BEYOND THE DEMOCRATIC STATE: ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN INTERVENTIONS IN DEMOCRATIC THEORY by BRIAN CARL BERNHARDT B.A., James Madison University, 2005 M.A., University of Colorado at Boulder, 2010 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Political Science 2014 This thesis entitled: Beyond the Democratic State: Anti-Authoritarian Interventions in Democratic Theory written by Brian Carl Bernhardt has been approved for the Department of Political Science Steven Vanderheiden, Chair Michaele Ferguson David Mapel James Martel Alison Jaggar Date The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we Find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards Of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. Bernhardt, Brian Carl (Ph.D., Political Science) Beyond the Democratic State: Anti-Authoritarian Interventions in Democratic Theory Thesis directed by Associate Professor Steven Vanderheiden Though democracy has achieved widespread global popularity, its meaning has become increasingly vacuous and citizen confidence in democratic governments continues to erode. I respond to this tension by articulating a vision of democracy inspired by anti-authoritarian theory and social movement practice. By anti-authoritarian, I mean a commitment to individual liberty, a skepticism toward centralized power, and a belief in the capacity of self-organization. This dissertation fosters a conversation between an anti-authoritarian perspective and democratic theory: What would an account of democracy that begins from these three commitments look like? In the first two chapters, I develop an anti-authoritarian account of freedom and power. In Chapter I, mobilizing insights from libertarians and republicans, I offer an account of freedom that is divorced from self-sovereignty and committed to non-domination. In Chapter II, utilizing work in anarchist anthropology, I show why freedom as non-domination is incompatible with the state, and that an alternative to the statist organization of power is possible. While a centripetal logic unifies society’s power in a Leviathan, a centrifugal logic disperses power across many non-sovereign nodes. In the second half of the dissertation, in order to elaborate what centrifugal power may look like in our contemporary context, I focus on two core anti-authoritarian social movement practices: direct action and networked organization. In Chapter III, I argue that direct action, a practice that enacts collective power, is democratic to the extent that it upsets power inequalities and domination, and creates spaces for others to exercise political power. In Chapter IV, I argue that networks enable two ends that are often thought to be in tension: coordination, and self-governance, on the one hand, and diversity and pluralism, on the other. In contrast to representative elections and directly democratic assemblies, however, networks do not require a well-defined people, a centralized decision-making body, or even a single, unifying decision. Throughout the dissertation, I argue against the platitude of the “democratic state” in favor of a democracy against the state. I conclude by re-imagining democracy as the dispersion of power. iii CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: DEMOCRACY AGAINST DEMOCRACY. ...............................1 CHAPTER I. RECLAIMING LIBERTARIANISM .....................................................33 II. THE INDIAN AGAINST LEVIATHAN ...............................................64 III. THE DEMOCRATIC POTENTIAL OF DIRECT ACTION ...............103 IV. NETWORK DEMOCRACY ................................................................151 CONCLUSION: DEMOCRACY AS THE DISPERSON OF POWER. ..................200 BIBLIOGRAPHY. .....................................................................................................213 iv INTRODUCTION DEMOCRACY AGAINST DEMOCRACY “‘Democracy’ was once a word of the people, a critical word, a revolutionary word. It has been stolen by those who would rule over the people, to add legitimacy to their rule. It is time to take it back, to restore it to its critical and radical power.” - C. Douglas Lummis (1996, 15) “Nuestros sueños no caben en sus urnas” (“Our dreams do not fit in their ballot boxes.”) - Slogan from Argentina’s 2001 rebellion I. Ambivalence and Ambiguity We are deeply ambivalent about democracy today. On the one hand, democracy has never enjoyed such great global popularity. There are more democratic governments in existence today than at any previous historical moment. Moreover, the democratic ideal has been an important source of inspiration for the wave of rebellions known as the Arab Spring that began in late 2010 in Tunisia and spread across much of North Africa and the Middle East the following year. Indeed, the Arab world – often thought to be among the least hospitable places in the world for democracy – has recently been a hotbed of democratic activity. This wave of protests and occupations then moved beyond the Arab world and swept across Europe and, finally, the United States throughout 2011: the Arab Spring became the American Fall. While the motivations for the occupations varied – from opposition to long-standing dictatorial regimes in North Africa, to economic austerity in Greece, Spain and the United Kingdom, to a growing concentration of economic and political power in the United States – it is noteworthy that the form of resistance employed in each place bore striking similarities. From Cairo to Barcelona to New York and Oakland, protesters sought to occupy public spaces and hold them for an extended period of time. The tactical strengths of such a strategy were clear: maintaining a visible and accessible space provided an easy way for large numbers of people to 1 engage with the protest and, simultaneously, allowed momentum to build through escalating tension with police and city officials. It is no surprise then that this tactical innovation, which garnered so much attention in Tahrir Square, was duplicated in cities across Europe and the U.S. Beyond its tactical strengths, though, the public occupations provided a highly visible testing ground for alternative models of democracy and modes of citizen action. Underlying both the Indignados movement in Spain and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States, was an effort to radicalize and reinvigorate democratic practice. There was, as the Spanish put it, a call for ¡Democracia Real YA!: Real Democracy NOW!. Campaign slogans aside, the actual practice of decision-making in many occupations – characterized by such mechanisms as the “general assembly” and “the people’s mic” – illustrate this radically democratic impulse, which used the occupations as a site to experiment with direct and participatory forms of democracy. In short, democracy has been and continues to be an incredibly inspiring ideal. On the other hand, though, there are very real, and quite stark, concerns about the reality of actually-existing democratic governments. In Egypt, for example, while 66% of people agree that “democracy is preferable to any other form of government,” 56% percent are “dissatisfied” with the way democracy is working in their country (“Egyptians Increasingly Glum” 2013). More striking, I think, are the perspectives of citizens in the so-called “consolidated democracies” – that is, democracies that are thought to be highly functioning and stable. Consider the United States. Fully 80% of Americans says they “trust the government in Washington” “some of the time” or “never.” In contrast, only 19% of Americans say the trust the government “just about always” or “most of the time” (“Public Trust in Government: 1958- 2013” 2013). Similarly, 69% of Americans say that “government is run for the benefit of a few big interests,” whereas only 29% say that “government is run for the benefit of all” (“The ANES 2 Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior” 2008a). Finally, 60% of Americans agree with the statement “public officials don’t care what people like me think,” while only 23% disagree with that statement (“The ANES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior” 2008b). These numbers should be very troubling. Citizens are highly skeptical of our democratic government. Indeed, in this era of partisanship, the fact that we have serious doubts about our democracy and little say over our government seems to be one of the few things that a large majority of Americans agree about. As an activist, I have witnessed and experienced this ambivalence first-hand. My first experiences with protests and social movements came during the early 2000s as part of the alter- globalization movement in the Washington, D.C. area. The international institutions whose summits we protested – the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the G8 among others – were not only propagating poverty and privatization, but were fundamentally anti-democratic. I still have a shirt I made for an anti- IMF/World Bank protest that reads, simply “Globalize Democracy.” If the primary ills of neoliberal economic globalization could be traced to its unelected, unaccountable, and unrepresentative institutions, then the solution was to democratize them. And, yet, at the same time, it was the police and politicians in supposedly highly-functioning democratic governments that suppressed these movements through the use of