email protected]) Mayer, Margit; Senior Fellow, Center for Metropolitan Studies, Tech- nische Universität Berlin, Hardenbergstraße 16-18, 10623 Berlin, Germany ([email protected]) Mazzucato, Mariana; Professor in the Economics of Innovation & Public Value, University College London (UCL), Founding Direc- tor of the UCL Institute for Innovation & Public Purpose (IIPP), 11 Montague St, Holborn, London WC1B 5BP, United Kingdom Meier, Birte; Senior Producer / Director, Zweites Deutsches Fernse- hen, Programmbereich Info, Gesellschaft und Leben, Otto-Schott- Straße 13, 55100 Mainz, Germany ([email protected]) Mo’e’hahne, Ho’esta; Assistant Professor of English, Department of English, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-153, Uni- ted States ([email protected]) Monot, Pierre-Héli; Professor of Transnational American Studies: Po- litical Theory, Aesthetics and Public Humanities, Amerika-Institut, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Schellingstraße 3 VG, 80799 München, Germany ([email protected]) Paul, Heike; Professor of American Studies, Department of English and American Studies, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürn- berg, Bismarckstraße 1, 91540 Erlangen, Germany ([email protected])

Amst 66.1 (2021): 317-21 319 List of Contributors

Pease, Donald E.; The Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities Department of English and Creative Writing, Dartmouth College, 6032 Sanborn House, Hanover, NH 03755, United States ([email protected]) Raetzsch, Christoph; Associate Professor for Journalism Studies and Digital Methods, Department of Media and Journalism Studies, Aarhus Universitet, Helsingforsgade 14, 8200 Aarhus N, Denmark ([email protected]) Rodríguez, Dylan; President of the American Studies Association and Professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies, 900 University Ave., Riverside, CA 92521, United States ([email protected]) ross, kihana miraya; Assistant Professor of African American Studies, Department of African American Studies, Northwestern Universi- ty, 1860 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208, United States ([email protected]) Sassen, Saskia; Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Co-Chair of the Committee on Global Thought, Department of Sociology, Columbia University, 713 Knox Hall, 606 West 122nd St, New York NY, United States ([email protected]) Schäfer, Stefanie; Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, Department of English and American Studies, Universität Wien, Spitalgasse 2, Hof 8 (Campus), 1090 Wien, Austria ([email protected]) Schleusener, Simon; Postdoctoral Researcher, Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Ha- belschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin, Germany ([email protected]) Sennett, Richard; Senior Advisor to the United Nations’ Program on Climate Change and Cities; UN Habitat New York Office, Two United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017, United States Shank, Barry; Professor of American Studies and Comparative Studies, Department of Comparative Studies, Ohio State University, 1775 St College Road, Columbus, OH 43210, United States ([email protected]) Stryker, Susan; Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women‘s Lea- dership, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland, CA 94613, United States ([email protected]) Sze, Julie; Professor of American Studies, Department of American Studies, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Da- vis, CA 95616, United States ([email protected]) Thompson, Vanessa E.; Postdoctoral Researcher in Comparative Cul- tural and Social Anthropology, Department of Social and Cultural

320 Amst 66.1 (2021): 317-21 List of Contributors

Sciences, Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt, Große Scharrn- straße 59, 15230 Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany ([email protected]) Võ, Linda Trinh; Professor of Asian American Studies, Department of Asian American Studies, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA ([email protected]) Vormann, Boris; Professor of Politics, Director of Politics Section, Bard College Berlin, Platanenstraße 24, 13156 Berlin, Germany Wakeman, Rosemary; Professor of History, Coordinator of University Urban Initiatives, History Department, Fordham University, Lin- coln Center 33 W. 60th Street New York, NY 10023, United States ([email protected]) Warren, Calvin; Associate Professor of African American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Department of African American Studies, Emory University, 201 Dowman Drive, Atlanta, Georgia 30322, United States ([email protected]) Weinman, Michael; Professor of Philosophy, Bard College Berlin and Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Indiana University; Platanenstraße 24, 13156 Berlin, Germany ([email protected])

Amst 66.1 (2021): 317-21 321

current officers of the german association for american studies

President Prof. Dr. Philipp Gassert Universität Mannheim Historisches Institut Lehrstuhl für Zeitgeschichte D-68131 Mannheim [email protected] Vice President Prof. Dr. Karsten Fitz Universität Passau Professor of American Studies Innstraße 41 D-94032 Passau [email protected] Executive Director Prof. Dr. Catrin Gersdorf Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg Lehrstuhl für Amerikanistik Am Hubland D-97074 Würzburg [email protected]

Visit www.dgfa.de for information on the German Association for American Studies (DGfA / GAAS).

publication guidelines Manuscripts should be submitted to the editorial offices of Amerika studien / American Studies at Europa-Universität Flensburg and Philipps- Universität Marburg via [email protected]. E-Mails regarding books for review should be submitted to our review editors via [email protected]. Hardcopies should be sent to reviewers directly, so we ask publishers to kindly coordinate this process with our review editorial office at the University of Cologne. The journal is under no

Amst obligation to review unsolicited books. In view of the computerized production of the journal, manuscripts of articles and reviews can only be accepted if submitted as computer files (preferably MS Word, .docx, Office 2010 and higher). Please note the following formal requirements: — Article manuscripts—manuscript text, abstract, footnotes, list of works cited—should not exceed 60,000 to 70,000 characters (including spaces). — All articles must be preceded by an abstract in English of no more than 200 words. — Since Amerikastudien / American Studies follows a double-blind peer review system, articles should contain no references to the author. — Upon submission, please confirm explicitly that the article has not been previously published (online or in print) and is not currently under review elsewhere. — An Amerikastudien / American Studies style guide is available here: https://dgfa.de/american-studies-a-quarterly-2/article-style-sheet/ eISSN 2625-2155

66 | 1 2021

A Quarterly Volume 66| Number 1 2021 66| Number Volume

CONTENTS

COMMON GROUNDS? AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AFTER TRUMP Cedric Essi, Heike Paul, and Boris Vormann (Guest Editors)

I. PROLOGUE Melba Boyd

IV. EPILOGUE Melba Boyd