Micropolitical Engagement for Social Justice in the Political Economy

By Christopher Tallent

B.A., The Johns Hopkins University, 2004 A.M., Brown University, 2011

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island May 2014

This dissertation by Christopher Tallent is accepted in its present form

by the Department of Political Science as satisfying the

dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date______

Sharon Krause, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______

Mark Blyth, Reader

Date______

James Morone, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______

Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

iii

VITAE

Christopher Tallent was born in Norman, Oklahoma on June 25, 1981. He completed his B.A. in Political Science at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland in 2004. As a graduate student, Christopher presented his work at regional and national conferences including The Midwest Political Science Association, The New School for Social Research Conference on Radical Democracy, and numerous others. He was funded by a Brown University Graduate Fellowship. In addition to his doctoral work, he has other collaborative research projects on topics related to community organizing, public policy, the history of architecture, and politics as it relates to the built environment.

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation would not have been possible without the support and assistance of numerous individuals and I would like to express my deepest gratitude for their help along the way.

First and foremost I have been exceptionally fortunate to be able to work with Sharon Krause as the chair of my committee. Her thoughtful and incisive comments and suggestions throughout every stage of my project have been central to further developing my ideas in political theory and completing the dissertation. Most of all, her willingness to listen and exchange ideas about political theory has enlivened this project and kept it going when it would have otherwise been impossible. I cannot thank her enough.

I have been additionally fortunate to work with my other committee members, Mark Blyth and James Morone. Mark’s support gave me the confidence to cross intellectual boundaries and draw on sources of inspiration that would otherwise simply not have been possible. He has always been a key interlocutor for me and I am deeply indebted to all his assistance along the way. Without James I simply would not have had the full committee to even defend a dissertation and I am deeply grateful for his willingness to engage with me about my work at a later stage in the process. Yet, even at that stage, his criticisms and comments proved invaluable. Moreover, his welcoming spirit gave me an incredible boost to keep working.

Additionally, I want to thank all the activists and organizers I engaged and talked with at different points during this project. My sincere appreciation goes out to groups as diverse as the Tea Party Patriots of Cecil County Maryland, Occupy Wall Street, and especially Occupy Providence and Mark Simmons in particular. There is a lot of interesting and inspiring political action happening out there in the world. Jason Judd was a key interlocutor with regard to Saul Alinsky organizing and community organizing in general.

Finally, I have been fortunate to have incredible support and friendships here at Brown and further afield. I would like to especially thank Sean Dinces and Sarah Matthiesen here at Brown. Additionally, I would like to thank the participants at the 2013 New School For Social Research Radical Democracy Conference for an exceptional intellectual experience. William Connolly inspired me to study political theory back when I took his introductory course as an undergraduate student, and he continues to be an underlying source of inspiration in all my work. Suzanne Brough provided critical administrative support at all stages of my time at Brown.

Finally, this project would not have been possible without the support of Stacy Cardin, and especially not without the support of my parents, Larry and Pauline Tallent, and my sister Elizabeth Tallent. My parents and sister give me the most inspiration of all.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………1

Chapter 2: The Need to Displace Resentment with Motivation in Liberal Consent….…26

Chapter 3: Adjusting and Supplementing the Terms of Validity in Discourse Theory to Solve a Problem for Motivation around Norms………………………………………….76

Chapter 4: Economic Justice and Micropolitics………………………………………..134

Chapter 5: Towards a Bricoleur’s Ethos for Justice in the Political Economy…………196

Chapter 6: Conclusion……………………………………………………………….….247

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………254

Chapter 1: Introduction

Making a Place for Citizen Action in Justice

Anyone who spends any time working in politics gets used to hanging out with the same people most of the time, and in the most direct sense the contradiction of this expectation is what made Occupy so unusual at first for so many hardened political activists. This was not your usual phonebanking crowd of retirees and interns looking for college credit.

It was something else entirely. On a chilly, nearly rainy and drizzly day in early October in Providence, dozens of folks started showing up in a public park in the center of the city known mainly for its needles and homeless population. They had all heard about something called Occupy Wall Street, and through various different means of social media, word of mouth, or happenstance, found themselves coming together at sundown in a public park with a group of strangers. It was the kind of setting most people would avoid with determination under normal circumstances, not to mention that the park was technically “closed” anyway. And yet, here were the young, the old, the middle aged, the nuns, the college kids, the “crusty” punks, the Afghan war vets, homeless folks, skateboarders, middle aged families with kids and even high schoolers (practically a non- existent population for any conventionally-practiced politics). Moreover, it was also a mix of races, black, white, indian, others, and as we would learn after many conversations, also a mix of genders, sexual orientations, and even political viewpoints.

Perhaps the most important general point is that these were decidedly not the people who

tended to show up at the weekly phonebank group around town. Rather, any hardened political activist would tell you that this was essentially a group that was truly unusual.

There was little to gain from coming out together in a supposedly “dangerous” park with a group of strangers. No one was getting paid to be there or even to organize it. Rather, these were folks who were coming together for the sake of a cause that had shaken them from their normal lives and inspired them to action. This leads to a question of what kind of inspiration would bring people together like this, and what would be the effect for that cause, for justice.

I will argue in this dissertation that this kind of citizen action, replicated in other ways by more conservative, and other groups as well, was not only good for justice, but crucial. Yet, to argue that citizen action of this kind is crucial for justice is not an uncontroversial point. On the one hand, activists around Occupy or The Tea Party or other amorphously affiliated groups or actions would find themselves constantly trying to weather a barrage of criticism that they were simply unorganized rabble-rousers with very little idea of what they were doing. So you want to get together and organize for yourselves? That’s cute, these critics might say, but let’s leave the real decision-making to the adults thank you. And I would argue that this sentiment was expressed not only in popular media and by our political “leaders,” but is grounded also in a tradition of political theory that supports a more abstract conception of what justice is supposed to be.

These two strains came together in an opinion piece in the New York Times that was truly laughable to any actual activist engaged in the hard work of cooperating together with strangers to build common understandings, in which a professor argued that perhaps this might be the moment when people would finally come together and debate Rawls’

difference principle, realizing the virtue of that landmark theory of justice.1 That’s right, a professor of theory who likely spent little if any time at all participating in the general assemblies of decision-making, straining to understand different and new folks, listening hard into the night instead of watching tv, shopping, or just sleeping and getting some rest, thought that this might all be summed up neatly into Rawls’ theory, and wouldn’t that be just great!

I will argue that both the popular idea that politics should be left to the experts and professionals and the theory idea that justice really is a finely-tuned abstract ideal, not only is less well-grounded in theory than those theorists like to believe, at least in the economy, but also that it tends to buttress and combine with that popular ideal that politics is not for “the rest of us,” in ways that promote ultimately illegitimate policies for the political economy. In order to make that argument I will need to look at the political theory debate about social justice, as well as considering the real world effects of these theories in our politics. In doing so, I hope to give fair consideration to the important ways that theories of justice should direct our thinking in politics, but also consider the effects of those directions in the real world. As a result, I hope to gain a more well- grounded understanding of what justice really requires and how real-world cases might transfigure some aspects of our theoretical insights.

The Big Picture

This exploration is grounded in important questions about the role of consent in legitimate government. Questions about consent form a long-standing matter of debate in

1 Mazie, Steven V. “Rawls on Wall Street.” The New York Times 21 October 2011 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/rawls-on-wall-street/?_r=0 10 September 2013.

political theory. In classical theory, social contract theorists broached questions of consent out of new concerns about legitimacy in the context of modernity. In one way or another, their approaches more or less featured our grounding for government in god, anthropology, autonomy, safety, or utility and drew on different conceptions of the state of nature to formulate how citizens might rightly come together to govern in light of these featured insights. The social contract tradition is of course a complex and contested topic in the history of political thought and I do not address it here. Rather, I am specifically concerned with the way contemporary theorists have synthesized this tradition to address the special topic of social justice in liberal democracies. In that spirit,

I take an insight from Jeremy Waldron about consent as a key point of departure for that question about liberalism. According to Waldron, “The thesis I want to say is fundamentally liberal is this: a social and political order is illegitimate unless it is rooted in the consent of all those who live under it; the consent or agreement of these people is a condition of its being morally permissible to enforce that order against them.”2 This is a key point for liberals because of their concern for the inviolability of the individual.

Stemming from that concern is an effort to ground any collective coercion in terms that individuals would be able to agree to. Yet, that concern leads to a more complicated question about the relationship between more or less actual or hypothetical forms of consent.

Even in proposing different terms that may become subject to compromise, we are always in fact imagining what different hypothetical terms might look like, and we will simply never be able to talk with everybody, especially in large and complex modern

2 Waldron, Jeremy. “Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism.” The Philosophical Quarterly 37.147 (1987): pg. 140.

societies. This does not have to be a bad, or crippling factor though. Rather, it may be a recognition that prods us to determine exactly what hypothetical terms are most valid and where we should be more careful. As Waldron suggests, our efforts to resolve questions of consent will always involve a two-sided concept that is in some ways more or less hypothetical and actual: “Though a social order not legitimated by actual consent may be unfree, that unfreedom can be mitigated by our recognition that it is at least possible to imagine people giving it their consent.”3 In order to imagine what that requires it is important to have a place to start, such as an idea of free and equal citizenship. However, if it is the case that there are disadvantages to more abstract formulations of public reasons as bases for consent, then we will find ourselves pulled back in the direction of more actual grounding for our terms of government.

As a result, questions about the right role for more or less abstract or real grounding for terms of cooperation have been the subject of a lively debate in contemporary political theory. That debate took an early form in the communitarian/liberal controversies of the 1980s and early 1990s. Communitarians like

Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor accused liberals like Rawls of presupposing a particular kind of autonomous self as the basis of claims about the requirements of social justice.4 However, these criticisms were grounded in a critique of Rawls’ work in Theory, and mainly the second half of the book which presumed a kind of Kantian autonomy underlying his view and leading to misunderstandings about the kind of theory he was

3 Waldron, Jeremy. “Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism.” The Philosophical Quarterly 37.147 (1987): pgs. 140-141 4 Taylor, Charles (1989) Sources of the Self. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

presenting.5 That would all change with the publication of Political Liberalism and

Rawls’ new formulation of his theory as political in a freestanding sense.6 In that sense

Rawls explicitly reformulated justice as fairness as having a status separate from any particular idea of the good, or comprehensive doctrine. This fundamentally changed the terms of debate around Rawls’ contractualism, leaving behind in large part the big critiques about the right vs. the good, and turning the attention of critics and interlocuters to the status of the political and its meaning for justice.7

Along with Habermas’ publication of Between Facts and Norms in 1992, the debate about the political ultimately turned into a debate between Rawls and Habermas later in the decade.8 This debate turned on some key questions about consent and pluralism that helped to crystalize some of the key differences between these theorists.

Most importantly, Rawls argued that Habermas’ discourse theory actually tended to impute a moral worldview to its deliberators, thus violating liberal terms of pluralism as a result. Habermas in turn essentially accused Rawls of sacrificing democratic legitimacy around his theory and violating pluralism in his own way by foisting an entire theory of rights, liberties, and obligations onto publics in which this would be entirely unlegitimated. Yet, though the debate was never properly resolved in any real sense and represented important differences about the right conceptions of consent, it was also

5 Rawls, John (1971) A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. 6 Rawls, John (1993) Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press: New York. 7 Finlayson, James Gordon and Fabian Freyenhagen ed. (2011) Habermas and Rawls: Disputing the Political. Routledge: New York. 8 Habermas, Jürgen (1996) Between Facts and Norms. The MIT Press: Cambridge.; Habermas, Jurgen (1998) The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Ed. Ciaran Cronan and Pablo De Grieff. The MIT Press: Cambridge.

downplayed by Habermas himself, calling it a “family” dispute. This claim in turn may have led to some of the initial non-reaction to the engagement between these thinkers.9

Questions about the Political Economy and New Challenges

Lost in this debate to a certain extent were questions about the nature of a just political economy and the role of the difference principle. Because the Rawls/Habermas debate focused on questions about comprehensive doctrines, stability, and questions of ethical overload on the one hand or alternatively lack of ethical input on the other, and because

Habermas referred to the dispute as a “family” disagreement, it was easy to assume that the difference principle was accepted as the right way to ground terms of cooperation in the economy. The debate had turned decidedly to the political and what it requires. Yet, lost in that turn, meant to neutralize and advance beyond the kinds of criticisms that had earlier come from the communitarians, was a certain ambiguity in Rawls’ difference principle itself expressed in his re-articulation of justice as fairness in Political

Liberalism. In that book, Rawls had admitted a more open scope of liberal ways the economy might be justly grounded, but also held to the difference principle as the right way of doing so, without ever resolving the ambiguity about what is necessarily required for justice in the economy resulting from these two claims. On the one hand, Rawls would double down on his affirmation of the difference principle in his later book Justice as Fairness10, and others like Joshua Cohen would later accept and try to advance that view,11 while on the other hand an emergent agonist and radical democratic approach

9 Finlayson, James Gordon and Fabian Freyenhagen ed. (2011) Habermas and Rawls: Disputing the Political. Routledge: New York. 10 Rawls, John (2001) Justice as Fairness. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. 11 Cohen, Joshua and Joel Rogers. “Foreward.” Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond. Eds. Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson. Wiley-Blackwell: Hoboken, 2012. xiv-xv.

would push for more equality in the economy than the difference principle would necessarily afford.12

In Justice as Fairness, Rawls suggested a new way of bringing our institutional considerations related to the economy into our affirmation of the right hypothetically- affirmed terms for consent. Delineating four different institutional configurations, Rawls suggested that we might affirm property-owning democracy or liberal socialism as part of our reflective equilibrium in which we consider principles of justice. In making this textually minor, but theoretically potentially very interesting claim, Rawls opened up the possibility for asking all kinds of new and exciting questions about the role of institutions in his theory. For the first time, Rawls had suggested particular institutional configurations and placed them with key principles of his argument. Although he had discussed institutional contributions in the ‘Distributive Shares’ section of Theory, this new contribution laid the groundwork for provocative investigations into the meaning of

Rawls’ political theory and social justice more generally. This groundwork was laid because of Rawls’ inclusion of those terms into our principled considerations of what we can hypothetically assume individuals should agree to for justice. However, Rawls’ articulation of what this involves leads to difficult questions about whether we can affirm those principles with these additional adjustments. On a deeper level, it might lead us to question why he pursues this kind of effort for clarification in the first place. This problematic opens a door into considerations about the limits of hypothetical consent for justice that demands greater development.

12 Connolly, William (1999) Why I Am Not a Secularist. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis and London.

Problems with Hypothetical Consent in Rawls’ Theory

In the next chapter I take up this question about the political basis of agreement for shared terms in the economy as proposed by Rawls. In order to discuss Rawls’ proposal for those specific terms of agreement, it is necessary to better understand his grounding for shared public reasons in general. That grounding arises from taking seriously our shared status as free and equal citizens and finds expression in Rawls’ idea of a just political conception. That conception is meant to be grounded in the liberal principle of legitimacy, and in turn give that principle expression in shared reasons that we can appeal to in justifying political decisions. The expression of this of course is in the first principle for the greatest shared equal rights and liberties and the second principle calling for fair equality of opportunity grounded in a maximin difference principle. Appealing to reasons articulated in these principles is meant to successfully generate the shared grounds for assuming hypothetical consent that would justly function as legitimations for public policies as a result.

After reviewing Rawls’ approach, I argue that he runs into a problem grounding the difference principle in shared reasons that is indicative of a bigger problem in general for his approach. With regard to the difference principle, Rawls of course no longer attempts to ground its affirmation in any shared Kantian mindset as he arguably inclined towards in Theory. Rather, that principle becomes part of a shared political conception known as justice as fairness. As a political conception, reasonable citizens are expected to be able to affirm its terms in their own ways, without impugning their own personal worldviews such as religious views, and so on. However, as part of this unmooring of our political conception for justice from comprehensive doctrines that characterizes

Rawls’ efforts in Political Liberalism, he acknowledges that justice as fairness may be simply one liberal conception amongst many. Yet, given that our shared political reasons for justification are to be found in that conception, it would seemingly raise critical questions about the possibility for justification if there are multiple conceptions. Rawls essentially responds that stability around our overlapping conception on a particular liberal conception is likely to be greater to the extent that the variability between these different conceptions is less narrow. However, Rawls does not explicitly discuss how we might manage the difficulties that would arise from differing liberal conceptions competing for the basis of overlapping consensus.

This problem is greater with regard to the economy, and it is in this realm that I argue that his efforts to resolve concerns about an overlapping consensus fail, and should lead us in the direction of seeking greater actual consent around terms in the political economy as a result. In Justice as Fairness, Rawls doubles down on the difference principle through a greater emphasis on affirming its institutional requirements in our reflective equilibrium in which we consider principles of justice. This is perhaps in order to redeem the importance of reciprocity that is at the heart of his efforts around justice.

Reciprocity requires that we feel included in society and not discriminated or mistreated at the most basic level, even though different citizens may find themselves in all sorts of different situations with different life prospects. In Justice as Fairness Rawls suggests that we can better affirm justice as fairness once we appreciate its institutional configurations, namely property-owning democracy and liberal socialism. As a result, we are more likely to affirm terms that do not generate resentment or apathy. Most importantly, he extends an effort begun in Political Liberalism to ground our affirmation

of these terms in the fair value of the political liberties. That fair value refers to the equal chances of each to compete for public office and participate in politics. This point about the fair value of the political liberties is a key consideration in regard to questions in

Political Liberalism arising around the potential for more or less narrow bases for our overlapping consensus. It seems here that Rawls hopes to be able to ground stability in the equal chance to participate in politics in which the more dirty decisions about exactly how we decide on the best reasons for public justification are reached.

Ultimately, I argue that this effort to redeem reciprocity through the fair value of political liberties fails because it in fact privileges a certain kind of politics, running for office and serving in government, over other forms that are still liberal but reject that approach. These other forms include Saul Alinsky style organizing that rejects public office but is no less liberal in its aims. Suggestions that this alternative kind of political participation is less liberal or less valuable in society is likely to be no less alienating or depression-inducing than the exclusions that Rawls associates with not ensuring the fair value of the political liberties. Yet, I suggest that if that fair value does not serve as a safety valve to successfully mitigate our more or less narrow bases for overlapping consensus around terms in the political economy, then we find ourselves facing a broader problem about what is required for affirmation of terms by citizens to not generate resentment. This point is usefully illustrated by the example of the recent Tea Party movement in the US. That movement, when not reducible to noxious elements of racism, sexism, or homophobia, is not clearly illiberal in its affirmation of free and equal citizenship. If this is the case, then there is a question about how it could be included in terms of cooperation not resolvable simply through ensuring the fair value of the political

liberties. In fact, Rawls himself flags a possibility like this in the later chapters of Theory when he suggests that resentment towards maximin arising from liberal concerns is a more legitimate conservative reply to his argument than the suggestion that those terms are only affirmed out of envy. In this sense, Rawls broaches the idea of something like a

‘resentment test’ to judge whether his terms are legitimate. However, as becomes clear in

Political Liberalism and Justice as Fairness, what such a test requires or could involve remains essentially unresolved. It must be a testament to the good faith of Rawls’ effort that he flags these problems even if they are left somewhat open-ended.

I argue that his effort in Justice as Fairness to better resolve these problems through greater institutional articulation is insufficient and is more likely to generate resentment and open the door to elitist interpretations of public reasons that may find no grounding in shared public reasons. Instead, I suggest that Rawls’ effort should be supplemented by an acknowledgement of the necessity of a wider realm of legitimate political action than he envisages in the fair value of the political liberties. The hope of such a widened scope of politics would be to serve as a kind of resentment test that has reciprocity-based benefits around what our reasons require even if they are not entirely shared – as Rawls acknowledges they might not be. In that sense, active groups like the

Tea Party or Saul Alinsky organizers may have a special role to play in the different ways they generate actual consent. Only through some degree of actual consent can we avoid the elitist problems generated by hypothetical public reasons. Of course, how that consent should be conceieved is the next question. In that spirit, I turn to Habermas to determine the extent to which his acknowledgement of the importance of radical democracy

constitutes a successful response and supplement to Rawls’ view which may avoid and ameliorate some of these difficulties.

Benefits of Actual Consent in Habermas’ Theory and its Limitations

Thus, in the fourth chapter I take up the question of whether Habermas responds to Rawls on the political economy in a way that can make up for the shortcomings of the latter or whether his approach also has its own shortcomings that we may need to build on in order to better understand how consent is most rightly conceived for justice. Habermas’ approach is especially important because he wants to preserve the “embers of radical democracy” for an approach to establishing legitimacy around shared terms. This is important because it is precisely the factor that Rawls’ approach often seems to be lacking. Specifically, Habermas wants to find terms we can all agree to, just like Rawls, but also wants to find a way to more deeply ground those terms in democratic legitimacy.

If he is successful, he may avoid the problems Rawls ultimately faces by trying to carve out a special status for the political liberties in terms of their fair value. That approach, I suggest in the previous chapter, is essentially a band-aid solution to a deeper problem about how we bridge the more or less narrow scope of liberal conceptions competing to be the basis of an overlapping consensus. By focusing precisely on the kind of political problem that Rawls runs into, Habermas may be able to salvage his concern for free and equal citizenship.

Habermas argues for the importance of the co-original terms of our normative agreement. What this refers to is the equal status of our rights and liberties and our own articulation of what those mean. By not privileging the former, as Rawls does, Habermas

hopes to be able to better ground terms in deeper forms of legitimacy. Moreover, in doing so he hopes to make room for an important role for social movements and citizens at the

“periphery” of society. That periphery refers to the many mini-publics and citizens not working in government who are uniquely positioned to discern illegitimate interventions in the lifeworld. That lifeworld refers to the forms of coordination we come to share together and endorse. To the extent that citizens can endorse the norms they live by, that lifeworld is not subverted. Yet, it is also not static because it represents a constant learning process by which we come to understand each other and live our lives under shared terms. In the political economy, according to Habermas, that lifeworld can be subverted by strategic interventions like those motivated by capital or the administrative apparatus of the state. When this happens, citizens may find themselves governed or directed by terms they did not endorse. When this is the case, citizens in the periphery, often in the form of social movements, have a special role in liberal democracies which is to inform society at large and the parliament in order to bring these interventions under control in ways that represent shared norms.

Importantly, when citizens take this role, they not only subvert illegitimate interventions, but they also take on a moral view that draws on the ability to coordinate learned in the traditional lifeworld but will tend to replace it as well with new shared norms for justice. For Habermas, it is important that citizens take up discussion with each other that is noncoerced and refers to objective facts in the lifeworld. If it does not do so, then it risks re-affirming those interventions as norms. Ultimately, it is only those noncoerced validity claims that can be accepted as legitimate shared reasons on Habermas’ account. Whether this is a reasonable requirement of citizens is an important part of the

debate between Rawls and Habermas. They broach the question about whether the latter imputes an ethical overload to citizens and whether the former presents terms that are too hypothetical to actually generate support. Yet, they essentially agree on the kind of rational terms citizens should try to achieve, hence Habermas’ label of the controversy as a “family” disagreement.

In this key clash in the debate between Rawls and Habermas I examine alternative approaches and suggest a different way forward based on taking more seriously the role in which the inclusion of some distorted views may ultimately aid in our ability to construct shared terms of agreement in the political economy. On the one hand, I consider an effort by Arash Abizadeh to take more seriously the potential for rhetoric to play an important role in Habermas’ scheme.13 Abizadeh suggests that rhetoric might play a mediating role in our efforts to communicate together by opening our dialogue with each other to include references to social facts that resonate best with us, rather than only to what is necessarily objective. In doing so, he suggests that slanting our claims in one way or another might have the effect of better serving our objective ends. In this way, rhetoric can play a mediating role. I critically engage with Abizadeh in order to better understand how far this role for rhetoric might go to bridge our differences when our disagreements go deep in a nonjuridical sense. In that sense I mean to refer to the kind of identity-based motivations that lead us to make one argument rather than another. If these cannot be mediated by rhetoric, then there is still a problem that Abizadeh does not entirely resolve.

Moreover, if this is the same problem identified in Rawls’ acknowledgement of the

13 Abizadeh, Arash. “On the Philosophy/Rhetoric Binaries: Or, is Habermasian Discourse Motivationally Impotent?.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 33.4 (2007): 445-472.

possibility of a more or less narrow scope of disagreement around terms that would ground our political conception, then the contentiousness that might arise from that problem has still not been resolved on Habermas’ approach as abridged by Abizadeh.

Thus, I go on to consider the more extreme radical democracy alternative represented by Lars Thomassen and Chantal Mouffe. Thomassen is the most important interlocutor here because he presents a more accurate depiction of Habermas’s theory. He suggests that the problem with Habermas’ approach goes well beyond anything that can be remedied by rhetoric because it retains an “aporia” within its terms that stifle its ambitions altogether. Specifically, Thomassen claims that Habermas’ claim to democratic legitimacy is stifled by the potential of a rational reduction that would eliminate the need for democracy. As a result, there is an aporetic feature in his account in that participants must ultimately answer “to” the reason behind that reduction, limiting and ultimately obviating their role in what it requires. Thomassen seeks to establish a place for answering “for” reason instead, in which we eliminate exclusion by listening to those who speak for their own particularities. This account is based on the premise that ultimately Habermas’ version of discourse is not attentive to those particularities but stifles them in its universalist reduction. That reduction must be false if there is a multiplicity of pluralism. I critique Thomassen’s view because it seems to ultimately jettison a place for reason-giving in the articulation of what is required for legitimacy.

Instead, Thomassen and Mouffe tend to prioritize a place for constant questioning, and even something like the heroic decision to include minorities who speak “for” particular claims to reason. Although they seek aggressively to include these minorities, I find their claims to ultimately be dangerous in leaving too much up to the hope for good political

decisions, and ineffective in that all decisions must be questioned in an exhausting and never-ending process. Yet, I suggest that we could learn from their insistence on taking an ethical responsibility to listen to others. In doing so, we might learn more about the needs of minorities. However, we should not give up on reason-giving not only because it is dangerous for those very minorities but because it would vitiate the benefits for legitimation that take place in that process.

Thus, I suggest that we should retain reason-giving but transfigure the truthfulness requirement in Habermas’ account of validity to better be able to listen to others and build terms that we can agree on. What this would mean is taking our different beliefs about justice as a point of departure in discussion when those beliefs are not resolvable by appeal to objective validity claims. I draw on the example of the Tea Party to suggest that while its opponents may not understand the ultimate sources of its beliefs, individuals in that group cannot entirely be maligned as ill-intentioned about seeking terms of equal citizenship. Rather, we may have to take those beliefs as points of departure to build new shared terms around equal citizenship. Importantly, this does not mean giving up on equal citizenship because a constitution of equal rights must still be our aim in order to be in accord with justice. However, it does mean that we open ourselves to new articulations of what will constitute those equal terms in the political economy. This way of proceeding together requires an ethical practice in which those in the Tea Party also return the favor of accepting the truthfulness of their opponents. Only at that point might we be able to soften the contentiousness of our interactions and open the door to new and creative ways of thinking about how justice in the political economy

might come to be constituted. In this spirit, I turn to my next chapter in order to better delineate what an approach like that might entail.

The Importance of a Political Process for Justice

Grounding that kind of mutual receptivity requires fostering the exchange of ideas about justice that might be distorted, within the scope of disagreement about liberal conceptions acknowledged by Rawls. That essentially requires finding ways to ‘break the ice’ in our engagements with each other around seeking justice but remaining connected to the beliefs, sometimes distorted, that ground and motivate our support. Grounding that support successfully would create a kind of stability around justice based on a resonance with our beliefs and experiences. In my fourth chapter I argue that taking justice seriously in this way that affirms the Rawlsian concern for principles and the Habermasian concern for motivation requires a basis in micropolitics if distorted views may be a persistent part of our discourse. In this way, justice will come to be grounded in a process that represents taking seriously our equality as citizens. That process should be micropolitical because that kind of politics refers to engaging each other about abstract values on the level of belief. As a result, that process can generate norms that are endogeneously related to the political action in that process. This represents stability around justice that includes the material and symbolic forms that it takes, and the kind of political action in the process that leads to those terms. Ultimately, the latter is the more important since it combines

Rawls’ concern for principles with Habermas’ concern for motivation. By grounding that process in micropolitics, it seeks to reconcile these two concerns with our beliefs.

Drawing on a case of environmental activism by a group in Kansas, I argue that there are four principles that together constitute a micropolitics of justice. These principles include looking to each other, appealing to shared beliefs, agonistic compromise, and constructing beliefs. I use this case for broaching questions about equal treatment in our engagements because it represents an effort to take seriously people’s beliefs in efforts to work together around an abstract goal, which in this case is environmentalism. Activists in this case engage in different mircopolitical interactions that ultimately ground new environmental initiatives in values and beliefs that have meaning for the people involved in those interactions. So, in the case of wind power or energy consumption, activists begin not by attempting to convince people about climate science and the expert models of the most efficient ways to combat climate change.

Rather, they look to each other to better understand what their fellow citizens care about to be motivated to action. In this case, “heartland” values like stewardship, thrift, and patriotism were found to be powerful motivators across different groups like business leaders, farmers, religious groups and others. By looking to each other this way through conversations and testimonials, environmentalists were better able to appeal to shared beliefs by understanding the meaning of environmentalism to these groups. For example, part of being an environmentalist in Kansas meant supporting wind power and energy efficiency upgrades, not because these are necessarily the most rational ways to stop climate change in its tracks, but because these dovetailed with a concern for stewardship of resources like the wind and a thriftiness and patriotism expressed in using less and freeing our troops from overseas engagements. Appealing to beliefs in that way meant that groups could form agonistic compromises. They are ‘agonistic’ because they are

based on an acknowledgement that new events or proposals could arise that could better appeal to shared meanings and change the nature of those compromises. However, the case in Kansas shows that savvy environmental activists will use that agonistic element to continue to work on engagements with different constituencies. Thus, while different constellations of policies and norms may come to represent what environmentalism is all about in the state at any historicized point and time, it is the process itself that is most important because it takes the consent of people seriously around some shared abstract goal.

The micropolitics of that process can come to be realized in many different ways.

Those ways will be effective towards realizing shared norms to the extent they are more deeply engaged in the principles of a micropolitics of justice described above. So, on a deep level, what the environmental case shows is people taking the consent of each other seriously. The aim of that engagement depends on the goal at hand. Micropolitics can take a variety of forms which is why the ingenuity of activists is so important. For example, in Kansas the ‘Take Charge Challenge’ engaged different communities in a contest to find out who could save the most energy. That contest was beneficial because it exposed Kansans to new ways of interacting with each other around a shared goal. In doing so, it had the benefit of appealing to perhaps distorted beliefs by introducing people to an experience that might challenge those beliefs. The reason this is important is that it represents an effort not only to appeal to shared beliefs, but to find ways to engage with different distorted beliefs of others towards the creation of new beliefs that could support different norms. Likewise, in the Tea Party case, activists concerned with justice will find themselves facing highly-motivated opposition to pre-conceived abstract ideas of justice.

However, if the folks in these movements are here to stay as part of our pluralist publics, then we have to find ways to engage with them. The environmental case helps to understand how activists might do that by illustrating some principles of engaging with people around different abstract ideals. Thus, in this chapter I juxtapose the cases to discuss how the respect and benefits of principled interactions in the environmental case could also inform a micropolitics of justice.

Those principles of engagement represent a concern for actual consent around some ideal that comes to constitute that ideal in important ways. Those different ideals are represented by different values such as a better environment or equal citizenship. In each case, the ability to achieve real stability for those values is a benefit that comes from taking our fellow citizens seriously. It is that spirit in the process that is most important for justice. The reason that our micropolitics should be principled, meaning that it is mediated by a concern for actual consent, is that the alternative would be something more akin to simple manipulation or brute coercion. By not seeking to simply manipulate or coerce our fellow citizens, but to engage with them even though we disagree even in distorted ways, represents a realization of respect as equal citizens. My hope in this chapter is that this kind of disagreement can mirror Habermas’ concern for motivation with Rawls’ concern for principles in a way that has real grounding, developing a greater legitimacy for our norms for justice as a result. That grounding may come to be represented in different historicized norms and policies for justice. However, the most important part of a micropolitics of justice is that it represents an effort to take each other seriously as equal citizens in our shared projects.

An Ethos for That Political Process

Thus, it may be the case that this kind of political work requires an underlying spirit capable of sustaining those engagements. What kind of individual can engage his or her fellow citizens in these kinds of ways and work to transcend and overcome our entrenched differences that make it difficult for us to achieve more justice? In chapter five I try to answer this question in order to understand what is really behind this kind of micropolitics, instead of asserting it as some kind of circular claim. Rather, I want to better understand how it might come to be realized so that activists can draw on that understanding to make their engagements with each other more just and more successful as a result. In order to do so I investigate three different understandings of the ethos required for mutual engagements between citizens under modern liberal democratic conditions. These three understandings come from Connolly, White, and Coles.14 I critique their views but also draw on critical insights to better understand what it really means to have an ethos of engagement that would support a micropolitics of justice. So, in one sense I am interested in evaluating their own unique claims, but in another sense I am interested in how doing so can better illuminate the kind of spirit of engagement in my own claims about a micropolitics of justice. My hope is that doing so will better illuminate the kind of shared spirit between individuals that constitutes justice seen as a micropolitical project concerned with principled actual consent.

14 Coles, Romand (2005) Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.; Connolly, William (2008) Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. Duke University Press: Durham and London.; White, Stephen (2009) The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen. Harvard University Press: Cambridge.

I argue that the right ethos for justice manifests a kind of political bricolage arising from courageous and original action around commitment to the ideals of equal citizenship. Connolly proposes an ethos of engagement to create what he calls assemblages. These assemblages are like social movements that give form to some axiomatic like capitalism by infusing it with terms that are more or less resentment or gratitude based. In the political economy he supports the reduction of positional goods and proposes interim visions that can guide our action. I suggest that this idea, while quite propitious for pluralism by affirming a great variety of motivational sources, actually fails to live up to its potential in the political economy. Instead, we need an ethos that does not reduce that sphere to imputations about what necessarily does and does not engender resentment. White thinks he can do something like this by grounding an ethos for mutual respect between citizens in their engagements in an enlivened awareness of our shared mortality. His view presses us to take seriously the commitment to the special equal status of persons, perhaps more than Connolly, but I find that he still leans too heavily on some imputed recognition about mortality to achieve the results he desires for justice. Thus, Coles provides a productive alternative to these two by both affirming the widest possible motivational sources like Connolly, but also grounding our equal respect for each other through activist practices like listening and “tabling.” The latter refers to moving the place of our politics, often out of the seats of power, and into our local communities. I find his emphasis on listening to others to be inspiring to an approach that seeks to take seriously something like a micropolitics of justice in that he affirms the importance of listening both to our contemporaries and forebearers as agents of justice.

Yet, his conception of what that requires at once relies on non-sequitors about opposing

capitalist globalization and remaining always in a state of tension in order to avoid overreaching in ways that might cause unintended oppression. I think these goals are laudable, but I argue that our engagements with each other can involve a commitment to justice, as long as that commitment is carried by political bricoleurs who take courageous and original action. Engagements must be marked by some originality in striving to overcome sedimented preference oppositions between different constituencies around justice. Likewise, agents taking part in these engagements must be courageous in the sense that they acknowledge that by taking others seriously in our micropolitics of justice we may ultimately alter our own beliefs about justice. Yet, holding an open-ended commitment to what constitutes equal citizenship is critically important because it provides for the possibility that a spirit might flourish in our relations with each other despite our differences. Rightly engaged through a principled micropolitics, that spirit could constitute the element of actual consent that legitimacy around our desire for justice requires.

Where This All Leads

The debate between Rawls and Habermas and the deeper question about consent it reflects offer a fruitful and fascinating area for investigation. My hope is to make some contribution to better understanding the role of consent in our debates about justice in the political economy. I do this through both critique of the prevailing theories and critical examination of different relevant cases. Ultimately, my hope is that the theories will help illuminate some of the most important cases facing us today, and that these cases might also offer insights that can add to our theories. In my conclusion I will briefly sketch the ways in which this work dovetails with a concern for movement-building and solidarity.

Hopefully this work can show that social justice is possible, if maybe a bit more nuanced and mediated by real world concerns and activists than sometimes portrayed.

Chapter 2: The Need to Displace Resentment with Motivation in Liberal Consent

Introduction

In one episode of the hit television show “The West Wing,” President Bartlet’s policy advisor Will Bailey proposes a solution to a debate about taxes based on a theoretical idea from John Rawls.15 Bailey presents four tax payers including a box-unloader making minimum wage taxed at 15%, a teacher making $41.7k taxed at 20%, a doctor making

$150k, taxed at 36%, and an “uber-wealthy” CEO making $16 million. His plan, as he justifies it to a group of interns, is to raise the rate on the CEO by 1 percent to 37% to finance a deduction for college tuition for people making less than $180k per year. An intern speaks up and says “the doctor got into medical school, he had to work hard to do that. And probably the CEO has some skills, the value of which the market has placed at

16 million dollars.” Bailey brushes off the criticism at first, but later in the episode finds it necessary to explain his argument at a deeper level. He says to the intern: “the answer to your question of why the MD should accept a greater tax burden in spite of the fact that his success is well-earned is called The Veil of Ignorance. Imagine that before you are born you don’t know anything about who you’ll be, your abilities, or your position.

Now design a tax structure.” The intern replies, “The Veil of Ignorance.” Will replies,

“John Rawls.” The debate about taxes is settled.

15 Sorkin, Aaron. “Red Haven’s On Fire,” The West Wing, 19 August 2003.

This exchange illustrates the hope of Rawls that citizens would reconcile their differences about moral factors in life, such as those relevant to success and the economy, in favor of a principle for distributive justice that would win the consent of all. Taking his effort as successful, some have attempted to more fully work out the institutional schemes favored by Rawls. Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers have supported efforts to work out the different ways that a property-owning democracy would play out.16 Others, like

Chris Wyatt, have tried to formulate different versions of this institution to determine how it might meet a more leftist ideal.17 Even Rawls himself, who suggested the possibility of multiple liberal political conceptions in Political Liberalism, only focused even more narrowly on the difference principle and its institutions in Justice as Fairness without considering the implications of that diversity. Yet, I believe that before moving on to more fully describe Rawls’ preferred institutions, we should be sure they meet the right ideals in the first place.

The question of whether they meet the right ideals is really two questions. The first is whether they simply meet Rawls’ own ideals. These are represented by the liberal principle of legitimacy and citizens as free and equal. Citizens are free in this ideal in that they can formulate and follow their own idea of the good. The ideal of equality for citizens is “they are all regarded as having to the essential minimum degree the minimal powers necessary to engage in social cooperation over a complete life and to take part in society as equal citizens,” and, “The citizens of a well-ordered society affirm the

16 Cohen, Joshua and Joel Rogers. “Foreward.” Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond. Eds. Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson. Wiley-Blackwell: Hoboken, 2012. xiv-xv. 17 Wyatt, Chris (2008) The Difference Principle Beyond Rawls. Continuum: New York.

constitution and its political values as realized in their institutions, and they share the end for giving one another justice, as society’s arrangements require.” The idea of free and equal describes the individual in a way that is meant to be sensitive to our highest liberal concerns.

Thus, following from those concerns, the second question about the right ideals is about their usefulness more generally. That usefulness refers to whether they represent or help us to achieve our highest liberal goals for society. Jeremy Waldron refers to something like this when he says, “The thesis I want to say is fundamentally liberal is this: a social and political order is illegitimate unless it is rooted in the consent of all those who live under it; the consent or agreement of these people is a condition of its being morally permissible to enforce that order against them.”18 Importantly, that consent might be more or less hypothetical or actual in the way it is formulated and expressed.

Examining Rawls’ view is one way to figure out some of the relative strengths or weaknesses of these different forms of consent and how they relate to the political economy.

In light of our general liberal concern for consent, my hope is that looking critically at the strengths and weaknesses of Rawls’ own principles and institutions can hopefully tell us two things. First, by doing so we may be able to more clearly understand how well he meets his own terms. Second, we can more clearly understand whether he more generally meets the hope that citizens would consent to the terms under which they are governed. If he meets his own terms, and these are in alignment with our general

18 Waldron, Jeremy. “Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism.” The Philosophical Quarterly 37.147 (1987): pg. 140.

concern for the individual then perhaps we should proceed like Cohen et al, Wyatt, and

Rawls himself to work out his institutions in more detail. However, I would like to argue that while Rawls’ ideal of free and equal citizenship is well-grounded in our liberal concerns, like Bailey in the West Wing he goes too far in his policy and institutional recommendations based on that ideal. Doing so belies a problem with his second principle of justice that results from the way he attempts to limit politics in the first principle.

Hypothetical Consent in Rawls’ Theory

Rawls’ effort is characterized by an attempt to formulate principles for the basic structure of society that can gain the allegiance of all free individuals. Rawls takes the liberal concern for the individual and expresses its public requirements through what he calls

‘political liberalism’: “our exercise of political power is fully proper only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens as free and equal may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to their common human reason. This is the liberal principle of legitimacy.”19

Rawls’ argument for meeting this requirement is through the hypothetical ‘original position,’ in which parties deliberate on behalf of individuals behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ that prevents their decisions on questions of basic justice from being influenced by

‘morally arbitrary’ factors like income, birth, race, and so on. According to Rawls, parties under these conditions will affirm two principles including first, the greatest possible equal constitutional rights and liberties and second, a guarantee of fair equality of opportunity and a maximin ‘difference’ principle for the economy such that any increase

19 Rawls, John (1993) Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press: New York. pg. 137.

in inequality is subject to an increase in wellbeing for the least well off. ‘Justice as fairness,’ is realized and the requirements of the principle of legitimacy are met when citizens form an ‘overlapping consensus’ around the two principles as the right reasons for public policies. They are able to do so because the principles are part of a political conception that is ‘freestanding,’ able to be affirmed by individuals holding different worldviews, as long as these views can accept the principles, but without requiring moral changes to the views under these terms.

The difference principle arises out of the original position according to Rawls as an answer to injustices of wealth and natural endowments that comprise a natural lottery of birth. Because no one can claim to deserve the advantages arising from the circumstances of his or her birth, these factors are “arbitrary from a moral point of view,” according to Rawls, and must be left out of consideration of legitimate terms for society, as a result. Moreover, because rational individuals would bargain to their own advantage,

Rawls configures the original position with the veil of ignorance. The upshot of course is that he deduces a rational interest in fair terms across social categories such that parties in the original position would support a scheme of distribution in which any increase in inequality must be subject to an increase in wellbeing for the least-well-off. Therefore, the difference principle is the criterion of justice in the economy. It is lexically ordered behind the first principle. It is ordered this way because its terms are justified in virtue of the substantive value it realizes for that principle’s otherwise formal terms. In this way, it serves to answer a Marxist critique about the otherwise purely formal status of liberal justice. According to Rawls this is what parties in the original position would consent to

in order to feel confident that society has been structured as a fair system of social cooperation.

The formulation of justice as fairness as a political basis of justification is Rawls’ response to his critics that the view presented in Theory is premised on a moral basis that is at odds with the pluralism characteristic of modern societies. It imbues certain qualities to deliberators in the original position instead of taking seriously the moral commitments of individuals in contemporary societies. Thus, instead of basing his theory on that premise, Rawls reformulates his conception to argue that reasonable citizens are able to form an agreement around a political conception, affirming it as a “module”20 within their other distinct moral worldviews, rather than holding justice as fairness itself as their guiding moral worldview in all decisions public or private. Rawls argues that this reconfiguration of justice as fairness is more consistent with the requirements of the reasonable pluralism that characterizes modern societies. As a political basis of justification, individuals can affirm its terms without jeopardizing the unique views that constitute that pluralism in the first place. As a result, an overlapping consensus around these terms is supposed to become a more real possibility, and more in keeping with the requirements of liberal legitimacy. Therefore, justice on this view takes on a public element that is linked directly to the ability of each individual to accept or reject. Public reason is the mechanism connecting the principles to consent that forms the realization of an overlapping consensus.

The idea of public reason arises in response to the question of how matters of public importance should be decided in a liberal democracy. What considerations should

20 Rawls, John (1993) Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press: New York. pg. 12.

guide just deliberation between citizens that forms the basis of justification for public decisions? As a result of the fact of reasonable pluralism, a question arises as to how public decisions are to be justified to the citizens who adhere to these different doctrines.

A comprehensive doctrine describes a worldview regarding moral truth and may exist in different forms.21 A reasonable comprehensive doctrine is one that can support a political conception of justice.22 Thus, in order for public decisions to be made in accordance with public reason, citizens must be party to an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines, which as a result makes public justification to these citizens possible. The idea of public reason holds that decisions on constitutional questions or issues of basic justice are publicly justifiable, and therefore entail legitimate coercion, when they are equally justifiable to all the liberal political conceptions of all reasonable citizens.

Therefore, public reason becomes the basis of public justification for political decisions regarding matters of constitutional essentials and basic justice, essentially those issues effecting free and equal citizenship.23 Its content is determined by the requirements of a liberal political conception of justice. According to Rawls, a political conception is,

“…at best but a guiding framework of deliberation which helps us reach political agreement on at least the constitutional essentials and the basic questions of justice.”24 A liberal political conception is one that is based on principles of justice derived from consideration of all citizens as free and equal. A liberal conception has two parts:

21 Rawls, John (1993) Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press: New York. pg. 13. 22 Rawls, John. “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited.” The University of Chicago Law Review. 64, 3. (1997) pg. 801. 23 Rawls, John (1993) Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. pg. 224. 24 Ibid., pg. 156.

Substantive principles of justice for the basic structure, and guidelines of inquiry for how to apply those principles.25 The substantive principles relate to the values of political justice, and the guidelines for inquiry relate to the values of public reason.26 The guidelines of inquiry have essentially the same basis as the substantive principles of justice. Inquiry along these guidelines in a liberal democracy takes place in the form of deliberation between citizens, and is basically a form of reason-giving. However, the point is not to broaden the discussion, but to theoretically be able to give the right reasons for any public decision. As a result, citizens do not need to actually consent to every policy for it to have legitimacy. Rather, those policies must ultimately only be justifiable to citizens in terms of public reason.

Thus, the requirements of public reason are fulfilled when decisions on matters of constitutional essentials and basic justice are publicly justifiable in this way. Essentially, publicly justifiable political decisions are those that are in accordance with the liberal principle of legitimacy. That principle specifies the guidelines of inquiry that characterize the requirements of public reason.27 In doing so, it affirms a common human capacity for reason. It makes this capacity the basis for the expectation that reasonable citizens will recognize and act in accordance with the requirements of public reason. When questions of constitutional essentials and basic justice are at stake in political decisions, public reason requires that deliberation seek answers that are in accordance with the liberal principle of legitimacy. Only decisions that are in accordance with the principle will be legitimate, and entail justified coercion.

25 Rawls, John (1993) Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. pg. 224. 26 Ibid., pg. 224. 27 Ibid., pg. 224.

Therefore, public reason asks that legislators be able to explain their political decisions when necessary in accordance with the principles of justice that constitute the liberal political conception, which itself arises from reasoning in accordance with the liberal principle of legitimacy. This is the basis of justification that characterizes liberal democracy as an overlapping consensus. It is then not a modus vivendi, because it is based on the common grounds for justification provided by the principles of justice and realized in relevant decisions made through deliberation in accordance with the requirements of public reason. As a result, this means that decisions made in accordance with public reason will be publicly justifiable to all reasonable citizens.28 As long as political decisions can ultimately be justified in this way, legislators can assume the hypothetical consent of citizens.

When decisions in fact are justified this way under background conditions regulated by the principles, reciprocity prevails. This is important because the idea of reciprocity forms a criterion that sums up the relationship between the principles and how we justify them. Rawls explains that criterion this way: “For these terms to be fair terms, citizens offering them must reasonably think that those citizens to whom such terms are offered might also reasonably accept them…And they must be able to do this as free and equal, and not as dominated or manipulated, or under the pressure of an inferior political or social position. I refer to this as the criterion of reciprocity.”29 The criterion of reciprocity adds another level to the hypothetical standard of a well-ordered society that

28 According to Rawls, this is ideal is satisfied, or realized, “whenever judges, legislators, chief executives, and other government officials, as well as candidates for public office, act from and follow the idea of public reason and explain to other citizens their reasons for supporting fundamental political positions in terms of the political conception of justice they regard as most reasonable.” Rawls, John. “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited.” The University of Chicago Law Review. 64, 3. 1997. pg. 769. 29 Rawls, John (1993) Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press: New York. pg. xliv.

Rawls uses to ground consent to its terms. It makes sense to add this criterion since it unifies into one standard a way of looking at the principles initially developed in Theory and the idea of public reason in Political Liberalism. When citizens personally endorse the principles and justify their arguments about justice to each other in terms of public reason they will feel like they have been treated as free and equal and reciprocity will prevail. So, for example it would not be in keeping with reciprocity for legislators to not have to justify their political decisions about justice if asked by citizens even if the legislators feel their decisions are in keeping with the principles. Citizens might feel alienated and unsure about the grounding of justice. Instead, our standard for a well- ordered society is one in which it is okay for consent to be hypothetical, because reciprocity fills the gap that would otherwise make people nervous or worried about justice. This is a society in which it is publicly understood that citizens are being treated as free and equal. As a result according to Rawls, this society exhibits stability for the right reasons. Any society might exhibit stability, but on closer examination it might be induced out of fear or force. Reciprocity on the other hand is a different kind of stability altogether.

Rawls’ Political Economy: Is it as Good as it Sounds?

I will now argue that Rawls does not succeed in grounding his political economy in reciprocity. He does not succeed because he does not take seriously the possibility of multiple different liberal conceptions. Although he introduces this possibility in Political

Liberalism, he also suggests that justice as fairness is most in keeping with free and equal citizenship. In fact, I will argue that his effort to prove this point only belies the likelihood that we should take that diversity more seriously. I will make this argument in

two steps. First, I will argue that when Rawls describes institutions for the difference principle it is unclear how much of these institutions citizens are expected to accept on principle and how much are subject to political debate. This problem is exacerbated by the way Rawls changes the first principle to include the fair value of the political rights and liberties because it is closely linked with the difference principle. Yet, if we take the lexical ordering of the principles seriously, the difference principle and any particular institutions should not really have any special priority over any other economic arrangements that might realize the substantive value of the most extensive equal rights and liberties. If there are any other economic arrangements that might do so, then there is a question as to why the difference principle should be retained. The second part of my argument will be that the only apparent reason for retaining it is because of an assumption Rawls seems to make about resentment and instability. If there could be citizens who oppose the justification of the difference principle out of concern for equal rights and liberties and who do not exhibit either the resentment or political alienation he associates with the lack of that principle, then we should ask what it would mean to take seriously Rawls’ acknowledgment in Political Liberalism that there could be multiple different liberal political conceptions. In the meantime, the danger of not taking that possibility seriously may threaten society with elitist efforts to impose the difference principle by justifying their decisions under terms of hypothetical consent. Yet, this danger does not suggest that we should give up on the ideal of free and equal citizenship.

Rather, it leads to the conclusion that our efforts for justice in the political economy should find ways to increase actual consent in ways that can obviate those dangers.

1) What Does the Economy Require on Principle for Free and Equal Citizenship?

In Political Liberalism Rawls suggests that there may be different competing liberal political conceptions in a democratic society and that justice as fairness is his favored version and he thinks it is also the most persuasive. This is an interesting claim because he comes to that conclusion without any actual relative comparison between different conceptions. Instead, when he does make explicit comparisons they are absolute in degree. I will look at one of those comparisons below when I examine how well he is able to ground his preferred conception in light of his acknowledgement of the possibility of many different liberal conceptions. But first I believe it is important to describe this acknowledgement because it alters what is required to ground justice as fairness through public reason. It alters it in that he must defend justice as fairness as the most just conception, rather than simply defending it as the outcome of a process in the original position. The result of that is that he must defend justice as fairness as the preferred conception arising from that process. This could be important because it means that he must account for that relative scope in some way. If he cannot account for it then there is either a problem with his procedure in the original position or there is a problem with how he connects his preference to our broader liberal concerns.

In any case, as a result of moving from a Kantian to a political grounding for his conception, he finds it necessary to at least concede the possibility of other liberal conceptions. A common moral outlook makes it easy to reduce the possibilities for politics to whatever that outlook requires. However, an overlapping consensus does not seem so immediately reducible to one particular political conception. According to

Rawls, “In addition to cultivating comprehensive doctrines, PL does recognize that in any

actual political society a number of differing liberal political conceptions of justice compete with one another in society’s political debates…Note here that I am talking about liberal political conceptions and not about liberal comprehensive doctrines.”30According to Rawls the existence of multiple liberal conceptions does not change the grounding of justice in an overlapping consensus, but rather concerns the relative narrowness of that consensus: “…as to how far an overlapping consensus is specific, I have for simplicity assumed all along that its focus is a specific political conception of justice, with justice as fairness as the standard example. There is, however, another possibility that is more realistic and more likely to be realized. In this case the focus of an overlapping consensus is a class of liberal conceptions that vary within a certain more or less narrow range. The more restricted the range, the more specific the consensus.”31 This is an interesting idea because this range of the overlapping consensus was not an idea Rawls had previously introduced and its implications for his justificatory ideas are unclear. Rather than converging on the shared political conception that arises from hypothetical principles, Rawls seems to be suggesting that we might have an overlapping consensus that unites a number of different liberal conceptions. Yet he does not say much about how this would work other than that it concerns the more or less narrow scope of that consensus. On the one hand, he sets the question aside, stating,

“There is not time to examine these highly speculative matters. I simply conjecture that the narrower the difference between the liberal conceptions when correctly based on fundamental political ideas in a democratic public culture, and the more compatible the underlying interests that support them in a stable basic structure regulated by them, the

30 Rawls, John (1993) Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press: New York. pg. xlviii. 31 Ibid., pg. 164.

narrower the range of liberal conceptions defining the focus of the consensus.”32 So, based on the idea of the possible existence of multiple liberal conceptions underlying our overlapping consensus, Rawls now asserts that its support will be more or less narrow.

However, Rawls does not say whether the relative narrowness or wideness of that support will effect reciprocity or stability. Yet, it seems like it would make it more difficult to defend justice as fairness as a unifying idea that citizens could converge around and use to express their political decisions through public reason. It seems like it would make it more difficult to do so because up until this point Rawls uses that conception as what would unify us in the absence of organizing politics around comprehensive doctrines. It seems that Rawls must instead alter the way that conception grounds our politics to accommodate the possibility of not being able to center our hypothetical agreement on one conception. I believe that the way Rawls compensates for this is to defend justice as fairness as the best political conception rather than the only one. Yet, because he must ultimately describe the institutions of the difference principle in more detail to make this case, I believe he ultimately runs into a problem about how much of these institutions citizens are asked to accept on principle.

Rawls does suggest that the difference principle might not be necessary for social justice. He does not however forfeit the idea that it is necessary to have a principle for the economy that would give substantive value to the set of liberties referred to in the first principle. With regard to that set of liberties, Rawls suggests that they can be specified in a constitution because, “liberty of conscience and freedom of association, and the political rights of freedom of speech, voting, and running for office are characterized in

32 Rawls, John (1993) Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press: New York. pg. 167.

more or less the same manner in all free regimes.”33 These are the kinds of liberties that are essential to individual freedom because they are essential to what it means to be able to make one’s own life plans. But, it is more difficult to specify the material requirements for these liberties. As a result, these material requirements cannot be listed in the constitution like the basic right s and liberties. Rawls states, “…while some principle of opportunity is surely an essential, for example, a principle requiring at least freedom of movement and free choice of occupation, and fair equality of opportunity (as a I have specified it) goes beyond that and is not such an essential. Similarly, though a social minimum providing for the basic needs of all citizens is also an essential, what I have called the ‘difference principle’ is more demanding and is not.”34 That the difference principle is not a constitutional essential in itself does not mean that it might not be essential however. It might be the case that certain features of that principle are absolutely essential for the basic rights and liberties in the first principle to be realized, only that the principle operates only in the background of society, as sort of a sum of all our institutions, and not explicitly in the constitution. In fact this is what the body of

Rawls’ work usually tends to suggest. However, in keeping with his previous acknowledgement of a possibility of multiple different liberal conceptions, Rawls does suggest that the difference principle may in fact not necessarily be required for social justice. He states, “While the difference principle does not fall under the constitutional essentials, it is nevertheless important to try to identify the idea of equality most appropriate to citizens viewed as free and equal, and as normally and fully cooperating members of society over a complete life. I believe this idea involves reciprocity at the

33 Rawls, John (1993) Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press: New York. pg. 228. 34 Ibid., pg. 228-229.

deepest level and thus democratic equality properly understood requires something like the difference principle. I say ‘something like,’ for there may be various nearby possibilities.”35 If it is in fact the case that there may be other such possibilities, then this raises again the question of how Rawls resolves the question of the meaning of narrowness or wideness of support underlying our overlapping consensus. In what ways can we account for this in our public reason without losing the central grounding that unites us in our political conception for questions of justice in the economy?

One way Rawls might respond is that his favored conception is superior to alternatives for grounding free and equal citizenship. However, as indicated above, he simply asserts that a narrower range of liberal doctrines will lead to a more narrow focus of support for an overlapping consensus. As a result, he does not specifically consider the implications of what this more or less narrow scope might entail. However, he does compare the difference principle with the principle of restricted utility, which although it is not a fully liberal doctrine, illuminates some of the advantages Rawls associates with a political conception including the difference principle. Nonetheless, Rawls does prioritize this comparison because he feels that it is especially robust, stating that, “…among the conceptions of justice in which the principle of utility has a prominent role, the principle of restricted utility would seem to be the strongest rival to the two principles of justice.”36

The comparison is the strongest form of utilitarian objections because it takes into account a moral consideration in the inclusion of a social minimum, but may still be reducible to non-moral rational calculations of interest in other respects.

35 Rawls, John (1993) Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press: New York. pg. 49. 36 Rawls, John (2001) Justice as Fairness. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 120.

Nonetheless, Rawls uses this case to argue why the difference principle is superior to a principle for a social minimum specifically and why it is superior generally.

The principle of restricted utility is defined as “the principle of average utility, combined with a suitable social minimum.”37 The main problems associated with this arise from its utilitarian features and are that it would be possible for some to become better off at the expense of others under its terms, and for political and social groups to act against its terms for their own interests. The latter might be especially problematic if it threatens the institutions of the principle itself in favor of private gain. But both problems arise from the same essential difficulty according to Rawls which is a lack of reciprocity between citizens under its terms. More privileged citizens might try to buy the complacency of the less-advantaged through some social minimum, but given the soonest opportunity, those citizens will attempt to extract more from the more well-off, and so on. Moreover, to the extent that the social minimum is intended as a moral provision to bolster fair terms of equal citizenship, it too is flawed according to Rawls because of the indeterminacy associated with that solution. Because there is no maximin function that is included in its terms, or any other objective basis for decision, social cooperation is likely to revert back to the flawed bases of self-interest and game theoretic interactions.38

The real point Rawls wants to emphasize in this comparison is that the difference principle is necessary for relations based on reciprocity. This is important because these relations generate their own support for cooperation around free and equal citizenship, and avoid the difficulties that would assail a social minimum solution even if it could realize terms of free and equal citizenship from time to time. This is apparent in Rawls’

37 Rawls, John (2001) Justice as Fairness. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 120. 38 Ibid., pgs. 126-127.

aspiration to find terms for society that citizens can affirm as free and equal. Rawls explains his support for the difference principle even in cases in which the social minimum might realize an even higher level of well-being than the former would because of something he calls the “strains of commitment.” Assuming that those needs are met,

Rawls feels that its terms will still fail because least-advantaged citizens will not “feel that they are a part of political society, and view the public culture with its ideals and principles as of significance to themselves.”39 The result may not be violence or open discord, but a certain kind of depression or dejection for these citizens: “we grow distant from political society and retreat into our social world. We feel left out; and, withdrawn and cynical, we cannot affirm the principles of justice in our thought and conduct over a complete life. Though we are not hostile or rebellious, those principles are not ours and fail to engage our moral sensibility.”40 Instead, under terms governed by the difference principle, citizens will feel included in social cooperation since any benefits to one group require the inclusion of the least well-off.

Yet, while Rawls makes a strong case against the utilitarian aspects of the principle of restricted utility, his defense of the difference principle still does not directly consider the implications of competing liberal conceptions under an overlapping consensus. One response to the proposal of terms of restricted utility might be to point out all the ways in which it is illiberal as a utilitarian conception, as Rawls does. Yet, if other liberal conceptions were proposed in addition to those based on the difference principle, these same criticisms might not apply. As a result, it is unclear how we would maintain an overlapping consensus. It is unclear because it would make it difficult for

39 Rawls, John (2001) Justice as Fairness. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 129. 40 Ibid., pg. 128.

citizens to share public reasons. Seemingly, this would all but obviate the reason for the freestanding political conception in the first place. Perhaps Rawls might respond like when he says “something like” the difference principle might be the basis of a liberal political conception, and he could be referring to the difficulties of working out what that principle involves through our best considered judgments. Such a response might be in keeping with his efforts to more fully describe the institutions required by that principle.

Again, although this effort to describe those institutions is not necessarily meant as a response to the question of how our unity around a political conception might be retained under conditions of more or less narrow support for an overlapping consensus, it has implications for how we might understand that problem and is worth considering as a result.

Rawls in fact suggests that understanding the institutions for our principles plays an important role in whether we affirm those principles. The reason that understanding institutions matters relates back to stability. If we cannot actually withstand the force of whatever the institutions of our principles require, then we cannot actually really affirm those principles because they will inspire dejection or alienation rather than support.

According to Rawls, “It is also important to work out, if only in a rough and ready way, the institutional content of the two principles of justice. We need to do this before we can endorse these principles, even provisionally. This is because the idea of reflective equilibrium involves our accepting the implications of ideals and first principles in particular cases as they arise.”41 Reflective equilibrium refers to our efforts to think about the original position as it applies to the real world and determine what it requires. It refers

41 Rawls, John (2001) Justice as Fairness. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 136.

to our “considered judgments” about principles which can be expressed in terms of public reason and brought into our deliberations. It is sort of a fancy way of saying that we think about what the principles mean before working out our arguments about justice.

According to Rawls, “…since citizens recognize that they affirm the same public conception of political justice, reflective equilibrium is also general: the same conception is affirmed in everyone’s considered judgments. Thus citizens have achieved general and wide, or what we may refer to as full, reflective equilibrium. (The adjective ‘full’ we reserve for features as realized in a well-ordered society.) In such a society not only is there a public point of view from which all citizens can adjudicate their claims, but also this point of view is mutually recognized as affirmed by them all in full reflective equilibrium.”42 So, when this is related back to our principles of justice it causes us to include some considerations about their institutions. According to Rawls this forms an important consideration regarding whether we can affirm the principles: “We cannot tell solely from the content of a political conception – from its principles and ideals – whether it is reasonable for us. Not only may our feelings and attitudes as we work through its implications in practice disclose considerations that its ideals and principles must be revised to accommodate, but we may find that our sentiments prevent us from carrying it out. On reflection we cannot live with it.”43 Understood this way, the articulation of institutions that constitute our principles is a key part of whether we accept these.

Based on reflective equilibrium, Rawls argues in favor of property-owning democracy as a regime-type that would fill the institutional content of justice as fairness.

42 Rawls, John (2001) Justice as Fairness. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 31. 43 Ibid., pg. 136.

He comes to this conclusion through an exercise in reflective equilibrium in which he affirms something called property-owning democracy after a process of elimination of other regime types. He rejects laissez-fair capitalism, welfare-state capitalism and state socialism with a command economy. According to Rawls the first supports only formal equality, the second tends to create an underclass, and the third does not take seriously our basic rights and liberties. Interestingly, Rawls affirms two different possible regime types that might be more appropriate depending on “society’s historical circumstances…its traditions of political thought and practice, and much else.”44 These two regimes include a liberal socialist regime and a property-owning democracy.

However Rawls emphasizes a contrast between property-owning democracy and welfare-state capitalism because these both take seriously the right to private ownership of productive assets. He argues that property-owning democracy realizes what the principles require by providing the resources for fair equality of opportunity without the creation of a permanent underclass, which he suggests is a pitfall of welfare-state capitalism. According to Rawls, property owning democracy ensures, “…the widespread ownership of productive assets and human capital (that is, education and trained skills) at the beginning of each period, all this against a background of fair equality of opportunity.

The intent is not simply to assist those who lose out through accident or misfortune

(although that must be done), but rather to put all citizens in a position to manage their own affairs on a footing of suitable degree of social and economic equality.”45 Rawls believes that by not ensuring a widespread distribution of productive assets, welfare-state capitalism will lead to the creation of an underclass that receives transfers but cannot

44 Rawls, John (2001) Justice as Fairness. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 139. 45 Ibid., pg. 139.

compete for occupations or positions open to all. Instead, property-owning democracy supplements the redistribution of wealth and income with the other assets needed for fair competition.

The main benefit however on Rawls’ view, is that a property-owning democracy embodies the reciprocity required for the right kind of social cooperation. Rawls explains that system this way: “In property-owning democracy…the aim is to realize in the basic institutions the idea of society as a fair system of cooperation between citizens regarded as free and equal. To do this, those institutions must, from the outset, put in the hands of citizens generally, and not only of a few, sufficient productive means for them to be fully cooperating members of society on a footing of equality. Among these means is human as well as real capital, that is, knowledge and an understanding of institutions, educated abilities, and trained skills.”46 This is basically the extent of Rawls explanation of how a property-owning democracy would function to meet terms of free and equal citizenship.

However, Rawls’ exercise in reflective equilibrium only makes it more difficult in some ways to understand what the two principles involve. On the one hand, if Rawls’ reflective equilibrium is accurate, then we have gained knowledge about the institutional content of the principles. Like Rawls says, we might then be able to ask ourselves if we can “live with” what these require, or if they are somehow too onerous for us. This seems like it would be a benefit, except for the fact that his description is so broad and general that it is unclear what exactly is the real force of our knowledge about this institutional design as he describes it. How does it actually work in accordance with the difference

46 Rawls, John (2001) Justice as Fairness. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 140.

principle, and what does it do? Overall, it seems as though Rawls supports a scheme for the principles that provides for extensive resources with which all citizens might exercise their freedom. Yet, his description is so broad that it seems that it might include whatever productive assets we associate with freedoms we value. If this is the case, it is hard to see what real insight we gain from associating the difference principle with a scheme of broadly shared ownership of productive assets.

Rawls might respond that he in fact alters the requirements of his principles to meet just this kind of concern by specifying that only the political liberties are to be insured their “fair value” under a scheme of fair cooperation between citizens. The fair value refers to a certain substantive guarantee of these liberties for citizens because of their special role in a system of fair cooperation. Rawls recognizes that it is simply not possible to insure the fair value of all basic liberties as it would require either endless resources or divisive conflicts regarding which liberties are to be funded.47 However, in light of this impossibility, the fair value of the political liberties can both serve as a check against any corruption of the political system that would bend it towards particular interests and a means towards the promotion of reciprocity-based relations between citizens by including citizens from a wide range of social and economic backgrounds can participate. Thus, rather than claim the full substantive realization of all the possible basic liberties citizens might pursue, Rawls claims that only the political liberties can require this status. As the matrix through which limited resources might be allocated that would effect the potential substantive realization of the other liberties, it is especially crucial that politics be open and fair to all citizens. Otherwise, an alienation from politics might lead

47 Rawls, John (2001) Justice as Fairness. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pgs. 150-151.

to a more general alienation from society. The equality that defines the fair value of the political liberties is defined as, “…that citizens similarly gifted and motivated have roughly an equal chance of influencing the government’s policy and of attaining positions of authority irrespective of their economic and social class.”48 According to Rawls what this actually requires is some set of campaign laws or public financing and so on that helps to limit the role of the influence of money in politics so that all citizens are able to become involved if they wish to do so.

However, we might reply that the prioritization of the fair value of the political liberties only reproduces the same difficulties that Rawls encounters in his broader effort to describe the institutional content of the principles. The fair value of the political liberties requires the fair opportunity to hold office, effect elections, and “the like.” It arises out of the original position based on Rawls’ reformulation. It requires campaign finance reforms of various kinds, but Rawls does not fully work out its terms just as he does not do so with regard to property-owning democracy: “I cannot consider here how the fair value is best realized in political institutions. I simply assume that there are practicable institutional ways of doing this compatible with the central range of applications of the other basic liberties. Reforms to that end are likely to involve such things as the public funding of elections and restrictions on campaign contributions; the assurance of a more even access to public media; and certain regulation for freedom of speech and of the press (but not restrictions affecting the content of speech).”49 However, the difficulties that would be associated with realizing the political liberties are not

48 Rawls, John (1993) Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press: New York. pg. 358. 49 Rawls, John (2001) Justice as Fairness. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 149.

obviously different from the difficulties that would be associated with attempting to guarantee the fair value of any other basic liberties. There are no clear guidelines as to when exactly these would be realized whether it is through equal media time, equal campaign funding, or something else, and at what point these restrictions might run into conflict with other basic liberties such as free speech. Rawls believes this is essentially a matter for the courts to decide.

I think these problems with guaranteeing the fair value of political liberties are indicative of the more general problem that Rawls run into with his defense of institutions. That problem is that it is not clear what citizens are supposed to accept on principle as part of an overlapping consensus. On the one hand, his descriptions of property-owning democracy are very general and vague, and he suggests two different regime types that could meet the content of the principles. Perhaps Rawls might respond that this is just part of our “burdens of judgment” that we bring into our political reasoning. Those burdens should not prevent us from affirming the political conception, but are really part of what affirming that conception involves. Those burdens are that “the idea of reasonable disagreement involves an account of the causes, of disagreement between reasonable persons so defined. These sources I refer to as the burdens of judgment.”50 It seems plausible that these burdens may be involved in what is required to understand our liberal political conception. As a result, different reasoning around what this requires might lead us to a less narrow scope of support for an overlapping consensus. It seems possible that the burdens of judgment are a result of pluralism that perhaps might apply to our liberal conceptions as well. Rawls states, “The burdens of

50 Rawls, John (2001) Justice as Fairness. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 55.

judgment alone can account for the fact of reasonable pluralism (there are of course other reasons); and since we cannot eliminate these burdens, pluralism is a permanent feature of a free democratic culture.”51 Although this might help us account for the more or less narrow scope of agreement that could underlie an overlapping consensus, it still does not address how we might deal with that scope so that our political decisions are still based on the right reasons.

One problem resulting from the burdens of judgment as a response to this lack of clarity about the right reasons is that we may lose confidence in justice as fairness. If we cannot clearly explain our principles it is unclear how they can legitimately function as a basis for hypothetical consent. Legislators would seem to be able to draw on a set of interpretations about the principles to make political decisions. On the one hand this is a problem because legislators could make decisions not in keeping with the interpretations of their citizens. Perhaps some legislators believe the right solution for justice is a progressive tax structure with Eisenhower-era top rates reaching 90% or more. Other legislators may believe that only a barely progressive tax structure with only the most minimal provision of productive assets to the least well-off (maybe something like the bare minimum pencils and crayons list required for students at certain public schools) is justifiable. It is not clear that either of these are right or wrong according to the difference principle. Yet, Rawls might respond that this too is part of our normal political life, and that these are all efforts to approximate what that principle requires in which we use some set of reasons regarding maximin and reciprocity in order to reach some functioning consensus in order to hopefully move closer to what free and equal citizenship requires

51 Rawls, John (2001) Justice as Fairness. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 36.

even if we do not get it exactly right. However, on the other hand, Rawls’s suggestion of multiple liberal conceptions that might underlie our consensus could be a deeper problem if these involve other reasons that are not shared.

The case of the fair value of the political liberties might actually be a good example of this deeper problem. Rawls assumes that fair value means being able to compete fairly for elected political positions in government despite our economic or social backgrounds. Surely this is a good thing, but does it actually warrant inclusion in our principles of justice as they arise out of the original position? It is not difficult to imagine other liberal political conceptions that do not consider elected office to be the most important, or even at all part of what it means to be involved in politics in a meaningful way. The Saul Alinsky tradition in community organizing is an example of just such a conception. One key tenet of this tradition is to not pursue public office.

Alinsky organizations such as the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) reject the pursuit of public office as a legitimate means of doing politics. They reject it as this means because they believe that understanding the rights and liberties people care about should arise from listening to people in communities rather than attempting to be a good representative in office. As a result, one of the key aspects of IAF politics is to hold community meetings that are attended by but not controlled by representatives. At these meetings, community members voice their positions and simply ask their representatives for yes or no answers on whether they are supportive. Representatives are not allowed to grandstand or give speeches. They are purely a functional means to whether key rights are supported. Therefore, a political approach grounded in a liberal conception like

Rawls’ emphasizes reasons for the fair value of political liberties that are not shared.

I believe the possibility of a lack of shared reasons among liberal conceptions is a more general problem for Rawls’ principles than in just this one case. Perhaps on review of different conceptions, Rawls might be persuaded to remove the fair value provision from his first principle of justice. Yet, that would simply bring him back to the broader critique concerning the fair value of any of our rights or liberties implicit in that principle.

Given his acknowledgement of the possibility of multiple liberal conceptions we might ask why he feels it is necessary to retain the difference principle at all. This is an especially important question if our differences are not simply a matter of the burdens of judgment. In fact, because of the lexical ordering of the principles, the second principle is only necessary to the extent that it gives the right kind of substantive value to our otherwise only formal rights and liberties. However, there is really no measure for the success of this other than the possibility for equality of opportunity. That equality refers to the fair value of all opportunity for employment, education, etc. of which the political liberties are merely a subset. Yet, even here, the difference principle is set up as more fundamental than fair equality of opportunity given its priority in the second principle.

This is simply because of reciprocity. For example, with regard to fair equality of opportunity, the difference principle is meant to ensure affirmation of public reasons even if we do not get the job, the promotion, the acceptance letter and so on, despite our otherwise equal talents and hard work. We know that fundamentally society is fair, so our objection in any of these cases cannot rise to the level of breaking apart the overlapping consensus that maintains stability.

One counterargument might be a case in which all of our basic rights and liberties are realized to the extent we desire but society is not regulated by the difference principle.

I do think that if this hypothetical scenario is not reduced to the principle of restricted utility it is not immediately clear that we would still require the difference principle. In fact, why would we? If our rights and liberties have been substantiated to the extent we desire, why should we care if someone else gains more of what they desire and it does not benefit us? We have already attained what we want out of society and the difference principle in fact then becomes what is superfluous.

Rawls tends to respond that this example itself is superfluous or entails more social conflict than we imagine. It is superfluous because it might presuppose overcoming the limits of scarcity, or underestimate the proclivity of religious groups to demand ever more resources for the adulation of their gods. Surely this would not be sustainable and would only engender more social conflict. Rawls may be right on a macro scale, but on a micro case-by-case basis he is wrong. The fair value of the political liberties is the perfect example. Rawls argues that without the guarantee of that fair value, individuals will be depressed, alienated, and dejected from politics. In turn, the political realm will come to be increasingly dominated by moneyed-interests, large corporations, and corruption. This in turn will only increase the apathy and dejection felt by that excluded part of the population. However, any understanding or experience in politics beyond the frame of representative government knows this is not true. In fact, to many political activists, the claim that they must run for office, engage in a particular way with their opponents, or lack power because of money is in fact an insult that is more alienating than the scenario that Rawls envisions for citizens lacking the fair value of political liberties. Once this is acknowledged, there is a very wide scope, a multiplicity in fact, of engagements in politics that not only do not retain the fair value of political

liberties that Rawls suggests, but that are in fact insulted or alienated by the suggestion that they must. Moreover, it would be prima facie illegitimate to claim these groups are illiberal because they reject that fair value.

Moreover, the implication of this diversity of legitimate liberal politics would also be that Rawls would then lose his preferred method of restricting questions about fair value. If it is not the case that we can resist the suggestion that all our rights and liberties be subject to their fair value by funneling this concern into the fair value of our political liberties, then Rawls loses that option as a safeguard for ensuring that reciprocity prevails. Rather than look to the fair value of the political liberties as a way to ensure that we have done our best to maintain what justice requires, he would have to engage our subjective concerns for different rights and liberties on a case-by-case basis. Yet, this would simply embroil his efforts in an impossible process of trying to measure whether the requirements of maximin have been met in these cases. As such, it would be very easy to make miscalculations about when individuals do not feel included when they do not receive benefits from increases in inequality. In these cases it is unclear why we would want to continue to adhere to the difference principle since it would have become superfluous to its intended purpose as lexically ordered behind the first principle. There is no immediate reason to believe Rawls is necessarily wrong to look to politics as a way to avoid this kind of embroilment in an otherwise impossible effort to maintain the principle’s relevance. However, it at the very least suggests that some wider politics would be necessary than what he envisions as the fair value of the political liberties. That wider politics might perhaps need to find a way to more directly address concerns that

arise from the more or less narrow scope of liberal conceptions that might underlie our overlapping consensus.

Basically, the interesting thing, I would claim, is that the exception to Rawls’ premise for shared reasons in politics is just as likely to be shared in other micro cases as swell. For example, any case in which some individual who affirms the basic set of rights and liberties but is alienated by being conceived as the target of some supplementary benefit from the difference principle is a case in which this exception prevails. There are in fact people who opt out of Social Security, or less well-off people who will opt-out of programs like Obamacare, and if we care about free and equal citizenship, perhaps on a deeper liberal level than might prevail in Rawls’ own scheme, then we should hesitate to label these people as illiberal. Rather, it is possible that we do not sufficiently understand their motivations to impose that label. Yet, Rawls’ own effort to only further ground the difference principal through his institutional articulation rather than address the question of more or less narrow scope underlying his consensus only seems to deepen a problem about how to justify public decisions, and creates dangers that he does not address as a result. The problem it deepens is that it at once makes more and less clear our shared reasons for political decision-making. What I mean is that he adds institutional reasons that we can draw on for the purposes of justification, but these are both specific enough to be more likely to elicit opposition, and vague enough that they allow for the possibility that the terms of public reason may be drawn upon for political decisions that in actuality have little legitimacy.

This is a problem because liberal opposition to terms justified in accordance with another liberal conception might arise in ways similar to that associated with groups and

individuals who affirm the ideal of free and equal citizenship but do not affirm the priority for the fair value of the political liberties. These groups reject that priority for reasons that are liberal. They prefer to practice politics in a different way, and may actually see the institutionalized practice of politics to be at odds with forms of activism and community organizing that ultimately give substance to our other basic rights and liberties in ways that would otherwise be impossible. With regard to the broader set of institutions, these are likely to have the same implications because these also arise from differences based on different liberal conceptions. For example, even at the most general level, Rawls’ two different institutional configurations including liberal socialism and property-owning democracy are surely distinct enough that they may each find adherents in political society that would not share political reasons. This alone seems like it could be a serious enough problem to potentially threaten the stability of an overlapping consensus. Further, other forms of opposition, those not based on liberal reasons, may also resist buying into an overlapping consensus at all unless they could know what the reasons for justification would be in the first place. This also seems like a possible source of instability.

Nonetheless, despite his defense of including institutional content into the question of whether we affirm the principles that constitute our liberal political conception, it seems that Rawls may still be able to fall back on the difference principle as holding a more basic status that all those institutions are trying to reach in one way or another. Yet, the institutions he describes are vague enough to allow for politics to be dominated by elites who would claim to understand better what they require. I think it is possible that Rawls’ defense of the principles in accordance with the liberal principle of

legitimacy is especially problematic because despite the burdens of judgment he still holds out that reasonable agreement is possible through the force of common human reason. This crucially depends on the possibility of being able to discern shared reasons.

Yet, even if those reasons are theoretically discoverable through reasoning, the principles are still vague enough despite his institutional elaborations, that they may empower elites to claim a better understanding of what that reason requires. This is a problem if those understandings actually lack legitimacy. One example of this is the destruction of neighborhoods and construction of housing projects that was popular in the 1960s and

70s. These efforts were often well-intentioned for social justice but only later were found to have deep deficits of legitimacy. These same kinds of efforts are still common today in cities like Baltimore where hundreds of people are relocated in efforts that are not clearly grounded in legitimate policy-making. Nonetheless, these policies are easily articulated in terms of public reason.

This is simply a problem of hypothetical-based consent in that regardless of the integrity of our philosophical principles, that standard may empower those in elite positions in ways that are not truly legitimate. If the solution to that problem is not reducible to something like ensuring the fair value of the political liberties, then it becomes an even more serious concern. Yet, before accepting the political and moral risks that might be associated with affirming the difference principle under these political terms, it might be prudent to ask whether these risks are really necessary to take on.

Recall that one hypothetical objection arises from consideration of conditions of non- scarcity in which our rights and liberties have been substantively realized. The difference principle would be superfluous here. Yet, a slightly different question we could ask

would be whether the difference principle would be necessary under normal conditions of scarcity in which our rights and liberties have been substantively realized to our satisfaction. Granted, such a scenario may be difficult to imagine. Yet, any scenario in which some citizens do not benefit from increases of benefits to other citizens, and do not only not care, but do not care for liberal reasons, would be such a scenario. Such a scenario would lead to the question of why we would need the difference principle. And if we do not need it for its own sake under such conditions, then it would be more clear that there are other liberal conceptions that draw on different public reasons for justification in the political economy. If this is the case, then it becomes more pressing to lessen the hypothetical nature of assumed consent and figure out how we should proceed under less narrow support for an overlapping consensus. The implications of that scenario and how it leads us to see the limitations of hypothetical consent are what I want to consider next.

2) Does Justice at Least Require a Resentment Test?

There are likely many cases in which the benefits to some who are already more well-off do not come with any benefits to those who are less well-off. In some cases, the implications of these contrasts are so shocking as to deeply shake our moral sensibilities.

It simply seems wrong when CEOs make in a day more than their employees make in year, or when health insurance companies make millions by denying coverage to sick children and those with no other way of finding help, or when Wall Street bankers make millions in salaries by betting against homeowners and pensions, leaving people homeless as a result or without retirement savings while the bankers get another pay day.

There is something so off-putting about all of these examples that it is tempting to say

that it if social justice means anything then it must mean that something is wrong in these cases. Yet, as shocking as these kinds of cases are, our theories of justice sometimes seem to require perplexingly little social action in response. How can this be the case and what must we do? In this section I will first describe the political morass that assuming hypothetical consent draws us into. I will then suggest that this difficulty is suggestive of the need to try to better understand the liberal resentment of our fellow citizens through efforts for actual consent.

Rawls seeks a solution that would remove the injuries in these kinds of cases that lead us to question our very faith in society. Thus, though it may be possible to make a glib case suggesting that a few pennies here and there distributed to the least well-off from the success of the wealthiest members of society would meet its terms, it seems that something like this must be simply wrong. It is wrong because it would do nothing to restore our faith that society is not rigged against us – that we are valued just as much as any CEO or Wall Street banker. Surely, for us to be able to endorse society, we have to be able not to just claim our citizenship, but to claim the feeling that goes along with being a valued member of society. This, I think is at the heart of what Rawls wants to achieve. We might then be able to say to ourselves, ‘I am not a banker because I have chosen not to take that career path, and perhaps I even disagree with the morality of that profession, but it is not society that is against me, and there is nothing in the basic rules that would have prevented me from taking a fair try at that career path too.’ Surely, as is sadly the case, we can probably think of far too many examples in America today in which it is hard to believe that individuals could say something like that to themselves and truly believe it. When the ghettos of East Baltimore are either simply neglected or

destroyed to make ways for condos, or when sequestration cuts hit the Native American reservation, taking away what precious few resources are already available there, really it seems that we must be light years away from the society that justice must require. What then must we do if we care about justice?

One possibility we must consider is that our ideals of justice may not provide one abstract answer to these problems. Rawls simply must be right that in any just society we must feel treated as free and equal – not entitled to success in all that we do, but not denied that success for arbitrary and fleeting reasons either. I think that the most extreme examples of injustice get our intuitions going, leading us to realize that we need to wake up and do something – society is not going to fix itself. Yet, it is also the case that many other, less clearly unjust examples of inequality or difference might lead us to wonder how to proceed in life or in politics. Put simply: Pluralism is a weird thing. It may surprise us. Citizens in Providence and Baltimore take over warehouses and form their own collectives, looking for a life that proceeds at a slower or different and more creative pace than the rest of society – they would rather be left out of some terms of redistribution based on maximining their cooperation on a pace of life they do not endorse. Other citizens, to the disbelief of liberals may choose to opt out of policies like

Social Security or Obamacare, even though they are not wealthy. We may want to make the argument that this is not a smart decision, but it is less clear that we can argue that they are simply unjust people who do not care about free and equal citizenship. Thinking along these terms, the possibility of other, more different liberal political conceptions that may not always require the difference principle seems more plausible.

If some citizens are satisfied with the substance of their rights and liberties without being compensated by any benefits from increases in well-being to the most well-off, it is in fact not clear that they do not care about justice. For example, the Tea

Party movement in the US involves many citizens who want to reject the benefits of government redistribution. Those that oppose benefits because they object to minority homeowners receiving government loan assistance simply have no grounds for justifying their claims. Their arguments are illiberal in the most noxious sense and cannot be defended. Yet, it would not be fair to rule out the possibility that many Tea Partiers were brought into the burgeoning movement out of a genuine concern for free and equal citizenship. These activists defend the idea that inclusion as free and equal citizens in society means having an equal chance for success which is only stunted by government interventions to distribute benefits based on inequality. If we can take their most extreme ideas seriously, as hard as it may be, for just a moment, we can see how any marginally higher tax rates for certain groups impugn by definition the possibility of that success. No matter how successful you are, you are still denied some percentage of that success, impugning anyone’s equal chance to achieve that equal shot at similar success. If achieving that success comes with the benefits of empowering society’s “job-creators,” as some Republican talking points have suggested, then it is all the better.

Moreover, there is an attendant issue with regard to that conception that relates to our concern for reciprocity and stability. It is entirely conceivable that some who are less well-off do not feel more included when targeted by government benefits, but instead feel singled out and alienated as a result of those efforts, leading them to be less supportive of societal terms of cooperation. Of course, we might argue that this view is shortsighted – it

fails to take into consideration the broader set of benefits that relate to our inclusion in society. We may wish to opt out of Obamacare, but we also do not want to live in a society that is so unequal that we are actually barred from any advancement despite our best efforts – No schools, jobs, or new social relationships are actually within our reach.

We are truly left out. Again, it is not hard to think of examples in contemporary society in which this might be the case. Native American reservations may be some of the starkest cases. These are places in which isolation and exclusion from society may almost be the norm.

Yet, and here is the difficult issue, it is highly difficult to ascertain when truly disenfranchising levels of exclusion are actually in place. Whether or not we want to accept certain government benefits, or would rather give our plans a shot on our own terms without that help might relate only to empirical questions about what is required to achieve what free and equal citizenship requires. This seems like it might be the ultimate nexus of our disagreement. In any one example, this might be the case. Perhaps we could compare individuals from similar circumstances with similar talents and abilities and determine the minimal level of help required for these individuals to have a fair shot at success. Yet, our examples become vastly more complicated once we eliminate assumptions about what constitutes success or failure in these cases. If we cannot assume say, whether someone would rather apply to Harvard, start a local business, or live on a commune and ride the rails, we cannot really truly know whether it is our personal decisions or societal injustices that have led us to take these different routes. As a result, we do not actually know if the maximined terms of cooperation are part of, or even endorsed as just by those who take these different life paths. There may be some obvious

exceptions of course, such as gaining an equal childhood education, and so on. Yet, these exceptions are nearly as rightly necessary for justice as the health insurance CEO’s salary increase at the expense of treatment for childhood diseases is wrong. In other, more normal cases of choosing different life paths it will be very difficult to know if these cases are reducible to certain empirical circumstances that indicate a broad injustice. The question of basic education is I think an obvious exception because it does not attempt to measure the relative success of different individuals around similar goals but only seeks to make it possible for everyone to pursue these. This is surely what Rawls had in mind with the difference principle.

However, part of what the case of the Tea Party movement demonstrates here is that the resolution of our terms for justice will not be reducible to empirical measurements as we think these relate to our liberal conception. Instead, they reflect different liberal beliefs about justice. The difference principle can be expressed in terms of government redistributions of various kinds, as it often is. But it is important to keep in mind that these are only examples meant to illuminate its role in ensuring reciprocity and stability as a result. Therefore, if there is no empirical measure of our equal rights and liberties that can be taken as a hypothetical standard for whether we have been treated as free and equal citizens, then all that matters is whether we feel that we have been treated this way. Undoubtedly this in part depends on certain empirical and measurable variables like education. However, for every case in which someone achieves the standard middle class life, a house in the suburbs and so on, there may be somebody else who chooses live very differently and it is impossible to determine the counterfactual possibility of whether they would have been able to attain that other life if they had tried. In fact, they may be

likely to resent the application of this standard. Moreover, they may believe they could have even if empirical evidence suggests that the odds would be long. However, our affirmation of terms based on common human reason does not actually license us to tell them that they are wrong. Again, to go back to a useful example, this is no different than the case of which political activists are measured against their ability to run for and get elected to public office as a standard of free and equal citizenship. The only difference is that is a particular case of protecting reciprocity. In the case of broader society, we cannot prove any counterfactuals about life choices that could ground our ideas about what constitutes free and equal citizenship. The only question is whether that value is only reducible to the effects of being maximined, or whether other principles of equal treatment for citizens as free and equal are just as valid in their commitment to that value, but also cannot be substantiated by any counterfactual claims against what they hold.

Rather, all that likely matters in these cases is the way individuals feel about how they have been treated. Empirical evidence based on equality under different institutions may make powerful political arguments, but cannot disprove the sentiment that leads to the affirmation of different ways of endorsing free and equal citizenship.

Because there is no measurable way of determining the fair value of any of our equal constitutional rights and liberties, they are all of subjective value, and we cannot prove counterfactuals for how people might live their lives, it seems difficult to look to any particular case as a reason for why we must follow the difference principle. Yet, in a way I think what Rawls attempts is something much more broad, something like an effort to underwrite the “fair value” of social cooperation as a whole. We can affirm our place in society because we do not feel that any part of it has been denied to us out of arbitrary

caprice. And part of our reconciliation to our social world includes acknowledging that the burdens of judgment will always keep us guessing and investigating, but never impugning our deepest shared commitments.

Yet, it is in fact the case that Tea Partiers who wish for the success of all citizens will feel alienated by government efforts to help them, at least if we take them at their word. While they may be factually or empirically wrong to blame certain government programs for the lack of any one individual’s success, broadly speaking it is likely not possible to prove that they are necessarily wrong in most cases. Had some tax dollars been allocated differently by a business rather than taxed, had some regulations not been in place, and so on, we might be able to reasonably assume that jobs or opportunities could have existed that otherwise might have been curtailed. Yet, if resentment is elicited against maximin principles and arises from a source of concern for free and equal citizenship itself, it is not clear that we marshal any amount of empirical evidence that would prove them wrong. Rather, they may endorse a liberal conception that holds different reasons as legitimate for social cooperation for free and equal citizenship. If they in fact claim to hold such a conception, then our only question can be whether they fundamentally misunderstand the terms of free and equal citizenship and have mistakenly smuggled into that conception their own idea of the good life.

In fact, Rawls flags something like this early on in one of his lesser-read later chapters in Theory when he broaches a discussion about envy. Rawls rejects a conservative argument that the difference principle can be reduced to an expression of envy. This argument would be disingenuous because it signals a refusal to recognize that people who endorse the difference principle might be genuinely motivated by a concern

for free and equal citizenship, as is supposed to be the case of those who are the deliberating parties in the original position. Rawls’ response to this argument is pretty simple, which is that envy is one of many particular social or empirical considerations removed from considerations in that context. Of course, conservatives may claim that in the real world the reason why people might come to endorse the difference principle is out of envy. Yet, Rawls has a skillful response to this as well which is something like that although that may be possible, it fails to recognize that the force of his argument concerns the stipulations for hypothetical consent that validate the principles. So, even if individuals conceivably could endorse the principles out of envy, Rawls is only concerned about the ideal case in which individuals endorse them out of reciprocity. Only then do they set a standard that we care about. Further, Rawls does a favor to his conservative critics by transfiguring their argument to suggest that it in fact it could be valid, but only if it were based on a concern for resentment and not envy. In this case

Rawls states, “…we could equally well say that their social feeling arises from resentment, from a sense that they are unfairly treated. And similarly one could say to conservative writers that it is mere grudgingness when those better circumstanced reject the claims of the less advantaged to greater equality. But this contention also calls for careful argument. None of these charges and counterchanges can be given credence without first examining the conception of justice sincerely held by individuals and their understanding of the social situation in order to see how far these claims are indeed founded on these motives.”52 I believe we could interpret Rawls as saying here something like that if we want to take criticism of the difference principle seriously we might apply

52 Rawls, John (1971) A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 540.

something like a ‘resentment test.’ Such a test would be a way of asking whether people actually feel resentment towards the terms of that principle for legitimate reasons or whether they have accidentally smuggled in a conception of the good like imputed motivations of envy. Yet, Rawls does not apply such a test, he only seems to suggest that it could be possible.

Now, this may all seem highly relativistic or lacking in confidence in our ability to make the right economic predictions and measurements or normative evaluations and so on. However, I do not deny that Tea Partiers, conservatives, and their sympathizers might be wrong in any given case – very, very wrong perhaps – but what is extremely important to keep in mind is that the difference principle or any other principle for the economy is not meant to be grounded in empirical measurements that would represent that principle for us hypothetically. Doing so would actually greatly weaken its terms as it would imply that we should constantly be taking measurements of different programs or policies to determine which one “is” or “is not” realizing the difference principle. The difference principle or any other principle for the economy is simply not an empirical program. Instead, it is something like a sensitivity towards reciprocity that may lead us to advocate different programs. Whether it is legitimately possible seems to be a question

Rawls raises with regard to what I am calling the resentment test. However, the implication of this is that any prevailing scheme of basic rights and liberties, realized to any degree in any form, cannot necessarily be measured in terms of the difference principle – at least hypothetically. Rather, what matters is whether people feel they are being treated as free and equal citizens. This is the problem with the fair value of the political liberties reproduced writ large. If Tea Partiers feel that the maximin principle

denies everyone the free and equal chance to success, as it does if our conception of success is broad (at least to some percentage more broad depending one something like the tax rate), then they will resent that system and will not offer their support. We cannot immediately presume their reasons are illegitimate without applying something like the resentment test.

It is not clear that there is a reply from the difference principle that does not require measuring the value of rights and liberties with some hypothetical standard. That standard at its bare minimum is some increase in wellbeing for some resulting from the increase of someone else who is more well-off. Yet, the suggestion of benefit already implies that there is some measurement of our satisfaction of our inclusion as free and equal citizens. Here we might refer to the primary goods, but I think even those are only an epiphenomenon with regard to the deeper issue of reciprocity. Yet the idea that there must be some benefit broadly entailing feelings of reciprocity, leads to an effort to measure that somehow, perhaps empirically, and those measurements when used to represent whether or not we might generate consent to different reasons might be dangerous. They lead us either into a political morass of futile empiricism or an elitist empowerment against the limits of the former but just as fruitless nonetheless. Again, think of the example of housing projects and slum clearance. These well-intentioned efforts were eventually found to have deep deficits of legitimacy despite the hope that they would increase the life prospects of some of the least well-off members of society.

In this sense, hypothetical measurements based on maximin can be dangerous when they assume hypothetical consent. But, one might reply, the Tea Party example also includes some measurement of well-being in terms of success. Take any individual who has been

taxed and the rate which has been applied is how much their free and equal citizenship has been violated. So, both the difference principle and a Tea Party principle of success will ultimately include certain measurements. The more important point is that each of these still holds beliefs about free and equal citizenship that cannot be assumed to be held by other members of society. The hypothetical assumption about what is required for reciprocity in either of these cases cannot be assumed. Of course we can measure the effects of the claims of either – has redistribution actually helped people, has success been denied through taxes, and so on – and based on these measurements we might find that claims made by these groups are more or less right or wrong. Yet, we cannot make the principled assumption that either is right or wrong in the abstract. Rather, by privileging an effort grounded in hypothetical consent we end up in a political morass more likely to engender resentment or alienation.

This indicates a deep challenge to efforts to ground liberal justification in terms of hypothetical consent. If cases in which we apply maximin do not meet the resentment test but we cannot prove that motivation towards that resentment is based on subjective motivations about the good life, then there is a potential problem. In which case, we have to ask what reasons for objection lead to that objection and whether these are liberal and publicly justifiable reasons. Furthermore, if we cannot clearly ground the institutions of the difference principle to fill out our content before we endorse these, and if the burdens of judgment do not in themselves mean that our liberal conceptions must be reducible to the difference principle, then we must at least pause before assuming hypothetical consent. I would suggest this applies in at least most cases. Pressing cases of those like

East Baltimore or Native American reservations may be more akin to something like

someone holding a gun to your head – it is a significant and obvious threat to our rights and liberties – the fact that the government, and even social activists, overlook and deprioritize these cases on a day-to-day basis must be a testament to how slackened our sense of justice has become at large. Moreover, what I hope to have suggested here is that when governments or activists decide to all of the sudden take up flashy efforts like building housing projects to address these injustices based on assumptions about hypothetical consent, this is also, in a different way, a sign of the impoverishment of our sense of justice. What I suggest instead is that we should apply the resentment test. Doing so might at least lead us to engagement that could help determine which empirical means are most legitimate in these cases, thus avoiding the worst problems of elitism associated with the burdens of judgment, and also help to determine whether our approach is right at all beyond those burdens with regard to whether we are acting on shared reasons in a single liberal political conception. One intriguing possibility here is even if it turns out that our empirical efforts retain some amount of elitism, this “empiricial/political” problem might be somewhat mitigated as a problem for justice. For example, slum residents may not all decide to become architects and redesign housing all on their own – there will still be architects – but individuals effected might be able to better endorse the ultimate design. Likewise, with regard to a “public reason” problem, individuals may still hold onto differing liberal conceptions, but having been engaged through the resentment test by having a chance to make their concerns known, these too might to some extent be able to be addressed. Thus, it should be clear at this point that any consideration of the problems associated with attempting to find shared liberal public reasons for justification are likely to be closely linked to empirical/political problems but that neither of these is

reducible to the other problem. Mainly, my claim at this point is that assuming hypothetical consent makes it difficult to address either of these for justice.

Perhaps this is a reason why Rawls felt compelled to engage in an otherwise somewhat ham-handed effort to suggest that the institutional content of our principles must be part of whether we accept those principles. In doing so he brings together a concern for public reason with empirical/political concerns. Yet, it seems that part of the problem he experiences in grounding this effort arises from its over-reliance on hypothetical form of consent. If the burdens of judgment do not remove these concerns, then we must look carefully at what our other options are. At the very least, I suggest that the possibility of other liberal political conceptions, and the evidence for these that can be found for example in the case of the Tea Party, suggests that we should find ways to move away from hypothetical consent to the degree necessary in order to ameliorate these difficulties. I suggest that applying the resentment test is a start, not a solution or a final answer.

Conclusion: Moving Towards a Deeper Appreciation for Actual Consent around

Principles for our Political Economy and the Question of Motivation

The problems with grounding our consensus in hypothetical terms indicate a lack of motivational support for the principles. By motivational support I am referring to reasons in favor of willful or volitional expressions of affirmation of the principles. Without motivational support for principles, apathy or resentment might come to be prevalent in society. For example, in the case in which elites take advantage of the suggestion that common human reason justifies reasons for assuming hypothetical consent, individuals

may grow apathetic or resentful of decisions made on this standard. They may grow apathetic because they feel that their own understanding of principles has been ignored, but that there is no recourse because they are not experts who have studied what common human reason requires in this case. In this case, citizens may only grow more and more removed from society as they concede more and more ground to technocrats and experts.

The resulting society may be “good” on some measure, but increasingly illegitimate.

Thus, the more illegitimate it becomes, the more citizens are likely to be not only apathetic but resentful of the terms by which they are governed. In some cases, resentment may be the first reaction to hypothetically justified politics rather than apathy, especially from individuals and groups who tend to be politically engaged. The result of this resentment may be to actually ramp up their engagement, but in increasingly destructive or divisive ways as they perceive society to be increasingly divided between the self-interests of elites and everyone else. This would have the effect of creating great amounts of instability in society.

With that said, it is clear that while our efforts around increasing actual consent may be helpful, their role is not to replace any hypothetical terms for agreement whatsoever. A basic reason for this is because even in proposing different terms that may become subject to compromise, we are always in fact imagining what different hypothetical terms might look like, and we will simply never be able to talk with everybody, especially in large and complex modern societies. This does not have to be a bad, or crippling factor though. Rather, it may be a recognition that prods us to determine exactly what hypothetical terms are most valid and where we should be more careful. As

Waldron suggests, our efforts to resolve questions of consent will always involve a two-

sided concept that is in some ways more or less hypothetical and actual: “Though a social order not legitimated by actual consent may be unfree, that unfreedom can be mitigated by our recognition that it is at least possible to imagine people giving it their consent.”53

In order to imagine what that requires it is important to have a place to start, such as an idea of free and equal citizenship. It is for this reason that it is crucial to retain that ideal, but at the same time acknowledge that we will not be able to discover legitimate public reasons through hypothetical reason alone.

Rather, what the resentment test suggests is that we need a politics that can help us make up the difference for the points at which the capacity of our hypothetical terms falls short. Rawls’ effort to establish the superiority of justice as fairness is insufficient to our liberal ideals because he fails to provide a way to make up for that difference.

Prioritizing the fair value of the political liberties seems like a solution if our disagreements can be reduced to our burdens of judgment. But that supposed solution turns out to be only a distraction from the larger problem of which it is itself a part, failing to hold together his own conception as a result. That problem is that Rawls is ultimately asking us to accept too much on principle when he defends the difference principle through greater institutional articulation. In doing so he only creates the potential for more sources of resentment against its various terms. If it is the case that dissent to those terms comes from a wider scope of different liberal conceptions, then our politics needs to find a way to account for that without giving up on our highest ideals. A sensitivity towards the resentment of other liberal conceptions is a start to bringing some

53 Waldron, Jeremy. “Theoretical Foundations of Liberalism.” The Philosophical Quarterly 37.147 (1987): pgs. 140-141

of these other groups into the fold into a new kind of overlapping consensus that would be able to make up for that difference. Thus, efforts for justice must find a way to retain motivation through a sensitivity towards resentment through an acknowledgement of a wider political economy and a wider politics than hypothetical consent alone is likely to be able to meet. This is not just a problem for justice as fairness but for hypothetically- grounded consent more generally because if we cannot assume shared reasons for liberal terms, we have to find new ways to bring people together to re-vivify those terms through forms of actual consent or we will only meet the pitfalls of endless empiricism or empty elitism in our efforts to pursue justice. How it might be possible to meet this challenge is the question I will broach in the next chapter. In reference back to the example in the introduction, it is easy to want policy solutions, such as tax rates, to be resolvable through hypothetical standards that we could apply with little trouble. However, our highest liberal ideals suggest that meeting what those require will not be this easy, or this obvious.

Chapter 3: Adjusting and Supplementing the Terms of Validity in Discourse Theory to

Solve a Problem for Motivation around Norms

Introduction

Habermas turns our attention to the importance of motivation in his account of the role for democracy in legitimate constitution-making. This leads to the question of whether his effort to ground that constitution-making process in rational discourse successfully redeems a concern like Rawls’ for free and equal citizenship without running into similar problems. I will argue that there could be benefits for redeeming that concern in including some of what Habermas would call “distorted” claims into the reason-giving public discourse. Doing so would draw on insights about the conditions for reason-giving but require a different politics than Habermas conceives.

Thinking through how Habermas sustains his standards and whether he can generate motivation around liberal norms where Rawls might not be able to can help us to better understand whether he makes up for those deficits in the latter. The radical democratic critique of Habermas suggests that his account is characterized by an aporia at its heart that threatens to silence discourse. That aporia relates to the inclusion of a rational standard that requires dissent but would also eliminate it if achieved. However this critique seems to go too far in its willingness to give up on reason-giving in public justification. Instead, it raises a question about how we could retain the ethical political energy it prioritizes without giving up on constitution-making. I think the political

economy is a good example here because people hold many irrational or distorted views about the economy that are not necessarily illiberal. This essay hopes to draw out a better understanding of what might be involved in nurturing the motivation around support for liberal norms through a grounding that is less hypothetical and more attentive to the distorted claims in society. Thus, I only look at the implications of irrational or distorted views to that end, and not to replicate the views of radical democrats like

Thomassen or Mouffe.

The kinds of “irrational” views I am talking about are those that are influenced by power such that they might not really be in our best interest but are still held out of concern for free and equal citizenship. Instead of “irrational,” Habermas might call these views “distorted.” These are views that may have been in some sense formed through influences of strategic action, such as that by capitalist entities to persuade citizens. Some of these have been taken up by individuals in a nonjuridical way. In this Foucauldian sense they do not simply signal manipulation, but something deeper that is affirmed on the level of identity. Of course, irrational views arising from these identities may also not only be held out of regard for free and equal citizenship. Yet, even in these cases there might still be a need to allow their inclusion into public debates but not with the expectation that their normative force can only come from their ultimate reduction to rational agreement. That would only reproduce the kind of aporia identified by radical democrats for the reason-giving process and in turn threaten the kinds of elitist empowerment found in Rawls and which Habermas hopes to avoid. Despite any such aporia, we should be concerned about how we might retain a reason-giving process because of the ways authorship bolsters our motivation to support equal norms, even if it

may require us to understand the conditions for that process somewhat differently than

Habermas does.

I think that retaining a focus on what kind of reason-giving can be part of building social movements for liberal norms can be part of a response to a criticism Habermas would likely make that such views can only be asserted at the cost of performative contradictions. What it would mean to build those movements means explaining why these groups should engage citizens with distorted views and how that would be based on something that overcomes performative contradiction. However, acknowledging the importance of reason-giving between citizens for the motivational support of norms and constitutions should not lead us to jettison that process as the radical democrats sometimes seem to do. Rather, by changing it to include some distorted views we may be able to answer to both approaches. On the one hand, we can acknowledge the importance of conditions for reason-giving that underlie authorship-related motivations for citizens.

On the other hand, it would also give us a way around the aporetic problems identified by radical democrats. At once it would then redeem constitution-making as well as a concern for ethical considerations to underpin discussion as emphasized by radicals.

Thus, my focus in this chapter is on how we might retain the motivational force from reason-giving identified by Habermas but harness it more effectively by including a greater sensitivity for the role of distorted views. My acknowledgement of the radical critique is something of a transitional consideration to a further set of arguments not included in this essay. I will take it up as a strong counterargument for critique rather than relying on it to do my own critical work against Habermas here. As a result, the radical democratic critique can serve to highlight the importance of ethical considerations

in our democratic engagements, but it is not persuasive on its own terms. Those ethical considerations will ultimately need to be adjusted in a way that can assist in a reason- giving process supplemented by the motivational force of the inclusion of distorted views.

The Force of Motivation in Habermas’ Political Economy

Habermas takes a different approach to the generation of consent required for legitimate terms of social cooperation than does Rawls. Instead of attempting to develop principles in advance that could be the object of consent, risking the very crisis of stability he sees for Rawls, he focuses instead on the types of coordination that could ground normative terms in actual consent in the first place, circumventing the gap created by Rawls’ effort.

This attempt at least incorporates a central role for types of argumentation that can meet this aim. Though advanced and adjusted over many years, the place for a procedure based on a discourse principle that incorporates a central role for validity claims in argumentation and coordination is an enduring and central part of this project. Like

Rawls, it develops an effort to build universal terms into its justification process. But unlike Rawls, these are in turn constituted by our discourse in a lifeworld that depends on shared understanding for the basis of the generation of a constitution of what these terms involve. It is his concern for protecting these characteristics of argumentation and its sources that leads Habermas to articulate a political economy subject to the kind of legitimation which that argumentation is supposed to provide. Specifically, while he does not specify singular terms for a principle of the economy, he does set communicative terms that are supposed to control its administration, subject to the nature of what this would involve in some particular lifeworld. His project most essentially seeks to ground

legitimacy directly in the authority of those governed by its terms in part because he believes motivation to support those terms would otherwise not be forthcoming.

Habermas believes that the terms of social cooperation that structure our laws, which embody our norms, must be grounded in the autonomy of citizens in a democratic populace. How this form of social integration might be achieved is his answer to a problematic central to modernity: “…the type of norms required would have to bring about a willingness to comply simultaneously by means of de facto constraint and legitimate validity. Norms of this kind would have to appear with an authority that once again equips validity with the force of the factual, only this time under the condition of the polarization already existing between action oriented to success and that oriented to reaching understanding which is to say, under the condition of a perceived incompatibility of facticity and validity.”54 The idea that in light of the absence of overarching traditional or religious authority, individuals are to self-authenticate their subjective projects, shakes our faith in any effort to be reconciled to our social world as affirming our autonomy as individuals. Rather, our social world, on this view, is increasingly torn by success-oriented competition or administration, especially in the liberal context in which the prevailing political and legal efforts are to increasingly separate the state and its laws from our individual lives. Thus, in his concern for what could be required to reintegrate individuals to their social world as free and equal citizens, the above worry presages what Habermas perceives as the major challenge:

“Modern societies are integrated not only socially through values, norms, and mutual understanding, but systematically through markets and the administrative use of power.

54 Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms. The MIT Press: Cambridge. pg. 27.

Money and administrative power are systemic mechanisms of social integration that do not necessarily coordinate actors via the intentions of participants, but objectively,

‘behind the backs’ of participants.”55 Habermas is concerned that the overarching conditions of modernity create a problem that is exploited by different success-oriented systems at the expense of social terms that would affirm our free and equal citizenship.

However, he of course believes that modernity also holds sufficient resources to meet this challenge and reconfigure a political economy through intersubjectively validated norms for our social world.

Social Integration Through the Discourse Principle

Habermas is keen to develop terms that all citizens can endorse, but is also intent on not articulating these in advance of their actual affirmation by these citizens. Rather, he is attentive to a worry that to do so would estrange any principles developed in this way by underestimating the importance of the co-originality of private and public autonomy.

Denied authorship of the normative terms of social cooperation, individual citizens would lack at once an understanding of those norms and the motivation to see them implemented. This is because reason alone does not necessarily motivate: “Such insights are reached in a hypothetical attitude and carry only the force of rational motivation. In any case, they cannot themselves guarantee that insight will issue in motivated action.”56

It is by closing this gap between private and public autonomy for the articulation of rights that Habermas attempts to overcome this problem.

55 Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms. The MIT Press: Cambridge. pg. 39. 56 Ibid., pg. 5.

Doing so requires finding a way to reach agreement despite our fractured social world. Thus, any effort to do so would have to take this challenge seriously through intersubjective efforts that retain our ability to self-authenticate claims. “…Without religious or metaphysical support, the coercive law tailored for the self-intentioned use of individual rights can preserve its socially integrating force only insofar as the addressees of legal norms may at the same time understand themselves, taken as a whole, as the rational authors of those norms.”57 Rather than separate the articulation of norms into an abstract discourse that would represent our public autonomy, Habermas wants to instantiate this autonomy through our private discourse from the beginning.

Thus, he believes that this can be accomplished through communicative action.

By ‘action,’ Habermas refers to “…those symbolic expressions with which the actor takes up a relation to at least one world (but always to the objective world as well)…”58 and these can include “teleological, normatively regulated, and dramaturgical,” actions amongst others.59 The idea that we always refer to an objective world as well in our communicative action will come to have a special importance for Habermas. This is because Habermas is focused on how to develop our illocutionary exchanges in such a way that we move towards terms of cooperation we can all endorse. Basically, in order to do so, we have to know what the other person is talking about to be able to interpret and accurately understand the illocutionary effects of our interlocuter. For Habermas, communicative action embodies what is required to accomplish this. It is rational discourse that offers access to all citizens as such, and develops our capacity for

57 Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms. The MIT Press: Cambridge. pg. 33. 58 Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action: Volume I, Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Beacon Press: Boston. pg. 96. 59 Ibid., pg. 96.

illocutionary effects towards the ends of norm construction for society that we can all accept. Of course, it is only through actual intersubjective action that we can come to know the effects of the claims we make, and act on those effects in turn. This is important because these claims will inform our norms, and without engaging with each other, we really only guess what the other thinks or wants.

Specifically, communicative action is a means to interpret and evaluate our social conditions such that our conclusions can constitute the legal code that embodies the manifestations of this normative project. It is normative because it takes seriously what we actually want through our acceptance or rejection of validity claims about our world in discourse and attempts to use these insights for the construction of terms that can be affirmed by all. It aspires to impartial terms for the regulation of society in that what we want comes to be refined through discourse, so that it can generate terms that we agree to live by.60 This is what Habermas refers to when he references a process of ‘ideal role taking’: ““Discourse ethics rests on the intuition that the application of the principle of universalization, properly understood, calls for a joint process of ‘ideal role taking’… In the course of successively undertaken abstractions, the core of generalizable interests can then emerge step by step.”61 The mechanism for reaching agreement in this way is through the acceptance or rejection of validity claims about how to structure our social world with our interlocutors. Validity claims are true or false assertions subject to evaluation by all, and generate these terms through discussion: “The speech act of one person succeeds only if the other accepts the offer contained in it by taking (however

60 Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms. The MIT Press: Cambridge. pg. 103, 104. 61 Habermas, Jurgen. 1998. The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory. Ed. Ciaran Cronan and Pablo De Grieff. The MIT Press: Cambridge. pp. 57-58.

implicitly) a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ position on a validity claim that is in principle criticizable.”62

Nonetheless, how it is possible to constructively engage in this conversation towards shared ends is not immediately clear. Criticizability per se would not seem to necessarily imply universal standards for evaluation.

Yet, for Habermas this point returns us to our social world. We have access to shared understandings that arise from our lifeworld, which is essentially the constitution of background assumptions that establishes the basis for our rational evaluation of validity claims.63 Our coordination efforts in the lifeworld, though it consists of particular traditions, vocabularies, and so on, prepares us for communicative action by requiring us to understand each other in these efforts. In other words, we can refer to things in the world, from everyday objects to systems like the economy, and can either know what our interlocutors refer to, or through making validity claims concerning these topics, come to more accurately understand what it is we are talking about and how we envision our shared terms of social integration. Moreover, we can come to understand also what mechanisms work and do not work in accord with the rights we all affirm – these may differ in different lifeworlds – but through the common understanding manifested therein, we hold the resources to constitute our norms together through a rational project. Within norm construction, for example, we can come to better understand and affirm our rights through these efforts: “In this sense, ‘subjective’ rights emerge co-originally with

62 Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action: Volume I, Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Beacon Press: Boston. pg. 287. 63 Ibid., pg. 335-227. “…this meaning [of speech acts] could not be thought independently of contextual conditions altogether; for each type of speech act there are general contextual conditions that must be met if the speaker is to be able to achieve illocutionary success.” pg. 335.

‘objective’ law…”64 Thus, through the universally rational character of communicative action, we may come to articulate norms which express our rights in ways that are both contingent , and dependent upon our lifeworld: “…it is inherent in the concrete nature of the matters to be regulated that in the medium of law – as opposed to morality – the process of setting normative rules for modes of behavior is open to the influence by the society’s political goals. For this reason every legal system is also the expression of a particular form of life and not merely a reflection of the universal content of basic rights.”65 Thus, through communicative action, norms may come to be constituted in contingent ways that would not be possible without being grounded in democratic authorization characterized by the co-originality of public and private autonomy. We need to understand which rights claims apply to and are acceptable to all, and how these are constituted and realized through normative structures or policies in our particular lifeworld.

Something like this sensitivity to the context of our lifeworld with the construction of rights occurred with the progression from classical to social welfare liberalism according to Habermas. While the institutionalization of state policies to give substance to our rights was a response to the ways in which the classical version was unresponsive to the requirements of private autonomy, the former too has come to run up against limits for private autonomy in the contemporary context. Thus, Habermas finds fault with the empowerment of the administrative apparatus fostered by the resulting social welfare model. It too easily empowers the administrative state in such a way that it no longer draws on insights arising from the requirements of our rights in the lifeworld.

64 Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms. The MIT Press: Cambridge. pg. 87. 65 Ibid., pg. 217.

Instead, it tends to empower the dictation of technocratic terms – this comes at the expense of our private autonomy, and ultimately at the expense of the very legitimation of this project, despite its original grounding in an effort to be responsive to terms required for equal citizenship. Thus, Habermas comes to see a practical role for his effort in working out a legitimate set of normative terms in a contemporary context that can neither be reduced to the classical or social welfare paradigms for our autonomy as free and equal citizens.66 How this might work is a question about the generation of norms in our lifeworld context.

Thus, when this system of norm articulation works correctly, it comes to be in accordance with a discourse principle that sums up the nature of this effort. That principle which establishes the standard for legitimate terms states that, “Just those action norms are valid which all possibly affected persons could agree as participants in rational discourses.”67 This standard is approximated through intersubjective communicative action, leading to an articulation of what our norms require, such as the nature of rights and how success-oriented action of the market or administration is subjected to what these rights involve. It brings together democratic authorization with the content of the law: “The discourse principle is intended to assume the shape of a principle of democracy only by way of legal institutionalization. The principle of democracy is what then confers legitimating force on the legislative process.”68 Habermas is confident that as long as we can rationally communicate with each other, referring to our common reference points,

66 Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms. The MIT Press: Cambridge. chptr. 9. 67 Ibid., pg. 107. 68 Ibid., pg. 121.

and accepting or rejecting validity claims about the terms that apply to us, we can approximate this institutionalization of norms.

Legitimation and the Political Economy

As one of the ‘success-oriented systems’ that prevails in the absence of unifying communicative action in the modern context, the economy is a potential threat to the realization of legitimate terms on Habermas’ account. Whereas communicative action appeals to our common effort to reach shared norms through the acceptance or rejection of validity claims, the ‘success-oriented’ nature of the market comes to be a threat to this effort, according to Habermas. Like its administrative counterpart in the government, it attempts to coordinate action ‘behind the backs’ of the real objective intentions of participants in different social systems.69 Like communicative action, it too is a coordination mechanism - it arises from a system that requires and generates certain terms of interaction - but one that holds the threat of disintegrating rather than reintegrating our social world as a result of motivating us away from norm generating action and towards action which makes that form all the more difficult to achieve.

This is because the ability of our communicative action to meet the aspirations of the discourse principle depends largely on the nature of its activity in a broader public sphere. In articulating his view of what this sphere involves, Habermas rejects Joshua

Cohen’s effort to set similar principles for deliberation across all political communities because it does not take seriously the “internal differentiations” that would constitute the different operating pieces of the contemporary public sphere.70 Cohen wants essentially a

69 Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms. The MIT Press: Cambridge. pg. 39. 70 Ibid., pg. 306.

form of noncoerced deliberation that would take place in similar form, appealing in the same way to certain abstract principles, in as many social institutions as possible. Yet,

Habermas finds differentiations between parliamentary, administrative, and a peripheral civil society, such that together they sharpen a process of a rational will-formation and implementation of norms that relies on filling different roles towards that end.

Specifically, parliaments in this view engage in a process of justification that relies on administrative, expert knowledge, but which both must be subject to the “discovery” and expression of issues arising from the periphery. The latter is more anarchic, spontaneous, and subject to varied forms of media, making it more immediately responsive and sensitive to new issues. Yet, this public finds itself in a double-edged position characterized by its capacity to both respond to issues arising in the lifeworld, and its susceptibility to coercion: “On account of its anarchic structure, the general public sphere is, on the one hand, more vulnerable to the repressive and exclusionary effects of unequally distributed social power, structural violence, and systematically distorted communication than are the institutionalized public spheres of parliamentary bodies. On the other hand, it has the advantage of a medium of unrestricted communication.”

Without issues arising from the periphery, norms would have no grounding in actual democratic consent, thereby imperiling the co-originality and realization of public and private autonomy.

Yet, the political economy and its administration, on Habermas’ view, when uncoordinated by communicative action, can skew the potential of that public by undermining its capacity for making and institutionalizing unifying claims. Rather, its influence leads us to endorse claims that are not normative, but simply ‘success-oriented’

and concerned with power rather than impartial terms for all. In a deep sense, this is a result of its effect on our relationship to the lifeworld. Our capacity for shared communicative action is anchored in the lifeworld: “…the lifeworld remains the subsystem that defines the pattern of the social system as a whole. Thus, systemic mechanisms need to be anchored in the lifeworld: they have to be institutionalized.”71

However, the differentiated contemporary context which prompts Habermas’ effort in the first place is not simply static, but pulls apart at the unifying effects of the lifeworld:

“…increasingly autonomous organizations are connected with one another via delinguistified media of communication: these systemic mechanisms- for example, money – steer a social intercourse that has been largely disconnected from norms and values.”72 This is a deep structural effect behind Habermas’ general concern with the capacity for communicative action to direct our social world. It is concerned with actions by the state administration or economic agents, possibly corporations or individuals, to simply set terms or attain ends through money, without much if any public justification, but through the force of reward or punishment. They bypass our common lifeworld, and

‘colonize’ it with the resulting social structures that have not been subject to legitimation.

It seems then, based on Habermas’ above discussion of the public sphere, that his early concern with these deep systemic and structural forces completely outside the force of discourse, comes to be advanced by a concern also with the reflection of these forces in discourse itself.

71 Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Theory of Communicative Action: Volume II, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Beacon Press: Boston. pg. 154. 72 Ibid., pg. 154.

Thus, Habermas’ corollary concern is not simply the operation of systems ‘behind the backs’ of citizens, but how citizens may become co-conspirators in these effects through discourse itself: “Democratically constituted opinion – and will-formation depends on the supply of informal public opinions that, ideally, develop in structures of an unsubverted political public sphere.”73 However, the media-steered systems of money and administration have communicational consequences for publics operating at the periphery. Specifically, because of the necessary reliance of these publics on mass media of communication they are also subject to manipulation or distraction resulting from this medium of opinion and will-formation. Habermas critiques this problem as cultural:

“Reporting facts as human-interest stories, mixing information with entertainment, arranging material episodically, and breaking down complex relationships into smaller fragments – all of this comes together to form a syndrome that works to depoliticize public communication. This is the kernel of truth in the theory of the culture industry.”74

This is a problem that is only exacerbated when the money-steered systems manipulate the content of this media to support non-socially legitimated ends, selecting stories for the news media or the subject of their portrayal. For Habermas, these effects are not insurmountable challenges for publics operating on the periphery, but raise questions of interpretation: “It directs our attention to the strategies of interpretation employed by viewers, who communicate with one another, and who in fact can be provoked to criticize or reject what programs offer or to synthesize it with judgments of their own.”75 As such, whether the parliamentary and administrative systems that regulate the economy can successfully subject its terms to legitimation is both a question of public attention, are

73 Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms. The MIT Press: Cambridge. pg. 308. 74 Ibid., pg. 377. 75 Ibid., pg. 377.

citizens aware of what is going on in their social worlds and not oblivious to money and administratively-steered systems operating behind their backs, and one of action, can they marshal the resources and attention necessary to subject these aspects of the political economy to democratic legitimation. This for Habermas would be the key question for critical issues of political economy.

Thus, social movements are the key agents for Habermas in the capacity of the public to overcome these challenges and subject the economy and administration to legitimation. According to Habermas, social movements and new subcultures can,

“…dramatize contributions, presenting them so effectively that the mass media take up the matter…” and, “Sometimes the support of sensational actions, mass protests, and incessant campaigning is required before an issue can make its way via the surprising election of marginal candidates or radical parties…into the core of the political system and there receive formal consideration.”76 The quintessential model of a successful case for Habermas is the emergence of the women’s movement which dramatized unequal treatment and altered the norms of society. These agents are critical for Habermas because they draw public attention to unlegitimated interventions into the lifeworld, and draw on that shared lifeworld background to focus our attention on these cases that would otherwise be normatively unregulated.

However, the nature of social movements that Habermas has in mind raises questions about the capacity for the realization of communicative action around issues arising in the political economy. For Habermas, these movements are effective for legitimation through communicative action to the extent to which they meet the standards

76 Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms. The MIT Press: Cambridge. pg. 381.

for the kinds of discourse required therein. This of course calls for noncoerced rational discourse that at once contributes to and draws on an objective lifeworld: “In communicative action we today proceed from those formal presuppositions of intersubjectivity that are necessary if we are to be able to refer to something in the one objective world, identical for all observers, or to something in our intersubjectively shared world.”77 Recognizing these shared precepts requires our noncoerced interpretation of that world; it is a basic precept for rational discourse: “exclude every kind of coercion – whether originating outside the process of reaching understanding or within it – other than that of the better argument, so that all motives except that of the cooperative search for truth are neutralized.”78 These are high standards for the social movements aiming for articulation of normative legitimation of the political economy.

Of course, for Habermas, this generation of constitutional terms is an ongoing political process – it has imperfections: “The dispute over the correct paradigmatic understanding of the legal system, a subsystem reflected in the whole of society as one of its parts, is essentially a political dispute. In a constitutional democracy this dispute concerns all participants, and it must not be conducted only as an esoteric discourse among experts apart from the political arena.”79 It must retain a role for social movements and other dynamic instigative and interpretive agents. Yet, despite the imperfect political process of rational will-formation here, normative insights are still only those characterized by an unsubverted public sphere. These movements may give us bits and pieces of critical information, hold or draw our attention and instigate our action,

77 Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action: Volume I, Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Beacon Press: Boston. pg. 50. 78 Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms. The MIT Press: Cambridge. pg. 230. 79 Ibid., pg. 395.

but are directly valuable to norm construction only to the extent of the quality of their validity claims. These claims can help contribute to our identical objective world only through stimulating our uncoerced discourse.

What Really Grounds Our Norms in Motivation?

Uncoerced self-authorship of norms sounds great, but the reduction of normative insights to uncoerced discourse raises a paradoxical question about both the motivation of participants and the constitutions they can generate. On the one hand, if individuals are in any way motivated towards norm construction through forces of coerced social power, they would seemingly be excluded or impermissible on Habermas’ view – not at least from discussion, but at least as this power relates to normative insights. This might include something like motivated orientations to issues of political economy such as the relative rights to taxed or untaxed income or wealth, regulations of business, or rights of employees or owners and so on, that could easily be to some degree influenced by presentation in mass media or other deeply held views impacted by social power. These effects may be motivational because they tap into deeply held identities that arise as the sources of motivation for politically engaged individuals. To withdraw these insights may be to withdraw also the motivation required for the generation of co-original terms.

On the other hand, if these sources are influenced by strategic actors looking for influence in the political economy, he would in fact like to uncover this through the exchange of validity claims that are expressed correctly only under the right conditions.

Those are the conditions of the lifeworld which prepare us to make illocutionary claims that can be accepted or rejected. Those conditions of these very claims subject to that

evaluation include truth, rightness, and truthfulness and underlie the kind of claim that meets the requirements of validity.80 This is simply another way of looking at the factors in evaluating illocutionary claims. Habermas states, “It holds true not only for constative speech acts, but for any speech act, that we understand its meaning when we know the conditions under which it can be accepted as valid.”81 The extent to which the lifeworld has been steered ‘behind the backs’ of participants with effects for the rightness, truthfulness, and ultimately the truth of the claims under consideration will effect how distorted our claims are and how expediently we are able to evaluate them. This is only to reiterate the importance of that lifeworld condition. Of course, as it relates to motivation, how the influence of strategic action has influenced our understanding of these conditions in the lifeworld and the nature of the claims we make there, there is a potentially very real impact for what motivates us to participate in discourse. How deep that impact goes within our identities has important implications for whether it would likely be altered through discourse or would alter that discourse towards sustaining different terms as a result.

How this gets squared with the moral conditions arising under discourse is a difficult question for Habermas. Of the conditions we must meet for validity, truth refers to “the existential presuppositions of its propositional content,” rightness refers to “the rightness of the speech act in view of the normative context of the utterance (or the legitimacy of the presupposed context itself),” and truthfulness refers to “the intention

80 Habermas, Jürgen (1990) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. The MIT Press: Cambridge. pg. 313. 81 Ibid., pg. 313.

expressed by the speaker (that is the agreement of what is meant with what is stated).”82

Any validity claim can be rejected with regard to at least any one of these conditions.

Any claim that does not meet these conditions is distorted by its incapacity to be affirmed on terms that could be embraced by all. This gives us a better sense of what our claims require to meet the terms of the discourse principle. Yet, if we hold to claims not meeting these terms, they subvert our common understanding. However, if discourse functions as

Habermas hopes, the lack of that common understanding would prompt further questioning that would bring us closer to recognizing norms that we can all accept. As a result these views would be discarded under the right challenges. On this view, it is possible that the kind people who have been influenced by relations of power would recognize certain distorted features of their views and give these up in favor of more universal norms. This point in particular leads to a question about whether Habermas can motivationally ground his terms in the force of the better argument without sacrificing pluralism. It leads to this question because just how much we give up when we discard

“distorted” views through processes of discourse will effect just how much pluralism is vitiated as a result. If we must give up a lot, it seems less pluralist, but if we can recognize shared normative terms without giving up too much, then it does not seem too problematic. Just how much is he asking people to give up for these terms to be realized and what would be the cost? Rawls actually criticizes Habermas directly on this point.

Rawls’ criticism of Habermas opens directly into the question of whether the latter overloads his subjects with ethical commitments that unjustly exclude others from the public sphere in order to retain motivation for terms under rational validity. Rawls

82 Habermas, Jürgen (1990) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. The MIT Press: Cambridge. pg. 313.

argues that Habermas’ theory requires deliberators imbued with a worldview that incorporates these terms, and that as a result it is not consistent with real pluralist publics.

Therefore, Rawls argues that no procedure can substitute for the role of a constitution:

“…legitimacy of legislative enactments depends on the justice of the constitution…In view of the imperfection of all human political procedure, there can be no such procedure with respect to political justice and no procedure could determine its substantive content.

Hence, we always depend on our substantive judgments of justice.”83 The only alternative would be to insert the right commitments into the ethical outlooks of deliberators which would be in conflict with the requirements of justice under pluralist conditions in the first place. Thus, Rawls favors the political approach of an overlapping consensus as the only alternative.

Yet, for Habermas, Rawls has only attempted to purchase stability at the expense of endorsement from citizens, imperiling whatever substantive value the constitution was supposed to protect as a result. Rather, Habermas’ insight is that without co-original generation of norms, citizens will lack both an understanding of what these require and the motivation to see them implemented. Instead, he argues that rational argumentation through procedure is superior because it can generate the moral point of view, but does not presuppose that individuals hold that view as a ‘comprehensive doctrine,’:

“In my view, the moral point of view is already implicit in the socio-ontological constitution of the public practice of argumentation, comprising the complex relation of mutual recognition that participants in rational discourse ‘must’ accept (in the sense of weak transcendental necessity). Rawls believes that a theory of justice developed in such exclusively procedural terms could not be ‘sufficiently structured.’ Since I ascribe to a

83 Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press: New York. pg. 429.

division of labor between moral theory and the theory of action, I do not regard this as a serious reservation…84 Rather, he finds the more serious concern to be with Rawls’ willingness to impose a variety of substantive terms on citizens who are not clearly in endorsement of what these require: “…Together with the content of action conflicts in need of resolution, a whole conceptual frame for normatively regulated action is forced upon us – a network of concepts in which persons and interpersonal relations, actors and action, norm- conforming and deviant behavior, responsibility and autonomy, and even intersubjectively structured moral feeling all find their place. Each of these concepts deserves a prior analysis.”85 Instead, it is presupposed in the name of stability. But this for Habermas is only a fantasy, as it has no real grounding in actual consent.

Yet, this leads to a question about whether Habermas actually answers Rawls’ critique. On the one hand, it is possible that the moral viewpoint might be separable from our deeper commitments. If so, then Habermas could be right that by deliberating around what this requires in different lifeworlds, we can hope to gain a better understanding of what those requirements would involve. It is a particular viewpoint, but it is not clear that it requires any ethical overload that threatens pluralism. Yet, the problem with Habermas making this argument would be that it might imperil his case for grounding the motivation for supporting a constitution for free and equal citizenship by referring more to what an external view, the moral view, requires rather than grounding it in our commitments to each other through discourse. The more it is detached as a separate viewpoint, the less clear it is that it arises from our own internal motivations. As a result

84 Habermas, Jürgen. "Reconciliation Through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls's Political Liberalism," Journal of Philosophy 92 (1995). pg. 127. 85 Ibid., pg. 127.

it simply becomes a more hypothetical standard like Rawls’ which loses the motivational grounding in co-originality which Habermas hopes to secure.

Habermas’ response to this is in fact to emphasize an effect that our common understandings would have back on our very lifeworlds to bridge that gap. As we come to question certain practices in our lifeworlds, any motivation for our communicative action arising from the facticity of those lifeworlds may come to be undone. As a result according to Habermas that moral point of view must come to take its place in the lifeworld: “If it is to become effective in practice, morality has to make up for the loss of concrete ethical life that it incurred when it pursued a cognitive advantage. Demotivated solutions to contextualized issues can achieve practical efficacy only if two resulting problems are solved: the abstraction from contexts of action and the separation of rationally motivated insights from empirical attitudes must both be undone. And these two problems can only be solved when moral judgment is supplemented by something else: hermeneutic effort and the internalization of authority.”86 Of course in order to get to this point in the first place where the authority of the moral point of view could be internalized, we would have to be able to fully engage communicative action already.

Yet, this way of overcoming the motivational gap that might result from rational agreement does seem to give some credence to Rawls’ concern. If our ethical lifeworld is the context that includes our many private commitments that make up the context of pluralism, then suggesting that we take on normative commitments into our ethical viewpoints as a result of our communicative action does seem like a threat to that

86 Habermas, Jürgen (1990) Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. The MIT Press: Cambridge. pg. 179.

pluralism. It seems like a threat to that pluralism because it suggests that the political doctrine that we agree on in discourse is not of sufficient weight to win our consent.

Instead, we have to affirm it more deeply. This would seemingly lead Habermas into some tricky territory in order to explain just how deeply we must affirm those terms to win the motivation to see them carried out, without imperiling our ability to hold our own distinct worldviews as Rawls is concerned with. However, taking only Rawls’ critique as the final possibility would leave us then in the uncomfortable position of taking on any harmful effects of hypothetical consent as the only alternative. It would suggest that our only real alternative is to base constitutions on hypothetical consent with whatever risks for their support that form entails instead.

One response to this conundrum would be to reconfigure our understanding of discourse in the first place so that the return to our ethical world from our moral deliberations comes prepared with the resources necessary to maintain our motivated commitment to whatever constitutions and norms we had decided were most valid without threatening to obviate our conditions of pluralism. I take something like this to be the idea behind Arash Abizadeh’s effort to redeem a place for rhetoric in our understanding of communicative action. Abizadeh criticizes Habermas’ strict distinction between norms and facticity because of the way it evacuates our ability to conceive the former by characterizing the latter only as conventional, or without critical force. One feature of the facticity side of this dichotomy we might retain to better serve our given ends for understanding would be a role for rhetoric.

Abizadeh argues that Habermas is wrong to conceive rhetoric as only at odds with validity because it is in a way already part of our activity in communicative action. In the

lifeworld we must already use given vocabularies to make claims in ways that are more or less likely to be understood by our interlocutors. Therefore, it is not the case that effective rhetoric must mean only to manipulate for the sake of persuasion, but instead may play a role for our given end of reaching common understanding. Taken up this way it draws on an insight that directly aiming is not always the best way to achieve some end. This is especially true in the case of common understanding in discourse because that discourse is always mediated by unique vocabularies. We will likely need to use roundabout terms or appeals that make sense in our distinctive lifeworlds in order to reach that form of understanding. It seems this may be as simple as knowing which references are meaningful to people in different contexts, and so on.

Understood this way, rhetoric serves our aim of common understanding by its use in an Aristotelian sense as techne. It is an artful effort to guide our understanding rather than merely to persuade. It is a “guiding end” for “the art of discourse.”87 However, it does not replace the aims of that discourse, which are still identified with the telos of common understanding: “facticity may be a constitutive feature of the validity dimension to the ends of validity…Validity here is constructed not by an expulsion of (nor by a fusion with) facticity, but by organizing the operation of facticity to serve the ends of validity.”88 According to Abizadeh, a good example of this would something like a criminal trial: “A criminal court of law may be designed with the given ends of ascertaining the truth about the facts of the matter, and fairly applying the law to those facts. While these may be the given ends of the process, the guiding end of its constituent

87 Abizadeh, Arash. “On the Philosophy/Rhetoric Binaries: Or, is Habermasian Discourse Motivationally Impotent?.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 33.4 (2007): pg. 465. 88 Ibid., pg. 465.

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parts may have quite a different character: the prosecutors and defence lawyers each try their best to slant the factual and legal evidence in opposing directions. The presumption is that the given ends are best served mediately, without participants aiming directly at them.”89 Although the main thrust of this example is surely how ends might be served mediately, it also would seem to serve particular kinds of ends, if we take the example seriously. Abizadeh’s example concerns a criminal trial in which there is presumably a real truth about the guilt or innocence of the defendant. Of course, there are different kinds of criminal trials. Those concerning material facts such as whether some particular person is the one seen in video footage committing a crime have a truth in this sense which we might approximate from approaching in a wide variety of ways rather than simply posing a direct question like ‘is he or she the one in the video?’ Rather, the kind of criminal trial more in keeping with the normative concerns like those of Habermas might concern certain constitutional charges like whether a defendant can legitimately claim a set of rights. This is a different kind of trial and it is not clear which kind

Abizadeh means to refer to.

This confusion indicates a potential problem for an approach like Abizadeh’s to solve Habermas’ dilemma because it can suggest that he retains a conviction in an ultimate rationalist reduction of our common understanding through discourse. This is a problem if the existence of distorted views in any way make that reduction practically or normatively problematic. We retain persuasion as a guiding end to distinguish also between that which is subordinate to our given end of reaching common understanding.

In other words, understood in that sense it may meet our conditions of truth, rightness,

89 Abizadeh, Arash. “On the Philosophy/Rhetoric Binaries: Or, is Habermasian Discourse Motivationally Impotent?.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 33.4 (2007): pg. 464-465.

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and truthfulness. The key point for whether this is sufficient I think for retaining a commitment to these conditions in a way that serves a rationalist reductions is what kind of truth those mediate aims actually serve. Although it expands the kind of “right” vocabulary we might use to describe normative ends and may of course be expressed with more or less truthfulness with regard to the aims of our persuasion, whether it refers to the “true” ends of our understanding is a more difficult question. In a material criminal trial there is a true aim to achieve based on the objective truth of what happened, but in a constitutional trial it is not clear that different cases can be resolved by assuming a rationalist solution that does not take into account what people believe about different facts in the case.

Again, in a criminal trial with material evidence the only way to determine actual guilt or innocence in some cases may be achievable only through indirect means of persuasion given a lack of direct documentation of the crime through witness observation, indisputable physical records, and so on. However it is not clear that this kind of end can be so easily proposed in our political discourse. The different kind of

“truth” we might refer to in our conditions of validity may concern the kind of “truth in politics” that Foucault has in mind when he also refers to Aristotelian rhetoric. This kind of truth refers to regimes of knowledge sustained by power that function as political truths. Another way of putting this I think is something like the conventional wisdom that functions in a regime of politics. Examples of this would be overarching ideas like ‘the market is always the best solution,’ or ‘individuals are sovereign,’ and so on. Whether or not these ideas may be existentially true in any given case does not change the fact that our politics views them differently and acts upon them as truths. Conversely, in a way

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similar to Habermas’ emphasis on the key role for social movements, regimes of truth are also subject to challenge, but not clearly susceptible to being successfully critiqued through validity claims as understood by Habermas. How deep this problem goes and whether it is amenable to resolution merely through the rhetorical design suggested by

Abizedah or might effect the nature of what kind of reason effects our terms for understanding is what I will look at next. Nonetheless, it is worth flagging at this point that the Foucauldian view is not necessarily as morally flat as Habermas suggests and which I will point out below.

In any case, this kind of truth may raise challenges for our common understanding in the Habermasian sense depending on at what point of regress in discourse we are willing to assent to new claims. If this is the case then we might still have to grapple with

Habermas’ suggestion that our moral viewpoint comes back into our ethical frame after dialogue to replace what it has fractured. If it is the case that there are questions in constitutional law reducible to the kind of criminal trial example suggested by Abizadeh then this may be less of a concern. In fact, questions concerning the right to participate in discourse, and the freedoms that go along with that would seem particularly amenable to that kind of approach because they concern the most basic requirements for undertaking together the constitution and norm-making process. Yet, even in these cases there may be a quick slippery slope from questions of individual free speech to regulations of money, corporate speech, etc. that concerns rights potentially grounded in the constitution of our norms. However, if there are motivated disagreements that go deeper than this there is still a question of whether we can reach a common understanding in the Habermasian sense without threatening pluralism.

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The Return of Distorted Views

There is still a problem for Habermas if our claims in discourse are influenced by relations of power. This problem arises from the nonjuridical ways in which power motivates rather than represses. This power, expressed in the Foucauldian sense, can be understood this way: “If power were never anything but repressive, if it never did anything but say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse.”90 Habermas is already aware of something like this with regard to the influence of strategic action in our lifeworld, especially as it relates to the media culture. That culture influences and asks us to assent to subjective pleasures or aims regardless of the cost to our mutually shared world. Habermas states, “The communicative potential of reason has been simultaneously developed and distorted in the course of capitalist modernization.” We should then subject these kinds of appeals to the test of validity when making shared law in order to ensure our equal treatment.

As Abizadeh notes, Habermas reverts to a dichotomy between his rationalist ends and the kinds of strategic-influenced action we also find in the social world. Habermas states: “Subject-centered reason finds its criteria in standards of truth and success that govern the relationships of knowing and purposively acting subjects to the world of possible objects or states of affairs. By contrast, as soon as we conceive of knowledge as communicatively mediated, rationality is assessed in terms of the capacity of responsible

90 Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. Pantheon Books: New York, 1984. pg. 61.

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participants in interaction to orient themselves in relation to validity claims geared to intersubjective recognition.”91 The “possible objects or states of affairs” which Habermas refers to here are simply those that are conventional and as a result retain a conservative bias in their expression as a result according to him. The denouement of structuring our intersubjectivity around this dichotomy between conventional and moral postconventional forms is to denigrate the former as having no critical or normative edge and as a result put it at odds with the latter. Thus, true argumentation, given its demands under the conditions for validity, precludes assertions that operate only in that conventional sense: “Once participants enter into argumentation, they cannot avoid supposing, in a reciprocal way, that the conditions for an ideal speech situation have been sufficiently met.”92 To not do so is to engage a performative contradiction in that one simply cannot perform discourse without meeting its conditions and once a claim against discourse theory is made from the conventional side it is already on an inevitable path towards common understanding if it truly believes to have attained an argumentative advantage. To go back to Abizadeh’s trial example, to the extent that it mirrors something in Habermas’ discourse theory, I think what he wants to avoid with regard to an opposition to conventional reasons as justification for shared terms is a case in which our exchange of those reasons does not meet on terms of validity. Instead, it would consist maybe of something like a prosecutor expressing that he or she feels the defendant is guilty and the defense feeling that he or she is innocent and there is no evaluation on terms of the validity of either of these claims. Instead, the side that is in some sense more powerful, perhaps in that the judge shares the feelings of one or the other, would tend to

91 Habermas, Jürgen (1990) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. The MIT Press: Cambridge. pg. 314. 92 Ibid., pg. 323.

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win. Regardless of whether the nature of a criminal trial fully mirrors the kind of communicative action Habermas has in mind, at least as an illustration it demonstrates the kind of resolution for shared terms which he would like to avoid.

Once we think about this with regard to the political economy, the closest cases imaginable might be those like industry lobbyists allowed to write laws by members of congress elected in large part by industry campaign donations. The closer that the terms of these laws come to alter the shared terms of our law and constitutions, the closer we come to losing any shared normative grounds and politics becomes a race to raise money.

Something like this can be seen in the Citizens United ruling that retains the status of corporate actors as “persons” under the constitution. Such a ruling runs very close to the heart of our shared terms and at once seems highly suspect from the perspective concerned with the way money steers our political terms of cooperation. Subject to real

Habermasian discourse we may find it difficult to uphold claims that corporations are people and so on. In any case, it is not clear that rulings like Citizens United are prima facie unjust either. A pertinent question then is whether subject-centered beliefs go deep enough that an approach like Abizadeh’s is not sufficient to salvage our ability to reach common understanding by acknowledging and affirming the role for rhetoric in a mediate form. The problem is that it is not clear that the development of these views over the course of capitalist modernization can be so easily or justly removed. So, instead of trying to get rid of them we must ask what they mean.

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What is Distorted Motivation?

A key question here is what does it mean to be motivated in this way. Does it mean to be brought into politics only to serve strategic ends? It seems this is what most concerns

Habermas. For example, strategic agents might make appeals to certain reference points in the lifeworld to in fact only serve their own narrow economic ends. This might be the case with networks like FoxNews and so on. If this network operates by appealing to values of patriotism or concern for particular ways of life such as a boot-strap ideal of the political economy, it may influence people to act in politics to attempt to act to protect these ends. Doing so may in turn make them more motivated to consume a greater amount of this news product as they become more invested in these activities. The ancillary benefit to FoxNews is to increase its revenues as a result of higher air-time value due to more and more passionate viewers. The general side effect in society has been to fuel a politics dominated by this money-steered aim if only in ancillary ways.

Now, if we go deeper and assume that the corporate ownership of FoxNews and its affiliates has a hand in the portrayal and presentation of news reports, then it may bolster a concern about the money-steered influence in politics. No longer is the effect simply ancillary but rather in tune with an effort to protect a more direct strategic aim of these corporate entities. If individuals might be brought to support, say, cutting taxes for that corporate entity out of reference to things in the lifeworld which represent values they affirm, such as economic opportunity, they may in the end only serve strategic ends of some more powerful economic agent. Moreover, this causal chain itself does not have to be precisely accurate to plausibly suggest that such motivations may arise. It at least begs the question of how we would deal with them if they did. Habermas’ approach would be

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to subject claims made by these people motivated to participate to tests of validity to determine whether they would actually win consent.

If individuals participate in politics strictly to advance narrow economic aims then their efforts could be more easily exposed as such. Say some individuals, such as a group of CEOs publicly suggest they should be given large tax cuts, while no one else in society would receive similar benefits, it seems that this would be easily exposed as a kind of attempt to gain privilege in a way not commonly affirmed. But say some group of citizens like the Tea Party supports this aim out of a belief that it represents something commonly shared, and say this belief is deeply held as an influence of an extensive amount of nonjuridical conditioning over the course of a lifetime, then they will not be so easily persuaded that the demand for a tax cut is unjust. In this case it is not so clear that people affirming power-influenced views actually do so only as strategically-steered by external interests. Regardless of the influence of those interests, the views held by these individuals are genuinely affirmed, perhaps on the level of identity. As a result, the symbolic achievement of understanding seen as common, even if in some ways money- steered, will function as a political truth for this group.

Yet, at the very same time those views can also likely never be reduced to money- steered influence. A further complicating factor may be that the views affirmed by these agents even if influenced by strategic actors are likely to be transfigured by these agents in turn. For example, although its origins are some matter of dispute, there is no question that FoxNews and its affiliates played a role in supporting Tea Party protests around the country by broadcasting their events and giving them extensive airtime. This attention was of course in part related to the fact that these groups were amenable to the messages

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of FoxNews. However, they were also subject to being pushed in that direction in their incipient forms. Yet, eventually these groups would work together on a level of citizen action that would transfigure many of these various attempts at influence. For example, some of these groups became heavily involved with local issues of little interest to

FoxNews, or some expressed an anti-corporate sentiment that would not play well on the network. The main point here is that there were and are variations that make reductions of their views to money-steered interests a somewhat disingenuous proposition. In this case

Habermas’ claim to uncover the distorted ideas held by these groups comes under more pressure.

How Do We Bring Distorted Motivation into the Conversation?

Two questions might arise here, including whether or not the acknowledgement of rhetoric can make for gains towards shared understandings here, or whether if that fails is it then the case that it also fails Habermas’ conditions for validity considering its subject- centered basis. This is a question about the kind of reasons endorsed by these groups in deliberation. For example, basic differences on the role of the market or government at least suggest that there is something different in deeply held views about the right norms in our political economy. Habermas suggests that social movements originating in the periphery must be able to direct our attention to a more uncoerced view of the world, thereby moving us closer to our shared terms. But on many given issues of political economy these groups are likely to run up against beliefs that complicate this effort. For example, in the debt-ceiling debate of 2011, conservatives allied with the Tea Party fought against a provision to budget international payments and compromised for a set of required across-the-board federal budget cuts. To the extent that these allied groups

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believed this effort was in the best interest of all, there was a point in public debate where a claim to a deeper truth would fail to persuade even if both sides were being “truthful” in their engagement with each other. For example, if there was an economic report of the highest standards possible that would have favored either side of the debate, it probably would simply not have mattered because the inclination to believe or reject that report would override its relative rightness despite its implications for norms if we all accepted it. If we all accepted it then that would represent bringing rightness and truthfulness into alignment with the normative truth at stake. This would be in keeping with the kind of uncoerced force of the better argument Habermas has in mind. Yet, the way the debate actually played out represents a kind of stumbling block for the idea that our agreements could operate in this kind of noncoerced way.

This leads to a question about whether our arguments should be expected to operate in that noncoerced way. Habermas would argue that they should because otherwise distorted views would corrupt the potential for our most commonly shared terms of agreement. The implication of holding onto those distorted views on his view is that some citizens are not treated equally. Moreover, because these views can only be held at the cost of performative contradiction, we know they are illegitimate. However, making this assertion depends on meeting the validity conditions that would allow us to either accept or reject these views on evaluation. Again, like in the case of an economic report of the highest standards, we may find it to be right in its empirical claims, but the way it is received by people with different power-influenced beliefs will influence their truthfulness about its terms. As a result, if we take seriously the idea of truthfulness under

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our validity conditions, then it is not clear that it would not have an impact on the ultimate normative truth value for what it means for our norms.

It is on the “truthfulness” requirement for validity that Habermas cannot sustain his opposition to the inclusion of distorted views as public justifications. If Tea Party groups and their congressional allies push the debt ceiling debate to the brink for truthful reasons about what is in the best interest of all, they have met the requirements for this condition. Moreover, groups that would challenge this view from the periphery cannot claim to simply leverage uncoerced knowledge against their position because they will run up against beliefs about what is required for common understanding. This might make us uncomfortable if we still believe along with Habermas that the inclusion of distorted views necessarily indicates exclusion. As a result, we will want to determine if we can still reach the kind of rational resolution that he has in mind.

This brings us back to the question of whether this is an issue that can be mediately addressed through rhetoric as Abizadeh suggests. We may simply need to find ways to better guide our deliberations so we may more effectively reach the end of common understanding. Thus, on the one hand a view like Abizadeh’s is about the efficiency of our discourse for reaching common understanding. On the other hand, it is about re-thinking about how those efforts as well as their ends are constituted. Once we recognize the kind of effectiveness necessary to make our validity claims function we will make those claims in ways that previously would have seemed simply indirect or confusing. For example, perhaps on the most strictly rational understanding of the trial example, all the evidence is presented objectively and we come to a decision about guilt or innocence. Yet, Abizadeh suggests that there is value in the evidence being slanted in

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its presentation. What I think is not clear is whether a legitimate outcome in the trial could include one that is “slanted” in this way also? I think it is clear that in a criminal trial as he suggests this would not be legitimate. Each piece of evidence may point towards guilt but we may claim there is some tiny uncertainty in each case that we blow out of proportion to its significance to change the results despite the evidence. This might be one way of slanting the outcome illegitimately. But, in a constitutional trial without direct criminal evidence, some degree of interpretation may be necessary that cannot be reduced to objectively rationalist determinations. For example, take the most serious charges against military leaker Chelsea Manning. On the lesser charges of stealing information from computers her direct culpability is indisputable according to the law.

Yet, on the more constitutionally-grounded charges of whether she is a traitor, there is no clear rational reduction. Rather, truthful interpretations on different sides of this argument may be more or less likely to view her as a patriotic figure who did a service to her country for the equal good of all. The normative truth-value of whatever claims about her actions we make depend heavily on our truthfulness about how we view the case. Thus, I am inclined to think that if we move beyond the example of the criminal trial, questions of validity that relate to truthfulness cannot be absolved by the use of rhetoric.

No Rhetoric – No Reasons?

That these disagreements cannot be absolved by rhetoric leads to the question of why we should retain efforts for common understanding at all. The flip-side of Habermas’ suggestion that distorted views necessitate exclusion is the radical democratic argument that presumptions of rational reductions to our disagreements are actually guilty of that same charge. These views, advanced by those like Thomassen and Mouffe build on the

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idea that if our disagreements cannot be rationally resolvcd than any political decisions necessitate exclusion. This leads to a particular critique of Habermas that is advanced most persuasively by Thomassen. He rejects Mouffe’s claim that Habermas’ discourse requires us to identify with a rational self purified of all particularities because this claim does not recognize that Habermas is concerned with rationality in intersubjective terms.

Further, in contrast to what Mouffe claims, Habermas does in fact allow for the inclusion of our many particularities within discourse. Yet, he simply wants to subject these to that intersubjective critique which would have a rationalist reduction. This is of course the only critical path forward for Habermas because of his claim that the alternative is a total critique of reason that can sustain its claims in argument only at the cost of performative contradiction.

Thomassen argues that reason does not require this rational reduction and that in fact Habermas’ terms include a contradiction that imperils democracy if he does not attend to reason in the way that Thomassen does. The central claim that Thomassen makes against Habermas in this regard is to point towards an aporia at the heart of his discourse based on its requirements and its resolution. While discourse requires dissent in order to root out distorted claims and appeal to our authorship of norms, those norms presuppose a rational conclusion that would end all dissent. According to Thomassen,

“…the idea of rational consensus is aporetic, and this should lead us to rethink the status of rational consensus and the relationship between consensus and dissent.”93 This is clearly a variation on the central problematic with regard to motivation for Habermas because it refers to what would sustain terms held under the moral point of view. Yet, it

93 Thomassen, Lasse (2008) Deconstructing Habermas. Routledge: New York. pg. 19.

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constitutes a strong rejection of Habermas’ terms because the suggestion that any rational reduction would end dissent not only would imperil motivation but would necessitate exclusion. Thus, whether a re-grounding of the moral perspective in our lifeworld in rhetorically-resonant terms would be sufficient to retain our motivation for those terms even if we reach that point of consensus is actually not what is at stake here for

Thomassen. His critique suggests that any resulting instability would in fact arise more from outright repression of citizens excluded as irrational. As Thomassen states, “For

Habermas, the ‘no’ to a rational consensus or the refusal to engage in rational discourse are not possibilities internal to reason, but external to reason and therefore irrational.”94

Thomassen’s response to this rejoinder from Habermas is to internalize these new possibilities back into reason in order to avoid the exclusion he fears would result otherwise.

Instead, Thomassen suggests that we need to engage this aporia to remain faithful to reason but avoid resolutions that necessitate exclusions. His suggestion is that we answer ‘for’ reason and not just ‘to’ reason. While this is not always clear, this idea seems to relate back to the idea of why he and Mouffe identify the rational reduction with exclusion in the first place. They identify it with exclusion because our particular identities likely have the implication for finalized terms that these terms are based on what is reasonably required to support those identities and not others. Thomassen’s critique is different from Mouffe’s because he maintains that this is still a problem despite the fact that we are not actually asked to identify with a purely rational self. So, when we answer ‘to’ reason we only respond to terms that have already been dictated to

94 Thomassen, Lasse (2008) Deconstructing Habermas. Routledge: New York. pg. 31.

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us, do we or do we not comply, but when we answer for reason we propose something new to these terms already in existence. All this happens within the aporia that Habermas wants to avoid or shut down. Thus, the situation here is in no way resolvable by rhetoric but instead by “political articulation” that is a “negotiation of this tension.”95

That negotiation is constituted by a kind of constant questioning of democracy.

Answering for reason within this aporia includes questioning the procedural terms of democracy that would ground the Habermasian discourse. Most basically, these are the procedures of reason-giving that underlie our co-originality. Yet, taken on Thomassen and Mouffe’s view these are equally exclusionary. They become only something else we should answer ‘for’ and not ‘to.’ According to Thomassen, “Like democracy and justice, philosophy and reason are marked by a tension between conditionality and unconditionality. This is highlighted when we take the question ‘What is philosophy?’ to be an essential part of philosophy (and similarly when we take the question ‘what is reason?’ to be an essential part of reason).”96 Taken this way, Thomassen and Mouffe’s response to the charge of performative contradiction is a kind of totalizing critique, but just not in the way Habermas thinks. Instead, it seeks to apply reason relentlessly, rather than not do so at all. As a result, Thomassen claims that it is in fact more critical than

Habermas’ terms because it will refuse to assent to any of these without questioning.

Yet, the denouement of this view is not clearly critical so much as it is a fetisization of the moment of political decision. According to Thomassen, “Although we should aim to collect as much knowledge as possible, there is ultimately an element of

95 Thomassen, Lasse (2008) Deconstructing Habermas. Routledge: New York. pg. 30. 96 Ibid., pg. 122.

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political decision involved because we do not know what democracy is (assuming that we retain the possibility of asking what democracy is).”97 The regress in our questioning may apparently lead even to a form of democracy in which we somehow do not retain even this possibility. Thomassen still concurs with Derrida that there may come times when democracy must act against itself to save itself, such as through military intervention and so on, to retain its possibility. Yet, this is a dangerous moment of political decision especially when we can never really know what democracy is.

The dangers involved here are likely what lead radicals like Thomassen to propose some ethical suggestions that would avoid these dangers and sustain the process of questioning without the most dangerous harms. Thomassen would like to urge us to hold to an ethics of discussion because of certain factors relating to identity. This ethics is based on the idea that what we cannot question is that we can never truly understand the other and that our efforts to do so cause some amount of “violence” to their identity.98

Therefore, “my responsibility to the other is, thus, impossible. However, this impossibility is simultaneously the condition of responsibility because it means that responsibility cannot be exhausted, for instance in transparent communication.”99 In this the idea of responsibility relates back to a resistance to an exclusionary rationalist reduction by constantly questioning whatever terms govern us. Thus, our understanding of what democracy is would come to be bolstered by an ethical commitment that would reduce exclusion in whatever understanding we come to settle upon, even momentarily.

97 Thomassen, Lasse (2008) Deconstructing Habermas. Routledge: New York. pg. 137. 98 Ibid., pg. 121. 99 Ibid., pg. 140.

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Yet, because that ethical commitment is not clearly mediated by reason-giving, it relies again on the role of political decision-making: “…there is an element of decision and exclusion that cannot be rationalized in the Habermasian fashion. This, we may say, makes us responsible to the other, to the excluded or suppressed voices.”100 The avoidance of exclusion in this account then rests on this element of responsibility in which democracy relies on our political decision to include the other. Thus, we can see a sort of fetisization of that decision-making here: the more the better. In fact it is a kind of hyper decision-making because of the way it can never be exhausted. Seemingly once we stopped or took a break from these efforts, exclusions will arise once again with nothing to lean on for legitimacy otherwise.

However, this approach seems to only trade our possibility for self-authorship for the whim of the decision. Yet, it is not clear why this trade-off is necessarily inevitable or desirable. Even if there is an aporia at the heart of Habermas’ idea of rational consensus, and our identities are to some degree unbroachable, it is not clear why we might not use politics to build terms we can agree on rather than rely on the decision. It seems we have two choices here: On the one hand, we can run up against identity-based claims in discourse and retreat to questioning and a hope for the political decision that might be responsible. Or, on the other hand, we meet identity-based claims with counter claims in a non-zero sum way that creates some terms we can agree to.

Of course, this would only seem to run up against the very motivational gap identified by Habermas and Abizadeh and embraced full on by Thomassen and Mouffe as

100 Thomassen, Lasse (2008) Deconstructing Habermas. Routledge: New York. pg. 140.

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an aporetic condition. But if there was a way to include an ethical responsibility to listen to those who speak ‘for’ reason into our reason-giving procedure then we might not have to give up that procedure and we might retain the benefit of avoiding the kinds of exclusions that worry Thomassen and Mouffe. These two are right to associate this worry with a political problem in the sense that it does not have a pre-given solution that we can hold out in front of us a rational reduction. In that sense it requires political negotiation of some kind in order to be resolved. However, if we retain a way to place this ethics into our reason-giving without corrupting that procedure then we will have figured out a different politics that would avoid the dangers associated with the whim of the decision while making our reason-giving more attentive to exclusions.

Further, if these exclusions are not simply repressive as Mouffe and Thomassen implicitly seem to emphasize, but hold a nonjuridical Foucauldian quality, then our inclusion of an ethics to include what these require into our reason-giving procedure may also retain the motivational benefit associated with those views but in a deeper way than rhetoric could provide. For example, Thomassen and Mouffe want to ensure that some particularity is not left out of a hegemonic form of prevailing political arrangements. This would require us to act out of a responsibility to include those who are not included in these terms. This is like asking us to overcome an inclination to not do so were it not for the ethical requirement or conditioning that would lead us to. Of course, it may be equally possible that political agents do not care about reason-giving. However, in a context in which there is a normative emphasis on the importance of that process because of the ways it both recognizes and realizes our equal shared terms, the idea of co-

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originality, then we do not have to rely on the decision. Rather, we can lean on this process as justification.

What I want to do below in the next sections, after previewing this effort in the next paragraph, is to describe in some sense how this might be achieved. In fact, I think the basic resources for this are already existent in Habermas’ understanding of validity.

Most importantly, there may be room within the concept of truthfulness underlying our claims to incorporate this kind of responsibility that retains that process. I think that doing so would reaffirm the importance of reason giving, enliven it through taking truthfulness more seriously, and reaffirm the role of social movements. All of this would still take place in a framework that recognizes the importance of co-originality but transfigures it to bridge the motivational gap. Again, the idea here is that we bridge the motivation gap by bringing in distorted claims. How we do that determines whether we veer too far in the rationalist Habermasian or the radical democrat direction or find a middle ground that can reaffirm the constructions of liberal norms and constitutions that have real support.

If we take up this challenge we can either attempt to build that compromise in some regressive way that depends on pounding our opponent’s views until they concede, or we can take a more progressive approach that meets them halfway and builds on these views. The former approach will fail if citizens make distorted claims based on identity.

The latter approach could be taken up in different ways. On the one hand we could revert to the kind of decisionism suggested by Thomassen. However, doing so jettisons all the benefits of exchanging reasons. This includes the motivation to develop and support shared terms. As a result, we should not give up on this if there is a better approach.

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Instead looking at the possibility of rational consensus, and giving up any kind of agreement because of potential aporias, we should take heed of the ethical concern for exclusion in politics but find ways to incorporate it into our reason-giving process rather than giving up on that process. If we give up on it we are left with the whims of decisionism and responsibility. However, we can also be responsible in our reason-giving process. Therefore, because of their special role provoking our intersubjective conversations, social movements should recognize that views will be distorted and instead of either reverting to the decision or demanding uncoerced validity, instead find ways to reconfigure that validity to be responsive in a world of distorted views.

The Importance of an Ethics of Truthfulness

The way to bring together the benefits of reason-giving with responsibility is to renew our emphasis on the role of truthfulness in making validity claims. Truthfulness is like another way of referring to sincerity. When we make validity claims in a truthful way, we are sincere about our affirmation of these claims. This takes us right back to the problematic in which the demands of our validity claims leads us to evacuate the pluralism from which our motivations arise. Habermas’ idea is something like that we start our discussion within the lifeworld and people progressively take on alterations to their views that come from various challenges. I have two responses to this: 1) We should not immediately disregard the truthfulness of claims if they have in some sense been

“money-steered” or power-influenced because that alone does not mean they are not genuinely held out of concern for equal terms. Those views can be held at a deep level.

They are also likely to be held in unique ways as they develop within the periphery, and not reducible to strategic action as a result. Therefore, they are constitutive of our

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pluralism. As a result, if we did not find a better way to incorporate them into our reason giving process then Rawls’ critique of Habermas would be accurate and we would have to revert to more hypothetical terms for our norms with whatever costs for motivation that entails. 2) We should take these beliefs as a point of departure for figuring out our shared terms of social cooperation. This does not mean that we give up on critical or normative work because we can build on these views rather than try to break them down through validity challenges.

Truthfulness is an especially important condition for the validity of claims made in the reason giving process. Truthfulness concerns a way of getting our conversation started. In this sense, it allows us to get comfortable exchanging reasons with an interlocutor because we trust them as a partner in building norms and constitutions.

Truthfulness also has an effect for the construction for the rightfulness of our claims and the status of normative truth for our norms and constitutions that we come to settle upon.

This is why it is important to challenge strategic influence. If our engagement in conversation represents only an attempt to further corporate aims for profit or government and administrative aims for compliance, then the rightfulness of our claim and its implication for the normative truth that we settle upon will be distorted in a way that is harmful to equal citizenship. There is a motivational and constitutive effect from this. Corporations that are able to dominate public conversation may not only win more public resources at a distributive cost but also vitiate the public discourse in such a way that citizens see little desire or reason to participate. This a very bad kind of constitution of our social terms because it implies that those terms favor some particular entity at the

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expense of equal citizenship. To the extent that citizens are co-opted into supporting these strategic aims then their views are distorted in a way that is problematic for norms.

However, citizens who are influenced by these strategic aims may incorporate those aims in a way that is not reducible to strategic action. The suggestion that it must be so means that they have no communicative value. However, there are ways that they still can have communicative value. One way they can still have communicative value is if they are incorporated at the level of face value. Indeed, corporate and government entities may already take advantage of a presumption of truthfulness from citizens that arises from the lifeworld in their efforts to make claims that manipulate citizens. For example, a claim made by a corporation or FoxNews that tax cuts for the rich are good for equal terms of cooperation in society may simply be accepted at that face value by citizens. The result is that those citizens actually do care about equal terms but in a way that is influenced as “distorted” according to Habermas. If these terms were successfully implemented by parliaments then for many citizens there would be a symbolic victory for equal citizenship. A second and perhaps more likely way that views distorted by strategic action may still be communicative is that they will be transfigured by citizens. Most people are likely more critical than to accept only at face value claims about citizenship.

In fact, the entire process of constitution-making depends upon this. However, it is also possible that citizens do not give up these claims entirely. For example, claims about the importance of citizen action made by FoxNews can be taken up by groups like the Tea

Party in ways that network does not fully intend or control. Again, there is real communicative potential in those views even if they are “distorted.” That potential comes from the facts that, first, they can be held out of concern for equal citizenship, and

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second, that they are malleable. They are malleable within mini-publics like a Tea Party collective as well as in engagements between different mini-publics in the periphery. If they are malleable then it is possible that other interlocutors can have a conversation about in what ways they might be configured that could best represent equal citizenship for all considering the views those interlocutors also bring into the conversation.

Therefore, when these citizens make claims in discourse that are colored by these distorted effects, they can still be truthful. They can be truthful because either they seriously mean at face value what they say about equal terms even though it is a corporate or government message, or because they are expressing that message in a way that is combined with some other part of their identity that is not purely subjective.

Although Habermas wants to draw on an uncoerced conditioning in our lifeworld, if we have been socially conditioned in a way that in part means that we have been influenced by strategic action then that will not be available. Yet, in a specific sense Habermas is mostly concerned about our ability to coordinate. This is the most important trait that we can learn in the lifeworld and not any particular subjective taste or preference is more important for norms on his view. However it is the point at which that coordination insight is somehow colored by that subjective taste or preference that claims may become distorted. However, the problem here is that this coloring of the insight is also likely intersubjective in that we will come to like and dislike certain forms of coordination together. Market or government is the classic example. But if we throw out claims about how to coordinate our equal terms because they are subjective or distorted in this way then there may be a real coordination cost. The only way around this is to accept the truthfulness of the other. For example, political messaging by the Democratic Party that

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uses the “Tea Party” tagline to raise money or raise the ire of activists to incite mobilization is likely heavily vitiating the public discourse, at least within this min- public. Moreover, what is interesting in this case is that the Democratic Party may be doing more to keep that label alive in order to divide mini-publics than these groups themselves are actually doing because the “Tea Party” label itself continues to evolve and be transfigured. In order to resist these vitiating forces, we have to start by accepting claims about equal terms made by these groups and others as truthful, instead of excluding them based on the possibility of some other potential for unity that could exist.

Importantly, accepting them as truthful is different than simply accepting them.

Instead, it refers to our consideration. If we accept the truthfulness of our interlocutor in submitting a claim, then we will have to learn more about our interlocutor in order to know if that claim has potential to be part of our equal terms for cooperation. The most egregious example of someone we may come to not trust might be the ‘guerilla marketer.’ This person is one who we meet in the course of our social life and acts as our friend or interlocutor, but whose only aim is to sell a particular product. Of course, on the government side this may be something like a spy or agent of the state who pretends to be our friend. These people might make claims that resonate with us but are actually trying to slant our interactions towards one pre-given end or who are not actually prepared to follow through on any commitments and equal terms for discourse. They have no motivation to do so. What these examples demonstrate is that truthfulness relates to trust.

In fact, we might trust someone and say to them that their view reflects only a paid corporate message. If they disagree or argue but still hold that view then we should continue to exchange reasons with them out of concern for pluralism and shared terms.

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With regard to pluralism we would vitiate its terms if we only sought to exclude their views, but with regard to shared terms we might better realize these if we can marshal some of that motivation around what people believe into support for some shared terms.

This is of course only possible if we can generate that trust. Otherwise, we may become so paranoid that people are not truthful that we may be too quick to revert to only hypothetical terms of consent around norms.

However, because the resources for doing that are not ostensibly available in the reason-giving process as Habermas describes it, then it must be either thrown out or altered. We should not throw it out because the alternatives to reason-giving also do not make up for that problem. On the one hand, reverting to only hypothetical bases for consent would not generate motivation as Habermas points out. On the other hand, reverting to a faith in the political decision is both highly risky and exhausting at best.

Instead, once we acknowledge the political nature of our problem in that particularities related to distorted views may cause a rationalist reduction of terms to be exclusionary, we can still attempt to draw on something like the ethics of potential decisionism for our reason-giving process so that we can strengthen our terms of co-originality. This would mean that in evaluation of a validity claim we consider how someone might be trying to answer ‘for’ reason. This means that they draw on a particular distorted insight for shared terms. One example is rights. The political rights for participation are more basic and harder to challenge because they are necessary for any public reason-giving to take place.

However, other rights, such as the right to unionize or the right to fire union workers cut close to the heart of our liberal constitutions but may be more likely to arise and present as “distorted” claims. Our ethical practices for reason-giving may come into play here

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when we do not immediately disavow consideration of these claims as schills for corporations or unions right off the bat. Rather we let ourselves consider these as different ways that people are attempting to answer for reason. In doing so, we make a change with the truthfulness condition that frees us to have a more progressive conversation about what we can all agree to. We may find that we never understand some of the ultimate sources of our disagreements, but we also may find that once we free ourselves to start that conversation by altering the truthfulness condition, we will enliven our reason-giving and likely find ourselves affirming even those commitments in different ways after that conversation. As a result, we might be able to together affirm terms that represent equal citizenship to us after that progressively transformative process.

The result of taking truthfulness seriously in this way might be to strengthen both motivation and constitutions. Of course, this is Habermas’ very intended aim through co- originality. Yet he grapples with how to actually retain the motivation it is meant to entail and his solution to re-insert the moral point of view back into a shattered lifeworld is questionably effective and also problematic for pluralism. My suggestion is that we can make up the difference and strengthen the results through a kind of trust generated by the ethical practices we take into our reason-giving. One way to do that could be to prioritize our emphasis on truthfulness in that procedure to enliven our co-originality, by freeing ourselves to have discussions with people who answer for reason in different ways than we do ourselves.

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We Need a New Social Movement that Enlivens our Distorted Validity Claims

By taking truthfulness seriously we can take distorted claims when they come up as points of departure in our effort to build liberal norms and constitutions. We can also still criticize these views even if they are points of departure. Truthfulness can trump rightness and truth as a validity condition because it refers to what motivates us to believe different things about the latter two conditions. What this requires of us is that we privilege and also reconfigure the truthfulness requirement. Taking truthfully asserted beliefs about equal citizenship as points of departure does not require that we accept performative contradictions. What it means is that we understand rightness and truth in terms of that truthfulness. Doing so provides us with a starting point in efforts to attempt to builder greater terms of common understanding. Otherwise, if we look only for uncoerced claims and do not find them, we may have no starting point. If we have no starting point we will have no opening to engage in politics to build shared terms.

This leads to the question of what our shared terms might look like. It would seem that by definition whatever terms result would in fact not be shared. Yet, that understanding may include an understanding that we will also not always understand the deep sources of each other’s commitments. But to maintain the motivation around co- originality and be able to build something new, it is still crucial that we engage in reason- giving as a way to build what those terms involve. The role of social movements could change the views held as the prevailing conventional wisdom governing our norms, even if not to completely overturn them. What this leads to is the idea that our shared terms must be terms that we build together. Building something together does not mean that we agree on every aspect of what we build, or even understand it. For example, it may be the

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case that diverse movements like Occupy Wall Street or The Tea Party work together to build up shared terms for living together even if they do not understand why certain claims are valid to the other. Banking may represent freedom to the latter and capitalism may represent oppression to the former, but there are a multiplicity of terms that can be built together within this shared space. Perhaps they will come together to support community banking or local lending initiatives or some other idea that they had no conception of until they engaged together taking certain claims from the other as given starting points for doing so.

Yet, an important counterargument would question whether this is simply “mere compromise” that only represents strategic efforts to make as many gains as possible? I would argue that if we take truthfulness seriously we will end up with something much deeper than mere compromise. Engaging in reason-giving, even in Habermas’ preferred sense, involves something of a leap of faith. It suggests that we may lose attachments in our conventional lifeworld. This is why there is an almost terrifying notion to the problem with what happens to that world once we endorse the moral point of view. We risk endorsing something that cannot be sustained, but with nothing to go back to, nowhere to return. The practice of reason giving needs to generate a new kind of solidarity. My suggestion is that if some of our beliefs go deep so that these run up against claims to validity, then we are better off retaining these in some form if they are really our motivations. Yet, those motivations can be adjusted. Moreover, if what results for our norms is something new, not simply a matrix of interest allocation, then it is more likely that it is based on some solidarity rather than around mere compromise.

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However, is this not simply a conservative solidarity that would re-affirm traditions, conventions, and so on? If I have responded successfully to the “mere compromise” argument then it should not be conservative. Mere compromise suggests that we retrench our interests and obtain as much gain as we can in a matrix of game theory. Yet, truthfulness is a reflexive concept because discourse is intersubjective. We expect to take it seriously and we rightfully expect others to do the same. In this sense, its beginning force as it gets up and running may be no greater than in Habermas’ effort to initiate a noncoerced view of the lifeworld. Yet, exchanging claims this way is meant to build up a trust, or solidarity, as the process proceeds in a way that Habermas merely attempts to replace with the moral point of view. In doing so we build something new because we recognize that we do not understand all of the deep commitments of our interlocutors but that we must still build shared terms. Our rationalist interest-based claims may be both practically ineffective and lacking in legitimacy but joined to an effort to create shared terms we can achieve something with lasting force. That force basically comes out of the idea that we are acting for equal citizenship. On a basic level, that has to be a project that we care about. Yet, in approaching that project we make ourselves vulnerable in exposing our truthfulness and hope for the same from others. The outcome of the resulting constitutional terms that we build together may not be transparent as in the uncoerced way Habermas suggests, but we may but we may be able to affirm these terms together because of the solidarity built through practices of reason- giving. Moreover, the very fact that retrenchment to mere compromise reflects an unwillingness to take part in this project I hope indicates that it is definitionally unable to

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be conservative. In other words, its tagline could be just like that old Obama slogan,

“change we can believe in,” even if it refers to something completely different.

In fact, what I think I am suggesting is something of an ethical commitment to acknowledge truthfulness. By privileging truthfulness in our encounters, we do something like give the benefit of the doubt to our interlocutor rather than try to force challenges. Doing so implies an ethical obligation on the part of that interlocutor to also give us the benefit of the doubt in return. So, ultimately I think this can lead us to develop provisional constitutions, terms that represent a new solidarity of some kind based around what different groups believe about free and equal citizenship in the political economy. If we challenge an interlocutor’s proposed terms on the basis that these do not meet our own understandings of equal citizenship, that interlocutor also has an obligation to consider our own truthfulness in turn. This then becomes a starting point for building something new.

My suggestion here is that this points the way to some form of political engagement, rather than stalemate. Stalemate, I think, would be the outcome of subject- centered reason that refuses to exchange reasons. Instead, by exchanging reasons in that political engagement we must look to build something new out of those engagements if we are going to be faithful to truthfulness in reason-giving and the representation of equal citizenship that process entails.

Yet, one might respond that this provides little solace for minority groups in need of protection, and I would respond that this cannot be addressed without a re-invigorated process of reason-giving. Our normative commitments depend on a political basis to a

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greater degree than we might like to admit, but that does not mean we have to revert back to decisionism or hypothetical terms. To go back to the example of the trial, this is even the case in criminal trials as the recent George Zimmerman verdict suggests. To many

African Americans, the trial reinforces a belief that formal legal norms mean little when it comes to their equal citizenship. This may leave many citizens in the noxious position of rather than being able to rely on those norms, feeling inclined to develop practices of obsequiousness to police officers or reluctance to engage with authorities when legitimate crimes take place due to a fear of unfair treatment. My main point is this: It is perhaps more dangerous than Habermas realizes to rely on the force of nondistorted validity claims to change these underlying features when developing dynamic forms of political engagement is what is really needed. Setting out direct validity claims may in fact make for good rhetoric, but it may not make for persuasion. Pace Abizadeh’s point rhetoric is closely related to this concern. Yet, beyond the force of rhetoric we may find ourselves unable to rely on a rational telos for terms that would be best for justice because that rhetoric cannot displace our points of departure which may be distorted. This perhaps just leads to an interesting question about how deep Abizadeh means for rhetoric to go in changing minds towards a rationalist telos. If that is the goal he has in mind then I would suggest that rhetoric can only go so far. It still attempts to disassemble views that are at odds with our own truthful objections but to displace them rather than to build on them to create something new. Instead, I would suggest that instead of trying to disassemble them we take them as points of departure in efforts to build something new that could claim greater levels of common affirmation for our equal terms. This is not to say that we should carry all of our views with us all the time, but that in some form or another we are

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able to leave certain views behind through political engagements that are prospective and creative. How to best do that would have to be taken up in another essay.

Conclusion

According to Habermas by equally agreeing to terms through reason-giving we at once affirm that status of our citizenship and the terms which represent it. By understanding these terms as equal through a process of reason-giving through criticism of validity claims we are able to bolster motivation around norms which would otherwise lack the force of our motivated consent. However, Habermas acknowledges a challenge that arises when the moral point of view displaces the conventional subject-centered views of the lifeworld. His solution is that we take on that view more deeply in the lifeworld. Yet, as

Rawls points out this may be highly problematic for pluralism. Abizadeh attempts to salvage Habermas’ effort here but it is not clear how deep his attempt goes with regard to the final ends of our project. If distorted views may displace motivation around those ends despite our rhetoric then we still have a problem. One response to this problem would be to give up on reason-giving as a basis for our shared terms and instead rely on a constant questioning of democracy and faith in the political decision to be responsive to claims ‘for’ reason. Yet, with no reason-giving justification required in this response, we end up relying much too heavily on that decisionism with serious risks for our equal status.

Instead, I suggest that if distorted views do go deep but we care about a procedure for equal citizenship we should retain our reason-giving requirements for public justification but find a way to enliven it that would avoid reverting to Rawls’ hypothetical

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answer or to the whims of radical democracy. I suggest that way could be to retain the political insight from radical democracy that a less exclusionary politics requires an ethical commitment to respond to those who speak ‘for’ reason. Doing so means that they speak from a particular perspective. I suggest that if that perspective is nonjuridical in the

Foucauldian sense then without responding to its efforts to speak ‘for’ reason we will not be able to successfully engage with each other around norms. Instead, I suggest that ethical responsibility might be able to enliven and strengthen reason-giving processes if incorporated into the condition of truthfulness in our evaluation of validity claims. If we do this then we can take it as a point of departure to build normative terms that we can agree to together even if we acknowledge that we do not fully understand the commitments of some of our interlocutors. To do this I think would require a new kind of social movement that would seek to build terms of equal citizenship taking our distorted views as points of departure. Building on terms this way recognizes the unique sense in which co-originality transverses our equal citizenship across norms, constitutions, and other areas of law without being reductive in scope, but supplements it by providing a way to insert the resources that may actually enliven its possibility.

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Chapter 4: Economic Justice and Micropolitics Introduction

How can we work towards social justice when people seem to have completely different ideas about equal treatment and equal opportunity? The puzzle is whether the political economy can be open to groups seeking consent to its terms for justice without jeopardizing that value itself. What if these groups are crazy? What if these groups are wrong? What if different groups simply do not understand each other? This leads to two questions: 1) Is collective action around justice in the economy possible and if so what are some of its key characteristics? And 2) What are the implications of these characteristics for social justice? If this kind of action is possible and has implications for justice, it will be possible to better understand what is required for actual consent in the political economy. In order to better understand these questions I will look at cases including environmental activism in Kansas and the Tea Party movement. Based on these cases, I will argue that a micropolitics of justice is the answer for bringing together

Habermas’ concern for motivation with Rawls’ concern for reciprocity. What distinguishes the terms here from the Rawlsian view is that these terms acknowledge the fact that the difference principle is not required for stability in contemporary conditions.

What distinguishes the terms here from the Habermasian view is that those terms of stability do not require reductively rational communication and they are not grounded only in proceduralism. Rather, the idea here is that the Rawlsian concern for equal treatment as citizens is an important standard that requires grounding in motivation that

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must exceed the Habermasian limits of discourse theory. I argue that kind of consent can be best understood as a micropolitics based on principles of engagement involving looking to each other, appealing to shared beliefs, agonistic compromise, and constructing new beliefs.

Micropolitics and Social Movements

How can social movements and activists play a role in bringing about justice in the economy? The key puzzle is that if only 49% of active citizens support justice in the economy then liberals would be faced with the difficult choice to either coerce or give up.

If coercion is problematic, justice is imperiled. But, to get around this problem requires politics. In a way, a pollster for the Romney-Ryan campaign actually hit on an important insight when he said the following: “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”101 What this statement suggests is that they are going to play politics.

They are going to do their best to change preferences. Any given set of preferences is a social fact. How we might engage and change those is a question for politics. How to do so in favor of support for justice is what I want to consider here.

As a result, justice in the economy becomes a political problem. If the social facts of the fact of reasonable pluralism are lacking, liberals and advocates for social justice will find themselves faced with a political problem. In other words, people who believe in reasonable pluralism may not exist – that lack may simply be a social fact. Even if we want to reach a world in which some principle like Rawls’ favored overlapping consensus in fact prevails, advocates for justice must find ways to persuade people to

101 Stein, Sam “Mitt Romney Campaign: We Will Not ‘Be Dictated By Fact-Checkers,’” The Huffington Post, August 28, 2012.

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take that view.102 In other words, they must engage in preference formation. Doing so is not simply a question of deliberation and compromise if these alternatives to preference formation are understood as being reductively grounded in rational consent. Deliberation is not sufficient because the beliefs it requires for its terms may not exist in society.

Compromise alone is not sufficient because not only may the beliefs that favor justice may not be forthcoming, but that compromise may also be for the wrong reasons – those other than justice. Therefore, preference formation is important if we care about change for justice.

The only way to engage in preference formation is to take the contemporary social world as a point of departure for our efforts towards justice. In that sense, justice is conceived as a politics of becoming. It is, or at least has the potential to be emergent. It is a process that is never finalized. The resulting challenge for advocates of justice at that point is to determine how the ideal of justice in the economy might come to be constituted. Thus, I am particularly interested in what constitutes ideas of justice for active groups and how these are subject to change. I am interested in this question of change because clearly not any policy that finds wide support is just, but that does not mean that justice could not potentially be emergent in those cases. By more closely

102 In fact, Rawls seems aware of the argument that it could be the case that his principles would not be supported: “…given the actual comprehensive views existing in society, no matter what their content, there is plainly no guarantee that justice as fairness, or any reasonable conception for a democratic regime, can gain the support of an overlapping consensus and in that way underwrite the stability of its political institutions (JasF, 37).” But, he counts this as, “misunderstandings of the idea of an overlapping consensus,” and instead focuses on how to frame hypothetical principles to win consent: “Instead, we ask how to frame a conception of justice for a constitutional regime that both seems defensible in its own right and is such that those who support, or who might be brought to support, that kind of regime can also endorse that conception.” In Rawls, John, (2001), Justice as Fairness, Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg 37.

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understanding the motivations of active groups around justice, we can ask how engaging with these groups around that value could lead to its realization and in what form.

This is why micropolitics is so important. Understanding micropolitics is important because that form of politics seeks to ground abstract ideals like justice in the contemporary social world. If our motivations to support these ideals flow from beliefs grounded in that world, then micropolitics is especially important for generating support for justice. I understand micropolitics as engaging with people about abstract ideas like justice on the level of belief. William Connolly describes micropolitics this way:

“Self-artistry affects the ethical sensibility of individuals in their relations to others; micropolitics helps to shape an intersubjective ethos of politics. Consider some macropolitical proposals: ‘Let’s allow gays in the military.’ ‘Let’s grant individuals the right to doctor-assisted suicide.’ ‘Let’s get rid of the property tax and give everyone an equal education.’ ‘Let’s save the rain forests in North America.’ None of these proposals, enunciated by a court, a parliament, or executive decree, is either likely to be made or to get very far unless and until micropolitical receptivity to it has been nurtured across several registers and constituencies. If you think of public proposals and legal enactments as the molarpolitics of public officials, much of its preparation occurs through the molecular movements of micropolitics.”103

I take “macropolitical proposals” to refer to public policies that effect many people, such as tax rates, military engagements, or environmental protections with broad implications.

“Molarpolitics” is the public effort by politicians, pundits, or news programs to affect the outcomes of these macropolitical proposals. Micropolitics then refers to interventions grounded in engaging abstract ideas like those macropolitical proposals on the level of belief. For example, support for tax increases, war, or environmental programs will be contingent on these being constituted in way that connects with the beliefs of people to

103 Connolly, William (1999) Why I am Not a Secularist. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. pg. 149.

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generate support for these programs. Tax increases must reflect prevailing beliefs about poverty and social mobility, Wars must polarize publics to believe their own identities are at stake to justify the killing of people in foreign lands, and environmental policies must be able to connect with some real experiences with nature in order to generate meaning and support. Indeed, all these efforts are about generating terms that have meaning for the people affected. Being able to construct meaning in this way is what micropolitics is all about. With regard to that effort, micropolitics are about interventions around receptivity, constitution, and becoming.

Engaging with people micropolitically is important because otherwise abstract ideals like justice may find no receptivity in the publics affected by their terms. Connolly refers to receptivity being grounded in both subjective and intersubjective bases. Both of these are bases that have effects on our beliefs about abstract ideas like justice. Connolly refers to the example of undertaking subjective experimental practices to nurture receptivity to new rights that emerge onto the political landscape. With regard to the example of a right to suicide, Connolly suggests that many citizens of contemporary liberal democracies will relent at the establishment of this new idea in liberal constitutions. However, he suggests that individuals working on different registers of the self – emotional, aesthetic, rational, etc. - all elements that flow into belief- can alter and reconfigure their own receptivity to what this right involves. Examples of doing this could involve watching films about individuals who suffer from debilitating disease, reading books on the subject, and even visiting these individuals in hospitals to better understand their own belief-imbued ideas of rights. While we may or may not ultimately come to also affirm this right, or at least perhaps not in the same way, we come to

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approach the emergence of such rights on the horizon with less resentment. As a result, society may become more pluralistic, infused by and engendering an ethos of engagement. The changes in receptivity that take place as a result of these subjective and intersubjective processes are a key part of micropolitics.

Conversely, that receptivity is contingent on the constitution of abstract ideas like justice. Those ideas can be constituted by different ways of understanding the standards which they employ. The way those standards are understood will affect their material and symbolic representation in programs, policies or messages. For example, certain standards for justice like fair equality of opportunity are only meaningful when we take seriously what people believe an opportunity is. Is an opportunity the chance to bootstrap one’s way up in society with no help from others, or is it a social program or entitlement that helps people on their way to a better life? Only by understanding what people believe an opportunity actually is can we fully understand whether something like fair equality of opportunity is being realized. Micropolitical interventions, subjective or intersubjective, can engage and question people about what they believe an opportunity is. Such an effort may lead to receptivity to new ideas of opportunity that may multiply the chances available to different people. However, the institutions that represent the opportunity structure in a place like Sweden cannot simply be dropped into place for the institutions that exist in a place like the US. While certain liberals might believe that Sweden’s larger state structure constitutes a more just society, the effort to switch it out into the American system would likely face resistance. This is why micropolitical receptivity is so important. At the end of the day, Americans may choose policies that transfer less wealth which might lead to fewer opportunities for some citizens. If those particular citizens

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want to believe that their inability to succeed for lack of resources represents either their own lack of effort or disparate societal effects of large government, then there is nothing in a pluralistic society that can tell them not to believe that. Conversely, if other citizens believe differently, it is contingent on them to engage micropolitically with their political rivals to foster receptivity to a new constitution of our standards for justice. In part what this suggests is that our intuitions of justice must be redeemed in the crucible of political argument. Given the variability of different beliefs about the good life, the material requirements of justice can only really be understood through the micropolitical receptivity they can generate.

However, I crucially do not want to suggest that anything is just. Rather, I hope to take seriously the insight that social movements have a key role in pressing for justice by making certain disagreements known. In this case, dogmatism in support of a particular understanding of justice itself indicates injustice at play. This, I think, should lead us to a question about what kind of ethics of engagement is required to absolve our differences in a way that does not rest on hardened claims about particular material or policy requirements for justice. If understood correctly, those processes might come to be an important part of what constitutes justice itself. President Andrew Johnson suggested that former slaves should simply fend for themselves in the wake of the Civil War, arguing this would be just. Yet, I think this stark case suggests a general problem with those kinds of claims, which is that he presumed to speak on behalf of others, rather than listening or engaging. I want to suggest that some form of listening and engaging must take the place of those kind of dogmatic or paternalist claims if justice is to be done.

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Taken together, the receptivity engendered through micropolitical interventions for different constitutions of abstract ideals can create a politics of becoming. Becoming refers to the emergent quality of abstract ideals like justice understood micropolitically.

That quality is realized in the interplay between receptivity and how are norms are constituted, such as through processes of engagement. Public receptivity is engaged through different political interventions that come to constitute different abstract ideals like justice. However, the ideals in question in such a process are never fully implemented. They are never fully implemented because people may never fully agree on what constitutes their terms, and because unpredictable changes in contemporary conditions make any temporary agreement ultimately unstable. Since people may never fully agree on what constitutes their terms, any temporary coalition of governing will be open to new interventions. However, what will be especially propitious for these kinds of interventions are changes in contemporary conditions that shake up existing beliefs or offer resources with which to do so. For example, as long as individuals find they do not mind so much living with the changes brought on by global warming, advocates for care of the earth may find that their appeals for policy change fall on deaf ears. Of course, once cities like Tampa, Miami, and New York are underwater, they may find more receptivity. However, it is equally unlikely that even in these conditions they will be able to simply implement preconceived answers to global warming. Rather, they will likely find that their own preconceived ideas of earth justice will have to take into consideration changes that make these appeals more relevant in light of changes to the contemporary world. Creative and engaging interventions will be necessary to push forward political solutions in a case like this. The engagements that take place between advocates for

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different constitutions of whatever that standard includes will likely continue to be subject to different interventions under varying conditions. As a result, the constitution of our standards will be realized through a politics of becoming, fostered through interaction and debate, rather than through simple implementation of any ahistorical standards. This leads to the question of what kind of interventions we are talking about. Because of the historical variability that informs those interventions, they are in turn varied exponentially and are best understood through the examination of different cases.

I will examine two different cases to find out what those interventions might look like for justice. I will first consider a case of environmental activism in Kansas, and I then

I will look to apply some insights from that case to the Tea Party. The cases are relevant and important for each other because they concern how to engage people around norms in some of the hardest, but also most pressing contexts.

Engagement by Left-Activists in the Environment

Examples of environmental activists can perhaps set an instructive example for a different form of politics in the case of the economy. In order to make progress against the environmental damage of climate change, activists support a wide variety of policy changes to increase sustainability and decrease dependence on carbon-emitting fossil fuels. Yet, these activists have increasingly found that presenting abstract ideas about a better environment does not always yield support for the policies that might achieve that result. Rather, activists have been met with suspicion and antipathy by those who claim global climate change is a hoax to advance liberal interests. The vexing aspect of this

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debate for environmental activists is that the very people affected by climate change often refuse to join efforts to do anything about it.

People who are not experts in the field of climate science might wonder what exactly proposals to stem global climate change actually mean, and whether the intentions of environmental activists are consistent with the way of life which they affirm in their own local environments and communities. Indeed, this kind of fear is already burgeoning below the surface. A surprisingly common new meme making its way through Tea Party meetings around the country is the concern with a vague threat known as Agenda 21.104 That “agenda” is actually the content of a resolution passed by UN member nations at the Rio de Janero Earth Conference in 1992 in support of sustainable development. It is a nonbinding UN resolution signed over twenty years ago. But believe it or not, Tea Partiers have latched onto it to oppose just about every local ordinance for sustainable development that comes across the docket of local city councils across the country. At the Cecil County Patriots in Maryland, one of the projects being advanced by the group is to do everything in their power to prevent a series of bike paths from being developed in the county- these are merely the first steps towards the government taking away our cars and forcing us into new urban development projects, of course. And yes,

Glenn Beck has already published a book on it titled simply, “Agenda 21.” Really, what is at issue here is a deep uneasiness with what is perceived as a vague set of ideas. To many Tea Partiers, the idea of “sustainable development” has begun to take on a very nefarious meaning. As a result, they tend to oppose initiatives which cite this end as their

104 Mencimer, Stephanie, "We Don't Need None of That Smart-Growth Communism: Tea partiers' latest fear: a secret UN plan to herd us all into urban ‘human habitation zones,’” Mother Jones, March/April 2011.

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goal. Arising from an international conference and promoting vague ideals like sustainable development, Agenda 21 is the ultimate toothless political threat, but many

Tea Partiers have projected some of their greatest fears onto what they believe it means.

As a result, many of them have taken it upon themselves to prevent any signs of its advance.

In response to these kinds of reactions, some environmental activists have taken new and experimental approaches in their efforts to attempt to address climate change.

One way they have done so is that they have increasingly engaged individuals about abstract ideas like climate change on the level of the beliefs of these individuals. The results of these efforts have been surprising and unique, and propitious for advancing politics closer towards a version of earth justice that can help to forestall climate change.

One of these efforts has been undertaken in a novel way by the Climate and Energy

Project (CEP) based in Kansas.

A recent story in The New York Times described the efforts of this nonprofit group in Kansas to make progress against the effects of climate change.105 The material conditions of the world did not necessarily stand in the way of their efforts in that the natural resources and political institutions existed that could give voice and form to their alternatives to fossil fuels in policy. However, people in the state tended to react negatively to the discourse of climate change: “The Jacksons already knew firsthand that such skepticism was not just broad, but also deep. Like opposition to abortion or affirmations of religious faith, they felt, it was becoming a cultural marker that helped

105 Kaufman, Leslie. “In Kansas, Climate Skeptics Embrace Cleaner Energy,” The New York Times. Oct. 18, 2010.

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some Kansans define themselves.”106 The popular discourse of climate change constituted a politics and set of policies that promoted fossil fuel usages and diminished the attractiveness of alternatives. Yet, the climate change activists found themselves up against a confounding puzzle: “…even though many local farmers would suffer from climate change, few believed that it was happening or were willing to take steps to avoid it.”107 Yet, the activists did not try to force their view or work behind the political scenes in Washington to win contracts for wind power and solar panels. Instead, they found new ways to appeal to Kansans that changed their message and the nature of the resulting policies: “Ms. Jackson found plenty of openings. Many lamented the nation’s dependence on foreign oil. Some articulated an amorphous desire, often based in religious values, to protect the earth. Some even spoke of changes in the natural world — birds arriving weeks earlier in the spring than they had before — leading her to wonder whether, deep down, they might suspect that climate change was afoot.”108 As a result, the activists were able to make progress reducing energy use that greatly exceeded progress in other areas of the state. It was through engaging with people on the level of beliefs about an abstract idea like earth justice that progress could be made towards realizing that value.

The Climate and Energy Project (CEP) takes a specific kind of political approach to climate change that does not lobby first with statistics and scientific data or vague commitments because it recognizes the political and social problems associated with taking that approach. That approach, when misunderstood or unfamiliar to constituencies effected, is less likely to find acceptance and affirmation by these constituencies. Wisely

106 Kaufman, Leslie. “In Kansas, Climate Skeptics Embrace Cleaner Energy,” The New York Times. Oct. 18, 2010. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid.

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cognizant of the potential for these kinds of vague proposals to become the object of fear among those already afraid that their way of life may be under attack, Dorothy Barnett, the director of the Climate and Energy Project, has taken steps to avoid these problems in her efforts to fight climate change. Rather, the effort of her group seeks to engage with people on terms that matter for them already and might become the basis towards another goal like fighting the worst effects of climate change. The group’s motto is “Common

Sense in Kansas.” This motto is defined by the idea that, “Fighting climate change doesn't necessarily mean arguing about it. Appealing to heartland values of patriotism, thrift, and local pride may do the job just fine.”109 How they make real progress towards fighting climate change through appealing to these local ideals is part of the political artistry of the movement in how it engages with diverse constituencies. On closer examination, that artistry reveals insights about the kind of political process that takes consent seriously without reducing it to its social or hypothetical forms.

The CEP’s approach neither distorts the findings of climate science to fit patriotism, thrift, and local pride, nor does it seek to simply couch preconceived answers to that problem in “folksy” language. The CEP is up front about the findings of science.

Not only do they not hide the science in folksy language, they talk directly about hydrologic cycles, evapotranspiration, GHG emissions, and energy sinks.110 They do not dumb it down. They are direct about the predictions science makes about global warming: “Climate change is the result of global warming – and climate science has established that human-generated emissions of greenhouse gases are a big part of the

109 Climate and Energy Project, http://www.climateandenergy.org/default.htm, (15, Jan. 2013). 110 Climate and Energy Project, “Climate Change,” http://www.climateandenergy.org/Explore/ClimateChange/Index.htm (15, Jan. 2013).

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problem. This cycle presents immediate and significant risks for the American Midwest

(emphasis CEP).”111 However, the CEP is also open about the limitations of climate science: “Past climate models have overestimated some details, while underestimated others – for example, none of them projected the record Arctic polar ice melt that occurred in the summer 2007. Nor did they anticipate the ocean’s apparently lessening capacity to serve as a carbon sink… Scientists are working on developing better regional and local climate models. Also, they seek to better understand the mechanisms of abrupt

(versus gradual) climate change.”112 As a result, science is not represented as a monolithic or impenetrable force that might be imposed on local communities, but rather as incomplete in itself, yet still appealing to concerns we might want to heed, if only out of common sense.

However, the CEP’s reluctance to persuade only through the force of scientific data or predictions does not sap the group of any recognizable ends for their aims. Rather, the group has specific standards for the realization of earth justice that guide its efforts.

These standards include stewardship, resilience, balance, and innovation. On the one hand, these appeal to the rational interests of Kansans. They promote balance and innovation like using energy efficient lightbulbs, properly insulating homes and businesses, changing workplans to teleconference over driving and using fuel as a way to save money, and capitalizing on the wind potential of a prairie state like Kansas to benefit economically through the construction of wind turbines and the use and sale of that power. In all these ways and many others, the CEP has made it a priority to understand

111 Climate and Energy Project, “Climate Change,” http://www.climateandenergy.org/Explore/ClimateChange/Index.htm (15, Jan. 2013). 112 Climate and Energy Project, “Understanding the Science,” http://www.climateandenergy.org/Explore/UnderstandingTheScience/Index.htm (15, Jan. 2013).

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what kind of incentives are relevant for Kansans and as a result in what ways they might be able to develop solutions against global warming to fit these incentives. However, if the project was only incentive-based, it would be much less collaborative, and far more contingent in ways that might not be propitious towards the goal of fighting climate change. For every dollar saved and earned by building wind turbines and capitalizing on the economic benefits of these, there is no reason why it may not be possible that other less environmentally-friendly technologies might eventually come along that might also meet and exceed these goals. Therefore, this is not the extent of the CEP’s work. They neither simply use folksy language to sell preconceived solutions or search out relevant incentives that might attractive attention based on profit.

Rather, the CEP has both set and realizes its goals through discussions with

Kansans in order to derive the meaning of these goals for fighting climate change.

Stewardship, resilience, balance, and innovation are goals for earth justice arising out of conversations with citizens, businesspeople, faith leaders, and others on how that value might be understood and constituted. Successfully fighting climate change might be conceived of in a great variety of ways, preventing extreme weather events, protecting wildlife, having less CO2 in the atmosphere. These are all standards for the realization of successfully fighting climate change. In Kansas, the CEP formulates these as stewardship, resilience, balance, and innovation, and works across lines with different constituencies in order to constitute these particular standards and what they might mean to fulfill. As a result, the policies that are advanced successfully may not ultimately be the ones that best fight climate change based on an abstractly rationalist analysis with that

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end in sight. However, they result it policies that can be advanced politically in ways that would otherwise lack the social legitimacy that advancement requires.

That advancement is possible because the CEP seeks to formulate and realize standards for fighting climate change through its networking across these lines.

Objectively conceived standards for the reduction of global warming have not been foregone. Rather, these objectives such as reduced CO2 emissions are the goal of the group. However, what this would mean and what this would look like arises out a political effort to engage with different constituencies and find lines of connection that can bring them together to formulate answers to the problems of global climate change and provide sustained support for these answers. The general line that draws these constituencies together for the CEP is their identity as Kansans. The CEP engages with different Kansans to find terms to constitute standards for fighting climate change that can win the motivated support required for these to have sustained impact. The group engages with constituencies such as farmers and ranchers, local businesspeople, and faith leaders in order to find and activate these sources of motivation.

These kinds of engagements can happen in many different ways. The effect is to open up receptivity to new ways of thinking about how deeply held values can be advanced. An account given by CEP ally and Pastor Thad Holcomb describes a story that illustrates this kind of opening up of receptivity. Asked to give his story, Thad explains:

I was probably fourteen or fifteen. On the ranch I would go out birdwatching a lot, particularly during the fall and spring, to see bird migrations. Sunrise or sunset was best. I’d go out to a farm pond, a large dam pond of ours, with my binoculars. I’d just curl up and watch wildlife.

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One evening – it was fall - I was there watching ducks. Right before my eyes just an incredible explosion of wings occurred. I didn’t know what happened. Then I looked over – something was rustling in the shrubs. It was a bobcat. It had a duck by the neck. The bobcat went up to the top of a hill, it sat and it turned around. I thought it was looking right at me. Of course it wasn’t, but… Blood coming was dripping down, a little bit, from the duck. And then the bobcat just faded away, just faded away –That affected me in a way that I had to… well, I think at any age we have questions about suffering. Watching the bobcat, I think it took away all the romanticism I had about nature. Instead, it put me into nature in a profound and spiritual way. I was no longer an observer.

That day I somehow became a participant.

Because I said to myself - that is suffering. The suffering of another species, of the wild. So that is a question that I took into kind of my faith journey. I was trying to understand that, that question.

Asked how this experience has informed his care for the environment and taking action through what he calls “creation care,” Thad responds this way: “I like to say care for creation. When you say creation, it is not trying be scientific – although it’s not adverse to science – it just says that as humans we need a metaphor to understanding our web, our place. “Creation” pretty much covers that. You could also say earth ethics - I have trouble now with saying “environmental” ethics because the term environment has become kind of mundane.”113 The most important point of this example for micropolitics is not better understanding Thad’s particular rationalist motivation, bird-watching, as that could always change. Rather, the most important point is that it illustrates how novel experiences and engagements can change the meaning of those motivations. Instead of being motivated by bird-watching per se, Thad comes to see himself motivated by an expanded notion of creation care. That new meaning sets out a point of connection which might provide an opening to resonate with others, and requires seeing oneself involved in a particular social and interconnected world. As such, it sets the stage for other similar

113 Holcomb, Thad. Interviewed by Maril Hazlett, CEP Conversations 2008.

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interconnected efforts. He is not motivated by “the environment,” as that term has become “mundane.” Rather, he is motivated by his beliefs about what an environment free of the worst effects of climate change would look like. This has particular effects for the meaning and sustainability of earth justice in a particular place such as Kansas.

If creation care becomes a new principle for environmental justice, it is the novel engagements that make it possible. These engagements are those that tend to elicit among these constituencies the ways that people are interconnected. Once this point is elicited, such as in Thad’s case, it sets the stage for efforts to connect with others around similar meanings for something like earth justice. It elicits meaning and interconnection, and it builds on these.

According to a blog post by the director of the project on the topic of the reversal of clean air provisions that might allow more pollution to cross state lines, “Everyone has an opinion on the merits of this decision…As a parent of a child with asthma, as a

Kansan who’s energy choices impact others and as director of an organization who fully supports moving to a clean energy future – you can probably figure out which side I come down on.”114 I would argue that the key line here is, “as a Kansan who’s energy choices impact others.” That sentiment has both propelled the approach taken by the CEP and has in turn been fostered by that approach. It requires understanding meaning to know whether others are actually affected. If we do not understand what standards for the environment mean to different constituencies, possibilities for interconnected efforts are foreclosed. Moreover, because we cannot know what these meanings might be in advance, it is necessary for a group like the CEP to keep an open mind about how a value

114 Barnett, Dorothy, “Breaking news – Cross State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) struck down today,” August 21, 2012. http://blog.climateandenergy.org/tag/spp/

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like earth justice might come to be constituted. This form of engaging with Kansans is what makes possible that group’s micropolitics for making progress against the worst effects of climate change.

The micropolitics that elicit the interconnectedness that might make the possibility of a new political movement real requires taking seriously what other citizens believe without viewing those beliefs as a static division of differences. Instead, micropolitical interventions engage people on the level of belief out of an effort to build those movements. At the most basic level, there is nothing about these types of interventions that requires consent. In fact, they could be manipulative in a coercive way when they are based on appeals through lies, fear, or paranoia. In these kinds of cases, we might successfully change the beliefs of others, but only in ways that hide our true agenda. So, in the case of climate change, it might be persuasively argued that corporations like Exxon make appeals to people based on lies about the real effects of fossil fuel usage. This is the case if they know that usage is actually detrimental in ways that people would otherwise oppose. Of course, it is likewise crucial for any effort that takes consent seriously to acknowledge that people may hold beliefs similar to Exxon’s not out of fear, but as truthfully held dispositions. However, if it is exposed to these individuals that their beliefs have been influenced by lies, demonstrated by direct evidence of corruption and so on, then the legitimacy of the policies based on those beliefs will be impugned. Yet, because we cannot know in the abstract whether even lie- influenced beliefs might not be genuinely held out of some sense of identity, then we must take seriously the idea that we, as political agents, should take more seriously finding out what people believe.

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Taking seriously what people believe takes us back to the question of micropolitics then with regard to an approach that is not based on lies, fear, and paranoia.

What I think is especially interesting about the case of the CEP is that they take an approach that is in fact just the opposite of those appeals. Yet, by not presuming in advance that people have a false consciousness that must be changed, they position themselves to engage with others in interconnected efforts. Those efforts are political movements. The key point about positioning themselves this way is that their approach takes seriously the consent of those they try to build a political movement with.

Micropolitics can be about the process of changing beliefs based on consent. It can come in many different forms. Thus, even Thad’s experience is micropolitical in a subjective form. It awakens in him a new understanding based on an unexpected intervention. The

CEP also designs interventions like these in addition to its direct meetings with different constituencies. They do this because some constituencies do not want to agree to direct meetings, initially. An example of this is something called the ‘Take Charge Challenge’ in which CEP activists designed a competition between small towns in Kansas to see who could save the most energy through various kinds of efficiency efforts and upgrades. The competition involved a prize for more upgrades to the winner. Thus, towns got involved for various reasons such as winning the prize, or even an interest in the competition.

However, the CEP was clear that this was a challenge about saving energy. One result of people taking part in this challenge was to see the idea of working for greater energy efficiency as something less foreign, less a part of an amorphous scheme like Agenda 21 and more a part of being a Kansan. These kinds of interventions, in addition to direct conversations, helped to open up the sense of interconnectedness that a political

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movement relies upon. However, by being honest about their motivations in these cases, the CEP worked to create new spaces for those dialogues without reverting to coercive manipulation.

Instead, the CEP’s efforts elicit the interconnectedness needed for a political movement based on a micropolitics that is principled. Most importantly, it takes the consent of those involved seriously. Thus, at the end of the day it should not have to worry about a curtain being pulled away revealing ulterior motives, as Exxon might. Yet, it takes on this effort without directly trying to refute views that may have been influenced by groups like Exxon. Sure, this might happen along the way, but efforts to do so are too black and white – they are too easily maligned as another Agenda 21. Instead, the CEP’s efforts seem to illuminate some principles that might be involved in taking consent seriously where micropolitical engagements are at play. One of these principles is looking to each other. Activists do not go in with pre-conceived plans, but instead look to find out what beliefs others hold. Another principle is then appealing to those shared beliefs. Activists do not attempt to displace the beliefs they discover or upend a false consciousness. Instead, they look to find new ways to appeal to those beliefs. In doing so, they make agonistic compromises with new constituencies and construct new beliefs.

These are also principles that underlie the work of the CEP. In fact, in all these things, what they have done is to take consent seriously without reducing it to either its social or abstract groundings. Instead, they build something new that takes consent seriously but is only possible through principled engagements with each other. I will say more about this later, but I believe the effect of this process is similar to the kind of reciprocity Rawls invokes for his stability. It is a reciprocity born out of the idea that the norms governing

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our public life are fundamentally grounded in a kind of consent that is not at odds with our free and equal citizenship.

Consent is one concept and justice is another but they are crucially related. In the

Tea Party case to follow I want to argue that insights about consent illustrated by the CEP are also important for social justice. I want to look at the case of the Tea Party to further answer my question about whether citizen movements for social justice are possible, and apply ideas about a principled micropolitics to shed some light on my second question about how that kind of movement could be better mediated by consent. How to do that represents a normative argument for justice in the political economy, drawing on insights about consent from the environmental case. Looking at a hard case like the Tea Party hopefully makes those claims more robust.

What is a Tea Party Politics?

What is the Tea Party and how could it set the stage for a potential micropolitics of justice? The Tea Party label refers to an incipient social movement with both popular and

“money-steered” components, to use Habermasian terminology. It includes both grassroots activists and paid special interests. Most importantly, around 2009 and 2010, thousands of people affirming this label as a unifying theme took popular action around the direction of the economy. Since that apparent high-water mark for the movement, the

“Tea Party” label lives on as a genuine popular movement, a special interest vehicle for wealthy donors, and as a symbol in popular discourse.

In order to understand how the Tea Party and similar groups could be part of a micropolitics of justice, it will help to give some historical background on the movement.

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The popular side of the movement has multiple origins that precede and help give rise to large actions and electoral victories. The exact ways in which this side of the movement is causal to these later events could be open to question, but the popular organizing which precedes them is undeniably part of the colorful pastiche of symbols and ideas that come to embody what the movement means. Thus, while an exhaustive definition of the movement might not be possible, it might be possible to understand its general bases and draw out what might be meaningful for a micropolitics of justice.

The two main criticisms of the Tea Party by left-pundits and academics are that it is either completely misguided, or represents a more virulently right-wing strand of people who simply already identify as Republicans. These criticisms in turn imply that the movement is just a bunch of noise that can or should be ignored, or is only a more intense manifestation of something we are already familiar with, and as such should be understood and engaged in familiar, if perhaps in more firm and vigilant ways. For leftist pundits, this means the usual attacks on Republican foes apply, but in the extreme. For academics, this means that there is nothing important about the movement for the understanding and predicting of outcomes in American politics because the movement can already be filed under the familiar category of Republican Party identifiers. They may be actively protesting, but they already identify as Republicans in the first place, so they do not tell us anything new about the existing political landscape. So, another way to understand these critiques would be that the movement is either seen as ineffectual for change, or is reduced to its pre-existing rationalist or structuralist conditions. Of course there are also instances of cross-over between these academic and left-pundit crtitiques.

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In “The Tea Party Jacobins,” Mark Lilla makes the argument that the Tea Party is just a misguided and ineffectual group of malcontents.115 These malcontents, according to

Lilla, represent the newest and most extreme culmination of two revolutions in American society that have changed the way we live. On the hand, the social revolution that originated in the sixties represented a demand for more freedom to live as we choose, and it succeeded. That revolution emphasized greater freedom to make individual choices regarding sexuality, abortion, privacy, and so on. According to Lilla, the success of this revolution is evident in fewer and fewer Americans favoring religious influence in society, more Americans (including Christians) finding single parenthood and divorce socially acceptable, declining opposition to gay marriage and increasing support for equal treatment of gays and lesbians. The list goes on and on. The other revolution that changed the terms of social cooperation in America according to Lilla was the Reagan revolution that made individuals increasingly more free to do as they please with their own income and wealth. The common underlying theme of both of these revolutions was that

Americans want to be left alone – free to make decisions about their values and free to do as they please with their resources, regardless of social cost.

The key problem according to Lilla is that the success of these revolutions tended to decimate the very common or governmental resources necessary to deal with and address the problems they would create in their wake. The social revolution gave

Americans more freedom to choose, but, “also brought us more out-of-wedlock births, a soft pornographic popular culture, and a drug trade that serves casual users while

115 Lilla, Mark. “The Tea Party Jacobins,” The New York Review of Books, May 27, 2010. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/27/tea-party-jacobins/?pagination=false

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destroying poor American neighborhoods and destabilizing foreign nations.”116 The financial revolution of the eighties made some Americans wealthier than ever, but, “left the more vulnerable among us in financial ruin, holding precarious jobs, and scrambling to find health care for their children.” Unfortunately, these social and economic crises coincided with a decline in the trust of government, elites and institutions, which sapped their power to address these problems, which in turn only served to make people trust institutions even less. According to Lilla, “We wanted our two revolutions. Well, we have had them.”117 Americans gained the freedoms demanded in the sixties and eighties, but lost any means to deal with problems associated with these apart from demanding even more individual freedom with which we might pry ourselves individually away from the morass of unpleasant side effects of so much autonomy in the first place.

Thus, on Lilla’s view, the Tea Party is nothing but the most recent and most extreme manifestation of this ongoing social and economic phenomenon. In this sense, his diagnosis of the movement is basically downright nihilistic. According to Lilla, “A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now.

Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring

116 Lilla, Mark. “The Tea Party Jacobins,” The New York Review of Books, May 27, 2010. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/27/tea-party-jacobins/?pagination=false 117 Ibid.

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Americans into the streets.”118 Lilla calls these people the “antipolitical Jacobins.” They promise no solutions and thrive only on fear. Any institutions or government regulation must be rejected, and the craziest Glenn Beck conspiracy theories will be entertained in turn. This, according to Lilla is the Tea Party.

As a result, according to Lilla, the movement is doomed: “after tasting a few symbolic victories they will likely dissolve. This is not only because, being ideologically allergic to hierarchy of any kind, they still have no identifiable leadership. It is because they have no constructive political agenda, though the right wing of the Republican Party would dearly love to attach its own to them. But the movement only exists to express defiance against a phantom threat behind a real economic and political crisis, and to remind those in power that they are there for one thing only: to protect our divine right to do whatever we damn well please.” For, Lilla, and many others who take this view, the

Tea Party movement is a purely reactionary force with nothing to offer, and essentially no real beliefs. It is a nihilistic force that represents the creeping dangers of the sixties and eighties, our inability to deal with these dangers as a society, and will tend only to make these worse as long as it is a political force.

Skocpol’s analysis and criticism of the movement is a bit different. In TheTea

Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Theda Skocpol and Vanessa

Williamson argue that the Tea Party is reducible to Republican Party identification.

According to Skocpol and Williamson, “Grassroots activists, roving billionaire advocates, and right-wing media purveyors – these three forces, together, create the Tea

118 Lilla, Mark. “The Tea Party Jacobins,” The New York Review of Books, May 27, 2010. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/27/tea-party-jacobins/?pagination=false

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Party and give it the ongoing clout to buffet and redirect the Republican Party and influence broader debates in American democracy.”119 On their view, the main impact of the Tea Party is for the Republican Party, which is eager to incorporate the movement in order to draw on its popular energy. According to Skocpol and Williamson, reports of

Tea Party influence were only a media-driven meme that had little effect beyond what could already be explained by Republican voter turnout. Moreover, they see the movement as basically misguided by right-wing media and eventually co-opted by the

Republican Party: “…the alignment of Tea Partiers with Republican goals and their engagement in Republican primaries became unmistakable.”120 Analyzing polling data, they argue that this data overestimated levels of political independence of Tea Party sympathizers, finding, “In fact, Tea Partiers are conservative Republican voters.”121

Rather than attracting new ideas or voters to any particular candidates, the Tea Party, especially in 2010, was just a turnout boost for the Republican Party.

In addition to co-optation by the Republican Party, Skocpol and Williamson also argue that the Tea Party is reducible to the program-based constituencies that support policies like social security and Medicare. They state that, “Support for Medicare is also strong among Tea Party supporters, as among all Americans, though the long-term fiscal solutions are not as easy as the fix for social security.”122 Also, they state, “…broad surveys show that Tea Party supporters, like the vast majority of all Americans, prefer

119 Skocpol, Theda and Vanessa Williamson (2012) The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Oxford University Press: Oxford. pg. 13. 120 Ibid., pg. 142. 121 Ibid., pg. 147. 122 Ibid., pg. 63.

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new revenues to sustain Social Security over the long haul.”123 These findings are consistent with Republican Party policies that despite rhetoric, rarely actually cut these proposals or actually campaign to promote the better health of these programs. Thus,

Skocpol and Williamson are content to place these also in the context of Republican

Party identifiers. Republican Party voters, especially older ones, also support funding or at least solutions to these programs. They still vote Republican.

Yet, while Skocpol and Williamson categorize Tea Party activists as rational supporters of these programs explainable by statistical data, they also lament that they are misinformed, manipulated, possibly racist dupes who live in “different realities.”124 As a result, their evaluation of the movement is at once sure of it placement in conventional categories, but in disbelief about aspects which defy that logic. The Tea Partiers might be nothing more than your average conservative Republican voter, but they also want to audit the Fed, think the President is a socialist, and have an obsession with the

Constitution that borders on religion.125 Along this line of analysis, Skocpol and

Williamson also basically suggest that the media is either also duped or that the Tea Party message lacked the cool rationality of economic data: “…anyone who turned on the television in 2009 and 2010 had heard and seen much about Tea Party complaints and

GOP messages claiming that Washington DC was hurting rather than helping economic growth. Obama and the Democrats were not given credit for economic recovery measures effective in staving off a second Great Depression in the United States. How could some droning economic report compete with pictures of protestors carrying provocative

123 Skocpol, Theda and Vanessa Williamson (2012) The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Oxford University Press: Oxford. pg. 62. 124 Ibid., pg. 127. 125 Ibid., pg. 51.

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signs?”126 Yet, a more full account would have to mention that the argument that

Obama’s stimulus staved off a second Great Depression was also a Democratic talking point, not necessarily objective truth.

Thus, as a result of this confusion that confounds their categories – Tea Partiers are Republicans who rationally support social programs, but live in a different reality in which they do not understand the benefits of the stimulus and bailouts – Skocpol and

Williamson essentially throw up their hands in consternation when seeking to make any normative sense of the movement: “Grassroots Tea Party activism therefore marries participatory engagement and considerable learning about the workings of government with factually ungrounded beliefs about the context of policies. If people actively engage in the political process but on mistaken premises, is that good or bad for democracy? Our heads are left spinning. We admire the citizen participation and engagement we witnessed; we applaud the community organizer we saw at work. But it surely would be better to marry all that citizen energy to more accurate takes on what government does, or does not do.”127 What exactly would be the object of rightful marriage for this citizen energy, and how could such an attachment be engendered? This much is left unsaid.

Thus, both of these interpretations offer little for a politics of justice, or for a micropolitics that could change the existing politics of justice. On the one hand, Lilla suggests that the movement is simply aimless and dangerous in its insistence for more individual freedom. It has no other demand than to be left alone. If the movement is purely libertarian, and has no concern for society whatsoever, it is hard to see how it can

126 Skocpol, Theda and Vanessa Williamson (2012) The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Oxford University Press: Oxford. pgs. 160-161. 127 Ibid., pg.. 200.

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be part of a politics of social justice. Skocpol’s analysis on the other hand suggests that the movement holds the same aims as the Republican Party. They are not interested in justice, but in advancing the conservative aims of the party. The source of their action is in the structural forces in the economic downturn and the Obama presidency. They are

Republicans that react in this context, but not really much more than that. Both critiques tend to reduce the movement to reactionary characteristics. As a result, it is unclear what positive or constructive aims it could be part of on this view. Indeed, viewed in this way, it can only redeem politics as war.

What are other ways we could think about this movement that might be more propitious for justice? In order to be able to look at the movement differently and what different implications it might hold for justice, it will be necessary to better understand if it has any characteristics that can meet our first general challenge regarding whether it is a movement of active citizens who are using their political rights and liberties to pursue justice in the economy. Only then can we understand how it might be part of a micropolitics of justice. In fact, I would argue that there are aspects of Skocpol’s analysis that could be understood differently and with different effects for justice, but only by understanding how those effects might come about. So, what are some of the bases of how this might be possible?

The Tea Party Movement is Populist

Most common accounts locate the movement’s origins in “the rant” delivered by CNBC contributor Rick Santelli from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile exchange on February

19, 2009. The anchors ask Santelli what he thinks about the new administration’s

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economic stimulus and mortgage assistance plans, and his response became an instant

Tea Party classic.128 Santelli castigated the administration’s “bad behavior,” suggesting that the assistance program promotes irresponsibility by giving people money and encouraging them to spend rather than save. Hitting his stride as the traders around him started to pay more attention, he challenged the administration to hold a referendum, “to see if we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages; or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water?” One of the traders on the floor comments, “That's a novel idea.” At this point Santelli is on a roll: “This is America! How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? Raise their hand.” The anchors joke that Santelli has become a rabble-rouser, but at this point he is not joking. Finally, he offered what is probably the first televised mention of the Tea

Party idea, saying, “We're thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I'm gonna start organizing.” Then, in an unusual twist for a CNBC segment, he brings it all back to the Founding Fathers: “I'll tell you what, if you read our founding fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and

Jefferson,... What we're doing in this country now is making them roll over in their graves.” The rant gained a quick popularity, generating thousands of hits on YouTube, and being aired repeatedly on FoxNews. It also became a common reference point for people to point to as the start of the Tea Party movement.

128 Rick Santelli and the “Rant of the Year,” 2/19/2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEZB4taSEoA

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Yet, in fact popular conservative activism and organizing had already begun, off the television, even before Santelli’s rant. According to some,129 the first Tea Party was held in Seattle by Keli Carender three days before Santelli appeared on television.

According to others, Ron Paul’s presidential primary campaign in early 2008 had originated the idea, even using the term “Tea Party.” And in fact, Ron Paul supporters would be one of the many diverse groups of discontented Americans that would find common cause with the Tea Party movement. Indeed, even Ron Paul’s son Rand would eventually run for the US Senate, winning one of the Tea Party’s most decisive, important, and clearly ideological victories.

Yet, according to Kate Zernike, “…Carender’s Tea Party protest…showed almost perfectly in micro how the movement coalesced in its early months, combining resourcefulness and pluck with help from well-connected conservatives who were eager to spread the word.” Actually, Carender called her event the “Anti-Porkulus Protest,” in opposition to a range of grievances she expressed against the stimulus, TARP, and bailouts of the auto companies. Furthermore, Carender defied in a number of ways what would ultimately become the stereotype of Tea Partiers as angry racist white males.

Carender, part-Mexican, grew up with Democratic parents, and taught at a school for adults on welfare. Part of her motivation for organizing the protest came from her beliefs about the pernicious effects of welfare on those students. The other motivation came from witnessing leftist protests against the WTO in Seattle. In her words, “if the antiwar people

129 Zernike, Kate (2010) Boiling Mad: Behind the Lines in Tea Party America. St. Martin’s Griffin: New York. pg. 13.

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could do it, it can’t be that hard.”130 She turned out people for the event through appealing to family connections, her friends in the Young Republicans, and by reaching out to local conservative radio hosts and economics professors whom she admired. These people in turn agreed to spread the word further. Additionally, she also contacted conservative pundit and talking-head Michelle Malkin by email, who responded and agreed to publicize the event. This was certainly a coup for an otherwise small local effort. Finally, permits were obtained by Carender, the event was pulled off without even a PA system, and about a hundred people showed up. By most measures of political organizing, turnout, and publicity, it was basically a success.

The event was also an awakening. Like progressives who discovered web-based organizing with Howard Dean’s primary campaign back in 2004, Carender and her fellow protestors expressed both a sense of empowerment and consternation.

Empowerment because they had finally done something about what they believed.

According to Carender, “We’d all been sitting around our dinner table with our families and just talking at each other. It was like this awakening. Everyone was just like, Oh my gosh, this feels so good to be doing something about how frustrated I am.”131

Consternation because the one group they found unreliable was the Republican Party.

Instead of reaching out to the party, Carender found it to be one of her political opponents. She was just as angry at Bush and the Republicans for increasing spending as she was with Obama and the Democrats for the stimulus, TARP, and the auto-bailouts.

Her protest was decidedly not a rally for the Republican Party. Finally, after wondering

130 Zernike, Kate (2010) Boiling Mad: Behind the Lines in Tea Party America. St. Martin’s Griffin: New York. pg. 13. 131 Ibid., pg. 19.

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what to do next following her successful Anti-Porkulus Protest, Carender turned to the internet where she began writing a popular Tea Party blog under the name Liberty Belle.

In fact, Carender’s protest exemplified aspects of the movement that were reflected many times over by other early Tea Partiers.

In “The Early Adopters,” researchers at the Sam Adams Institute documented the seminal grassroots experience of Tea Partiers all over the country. These experiences could also be discerned in the volume of video documentation found on the internet in blogs, YouTube videos, and established sources like the New York Times.132 The Sam

Adams Alliance study is the most comprehensive including in-person meetings with Tea

Party leaders in thirty-eight states, survey data from forty-nine leaders, and ten in-depth interviews.133 According to that study’s findings, “The people involved with these movements are not political junkies or crusty right-wing extremists; 46.9% were uninvolved or rarely involved with politics prior to 2009.” Also, the study found that individuals professed to be motivated by their beliefs: “They aren't in it to express anger alone. An overwhelming majority characterized the goal of their initial involvement as 'to stand up for my beliefs.” And what did this mean, in practical terms? According to the study: “Being Responsible: Without fail, every Tea Party leader referred to the future generations of Americans whose prospects, they feel, weigh heavily on their shoulders.

The ability to act on this feeling of responsibility to fight for and preserve freedom can be fulfilled through the proactive, on-the-offensive nature of the Tea Parties." Thus, many expressed feelings of anger, awakening, and empowerment similar to what Carender had

132 “Voices of the Tea Party,” The New York Times, April 14, 2010. 133 Sorock, Anne. "The Early Adopters: Reading the Tea Leaves," The Samuel Adams Alliance, March 1, 2010.

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recounted. They were often political neophytes, and they professed to hold serious beliefs as their motivation for action.

These efforts began to blossom into something big with a burgeoning national protest movement gathering steam. Soon after Santelli’s televised rant in late February,

Tea Party rallies and protests began cropping up around the country. Figures vary, but according to some, over 30,000 people turned out for early rallies in more than 40 cities on February 27th. 134These were followed by more protests throughout March. For example, typical were protests much like one documented by a local reporter in

Lexington Kentucky: “Protesters took to downtown Lexington streets Saturday to sound off on what they think needs to change in state and national government. Hundreds of people showed up in hopes of changing the way lawmakers in both Frankfort and

Washington are going about things. Representative Stan Lee says people are tired of seeing their taxes raised and money being spent frivolously. Protesters brought out plenty of signs and even tea bags. It's part of what's being called the New American Tea

Movement.”135 Finally, the original Tax Day Tea Parties were held around the date of

April 15th 2009 to signify protest on the day returns were due. This was the largest Tea

Party event, and garnered national media attention. The day of protests exploded with an estimated over 750 rallies nationwide including a march on Washington DC.136

Eventually these were followed up in the summer and the following year with widely varied national and local protest events. These protests spread around the country

134 Hareyan, Armen. “Tax Day Tea Party Organizers Readying For April 15,” Huliq, March 5 2009. http://www.huliq.com/1/78097/tax-day-tea-party-organizers-readying-april-15 135 “Tea Party Comes to Lexington,” WKYT, March 22, 2009. 136 Robbins, Liz. “Tax Day is Met with Tea Parties,” The New York Times, April 15, 2009.

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and economic grievances were the focus. Concerns with debt and the federal government’s “takeover” of healthcare dovetailed into a special grievance for the Tea

Party. The protests turned local in district town-hall meetings during recess visits by members of congress. Nationally, Glenn Beck’s 9/12 project began to organize a large action in Washington that would precede the upcoming mid-term elections.

In many ways the grassroots nature of the movement was most evident in its use of varied internet organizing tools. These tools gave organizers a direct link to other interested bloggers and activists without requiring much mediation of any kind.

Awakening to the potential of these tools is one of the common themes of the Tea Party.

The exploding blogosphere served as one link though the networking through social media played an especially important role, with Tea Partiers eventually creating their own sites for this kind of work. Tea Party Patriots online became a grassroots hub for activists to meet and organize. Tea Partiers especially took to Twitter, seeing it as an online tool not yet dominated by the left. These activists rallied under the “Top

Conservatives on Twitter,” #tcot, on that internet sharing service, which was widely used to share information about protests and rallies. Popular online organizing also crystallized in a document called The Contract From America. This document emerged as something of a wiki for Tea Partiers, moderated into a list of the most to the least popular principles and demands based on the voting of contributors. Eventually Keli Carender would become the lead organizer for Tea Party Patriots, an online nexus for Tea Party groups to list their contact information, work together in the form of message boards, and simply be part of the movement.

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Yet, was all this nothing but a bunch of misguided noise? While it is possible to begin to add color to the movement’s expression, giving form to its wild bricolage, did this amount to anything constructive, or was it ultimately only a nihilistic frenzy like that described by Lilla? If so, then it has not provided much direct evidence that populism can be part of a micropolitics of justice or what that might involve. I am not going so far as to argue that the Tea Party caused certain electoral outcomes, since this kind of claim would require its own social science analysis. However, I would suggest instead that it had observable relevance for those outcomes. Tea Partiers and candidates for public office endorsed each other and found common cause. Something about the label held a shared attraction for many involved in political campaigns on the right. Whether that attraction was merely strategic or ideological on the part of candidates, it spoke to the power of the

Tea Party to set terms in politics. Moreover, regardless of the source of that label, corporate PACS and paid tv anchors on the one hand or grassroots activists on the other, the resonance was real. As such, to the extent that these terms have any constructive content, they became part of the ideological resources that elected candidates could in fact use in efforts to govern in the economy through making policy.

Indeed, the Tea Party’s populism did hold relevance. Scores of electoral victories in 2010 and beyond are important indicators of the Tea Party’s power and relevance.

Something about the movement constituted not only a populism, but a series of electoral and establishment victories as well, even if it sounded like nothing but noise to many on the left. Early motivational victories for the Tea Party included Scott Brown’s victory in a special election for Ted Kennedy’s former US Senate seat in Massacchusetts. This victory was important for the Tea Party movement because activists saw it as a way to

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win the vote necessary to forestall the President’ healthcare reform. Other major electoral victories for the Tea Party included Mike Lee in Utah, Marco Rubio in Florida, Ron

Johnson in Wisconsin, and Rand Paul in Kentucky. Tea Party movements were successful in upending Republican campaign strategies by promoting and turning out for insurgent candidates Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell in Nevada and Delaware.

These two candidates eventually lost their campaigns for US Senate seats. Incumbent

Senator Jim DeMint won his reelection on a Tea Party supported campaign and became an outspoken leader of the movement in the Senate. Out of sixty-three seats won by the

Republicans in the cycle, forty-two of them went to candidates closely identified with the

Tea Party.137

Misguided and Money-Steered?

Many on the left would claim that the movement was all astroturf, engineered for media broadcasts by wealthy interests. Indeeed, it is true that right wing groups including

PACS, organizing institutes, Republican Party operatives, and the right-wing media apparatus associated themselves with and promoted the movement. The Guardian’s

George Monbiot encapsulates the left critique of this phenomenon: “The Tea Party movement is remarkable in two respects. It is one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has seen – and the biggest Astroturf operation in history. These accomplishments are closely related.”138 Perhaps the most common critique of the movement from the left, besides accusations of racist intentions, is that it could be reduced to its well-heeled supporters and the organizations they fund, particularly those

137 Formisano, Ronald P. (2012) The Tea Party, The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore. pg. 39. 138 Monbiot, George, “The Tea Party Movement: Deluded and Inspired by Billionaires,” The Guardian, 25 October, 2010.

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sponsored by the billionaire Koch brothers and their panoply of right-wing initiatives.

This critique effectively brings together the leftist criticism that the Tea Party is misguided with the academic criticism that it is already reducible to its structuralist or rationalist roots represented by party identification. The joint criticism is that Tea Party activists are misguided Republicans. They are not simply confused, they are confused in a specific way as misguided pawns. As such, the arguments of the Tea Party do not deserve attention. Rather, left-critics on this score argue that it is necessary to unearth and expose the real powers behind the people on the ground in order to expose this false consciousness. Though they may be organized in the way they vote, they have been completely misguided by corporate right-wing propaganda.

The first aspect of Tea Party association with this kind of influence is the role of the right-wing media. Many point to the influence of FoxNews and its anchors in promoting and sponsoring the movement. Glenn Beck’s boisterous television program in which he sketched conspiracy theories on a chalkboard was criticized by left-pundits as the worst example of appealing to fear to rally opposition to the Obama administration and its policies. Beck’s populism has been characterized by many as the worst and most frightening kind. Yet, Beck had a following. More generally, the FoxNews network promoted and associated itself with the movement especially in its early stages. The original tax-day Tea Parties included live broadcasts in which Fox reporters, Neil Cavuto,

Greta Van Susteran, and Sean Hannity reported directly from rallies, with the rally attended by Hannity in Atlanta reported to have been the largest event with around

15,000 participants. FoxNews supported the movement and gave it a great deal of publicity: “Sean Hannity featured segments on the tea parties a total of 13 times between

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March 12 and April 14, while Neil Cavuto’s afternoon business-oriented show featured a total of ten segments devoted to the protests during that same time. Nor were the ‘opinion shows’ the only ones to do so: Another 15 or so tea-party promotional segments ran those weeks on such ‘news’ shows as Fox and Friends, America’s Newsroom , and Special

Report with Bret Baier.”139 The publicity provided by Fox would amount to what would otherwise be a seriously expensive advertising effort by a burgeoning protest movement.

Additionally, right-wing groups, PACs and political organizations would come to associate themselves with and promote the movement. Party groups that arose to represent and promote the movement and would seemingly require the most intricate of social science taxonomies to discern. While the Tea Party Patriots appeared to be the most grassroots hub of activity for the movement, the Tea Party Express was run by

Republican consultants as a PAC and travelled the country in a bus to bring publicity to conservative candidates, and was in turn disliked by many Tea Party Patriots who felt it was a Republican co-optation of the movement. In addition, Freedomworks, the libertarian organizing institute based in Washington attempted to reach out to Tea Partiers active on Tea Party Patriots for training seminars in DC. That organization in fact began as an organizing effort called Citizens for a Sound Economy which was funded by the conservative Koch Brothers. The short story is that what most people think of as the “Tea

Party,” is a highly diverse set of individuals and groups competing with each other under that label for its meaning and deployment in national politics. These range from the ultimate examples of soulless corporate astroturf lobbying, to the truly grassroots, and

139 Amato, John, and David Neiwert (2010) Over the Cliff: How Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane, PoliPoint Press: Sausalito. pgs. 121-127.

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everything in between. As a result, the Tea Party label continues to be a contested symbol even within the movement.

Misguided and Racist Republicans?

The other way in which the movement came to be seen as deeply misguided was through its apparent nasty racial politics. Prevailing conventional wisdom has tended to classify

Tea Party activists as either misguided fools or just the same old Republicans with a different name. And there is much to support this view. In addition to the very fact that protests coincided with the election of the first African-American President, media accounts and the Tea Party’s own publicity, usually in the form of signs, came to showcase its worst elements. Thus, one particularly prominent criticism of the way in which the Tea Party is misguided is not only that they are money-steered Republicans, but that they are deeply misguided because they are motivated by feelings of racism.

It was often possible to find some of the most downright ugly and retrograde racist signs at Tea Party protests. In fact, this meme crystallized when the HuffingtonPost offered its “10 most racist Tea Party signs,” which was widely circulated online. These included messages like “Obama’s Plan: White Slavery,” “‘Cap’ Congress and ‘Trade’

Obama Back to Kenya,” and others that mentioned the most ugly racial slurs.140 The racist elements that had become part of the movement perhaps reached its ugliest and most offensive point when slurs were shouted at Congressman and Civil Rights hero John

Lewis during the movement’s lobby day in May 2010.141 Thus, the Tea Party did

140 Huffpost Citizen Journalists. “10 Most Offensive Tea Party Signs And Extensive Photo Coverage From Tax Day Protests (PHOTOS),” The Huffington Post, December 28, 2009. 141 Stein, Sam. “Tea Party Protests: 'Ni**er,' 'Fa**ot' Shouted At Members Of Congress” The Huffington Post, May 20, 2010.

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undeniably seem to include racist elements. It is undeniable that there is a lunatic fringe in the movement that simply seems to take pleasure in race-baiting whenever possible.

Does it have Relevance for Justice?

With that said, is there evidence that the movement’s populism cannot simply be reduced to misguided money-steered racist Republican Party politics? If so, how should it be understood from a perspective concerned with justice? Undoubtedly, there is an extremist fringe that associates itself with the movement. Individuals on this fringe may be truly racist. Skocpol argues that part of the movement can be explained in its reaction to specific characteristics of Barack Obama as the first black president. Yet, this leads to the question as to whether it is accurate to reduce the nature or potential of the movement to these truly insidious aspects. Of course, it might also be completely manipulated by wealthy right wing groups. However, it is not clear that the movement can be entirely reduced to being misguided and extremist once the beliefs of its members are considered more broadly and taken a bit more seriously. In fact, if viewed differently, on the level of expressed belief of members of the movement, it is possible to find an emergent politics of justice at work.

There is in fact a politics of justice in the Tea Party. Sometimes this politics is expressed explicitly and sometimes its potential seems only below the surface, but the emergent quality of this politics is discernible on closer examination. One way this politics can be identified is when Tea Partiers actually talk about justice in the economy.

This politics is also practiced by the celebrities and institutions that associate themselves

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with the Tea Party. Indeed, it is practiced by Tea Partiers themselves, and is especially clear when they are simply asked about it. The versions from each of these sources are not the same. However, turnout for events and support for Tea Party celebrities who talk about justice suggests a resonance, further suggesting some interplay at work with regard to what Tea Partiers and their preferred authorities think about the subject.

Dennis Prager is a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, a conservative talk-radio host, and a celebrity of sorts on the Tea Party circuit. His opinions about social justice can be found on Tea Party blogs. Asked about the meaning of social justice in a question-and-answer session, Prager responds this way:

“…ask all people who use the term, what is the difference between social justice and justice…they don’t like justice, social justice like environmental justice and all the other adjectives that are thrown in are agenda-driven, there is justice and there is injustice, there isn’t justice and social justice, social justice means left-wing equality, it is a substitute for the term, equality…”

“justice has no problem with there being rich and poor, social justice has a problem with there being rich and poor.”

“here is my favorite biblical quote…do not favor the poor in judgment…it’s book of Exodus…that’s social justice, favoring the poor guy – it’s injustice to favor the poor guy.”

“social justice has nothing to do with justice, nothing, it distorts it in the name of the egalitarian ideal that motivates the left.”142

Prager’s discussion of justice echoes some repeated Tea Party themes about the term.

Activists in the movement tend to be very concerned about anything referencing

“redistribution.” Yet, they do not disavow justice either. They also do not actually disavow social insurance programs, as Skocpol’s analysis shows. Rather, they tend to

142 “Excellent Definition of Social Justice,” Homer/Lockport Tea Party, 5/27/2012. http://homerlockportillinoisteaparty.org/2012/03/27/excellent-definition-of-social-justice/

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believe that when liberals talk about social justice, they are really talking about equality, and this makes their blood boil.

Glenn Beck talked a lot about social justice during the height of the Tea Party movement, and in classic fashion, he derided it, questioned it, and possibly lauded it all in turn. In the early summer of 2010 Beck actually held a three-part series of shows on the subject of social justice. In his more derisive moments, he characterized it this way, “how

'bout we use a topic like social justice, and we can sell it to people 'cause they're moral?’… ‘you can boil all these justices down to one thing, it is a fancy name for socialism, which is forced redistribution of wealth, which is a fancy name for Marxism.”143 Again, Like Prager, Beck takes special issue with the

“social” aspect which he associates with the left, and finds it to be a way for liberals to sneak in their real aim which is economic equality. Beck’s critique becomes more nuanced when he starts to explore the idea behind the ‘actual’ meaning of justice: “social justice is each individual getting his due, but what they're saying is a whole class...”144

This is what Beck opposes, the idea of a whole class being made to be economically equal with other classes in society. Beck hints that justice is a proper aim, but cannot be summed up by equality. Part of the craziness in Beck’s show comes from his conspiratorial worry that the left would do anything to implement that equality from

ACORN to the Black Panther Party and the UN, it was all a scheme to impose that equality on Americans who do not deserve it. Basically, Beck’s approach was to juxtapose again and again, in different and colorful ways, the real role of justice with a

143 “Glenn Beck – Social Justice 2,” 5/25/2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ0BeDq-2S4 144 “Glenn Beck – 5/18/2010 – The Truth About Social Justice Part 3,” 5/18/2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqDUwEBnZpQ

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variety of frightening supporters of equality whether they be communists, socialists, liberation theology – or Obama.145 The success of his show suggests that his message found resonance in an audience. Many Tea Partiers were part of the audience that drove

Beck’s popularity and he spoke directly to many of their themes and concerns.

What do Tea Partiers themselves say about justice in the economy? They will say quite a lot if they are asked. In my conversations with Tea Party activists in Maryland, the

Tea Partiers I spoke with expressed nuanced beliefs about social programs, human rights, and justice in the economy. In the following exchange, Jackie Gregory, one of the leaders of the Cecil County Patriots in Maryland, made the comments below in our discussion:

Q: Could you tell me how what you guys do relates to caring about justice for people in America?

A: Well, um, everybody as human beings we all have natural rights, and that, it doesn’t matter who you are, what color you are, what gender you are, we all have rights and they’re all to be protected – they’re natural rights, natural law.

…

Q: A lot of liberals would argue that you have to provide some social programs or entitlements to make sure that everyone has a fair chance or has the same rights, how would you respond, how do you respond to that argument?

A: I don’t believe that people in the Tea Party are against safety nets. There is a lot of abuse and…this is another instance when we have the federal government passing all of these programs with no oversight, people are very disconnected from them, and when you have bureaucracies handling these things there’s a lot of waste there’s a lot of fraud there’s a lot of abuse and a lot of the people who really need them are not getting the resources they need, and there’s a lot of money wasted, and then there’s people who take advantage of the system…and we’re not against, at least I’m not personally, are not against safety nets, we know that there are people who are disadvantaged and who need help, but like I said, there’s a lot of problems with the way that things are being

145 Beck, Glenn, “Glenn Beck: Liberation Theology and Social Justice,” 7/13/2010. http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/42891/

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implemented and to the level that they are, and those things should be temporary, and you know, I was a public school teacher for 5 years, I’m very much pro-education, I think education is what helps get people out of those cycles of poverty, it provides people opportunity, I’m for a very good, a very positive education system, but again, it’s getting people the opportunities, using the money wisely, and really helping people where they need it, and when you have this big government, this federal government that’s implementing all these things, there’s a lot of problems, I mean there’ s a lot of corruption in our federal government when you bring things back down to the people, people I think, people are, more wise with how they use things when it’s connected to them close to home.

Q: …people might have problems or issues in different areas of the country, …it’s a big question…what does it mean to have justice in the economy?

A: Equal opportunity not necessarily equal results, taking from one person and giving to another is not justice, but providing people the same opportunities, that is what justice is all about.146

Jackie’s response is thoughtful, considered, and deliberate. She does not disavow justice in the name of some kind of winner-take-all free market system. She is quick to point out that people have rights, which she says are grounded in “natural law.” Moreover, she also identifies certain social programs with the advancement of justice, but expresses deep concern about how these programs are administered. The main concern for Tea Partiers like Jackie when it comes to justice, is largely related to its terms becoming disconnected from people. In grounding these beliefs, Tea Partiers often refer to the Constitution, which is an important part of an emergent politics of justice for the group, and sets the stage for their outrage against government actions in response to the economic crisis.

Tea Party concerns that are not clearly expressed in the language of justice can sometimes be understood as reactions to perceived disproportional treatment. Oftentimes

146 Gregory, Jackie. Cecil County Patriots. Personal Interview, 10/5/2012.

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these are expressed in terms of the Constitution. Tea Partiers frequently place their concerns in the context of the politics they believe this document allows and requires. As a result, expressions of mistreatment in the economy that might also be part of an emergent politics of justice often make reference to this document and use its terms to explain that mistreatment. Thus, the Tea Party concern for actual consent and proportional treatment find common expression in the Constitution and the forms of economic expression they associate with the terms embodied in that document.

Tea Party devotion to the Constitution has been widely noted.147 One of the most interesting grassroots initiatives created by Tea Party activists was the articulation of their views through something they called the Contract From America.148This document was essentially made wiki style online, with activists able to submit what they felt should be the main tenets of the movement. Subsequently activists voted to decide on a ranking of these different elements. These finally included “Reject Cap and Trade,” “Demand a

Balanced Budget,” “Enact Fundamental Tax Reform,” and “End Runaway Government

Spending.” They also include “Restore Fiscal Responsibility & Constitutionally Limited

Government,” and “Protect the Constitution,” at the top of the list. So, while the policy demands of the movement tended to include things like cap and trade and taxes and budget, the top of the list was not a policy demand, but was instead a criterion that embodied certain rights and liberties – the Constitution. Activists asked sponsored candidates to sign onto the pledge, and in fact one of the first bills to be passed by the

147 Skocpol, Theda and Vanessa Williamson (2012) The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Oxford University Press: Oxford. pgs. 48-52. And Mencimer, Stephanie. “One Nation Under Beck: In which our reporter learns about the divine origins of the Constitution at a Tea Party seminar,” Mother Jones, May/June 2010. 148 The Contract From America, http://www.thecontract.org/ (15, Jan. 2013).

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new Tea Party congress after the 2010 midterm elections was for every proposed bill to carry a clarification explaining how it complied with the Constitution.

What is especially important to note then with regard to the economy is the Tea

Party belief that abiding by the terms of the Constitution would fulfill economic justice.

Once this is understood, fears that implementation of the Constitution’s terms were removed from individuals and placed in bureaucracies tends to make more sense, and the document’s relevance for justice with the group becomes more clear. The idea that grounding the implementation of the document in a greater degree of actual popular consent would help solve economic problems was amplified by the belief that the document in fact required this consent. So, expressions of Constitutional fidelity, expressed in the language of the document, are at once patriotic appeals to the document itself, demand for popular consent, and appeals to economic justice. Only by recognizing this use of constitutional language does it become more clear what meaning Tea Partiers ascribed to the document. Further, it makes the economic values of the movement at once more and less clear. By appealing to feelings of mistreatment and disproportionality through Constitutional language, the grounding in consent which matters so much to Tea

Partiers might potentially lead to support for varying different economic formulations.

This much is clear in the polling data from Skocpol and Williams – Tea Partiers railed against government intervention but supported programs like Social Security and

Medicare. How could this be? One answer is that the language of the Constitution or its ends are not clear, and in fact an emphasis on popular consent opens the potential outcomes of its language in surprising and radical new ways.

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Nonetheless, it is not unusual to see Tea Party fears about disproportionate treatment in the economy expressed in terms of Constitutional values. One Tea Party- friendly editorial149 broached the connection by asking a set of questions:

…we've got some questions:

* How will the government fulfill Obama's pledge not to reward irresponsible or unscrupulous borrowers? It's a nice thought, but how do you do it?

* How in the world can a government that couldn't track the billions in the bank bailouts be able to watchdog the $75 billion to $275 billion in the mortgage bailout?

* Where in the Constitution does it authorize the federal government to take money from one citizen and use it to lower another citizen's mortgage payments?

The editorial expresses the idea that harmful economic behaviors should not be rewarded, let alone bailed out. The writer asks how we can expect these programs to work, even acknowledges that the President’s effort is a “nice thought.” But the final point is the decisive one – it implies that even if these policies worked, properly compensating those who deserve such compensation (ostensibly from the crisis caused by the banks), it might not be constitutional. Of course the Constitution itself doesn’t explicitly call for any particular economic system. So, how do its terms here necessarily justify one bailout or another? The answer is likely that they do not, but liberals simply have not answered the question in terms that Tea Partiers want to hear – Constitutional terms.

Thus, especially once you consider how seriously Tea Partiers take the role for consent in the Constitution, and how they are not wrong that they have not been bailed out of crisis while they witness countless large institutions bailed out by the government

149 The Augusta Chronicle, “A revoltin' development; Obama's housing crisis solution is sowing seeds of dissent,” February 23, 2009.

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with their tax dollars, it is clear how, at least to this extent, they act out of expression of deep sense of disproportional economic treatment that has come at the cost of infringing the Constitution, on their view. Reactions to the economic crisis are a particularly salient emergent politics of justice on the part of the Tea Party. This anger was expressed widely and often in dismay. For example, “Ken Vaughn, the head of the Northern

Virginia branch of the Beck-inspired 912 movement, explained that his interest had been sparked by Washington ‘bailing out firms that had no right to be bailed out. I think that made people wake up and look at our debt and think, 'Maybe we need to make changes.’”150 This was common sentiment amongst the Tea Party. They were angry about the bailouts. Tea Partiers generally tend to consider themselves to be hardworking, responsible, middle-class people, and felt like while they did the right thing, those who caused the crisis in the first place were being bailed out, while middle-class working

Americans would be taxed to pay for these bailouts. To reach that conclusion in the way they understood requires a particular view of the Constitution, the economy, the desires of future generations, the role of the people, threats from the left, communism, socialism, liberation theology, Glenn Beck, and whatever else combines to paint a picture of what exactly was going wrong, who was to blame, and what was the answer. The genius of

Beck was that he could take these disparate elements and put them together in a way that made people lose sleep thinking Obama was coming for their children at night in black helicopters. Not a small feat of persuasion when you think about it. Yet despite his weirdness, Beck generated trust, but used it to rally people based on fear.

150 Mencimer, Stephanie. “One Nation Under Beck: In which our reporter learns about the divine origins of the Constitution at a Tea Party seminar,” Mother Jones, May/June 2010.

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Thus, while there was a segment of the movement that latched onto a racist myth about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailing out African-American homeowners, there were many who saw the bailouts in general as threatening the very institutions and mechanisms that served to realize fairness in American society – the Constitution and free markets. Their view was that people should have the opportunity to succeed, and not simply be bailed out when they cause harm to themselves or others. This would be ensured through Constitutional fidelity. At the same time, the view was not a wild-eyed free-market fantasy of boot-strapping one’s way up. Tea Partiers, at least some of them, expressed support for education, work opportunities, and even social programs. These were expressions of Constitutional values that would be grounded in actual consent, if only the government would get out of the way. Thus, when Rick Santelli referred to the creation of a moral hazard and to the Founding Fathers, he was speaking the language of people who thought about justice and fairness in these terms. As a result, whatever conclusions he drew from that point were more likely to find resonance. Yet, those conclusions were not necessarily interested in justice.

Micropolitics of Justice

The claim I want to defend now is that even in a hard case like the Tea Party, a micropolitics of justice is possible. In fact, not only is it possible but it is better than the kind of approaches Lilla or Skocpol suggest. On the one hand, Lilla’s approach is indicative of a view that says we cannot talk to groups like the Tea Party. They cannot be included in our politics because their views are too irrational. On the other hand,

Skocpol’s approach is indicative of a view that affirms consent around social justice as hypothetically-grounded. Skocpol implies that experts know what social justice is, and

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only if they could get Tea Partiers to see it that way then we would be better off. What I want to argue is that a micropolitics of justice that affirms principles of engagement around consent is a better approach. It is not only more efficient but it is normatively better than the alternatives. What the activists in the case of the CEP did was to do justice to the people involved in their project by taking their consent seriously. What I am arguing is the principles they show also apply to social justice, not just to the environment.

The main reason the principles illuminated in the environmental case are important is because they generate reciprocity around a normative end. What it means to generate that kind of reciprocity is that they create stability around those ends for the right reasons. These reasons are “right” in the sense that they arise out of a process that could engender reciprocity around reasons that would not otherwise be hypothetically discernible. This is a result of principled engagements that do justice to the equality of others in part through the sensitivity of that process. The approach of the CEP is not only more efficient than alternatives, but it is also more well-grounded in norms of equal treatment. This grounding is illuminated by the fact that the CEP does not need to hide its aims. If it did so it would fear an uprising against its project if those aims were discovered. Such an uprising would be the result of people feeling they had not been treated fairly. In the case of Agenda 21 this resistance is already under way. So, in fact I think what the CEP case shows us is not merely a way to more efficiently fight global climate change, but instead a normative way to engage with people with irrational beliefs in the pursuit of an ideal. It engenders reciprocity in part because the process itself realizes a kind of respect for the equality of different citizens.

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Likewise, the legitimacy of efforts for social justice could benefit from a principled micropolitics of engagement. That micropolitics would be in contrast to the kind practiced by fear-mongers like Glenn Beck or FoxNews. These agents practice a micropolitics when they appeal to people about justice or other values and ideals, on the level of belief. However, the micropolitics they practice is often one of fear, paranoia, lies, and racism. This kind of micropolitics is not in keeping with justice however because its aims are divisive. Fear, paranoia, lies, and racism are aspects are part of a micropolitics that is in contrast to the principled micropolitics I discern in the CEP case in Kansas. When race is used to divide people about support for social programs, then the aim of that effort is something other than justice because it is based on unequal treatment.

The goal of that kind of micropolitics may be to increase ratings for a talk-show host or to increase profits for a corporation, but it aims to use unequal treatment to achieve these goals.

A micropolitics of justice would require engaging with people on the level of belief around treating each other as equal citizens. There are two ways in which a principled micropolitics of engagement does this. On the one hand, it may lead us to construct beliefs around norms that represent equal treatment to us in ways similar to how the CEP created new beliefs around environmental norms that could be consistent with a heartland identity. But secondly, and more importantly, a principled micropolitics of engagement treats people as equals by grounding those outcomes in a process that takes consent seriously. This second aspect is more important because our norms may never be as fully inclusive as we intend. However, a process that acknowledges that by searching for new compromises around our ideals is critical because it is grounded in the idea that

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people have a right to be part of that process because their consent is necessary for equal treatment.

Yet, what if people rise up in movements that are irrational as Lilla fears or not in keeping with expert opinions about justice as Skocpol fears? Is a micropolitics of justice really better or more normatively appropriate in these cases? Lilla might argue that Tea

Party demands are nothing more than irrational self-indulgences that we cannot give into without further vitiating the terms of shared society. Yet, if Lilla is right that such a movement is a burgeoning force, then it is not clear what might sustain terms of justice beyond the force of coercion. However, if this movement continues to grow in strength then it seems even that force might one day be upended. Yet, the evidence suggests that citizens activists, including those in the Tea Party, do not divorce demands from larger more abstract meanings either. What Lilla really seems to be hinting at is a populous more like that described by Hobbes, in which an authoritarian central government would be the only recourse to order and preserving any liberties. Fortunately for justice, the case of the Tea Party movement suggests this vision is not accurate. However, Lilla offers no terms of engagement through which we might overcome the conflicts it represents.

Rather, it is likely that his derision would only further engender its anger.

Likewise, Skocpol’s account, while not derisive of the Tea Party, is dismissive of it. This is a problem for justice even if we prefer Skocpol’s view of that value because the

Tea Party has shown itself highly capable of winning elections. Where Lilla would like to push the Tea Party out of our political engagements, Skocpol would like it to convert to a more rationalist view which she seems to find more in keeping with the status qua liberal

Democratic Party initiatives around healthcare, Social Security, and so on. The problem

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of course is that the Tea Party is likely to only to be even more outraged by these admonishments. Rather, the suggestion that it only represents a false consciousness tends to embolden and embitter it, making it into a more readily receptive audience to fear- mongers like Beck. Even if Skocpol’s view of justice is right and the Tea Party’s is wrong, at the end of the day this may represent nothing more than a final ivory tower barricade against an onrushing revolution. Again, just as in response to Lilla’s view, it is fortunate that the Tea Party does at times demonstrates a concern for justice. But perhaps just as important is the fragmented nature of many of its views, as Skocpol herself notes.

That fragmentation suggests that its activists are not merely pawns for Glenn Beck and

FoxNews, but that there is a certain agonism in the political movements it finds itself identified with.

The main problem with views like Lilla’s and Skocpol’s is that while they keenly point out what is wrong with the movement, they have little to say about how it could be part of something with right-intentioned aims. This makes their criticisms likely to be off- putting, but without replacing that deficit with anything that might sustain an alternative.

Perhaps a Hobbesian Leviathan or an expert opinion on social justice might be proposed as alternatives. Yet, these seem either too bleak or too idealist in a quixotic sense.

Instead, I think what they, and others like them, tend to miss is the potential for a principled political process to express our commitments as citizens. In fact, the real problem with potential solutions on Lilla’s or Skocpol’s accounts is not their ultimate lack of general efficiency, but that this lack represents a deficit of stability for the right reasons in their accounts extrapolated to their logical outcomes. Thus, even if the normative terms that emerge out of that process are imperfect, they retain a grounding in

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something that legitimizes these terms for the right reasons. By taking consent seriously but not simply giving in to irrational demands, we are already more than halfway to a more just world.

However, this kind of effort requires a certain give-and-take between different constituencies. Engaging in this kind of political process requires participants to hold their own beliefs about justice with some contingency. Dogmatic views about justice of one kind or another are most likely to have the effect of stifling our dialogue. This is part of the reason micropolitical engagements are important. They may have the effect of skillfully shaking up our hesitancies to talk with each other in ways that would have otherwise been impossible. Yet, in doing so participants cannot give up their ideals, such as a concern for equal treatment of all citizens. Instead, sometimes micropolitics may involve creative engagements like the Take Charge Challenge in Kansas rather than simple dialogue. The main point is that for a micropolitics of justice to succeed individuals need to be able to find ways to talk with each other or make proposals that do not require forcing others to bend to pre-determined views. This is one reason why social movements are so important. They can use creative interventions to make a new discussion about justice possible.

Thus, the account about the CEP represents an illustration of how consent might be taken seriously without giving up our aims around some abstract goals like the environment or justice. The difference is that in the case of the CEP this arises mainly from an efficiency concern. In the context of Kansas, engaging people through a principled micropolitics is in fact the most efficient way to achieve environmental victories. However, in doing so, these activists also find themselves doing justice to their

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fellow citizens as equal members of society. This is especially important for justice because in that case equal treatment is not only conducive towards its end, but constitutive of tis meaning. The exciting implication is that a process like that pioneered by the CEP as the best way to achieve an environmental goal, demonstrates in fact a deeper dynamic at play. That dynamic is a way of taking each other seriously as equal citizens resulting in stability for the right reasons. At the very least, even if some views are not heard in particular instances of dialogue, the recognition of the importance of this process affirms a right to be heard. In this sense, social movements represent an imperfect form of intervention on behalf of this right because they cannot represent everyone in those efforts. Yet, this should only be an impetus for these movements to work harder and engage more broadly if they truly claim to care about justice. The hypothetical element of this dynamic for justification of any resulting norms is then that we do not assume that our reasons are reductively comprehensive. Rather, by assuming just the opposite we make space for inclusion that is at turns more or less abstract in its resulting norms depending on the work of various political interventions and social movements. In that space, our principled engagements represent a good faith effort around reciprocity that hypothetically extends to those not currently involved at any particular time. This is in part why it is so important that justice be understood as a politics of becoming that will be an always ongoing process. Justice understood that way will be in part grounded in the principled process of engagement and in part grounded in the norms it supports. These together represent our best efforts to combine actual and hypothetical elements of consent.

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Thus, in the case of the Tea Party, a micropolitics of justice is the best way to advance the aims of that value. It is possible because we are not merely Hobbesian. It is desirable because of its normative grounding. Looking to each other in this case is likely to reveal the particular ways Tea Partiers think about justice like a Constitutional view emphasizing greater citizen control. Appealing to shared beliefs means activists will need to find something in those views that can help to start a conversation. The fragmentation of Tea Party views is ripe for this kind of engagement. Where Beck suggests redistribution is a Marxist plot, activists might emphasize the way programs Tea Partiers already support like Social Security might be part of our shared ends. These initiatives might lead to agonistic compromises around support for these programs – agonistic because fear-mongerers like Beck will not easily concede. Instead, they will look to peel away support by appeals to divisive claims and threats. What these fear-mongerers will do is use their artistic skills to make appeals that attempt to divide people. It is important to note that those appeals had to be created at some point for these divisive ends in the first place – they did not simply already exist. Thus, activists for justice will likely need to be engaged in an ongoing effort to contest that divisiveness with new ideas about equal treatment, just as the CEP did in the case of wind power in Kansas. It was not always patriotic and ‘Kansan,’ to support that end. Activists for justice might find that a renewed emphasis on the Constitution makes their appeals more relevant and meaningful to Tea

Partiers, having a similar effect to the one experienced by the CEP in Kansas.

For example, campaigns to move deposits away from international banks might demonstrate something like this at play. In the wake of the economic crisis activists in these efforts have targeted campaigns like this out of concern about the accountability of

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these banks to local homeowners and small businesses. Where they have met resistance from Tea Party groups who have at times proposed a myth about special assistance to minority homeowners as a cause for the crisis, these activists have pushed back on that claim as a lie obscuring the larger causes of crisis. Yet, disputing that claim outright is not always effective. Where this is the case, one micropolitical intervention might be to include minority groups in discussions with Tea Party groups about the way their

Constitutional rights have been violated by rogue foreclosures, discriminatory practices, or predatory lending. Expressing their experiences with discrimination in terms of these rights might make their views more understandable and persuasive to Tea Party groups or sympathizers. As a result, it may be possible to establish new norms for lending or banking that do away with this kind of discrimination. That might be one victory for justice. But another victory for justice would be the equal treatment represented by engaging with each other in principled ways. One difficulty is that process requires otherwise hostile parties to be part of that process in good faith. That is why, in the case of the CEP, it was so important that they made their aims clear. Yet, by talking and understanding what values people cared about, they also in a way broke the ice for these conversations so that an interconnected effort could be initiated. A micropolitics of justice is not an automatic process that guarantees justice once we discern the right principles that would underlie it. But, one important effect of looking to each other and appealing to shared beliefs would be to soften our hostility and make compromises and building new beliefs possible. Thus, in the case of foreclosure scandals, bringing different constituencies together to talk about shared problems in terms that are meaningful to each other is one way that might proceed. Social movements are important because they make

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it their job to ‘break the ice,’ and make these principled engagements more possible. To the extent that our micropolitics more successfully set the stage for the realization of principled engagement, we might have greater confidence that justice has to some degree been fulfilled in that process, even if not perfectly in its outcomes.

But, one might ask, does this just suggest we should negotiate with racists?

Would it not be better to exclude those potentially holding such views from our politics?

Besides the potential efficiency cost that comes from exclusion, namely the possibility that these people could always potentially come to power anyway, there is a more important normative reason that a principled micropolitics of justice cannot involve negotiation over the inclusion of racism in our norms. That reason is that the divisiveness of racism, like appeals based on fear, lies, and paranoia, contradicts our equal status as citizens. That is why a micropolitics of division based on fear, paranoia, or lies is not in keeping with the principled approach advanced here. So, in part, a micropolitics of justice cannot involve negotiating about whether to include racism in the norms that govern our political economy because divisiveness is at odds with the end of justice which is our equal treatment of citizens. This is similar to the case of the CEP in that their engagements with Kansans are relevant only to the extent that these make for environmental improvement. The caveat is they may not know in advance what will resonate best with Kansans. Yet, dumping toxic waste all over the state would be out of keeping with the abstract end they have in mind. On a deeper level, the success of something like a micropolitics of justice is not a guarantee of justice. Whether race ultimately influences the kind of engagements people are willing to make with each other is a difficult and disturbing question. Yet, I think the only way to combat it is to engage

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with each other even more vigorously around shared compromises and new beliefs that can move people away from being influenced by that kind of divisiveness. Whether or not we can meet the aims of inclusion that make our engagements relevant as a benchmark for consent is in part dependent on social movements and activists to combat fear-mongering and race-baiting efforts by their opponents. My general claim is that activists should still find ways to engage these constituencies despite their most noxious beliefs because the alternative of ignoring or excluding these groups has no answer to a situation in which these groups actually come to power.

Ultimately, it is likely to simply be the case that the norms that arise from these engagements will not be perfect. This is likely the case because we cannot predict the next Tea Party or the next group with concerns about justice. Thus, the norms for justice arising out of this process will be imperfect. However, that is okay if the stability of those norms is grounded in a process that is stable for the right reasons. The most important reason for justice is treating individuals as equal citizens. An indication that groups have been excluded from the process because of race or paranoia would simply delegitimize the process. As such, a discovery of that kind would be similar to a discovery that our policies were only based on corporate lies meant to conceal profits. The implication of these considerations is that a micropolitics of justice will involve a lot of political action to unearth these kinds of exclusions. However, by grounding our effort for justice in a principled micropolitics we might achieve that end through a focus on consent that is not entirely reducible to its hypothetical or actual bases. We can ‘assume’ our norms to be as legitimate as possible in the meantime to the extent we adhere to these kinds of principled engagements. Thus, this has an element of hypothetical consent to it. Yet, our principled

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engagements illustrate that those norms are realizable only out of some actual connections with others. In this sense, we will have tweaked the consent requirement in justice to give that ideal much greater legitimacy.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I hope to have shown that not only is citizen action for justice in the economy possible, but that by taking on a principled micropolitics, that citizen action leads to a greater legitimacy for terms of justice. In fact, I hope to have shown that there is reason to believe that this can be true even in a hard case like the Tea Party movement.

Drawing on insights from the work of the CEP, I have suggested that a principled form of engagement is not only efficient, but is so for the right reasons. As such, it is a central part of justice. However, its success is also dependent on whether we make those engagements in micropolitically sensitive ways. Our engagements are not the only part of justice because we still must be able to create norms and govern. However, I believe those kinds of engagements are a safety valve for justice much stronger than exclusion or expert command.

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Chapter 5: Towards a Bricoleur’s Ethos for Justice in the Political Economy

Introduction

If justice in the economy requires engagements through micropolitics, then how should we understand the liberal subject who undertakes this task? To engage in experimental practices towards the realization of some new constitution of social and economic life requires a particular motivation. We know this because this type of political action does not happen all the time, and when it does happen it requires some original and courageous agency to get going. The first Tea Partiers who organized spontaneous meetings about bailouts, the first occupiers who sat on Wall Street before there was any larger movement, the Indignatos in Spain who defied the state, and so on – none of these, and many others in the US and around the world, at least in the beginning, were guided simply by political consultants, unions, or behind-the-scene machinations, yet they came to act for justice. Of course, each of these cases may not fully exhibit the micropolitics consistent with and supportive of justice either. But in their actions they helped to start something that both informs and gives potential to that micropolitics. It does so by affirming the hope that given the chance, individuals will come together to act for justice in the economy. The political economy can be politicized. That key insight leads to the possibility to open the question as to how that action might be taken up for justice, and not for either fascist ends or just pointless “venting” either. It leads to the question of what is the ethos of those who act for justice.

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Arguing For a Bricoleur’s Ethos

I want to argue that the ethos of those who act for justice is most similar to that of the bricoleur described by Claude Levi-Strauss. In The Savage Mind, he presents the idea of bricolage as a paradigm to challenge the totemic understanding of mythical through. The latter comprises an effort to establish the classifications through which the ethnographer can identify different tribes and belief systems and distinguish them from each other.

That effort identifies these groups and systems with their immutable totems concerning the world around them. These totems concern beliefs about the world and differ by tribe, making it possible to distinguish and classify different groups. Yet, according to Levi-

Strauss, this kind of effort to identify groups misunderstands the constitution of social norms by these groups because it effectively imputes a scientific form of thinking onto them. That form of thinking suggests an effort to build knowledge and norms through a reductive method. The scientist reduces his or her effort to a set of testable hypotheses.

Similarly, totems represent a reduced set of norms that might exhaustively define the beliefs of a group. Understood this way, they comprise something of a primitive attempt at science that is less legitimate in its ordering of the world in comparison to more advanced hypotheses and measurements. Levi-Strauss wants to counter this claim by challenging the imputation of the totemic view with claims about heterogeneity and change in mythical thought as these relate to the social order. In fact, tribes operating under this kind of thought framework are more likely to establish social norms through a practice of bricolage that uses what is at hand to create meaning out a of a diversity of beliefs that might be misunderstood as totems. The key point is that in doing so, the

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resulting belief systems are no less socially legitimate than what might be proposed by the more reductive approach of the scientist or engineer.

While Levi-Strauss’s research concerns the mythological thought of many disparate and isolated tribes, many of which may have since passed out of existence, his idea of the bricoleur still has great resonance today. The main idea of the bricoleur is that he or she uses what is at hand to make new meanings. What is at hand includes what

Levi-Strauss refers to as both nature and culture – the material world and what we believe about it. These elements are used to signify and re-signify various meanings: “in the continual reconstruction from the same materials, it is always earlier ends which are called upon to play the part of means: the signified changes into signifying and vice versa.”151 This idea has special relevance in contemporary politics as well because efforts to generate an ethos supportive of pluralism and liberal norms that does not take seriously this potential for signification and resignification risks serious failure. It risks that failure because any effort to establish that ethos through a particular political economy carries the possibility of resignification by crafty political bricoleurs.

Thus, the challenge of my argument here is then not simply to establish the relevance of the bricoleur for politics. Rather, my challenge is to explain what it means for our engagements to manifest bricolage in a way that is propitious for justice. If other attempts to articulate an ethos for contemporary conditions are unable to respond to the ways in which they might be transfigured and resignified against justice, this of course does not mean bricolage per se is the answer in itself. The right ethos for justice must be one that can take advantage of the potential for signification and resignification within

151 Levi-Strauss, Claude (1962) The Savage Mind. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago. pg. 21.

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our political engagements. I argue that kind of effort requires a commitment to rights and liberties that is characterized by a certain originality and courageousness like that displayed by Tea Partiers, Occupiers, Indignatos and others. The open-ended nature of engaging through bricolage demands originality if the status quo is not configured for justice, and courage because of the open-ended and contingent nature of that engagement.

However, engagements between citizens who take this approach can manifest bricolage in a way that is beneficial for justice if they remain committed to rights and liberties despite the dangers and contingencies entailed by these interactions. In order to make this argument I will first consider a few key theories about what engagements between liberal citizens requires under contemporary conditions. Hopefully doing so will make more clear why a more politically-contingent, yet committed, approach is necessary. In the last section I will say more about why originality and courage are key for that approach to manifest a bricolage propitious for justice.

Connolly’s Ethos of Engagement and Vision for Equality

Connolly argues for the importance of a generous ethos of engagement in contemporary politics. That ethos is defined this way: “…most would come to appreciate the profound element of contestability in the practice they do endorse. And they would incorporate that recognition positively into the way they engage other visions of public discourse in actual public life.” This form of political engagement is a response to pressures on individuals that arise from the identity/difference matrix under contemporary modern conditions.

This matrix is a condition in which no identity can be defined without a contrasting identity in existence. The assertion that this is true is derived from the impossibility of defining any identity in a social vacuum. Instead, according to Connolly, contemporary

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citizens find themselves constantly pressured to reassert the terms of their identities against rapidly changing and uncertain conditions. One effect of this dynamic is that individuals may react with resentment and a will to punish. Moreover, the implications of this dynamic are especially powerful because there is no abstract theory of justice or morality that can exist outside its terms. As a result, efforts to institutionalize these doctrines tend to simply rachet up the pressure on individuals to redefine and clarify their identities in order to conform to norms.

For example, Connolly takes special offense against the Rawlsian efforts to freeze justice into a “winter doctrine” that bases its terms on recognition of the secular individual. Like any other identity on this view, the secular identity is defined within the identity/difference matrix. Therefore, on Connolly’s view, while elevating this view of personhood to the level of norm, other incipient types of personhood are effectively submerged below the radar of the terms it sets out. This is the flipside to the case of the normalized individual who excels at conforming well. Both those who are “inside” and

“outside” of the norm are subject to conditions that cause resentment. According to

Connolly, this is the problem that causes suffering that we must overcome because it is the suffering of these submerged identities that causes resentment, which brings the persecution of those with other identities into our politics. On Connolly’s view, overcoming this dynamic should be the greatest concern for modern politics.

That task requires addressing some of the pathologies of that modern condition. In

Identity\Difference he suggests that a revised idea of freedom meeting his aspirations would include a three-pronged effort to “relieve discipline and to curb generalized resentment,” by, “tracing the deepest well of resentment to the modern quest to eliminate

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contingency from a world not susceptible to its elimination,” “attending to that in the self and its world which is defeated or subjugated by contemporary standards of normality and the common good,” and “relaxing modern dreams of bringing everything under control or into attunement.”152 Clearly Connolly is basically arguing that under modern conditions that encourage individuals to exert control, that drive needs to be relaxed in order for the right ethos to flourish that would let pluralism flourish without causing harms. The first prong identifies the source of that resentment in contingency writ large, while the second anticipates micropolitics and political engagements, and the third refers to the political terms these might lead to.

He argues that people who affirm a generous ethos of engagement would be able to counter persecution of those with other identities in politics because they would be less inclined to react negatively to the emergence of new identities on the cultural register.

The idea of that ethos would be to transmute resentment over contingencies into a gratitude for diversity. That gratitude would then promote a generosity to new identities rather than a rejection. This new attitude would arise out of arts of the self and micropolitics that lead to the emergence of a politics of becoming. In a way, a politics of becoming is the style of democratic politics we are able to practice when an ethos of engagement is able to flourish. It refers to looking at norms as always coming into existence, rather than as an end goal we try to meet. Arts of the self are diverse practices that Connolly describes this way: “The most admirable arts of the self cultivate the capacity for critical responsiveness in a world in which the politics of becoming

152 Connolly, William (1991) Identity/Difference. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. pg. 32.

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periodically poses surprises to the self-identifications of established constituencies.”153

These arts are mainly described by Connolly as mental experiments, instances of exposing oneself to new constituencies over time and to new ideas and how they can be presented and understood in novel ways. He cites the argument for a right to suicide as one example. Individuals brought up under Christian proscriptions against suicide are likely to relent at the establishment of this right, according to Connolly. But one might take the time to reconsider receptivity towards this new right, watching films that show the suffering of those who yearn for its possibility, understanding different cultural practices in which the suffering of the body and distinct organs within it is not separated in the way that modern Western medicine tends to do, and perhaps even talking with or visiting a suffering person in a hospital. In this way, one who is initially skeptical about the justification for this right might come to see its virtues and engage critically with new constituencies that promote its legality.

If this all goes well, then we might reach something like a “spiritualization of enmity,” in which different adherents to many different views can live together democratically under these terms. We might feel more willing to engage with people with new identities. For example, if citizens identify as liberals and have only watched

MSNBC or received campaign emails only from the Democratic Party, they may come to revile this strange new thing called the Tea Party and seek to exclude it from politics.

Surely, it is the embodiment of all that is evil and must be defeated. But, if liberals look at that movement from a perspective of modesty about their own views and gratitude for diversity, the result may be to lead to a more receptive politics. This kind of

153 Connolly, William (1999) Why I Am Not a Secularist. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis and London. pg. 146.

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spiritualization is an agonistic politics that both results from engagements with the right ethos and propels that way of engaging further on through micropolitcal practices.

One implication of this gratitude for diversity is an affirmation of abundance in political life. Anything that can be part of an identity is susceptible to engagement on its terms. For example, a more restricted view would reduce debates about the economy to economic statistics and growth figures. This kind of debate is commonplace in American politics in which Democrats favor Keynesian spending and Republicans prefer market mechanisms, but both express commitment to the goals of growth. A politics infused with

Connolly’s presumptive generosity would be open to the many different affective, aesthetic, emotional and other identity-imbued ways in which this debate is informed. An implication of such openness might for example allow a new politics of rehabilitating row-homes in Baltimore to flourish because of citizen’s affective attachment to how these represent city life rather than growth-only policies that literally tear down hundreds of homes to make way for chain stores and higher-rent residents in cookie-cutter condos.

This example is meant to show that the abundance-affirming aspect of Connolly’s politics really opens the possibilities in politics. The more identities are allowed to participate in the public constitutions of political life, the more directions our politics might lead in.

Thus, although Connolly’s theory has wide breadth, this effect on politics leads to questions about the effects of this affirmation of abundance for political institutions. With regard to that question, his proposed ethos is potentially in danger of both limiting and overloading its aims at certain points. What, we might ask, does Connolly most hope to derive from the successful practice of these arts for the institutions of modern liberal democracies? This much can be unclear. If he cannot answer this question then the value

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of his proposal may be limited. Mainly, he tends to laud its ability to get us to the point of a flourishing pluralism. According to Connolly, “My version of relational arts, however, transposes them into arts appropriate to a pluralist and pluralizing culture. The goal is to cultivate pluralist virtues, and to incorporate them into institutional design and political habit.”154 At a different point he frames his politics this way, that doing so, “might open them [moralities that insist in grounding themselves in the universal matrix of reason] up, for instance, to cultivate relations of agonistic respect and critical responsiveness to the type of perspective advanced here. Empathy, pathos, and humor flow more readily across lines of difference if and when such reciprocal acknowledgments are made.”155 Yet, are those specified virtues, empathy, pathos, and humor, the aims of what a politics of engagement seeks to achieve? The institutional and political economy that sustains these is of course not clearly liberal, though it is abundantly grounded and pluralist.

Yet, if the view is limited with regard to its institutional implications, Connolly also extends it in a way that arguably overloads his ethos in the economy. By

“overloading” it I mean to suggest that he may impute institutional ends to the view that are not clearly grounded in its elaboration. This begins with his preferred forms of micropolitics and leads him to certain kinds of proposals for equality. With regard to that micropolitics, according to Connolly, “There is no guarantee that artful selves and experimenting constituencies will always succeed in the experiments they undertake. And

– it almost goes without saying – in a highly stratified society many individuals and

154 Connolly, William (1999) Why I Am Not a Secularist. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis and London. pg. 152. 155 Ibid., pgs. 155-156.

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constituencies are in an unfavorable position to pursue such experimentation.”156 Thus, stemming from this preferred micropolitics, Connolly tends to assume a politics of equality for the realization of justice: “…many of us think multidimensional pluralism and economic justice set essential conditions of possibility for each other, and some have offered specific proposals to reduce inequality. Part of the issue, then, is whether micropolitics and relational arts can play a role in promoting such an objective or are facile indulgences that divert people from obedience to moral injunctions already intact.”157 It seems that part of the reason Connolly supports greater economic equality is that it supports that micropolitics. Yet, Connolly’s application to the economic sphere of his view can easily raise the question of whether he holds a double standard when it comes to those terms – pluralism for everything else, equality for the economy.

Connolly might reply that his view for the economy is more complex than simple equality suggests. What he is really arguing for is bringing people into a political assemblage, or a movement, that can reduce our collective suffering. He argues that it is necessary to counter what he calls the capitalist-evangelical resonance machine in

American politics to make progress towards the political economy he proposes. That

“resonance machine” is an assemblage. According to Connolly, “An assemblage is a temporal complex in which numerous coexisting elements are simultaneously interinvolved, externally related, and jostled by flows that exceed these modes of connection.”158 An assemblage is like a political movement around institutions that

156 Connolly, William (1999) Why I Am Not a Secularist. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis and London. pgs. 149-150. 157 Ibid. pg. 150. 158 Connolly, William (2008) Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. Duke University Press: Durham and London. pg. 12.

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cannot be understood by reducing its characteristics to either conceptual or historical characteristics alone. Rather, it is comprised by how it is organized around those institutions in this idea through referring to “axiomatics,” like the capitalist axiomatic, because they do not represent clean starting points that await control by assemblages, but are also subject to the many already existing influences that Connolly sometimes refers to as “flows.” The way an ethos infuses an axiomatic is the political application of the identity/difference relations. In that it is an extension of those relations, it is generated by and generates in turn political movements that are more or less resentment or gratitude infused. According to Connolly, the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine is one that thrives on resentment and therefore has all kinds of negative effects for society.

In order to counter that machine, Connolly argues that we need to reconfigure the political economy of equality with a new assemblage. He proposes an “eco-egalitarian resonance machine” for that purpose.159 What needs to be reconfigured is the way inequality is structured in the prevailing right-wing axiomatic. The reason it needs to be reconfigured is because its current form promotes resentment. That current form fosters resentment by structuring inequality in a way that makes the good life more and more difficult for many to identify with. Thus, it is with regard to this structuring of the good life that Connolly would focus a reconfiguration for equality. That good life is constituted with positional and defensive goods. Positional goods are those with value that declines as their use is expanded. These are goods with social value like orthodontic braces or plastic surgery that confer a societal benefit to certain individuals as long as they remain unique. The spread of these goods creates pressure for public expenditures because they

159 Connolly, William (2008) Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. Duke University Press: Durham and London. pgs. 93-117.

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exacerbate pressures for inclusion and create externalities. With regard to braces or healthcare, a widening advantage for some might lead to political pressures from the unincluded to share the benefits they confer. Other positional goods like large houses, cars, or business and state practices that use extensive natural resources can create externalities that also lead to calls for public action. For example, think about the SUV. It results from special efforts by some citizens to position themselves uniquely in a system in which cars are already an influential positional good in cities without public transportation. Criticism of these aspects of the SUV by leftists can lead to resentment by their owners, and that resentment is stoked by a right-wing assemblage that villainizes those critics.

Connolly’s equality proposal is to equalize access to the good life so that positional goods lose their exclusivity and are less susceptible for use by an assemblage that takes advantage of that exclusivity to gain power by fueling an ethos of resentment.

His alternative proposal for equality is based on this broader definition: “…an egalitarian economy is one in which those at the lower income levels participate in the good life rendered possible by the established infrastructure of consumption.”160 This good life refers to the “state and social supports [including] for modes of housing, education, healthcare, travel, cultural experience, waste disposal, and retirement,” that “within ‘the infrastucture’” presumably refer to norms for these and other goods that would otherwise be positional or incapable of being realized in a context in which the status hierarchy of positional goods prevails. Because achieving this reconfiguration requires a “shift” in

160 Connolly, William (2008) Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. Duke University Press: Durham and London. pg. 93.

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“the spiritual ethos,”161 it is necessary to demonstrate its appeal to those who would otherwise aspire to positional goods that entrench inequalities.

Therefore, Connolly argues that altering the aspiration to this different configuration requires appealing to that spiritual shift through interim visioning.162 What this means is that an activist imagines what the reconfigured economy looks like and visualizes it as an “interim” idea. According to Connolly, “One spur can be provided by intellectuals and academics who join critiques of cowboy capitalism to the imagination of positive interim agendas. These interim agendas form indispensable bridges, enabling resigned and depressed constituencies to identify new public possibilities and to participate in individual, local, associational, state, and global initiatives to support them.”163 Connolly’s favored interim vision is Denmark.164 It represents a combination of policies (bike paths, creative capitalism, etc.) and an aesthetic, (strolling the streets of

Amsterdam, etc.) that he believes will show the appeal of various reforms. In a more direct statement of how to use the interim vision, he states, “You then work back from that point to specific reforms that could actualize the image.”165 Presumably, once more and more otherwise “resigned” and “depressed” people begin to endorse this vision, reforms will be more likely to succeed and society will be on its way to relations based on terms of gratitude instead of resentment. Yet, the problem that arises here is that people are not necessarily “resigned” and “depressed” in the way Connolly suggests.

161 Connolly, William (2008) Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. Duke University Press: Durham and London. pg. 100. 162 Ibid., pg. 94. 163 Ibid., pg. 116. 164 Ibid., pg. 109. 165 Ibid., pg. 94.

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So, while it is true that his vision for equality is more complex than simple income and wealth leveling, it still seems like his proposal overloads his ethos is a way that is not clearly grounded in democratic or liberal legitimacy. It may in fact be true that a vision based on reducing the relevance of positional goods and expanding a different infrastructure of consumptions would reduce resentment across different constituencies.

However, that vision depends on imputing beliefs to constituencies that may actually reject these. Connolly says, “…resistance to this sort of change is intense, in part because the widespread view that market competition is solely responsible for the size of high-end salaries. To counter that idea it is critical to show, through comparisons with successful micro-experiments, how unnecessary and counterproductive to everyone except the superrich the existing distribution of wealth is in the United States.”166 Framing the challenge this way requires that we assume that the effect of these high levels of inequality must be to fuel the resentment that Connolly fears. He describes his view as appealing to people who are “resigned” and “depressed,” and peeling them away from an aspiration to positional goods and leading them to a new interim vision. However, the problem this imputation exposes is that it reduces the available motivational sources that an ethos of gratitude can draw on. Yet, there is no a priori reason why motivational sources might not be transfigured differently than Connolly imputes. For example, individuals might express gratitude towards higher income earners, lauding them as “job creators,” and feel no resentment towards them. In this sense, Connolly overloads the ethos by asking it to sustain a set of imputed beliefs that cannot be sustained without contradicting the diversity of sources for gratitude that the view includes.

166 Connolly, William (2008) Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. Duke University Press: Durham and London. pg. 109.

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In this sense, Connolly’s view is deficient because it has only considered one possible political bricolage, without considering what ethos would be necessary to retransfigure that form when it does not meet his expectations. Connolly’s expectations are that reducing those positional goods will foster a political economy less susceptible to inducements towards resentment by the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine.

However, his proposal is weakened by relying too heavily on assumptions about what people believe about a particular political economy structure characterized by positional goods. The advantage of his proposal is that he recognizes that people’s views might be changed. Yet, relying on that change to arise from the way people would respond to a different political economy structure in an interim vision is actually deficient in its willingness to engage. It does not yet fully consider how we meet people on their own terms in order to generate change for more inclusion.

For example, right-wing groups that will resist Connolly’s interim vision will easily pigeonhole it as liberal propaganda. Indeed, the idea that we might bring these folks on board with a new political economy by asking them to consider how great it would be if America was more like Denmark does seem laughable on second glance.

What would work better would be appealing to American values first and lauding

Denmark to the extent it achieves these. For example, rather than asking people to consider why America should be more like Denmark because bike paths are great, we may be more successful lauding Denmark because it happens to excel at realizing an

American value like sheparding resources or using the land wisely, and finding new ways of implementing that here. The point is that our interim visions will need to arise first out

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of real engagements to find out what values motivate people to affirm a vision, rather than overemphasizing the interim vision and micropolitics before those engagements.

For political bricoleurs to engage this way may require an ethos that is less idealist than what Connolly proposes, but perhaps more crafty and more successful as a result. Connolly’s view is appealing because it tends to draw out a very appealing interim vision writ large. With the context in which pathos, humor, and empathy characterize our interactions, that ethos is already operating well, and seems highly appealing. Yet, one must be careful to examine this proposal closely because in that context this ethos has seemingly already succeeded. In this sense, it is too idealistic, and it does not tell us enough about the ethos of the agents required to reach that point, especially if they operated under adverse conditions. That does not mean that the vision he draws out is unappealing or even necessarily wrong on its own terms, but we would be prudent to also consider what it takes to pursue justice under circumstances that are less idealistic. In order to do so we will need to describe the ethos of the political agent who can meet opponents on their own terms, yet still fight for justice.

The benefit of Connolly’s approach however is that it does acknowledge the wide variety of people’s motivations and the importance of putting these together into an assemblage. The downside is that its terms of engagement are actually deficient when that assemblage is not prevailing. This is clear when we ask what are the institutional forms that it takes because describing these would require us to draw out limits on flourishing pluralism in order to stem abuses. However, Connolly has subsumed these limits into an otherwise appealing interim vision. Yet, as White will point out, this kind of approach risks giving license to our interactions in ways that we may not intend. This

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leads to a question of whether there is some force of ethos that can prevent that without the need for the force of coercion. White does propose such a view arising out of mortality. Yet, his view is met with skepticism from the standpoint of one that considers political bricolage because it seeks the reduction of our motivational sources where

Connolly, and the bricoleur, would be happy to see these flourish. Thus, taking a look at

White’s view helps us to better understand the extent to which the right ethos would manifest some form of bricolage, or whether that entire approach is basically misguided.

Stephen White’s Mortality Approach to a Pluralist Ethos

Stephen White’s critique of Connolly is a useful touchstone to better understand the right ethos for realizing generous relations in the political economy because like Connolly he attempts to fashion that ethos for contemporary conditions but takes a different approach and ends up with different results while still affirming the importance of sustaining presumptive generosity. White agrees with Connolly on the challenge arising from modern pluralist conditions: “…a sense of the cognitive and affective need to dampen the initial wariness and certainty that we are likely to carry into our engagement with those whom we all too easily size up as radically other to us.”167 He argues that a heightened consciousness of mortality in wealthy Western democracies can help to achieve this end.

In framing this argument, he also raises a crucial question about how to legitimately limit the potential effects of a politics driven by this ethos, but his view ultimately lacks the politically engaged character of Connolly’s approach. While his case for chastening the effects of an ethos of generosity with the dignity owed to humans based on reasoned

167 White, Stephen (2009) The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 31.

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consideration of their moral status is an important advancement, his idea for using mortality to achieve this end is not entirely convincing.

White identifies a problem in Connolly’s theory with regard to the status of persons. He identifies the object of Connolly’s critique of secularism in the description of the modern individual as a capacious agent. That capaciousness refers to a type of unbounded agency which becomes a teleology to modern individuals in justifying their actions. The result can be the creation of a very ambitious agent who seeks control and domination. Of course, the vicissitudes of modern life lead to many challenges to that kind of agency, which produce the potential for conflicts which an ethos of generosity is needed to prevent. White argues that Connolly hones in on this problem at the expense of the broader concern from which it stems. That concern is for the status of persons as unique agents. That uniqueness is the ability to reason which can give rise to the idea of capaciousness under modern conditions. However, it also gives rise to an effort to design norms that would guide our equal treatment of all those sharing this status. But, if

Connolly implicitly affirms generosity to a full abundance of life, not just humans, but including plants and animals, in his effort to challenge the capacious spirit, then he by extension does not extend special status to the reasoning agent behind that capaciousness.

This a dangerous problem because it suggests there would be no grounds for priority for humans in conflicts involving any other types of life such as exotic endangered birds, which is White’s example. While he thinks Connolly ultimately wants to choose the human life, he argues his theory does not clearly favor that outcome.

Moreover, regardless of the validity of this critique of Connolly’s presumptive generosity, White raises a bigger point about the overall framework from which we

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should derive the right ethos for politics under modern conditions. According to White, it is a mistake to reduce that difference only to the pathologies of modernity that can be represented in the identity/difference matrix because doing so does not do justice to normative insights in modern liberal theory. Connolly may be right that within that matrix the liberal view can come to be represented by a particular secular identity that is subject to all the harms of identity maintenance in the face of new identities and so on.

However, as White pushes us to remember, this observation does not refute the possibility of important insights within the secular liberal view itself. The insight we should pay attention to is the special priority of humans that makes them deserving of respect. That priority is represented by the dignity that can be associated with the powers of capacious reasoning. Once we acknowledge this priority, it is impossible to examine the problems for pluralism solely from within the frame of identity/difference and generosity.

Yet, because political liberalism ultimately relies on this respect but does not necessarily generate it from any a priori source, White makes the dual acknowledgement that it must require some ethos affirming pluralism to actually make that status meaningful. Therefore, he seeks to affirm, “a figure of subjectivity in which the two aspects, presumptive generosity and capacious dignity are equi-primordial.”168 He proposes the answer to making this connection is to acknowledge our common human finitude resulting from our mortality. While finitude per se is of course also shared by plants, animals, and many other things, White draws on the human capaciousness for reasoning to find something to affirm in that characteristic regarding mortality that can

168 White, Stephen (2009) The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 50.

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prevent this disavowal of equal moral status while instilling the generosity needed to soften our engagement so that pluralism can be sustained. His answer on this score is to relate the ability of human reason to a common ability for meaning-seeking that necessarily results when that capacity is used to think about our own human mortality.

White says, “In its most general sense, reflection upon what is basic to human beings is a search for meaning in light of human finitude.”169 This view is more broadly premised on the ideas of how mortality pervades all our decisions as human beings. So, it is not relevant only for religious people pondering the meaning of life in churches, temples, and so on. Rather, White sees it as a sort of background scale on which we are always weighing our options and choices. He wants to push us to bring those same kinds of considerations into our relations with diverse plural constituencies.

White wants to push us to bring it into these engagements because without doing so that capaciousness can be a source of disrespect and harm that actually undermines the equal status of humans. When there is no check on that capacity, it can be an invitation to try to control uncertainty. This is because capacious agents will try to control uncertainty to protect their aims. Taken too far, actions following that invitation can lead to the suppression of others in society if they threaten that control. Examples might include wealthy flight to the secure confines of gated communities where more control is possible, leaving behind failing urban schools without a tax base, or genetic engineering of basic food crops with mostly unknown effects that may deeply disturb ecosystems and the capacity for human life on the planet. The harms left in the wake of these efforts to dominate society or nature may come back to haunt those responsible in the form of

169 White, Stephen (2009) The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 18.

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feedback loops that bring angry populations or environmental catastrophes in ways that are then impossible to ignore and demand further actions to control. Agents are left with the choice to relinquish control or push back in even more strong-willed ways that may have even worse consequences. However, it is not only instrumentalist efforts for control that might threaten the equal status of humans. Also what White refers to as “emphatic” practical reason is just, or perhaps even more dangerous. This is reasoning that gives us

“at least a minimal cognitive and dispositional grip in the sense of some orientation toward justice and general well-being.”170 Following Heidegger and Foucault, White acknowledges the potential for these otherwise seemingly right-minded efforts to run ashore on the rocks of homophobia, racism, sexism, and many other exclusions that might arise from the modern or secular identities that come to associate themselves with these projects. This acknowledgment represents a concern with the exclusions that arise from the necessary placement of these structures within the inescapable identity/difference matrix. Yet, unlike Connolly , White seeks to forgo the temptation to go full board and jettison those projects but instead attempts to buttress the normative standard they afford to humans and affirm some limit around this standard to avoid the dangers of an over-extended generosity.

According to White, the acknowledgment of mortality achieves this goal by fostering a limited ethos of generosity. That limited ethos is a result of the way “vivifying the consciousness of mortality may extend the reach of our imagination.”171 That consciousness encourages us to understand human equality in a more ethical way than

170 White, Stephen (2009) The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 11. 171 Ibid., pg. 72.

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only as raw capaciousness. Rather, it is what White refers to as a new kind of

“reasonableness” for restrained treatment of the other based on shared finitude. The basic idea is that given that we are all struggling to make life choices in the face of mortality, we should show some generosity and restraint in our will to dominate and especially in our interactions with others. Given our imperfect ability to make meaningful decisions in light of our mortality, we should be more hesitant in exerting domination and in the way we treat others and also more wary of the harms and exclusions that our projects may cause as a result of our imperfect ability to exert our capaciousness. Even in our efforts to promote justice or well-being we should be aware that our actions may have unknown exclusions even if these are not as noxious as racism or homophobia. Yet, we should not forgo these projects either. Instead, we should take them on with a vivified sense of mortality in our engagements with others. The effect of this then is supposed to foster a

“negative solidarity”172 in the way we interact with each other.

According to White, this ethos is relevant to contemporary Western countries and especially the United States because of broadly shared prosperity. He describes the income distribution in these countries as shaped like a diamond with the bottom tip shaved off, and most people in the middle range. As a result of this composition, these countries lack a traditional demos with shared interests. Rather, most of society is middle class and lives under conditions of material wellbeing. This wellbeing makes available the resources necessary to exert efforts for control over one’s life prospects. Additionally, there are a small number of citizens at the bottom of the income distribution. These citizens rarely come into contact with the well-off majority. The challenges to solidarity

172 White, Stephen (2009) The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 74.

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that arise from this composition are a middle class that pursues widely varying interests generating its own conflicts, and an underclass that is subject to the externalities of these pursuits. However, the tenuous advantages of those in the middle also opens the door to scapegoating those at the bottom when that advantage is threatened. By and large though, the middle and upper classes are able to experiment with life projects that ignore the lower class. The result of this dynamic is that it is only when there are shocks to the system like Hurricane Katrina that otherwise suppressed minorities are able to win access to the “bargaining table.”173 White’s hope is that a vivified moral consciousness based in a shared sense of finitude would help put the brakes on some of our projects that create these festering externalities in the first place and be more receptive when these groups try to engage in political efforts that challenge their exclusion.

Yet it is unclear how much this negative solidarity would actually accomplish to foster inclusion. According to White, “Ultimately presumptive generosity requires that I loosen – maybe only minimally and temporarily – the bonds of my identity in encounters with others, especially when they are less privileged than me in an economic or cultural sense.”174 A problem with this rather hesitant ideal is that it may not be strong enough to overcome the kinds of domination and exclusions that White is concerned about.

Arguably finitude is already well-inscribed in the public imagination with talk of “future generations” commonplace in political debates about different programs regarding social security, debt, taxes, the environment, and so on. Yet, while these points may elicit a minimal and temporary response from various citizens, Americans still do not punish

173 White, Stephen (2009) The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 74. 174 Ibid., pg. 106.

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politicians for raiding the Social Security Trust Fund, take on as much debt as humanly possible, refuse to raise taxes to invest in education and infrastructure for the future, and drive SUVs and throw out boatloads of plastic water bottles with little to no concern for the effect on the world’s ecology now and in the future. Further, those in the middle class who are quick to blame minorities or others for economic insecurity might loosen their presumptive hatred for these constituencies, but still blame them. For example, it is commonplace for conservatives to stand in opposition to racism but condemn programs that many minorities depend on. Overall then, it is unclear whether White’s ethos is actually effective for the ends he envisions.

Moreover, there is a serious question as to whether a “negative solidarity” actually meets the needs for political engagement in the prevailing empirical context.

Although White characterizes the Western world and America in particular as mostly well-off and comfortable, recent economic collapses have demonstrated that this appearance relied on a fundamentally unsustainable set of economic conditions. The main dynamic I would draw our attention to with regard to this point is the decrease in real wages and social supports for Americans over the last 40 years175 combined with credit smoothing and riskier investments to compensate for that lack of social supports. The phenomena is so pervasive that it is difficult to even know where to begin explaining its worst effects for most Americans, but income trends offer a compelling insight. What is particularly interesting is not simply that the majority of Americans have not seen a real wage increase in 40 years despite massive gains at the top of the income scale, but that

175 Matthews, Dylan. “Wages Aren’t Stagnating, They’re Plummeting,” The Washington Post, July 31, 2012. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/31/wages-arent-stagnating- theyre-plummeting/

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these losses are spread across all social groups.176 Moreover, this does not even broach discussion of the outright implosions of financial security that have become commonplace in other “wealthy” and “well-off” Western countries like Greece, Spain, and so on.

Basically, the reason this is significant here is because it suggest that the citizens in these markets are already very in touch with mortality and finitude in addition to racism, sexism, and homophobia as economic trends continue to worsen. It is well- documented that about 47 million Americans177 have no health insurance and that as many as 38 million more178 have insurance that is inadequate. The result of this lack of social programs along with falling wages suggests that people are already in touch with the weight of mortality and finitude in very tangible ways. When diminishing economic opportunity is combined with increased difficulty obtaining decent healthcare, mortality may become pressing on our minds in a way that does not enliven our moral imagination for respect to others. Rather, it may have a depressive effect that leads to alienation from politics, or it may simply make people more susceptible to exclusionary appeals that blame others. White might respond that he is attentive to the empirical context I have described because he considers those who are mostly well-off but beset by uncertainties and “tenuous advantage,”179 making them susceptible to resentment-based appeals to scapegoat and exclude minorities in response to this condition. Yet, even if his approach

176 Matthews, Dylan. “Wages Aren’t Stagnating, They’re Plummeting,” The Washington Post, July 31, 2012. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/07/31/wages-arent-stagnating-theyre- plummeting/ 177 The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. (2013, Sept. 26). Key Facts About the Uninsured Population. Retrieved from http://kff.org/uninsured/fact-sheet/key-facts-about-the-uninsured-population/ 178 PBS. The Uninsured. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/healthcarecrisis/uninsured.html 7/15/2013. 179 White, Stephen (2009) The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 108.

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is meant to be relevant to these more difficult circumstances then we again are left with the question as to why it does not appear to have had the effect he desires in a popular political culture that commonly references mortality. He may reply that while this political culture does commonly reference mortality, it does not seriously reference the shared nature of our finitude. Perhaps this is true, but it is a weak response because his argument is that acknowledgement of mortality per se is supposed to induce the “shared” response that would constitute our negative solidarity. White’s argument seems to be that recognition of our finitude is the best hope of enlivening these bonds, and not that those bonds per se are the starting point for his argument. The overall problem with this approach is that there are any number of empirical or historical factors in addition to changing economic circumstances that could lead his desired effect to play out differently than he hopes. For example, many Christians or other religious believers may simply not accept the nature of finitude as he has presented it, believing instead that humans are immortal in the sense prophesied by their belief system. Again, he may try to respond that our finitude has prompted this meaning-seeking which these believers should acknowledge in a more general sense. Yet, it appears that finitude has prompted a will to certainty that is not receptive to following the recognition of mortality in the way he prefers.

So, even if his argument has relevance for a less secure contemporary middle class than he seems to describe, that argument simply seems too weak to be effective because of its assumptions about the attitude that acknowledgement of finitude would produce. White hopes that temporarily loosening the bonds of identity will be an “initial

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gesture toward negative solidarity”180 and a “foothold of community.”181 That solidarity is supposed to make us less dominating in our interactions with others and in turn more receptive to new identities. He argues that this results from a “mimetic” effect: “…it constitutes a kind of bearing witness to (and thus honoring) the character of being. And, second, it constitutes an initial gesture toward that thin bond of negative solidarity that can take shape among creatures whose dignity and equality reside in their peculiar knowledge of mortality.”182 The intended effect here is that we would then be more receptive to new constituencies on the political register. With regard to the Hurricane

Katrina example, we would not need such tragic events to open our eyes to greater receptivity. Instead, we would be less inclined to disavow movements for the dispossessed before these kinds of events transpire. Yet, even if these kinds of bonds were to transpire in cases like Katrina and so on, it is not clear that “an initial gesture” would create an ethos with enough resources to draw on for this ethos to be meaningful.

That result may in fact be the very effect of trying to chasten an ethos like

Connolly’s in the way suggested by White. What White overlooks is that Connolly proposes not just an ethos of generosity, but rather a generous ethos of engagement. As a result, White fails to consider the ways others might respond differently to mortality than he asserts. As it stands, the solidarity it proposes may be mostly imagined on the part of those in the well-off parts of society that White is concerned with. Yet, even if that imagined solidarity leads to a real receptiveness in cases like movements for community assistance preceding Hurricane Katrina and so on, it seems to provide little resources to

180 White, Stephen (2009) The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen. Harvard University Press: Cambridge. pg. 107. 181 Ibid., pg. 74. 182 Ibid., pg. 107.

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do anything about it. At worst, having chastened the abundance central to Connolly’s spirit of engagement, agents may find themselves in a depressed state of solidarity, sharing a bond of finitude, but without the resources to overcome it for some shared project like building the New Orleans that would have weathered the storm, and so on.

This disadvantage is a result of the solution White suggests in light of his critique of

Connolly’s ethos as overly generous. However, in attempting to build limits into that generosity, White reduces the impetus for our ethical reasoning to a shared trait meant to elicit that reasoning. However, in doing so he squashes the resources for shared reasoning that could better overcome depressive aspects or unexpected interpretations of his answer.

This kind of reduction is at odds with a political bricoleur’s approach because it disavows many other possible sources of motivation. Connolly’s answer in this case for the political economy is of course to engage in interim visioning that mobilizes an abundant array of motivational imagery that would propel us forward to that vision.

White successfully chastens this effort by removing those sources of motivation and reducing them to our shared sense of finitude. Yet, in its wake we are left with a very thin and tenuous prospect of solidarity without clear meaning. Moreover, if I am also right about a potential depressive and alienating effect of this approach under economic conditions that are far more problematic than White envisions, then the problem may be even worse. It would be worse because suggesting this ethos in rather different economic conditions than he assumes could lead to different effects. People who are constantly faced with their economic limitations do not need to be reminded of their finitude. It is an everpresent background effect that does not necessarily spur us to community action for

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pluralism when it simply reminds us that our position is so tenuous that we cannot do anything about it.

Instead, finding ways to combine or even resignify other sources of motivation might be more propitious for enlivening the potential for justice. In a way, perhaps,

White is like a bricoleur who has not yet realized the vast array of other motivational sources that might achieve his aims. His aim in itself is not misguided, but in his focus on one particular recognition, that of mortality and the way he hopes it is recognized, he bypasses an explanation of the ethos that would be able to better and more effectively manifest our bricolage for justice. Coles’ effort to be both more highly inclusive than

White and more attentive to the importance of listening to others in our engagements than

Connolly offers a useful counterweigh for considering how we might proceed.

Tension, “Tabling” and Listening

For Coles, the idea of something like abundance is expressed in terms of a “torn” approach to politics in which participants reassert their motivations and the constitution of their ends based on engagements with others. Coles’ idea is important because it returns our focus directly to politics and these engagements. These engagements are important because they demonstrate the ways in which the public meaning of ideas like micropolitics and human dignity will always be subject to our engagements with others.

In this sense, Coles’ approach is more similar to a bricolage style of politics in that it seeks to work out positions in this already existing field of beliefs. More than Connolly or

White, Coles’ approach is important because it demonstrates why our ethos should manifest something like a bricolage in politics, what he refers to as traditio, because it is

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what tends to come out of actual engagements with others. Yet, the way he conceives of that context for our tension and our response to it will likely ultimately need to be refashioned if it is to be more useful for efforts by those who seek justice.

Like White and Connolly, Coles is concerned about a will to control in modernity particularly as it relates to pluralism and he is also concerned, like White perhaps more than Connolly, about the possibility for nihilism when there is no direction to our engagement with pluralism. Coles characterizes this problematic for pluralism as the conflict between teleological and ateleological aims. The former refers of course to our aims for justice, equality, and so on by efforts to articulate these ideas abstractly, an effort characterized by political liberals such as Rawls, while the latter refers to a kind of never- ending transgression like that of avowed postmodernists such as Jean-Luc Nancy. Coles thinks both of these approaches are dangerous because they reify certain identities and suppress others. The political liberal approach has a tendency to bureaucratize reason and favor background justice that downplays and even discourages listening to citizens, while the postmodernist approach never takes time to learn from the past or anticipate the future. Coles argues that the political liberal approach downplays this listening because it presumes that justice should be a “background” principle that forms a general context in which we take part in the economy. His argument is not that liberalism is incapable of incorporating input from citizens in order to improve or better realize justice, but that its characterization of justice as a background principle has the political effect of making it easier to ignore and harder for insurgent groups to challenge. It is harder for these groups to challenge because they have to make a case before any critique that citizens should even pay attention in the first place. The postmodern view does not simply have nihilist

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propensities but tends to obscure the possibilities that arise from drawing on an abundancy of motivational sources by suggesting that freedom can only denote always crossing limits. Like the political liberal view, it fails to consider how political nuances might alter our approach to its resources. Not confronting these limitations leads each of these views to be less likely to handle with generosity the exclusions that each generates, the reasoned-administrator of justice on the one hand and the never-ending limit-crosser on the other.

In order to avoid exclusions, the subject must give up committing to either of these pathological directions and instead find a different way to “be” in modernity. The subject who is approaching these tensions in the right way avoids these pathologies through the cultivation of sensibilities and practices that both stem from and give rise to a

“nepantilist” ethos of generosity. The reference to “nepantla” is to an articulation of this subjectivity by Gloria Anzaldua, who Coles draws on heavily to express his idea.

According to Coles, “…Anzaldua articulates a proximate theme with the term nepantla

(Aztec for ‘to be between’ or ‘torn between ways’) and she seeks to embrace the work of creative judgment and action that locates itself in these tensions by cultivating a nepantilist state of mind and being.”183 That state of being is between the teleological and ateleological considerations that motivate us to act. As a result of situating ourselves this way, we are in between different directions, such as between ideas like justice and other ideas of how we might live our lives.

183 Coles, Romand (2005) Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. pg. xiv.

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However, being between is really only a starting point that signifies a refusal to accede to modernist pathologies. It is with our political subjectivities that we engage this position and create something new. Therefore Coles suggests what I would characterize as a subjectivity with a political commitment that he finds most well-suited to these “in- between” circumstances. That is the subject whose political actions in these circumstances result in a “tearing” or a being “torn.” By not going in the direction of either of the modernist pathologies, but by also not refusing to act in the circumstances of being in-between, the result is political action that tears the motivational forces of these directions in different ways that results in a tension. This is the politics of what Coles calls “traditio.”

Traditio is the key to understanding Coles’ approach to the right ethical approach to engaging with others. In evoking this term, Coles is asking subjects to look differently at history: “The Latin root of ‘tradition is traditio. The fact that tradition is also the Latin root of ‘tension’ suggests that there is a vital and enduring agon at the heart of our relation to what history passes on to us.”184 Acknowledging history in this way is meant to evoke in subjects a kind of searching, always questioning attitude about their place in history. This acknowledgement has the effect of placing us “in-between” in the way

Coles envisions through invoking Anzaldua.

Once so placed, we are likely to come to see our own historical placement and political efforts as “unwonted.” What it means to see our own efforts this way means that we begin to see the uniqueness of our own contemporary efforts to fight subjugation, and

184 Coles, Romand (2005) Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. pg. xiii.

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the incompleteness of those efforts. When people attempting to fight subjugation look to history from a traditio-inspired vantage point, they will see that their current efforts have been preceded by many additional efforts. Moreover, they will come to realize that those earlier efforts were unique to their time, they were “unwonted.” This in turn may have the effect of leading us to see our contemporary movements as unique and incomplete as well. Following in this line of thought, we will then be more open to drawing on these past movements as influences for our current efforts as well as more open to learning and engaging with other contemporary movements that may inspire us. In this sense, we cultivate a “nepantilist” generosity. Coles argues that this was the case for feminists of color who became aware of an “agonistic indebtedness” to white feminists of a hundred years earlier. Just as their contemporary struggles could be maligned as out of place, or marginalized under current norms of identity and difference, feminists of color found that earlier white feminists had experienced similar marginalization. As a result, contemporary feminists of color are able to draw on the “vision, intensity, and modes of political practice,”185 of these earlier feminists for their current struggles. So, in this sense, contemporary feminists of color “…gain a deeper appreciation for and generosity toward political initiatives that move unwontedly beyond various historical presents.”186

Thus, through traditio, feminists such as these are able to cultivate a nepantilist generosity that provokes a certain politics in turn that drives this viewpoint and enriches it.

185 Coles, Romand (2005) Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. pg. xii. 186 Ibid., pg. xii.

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In drawing on the past in this way, the future begins to look different as well. We begin to see ourselves in a process of exceeding our current visions of the future by the way we draw on the past and the present. According to Coles, “For the visions they offer

(the radicalness of their political dreams and the energy of their activism), though greatly indebted to liberal notions of liberty, equality, fairness, tolerance, reciprocity, and efforts to realize them, exceed those in significantly ateleological ways and refigure them in light of broader constellations of subjugations and human flourishing that emerge in complicated relations to the dense specifications of their histories.”187 This approach is differentiated from the liberal approach on Coles’ view because it does not see those principles such as liberty, equality, fairness, etc. as having a non-historical meaning.

Rather, we exceed those visions when we draw on our ateleological motivations. This is likely because of the way these visions would be wrapped up in identity and difference on Coles’s view. Therefore, on that view if we come to see our movements as flowing towards the realization of those ideals, we run the risk of moving towards their historicized normalizations of the identities they have come to be associated with, while not realizing the ways in which these are historically contextualized. As a result, we would be less likely to look back on and notice histories in which unwonted movements challenged the liberal norms of their own day. And yet, the way in which traditio refigures our approach to politics is not postmodern because traditio encourages us to learn from the past and the present in order to better understand our current struggles, rather than engaging in an effort to continuously transgress limits with taking the time to learn, appreciate, and engage.

187 Coles, Romand (2005) Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. pg. 204.

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As a result, our historical task becomes to continuously negotiate these tensions, learning from historical and contemporary struggles and exceeding our principles.

According to Coles, this will have the effect of deepening democracy: “This politics – like all politics – will not eliminate peccable encroachment, but it does promise to broaden and deepen the agonistic spectrum of visions, sensibilities, and receptive capacities through which we perceive and judge the damages and more hopeful possibilities of our political activities.”188 With regard to this broadening of our receptive capacities through these agonistic engagements, it seems like Coles is referring to a back and forth process in which our receptivity engenders democratic engagement which in turn spurs more receptivity across new constituencies. It would encourage us to engage in practices like listening and “tabling,” as Coles does as an activist with the IAF.189

Listening refers to a renewed commitment to a “radical curiosity” in others that makes us more attentive to their concerns by learning more about them. “Tabling” refers to always moving the “table” of our politics, which refers to where we meet. We will be able to listen better when we move politics away from only taking place in committee rooms in congress and take it back to neighborhoods, local businesses, schools and so on. These practices make up practical applications of Coles’ democracy of tension. In fact, this democracy is a telos in itself according to Coles. Again referencing Anzualdua, he states,

“Even if Anzaldua lives for a telos that is significantly ateleological – crossing toward

188 Coles, Romand (2005) Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. pg. 254. 189 Ibid., pgs. 213-237.

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and welcoming the others, the other traditions, the unpredictability of the future – it is still a telos, a way, ‘the mestiza way.’”190

Yet despite Coles’ clever idea for how to chart a path between liberal and postmodern pathologies in the focus on tension, the ethical demands of that method may put a very high price on what is required to sustain an ethos of generosity, and that price is perhaps higher than we might want to pay if we can find reasons to desire exceeding the limits that would sustain that vision. On Coles’ view, the only way to sustain this generosity is through a constant cultivation of tension. Referring again to Anzualdua,

Coles says, “…she urges us to cultivate a certain ‘psychic restlessness’ and ‘malleability,’ an awareness that learning and teaching to live well involve us ‘in a state of perpetual transition.’…Every time she makes ‘sense’ of ‘something,’ she has to ‘cross over,’ kicking a hole out of the old boundaries…Though painful, the mestiza’s ‘energy comes from continual motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each paradigm.”191

This leads then back to Coles’ concern with finding the right position between teleological and ateleological impulses: “Justice, charity, love, courage, reciprocity, and so forth call us to orient ourselves and to open ourselves through them to a certain disorientation. Torn virtues help us to stay in the middle, in the profoundest moments, playing teleological and ateleological accounts and insights against each other.”192

Although this can begin to sound much like the postmodern approach, it does in fact demand something more if we take Coles’ argument seriously. It demands the difficult task of “staying in the middle” and always cultivating these tensions. One reason this is a

190 Coles, Romand (2005) Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis. pg. 193. 191 Ibid., pg. 192. 192 Ibid., pg. 198.

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difficult task is because of the usual critique of theories demanding democratic action which is that they simply ask too much of normal citizens. Democratic action can be exhausting and time consuming, and to suggest that people should be doing it all the time is simply unfair. Of course, Coles may respond that people do not need to engage in this all the time, but only that when they do, they would respond best to the modern condition by cultivating these tensions.

The first problem with Coles’ politics of tension is that it chastens our ethos for politics in very arbitrary ways. It is true that by taking on an ethical approach to engagement with others that stops us short of any totalizing projects necessarily induces at least some amount of caution, if not generosity. That generosity would likely come to be learned over time through the political practices advocated by Coles. The IAF is of course a good example. Rather than assuming that people hate their neighborhoods and proceeding to remove them to housing projects, the IAF would encourage a nuanced listening that may help us realize bit-by-bit how much we gain from being generous in welcoming the opinions of others. This might lead to community-designed housing with surprising touches, as it has in past IAF efforts. Rather than projects, developments like houses with kitchens overlooking the front yards and so on were considered advancements here as they represented a reaffirmation of community life because people spending more time in that part of the house would have a better sense of the street and what went on there, etc. This is fine, but it ultimately exceeds the capacity of Coles’ ethics without replacing it with anything that can ground our politics. For all the kinds of

IAF success Coles points to, there will be other tension-laden efforts that are excluded from these transfigurations of the present. For each urban victory for the IAF, voices

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representing a more aggressive capitalism are left out. For example, many of these battles feature big box stores like Wal-Mart and others trying to make inroads into these communities. Entertaining them would certainly introduce a new tension into the dynamics of the politics Coles describes. Yet, to the extent that these kind of efforts to do not listen to others and add tension to their own efforts, then they are not really as legitimate in Coles’ eyes as true community efforts. This does seem like a great virtue of

Coles’ approach. In fact, these otherwise aggressive purveyors of modern capitalism like

Wal-Mart and so on could become part of the communities he describes if they were to embrace his political praxis. The only problem is that this is unlikely, making the interventions by these actors in Coles’ politics very dangerous. It is dangerous because they are likely to take advantage of inaction that comes with reluctance to make political commitments beyond tension in order to pursue divisive aims.

Thus, a serious problem for justice arises from Coles’ effort that would seemingly limit the ethical boundaries of his approach from any kind of visioning similar to that proposed by Connolly. His ethical commitments would appear to limit the proposal of interim visions if putting forth a positive vision were to jeopardize the kind of tension that requires us to “stay in the middle” and not overcommit ourselves in any direction.

This might be fine as long as everyone in our community agrees to this political orientation and is satisfied with it. Yet, the problem that arises even if his vision works for those who practice it is that the logic of assemblages as described by Connolly may still apply. It is likely that large corporations and divisive ideologues will not stop at the borders of our tensions or feel any pull to stay in the middle. Rather, these actors will develop very attractive visions that may ultimately displace communities and divide

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constituencies by stoking resentment. On the one hand, corporate entities like Wal-Mart will describe very attractive results from their practices. Often, not only will Wal-Mart promise jobs and easy access to commodities, but will add development promises such as housing to its proposals. Yet, it often does very little to fulfill these promises, using the vision it describes as a motivational source rather than a real transformation for justice.

Ideologues like Glen Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Pat Robertson not only stoke the fear of their viewers but juxtapose their enemies with the vision they threaten that appeals to a more simple 1950s style of America. My concern with regard to Coles’ suggestion is that in the face of these aggressive marketing and political campaigns, we may find presumptive generosity slipping away when our tensions seem to offer little in return.

Although it is a caricature, it reminds me of some of my left-wing, vegan, socialist, angry friends who cultivate complex political tensions, but are no competition for the right- wing assemblages at work against their generosity. These are the kind of people that might start an anarchist bookstore, and I love those bookstores, but it is not the same as starting a political movement. And one day, the Mayor of Baltimore, or Providence, or some other city will come in with their corporate allies and take away that bookstore in the name of development behind corporate sponsorship and kick out the long-time residents of the community, dividing cities in the process, and our tensions may not carry the day and presumptive generosity may suffer. In fact, when this happens, even former anarchist bookstore owners may find themselves fighting surprising upswells of resentment.

This should lead us to ask what kind of political commitments might serve to prevent this and how those can be negotiated without giving up on the benefits of

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traditio. One of the most important benefits of a traditio-inspired politics is that it requires actual engagement with people across the full diversity of motivational sources.

In doing so, it also seeks to limit the potential for harms that might arise by forewarning us to stay ‘in the middle.’ The actual engagements it emphasizes through tabling and listening is an important benefit for liberal politics to flourish because it does not tie us to particular recognitions and does not leave us without options when the vision we bring to politics do not generate the support we hope for. Rather, we are able to enter political engagements with a radical curiosity that carries us forward – that is until we become exhausted or opposing assemblages take advantage of our tension when it leads to inaction. That is a particular problem for Coles’ view because it ultimately requires a commitment that can make action difficult because any direction we seek to advance will in some sense need to be stopped short by our questioning of it. Thus, it is surprising when Coles asserts that his view amounts to fighting capitalism and globalization. This assertion seems to too easily override his commitments to listening and remaining in tension. Yet it also begs the question of whether any program for political action that would oppose illiberal assemblages on his view would have to simply assert a non- sequitor. Doing so would be problematic because it at once empties the normative and motivational force for actual engagements emphasized by his politics without replacing it with anything that can win back that legitimacy. In doing so, it points to the need to be able to sustain some commitment in our politics for justice that would not remove those normative and motivational sources so easily. Tension is similar to the idea of a bricolage but it needs to be manifested a bit differently be a motivational source for those who act for justice.

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Towards Acting Like a Political Bricoleur

The agent who comes to act for justice takes on the ethos of the bricoleur because the virtues required for engagement requires it. Yet, because real engagement involves a certain unpredictability and uncertainty, that agent must be able to affirm those contingencies without losing sight of justice. He or she must continue to take a stand, even though what it means to do so will be contingent on our engagements with others.

Therefore, the ethical commitment to bricolage which he or she takes on will need to be characterized by a commitment to the equal rights and liberties that make those very engagements possible. The resulting ethos is a bricoleur’s attitude characterized by courage and originality in its action. This approach to understanding political action has the effect of broadening our perspective on what it means to be drawn to act by ethos. All of the sudden, other approaches like Connolly and White’s look like examples of efforts that manifest some particular bricolage, but still incomplete in articulating what ethos drives some activists to take that chance and present those ideas. Coles’ approach in contrast looks far more prescient, but critically lacking in the kind of commitment necessary to be an ethos of those who act for justice. Instead, it begins to seem more like the ethos of those who simply act, but not for anything that can exceed tension. Yet, when we engage around justice we will find ourselves exercising certain virtues that manifest a bricolage signifying our rights and liberties – thus making activists into bricoleurs as a result.

The pressure on agents who enter political engagement with others is often to stake out a position in advance and hold to it through the engagement. I will call this the cable news style of engagement and suggest that it demonstrates a false kind of courage.

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It is a false kind of courage because it relies on the repetition of pre-conceived ideas instead of affirming the chance that there is at least a possibility of changing those ideas and the dangers associated with that possibility. I call the unwillingness to affirm this possibility a ‘cable news’ style of engagement because of the way shows on news networks are often structured to deliver a juxtaposition of opposing views. The effect of this structure is to emphasize repetition in contrast to the other instead of building new ideas. The false courage of this style is hidden behind bluster and passionate rhetoric, but affords each party the safety of simply repeating already settled-upon viewpoints.

Real engagement with others in politics is important for the reason Connolly points out, which is that otherwise new identities will continue to be reified and subjugated in politics. Real courage, I suggest, takes a commitment to rights and liberties going into political engagements that is open to changing the way we understand these based on those interactions. When this occurs, a type of bricolage is manifested. That courage is ‘real’ because it requires originality in its action around rights and liberties.

This courage can be seen in political efforts that loosen, but not give up, their commitments going into engagements so that they can more freely play with the signifiers involved in doing so.

For example, this kind of courage can be seen in the work of environmental activists in Kansas. Like the bricoleur described by Levi-Strauss, these activists work with ‘whatever is at hand,’ and define these resources not in pre-conceived terms but rather in terms for their potential. According to Levi-Strauss, these tools and materials are, “…always finite…and also heterogeneous, because what it contains bears no relation

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to the current project…It is to be defined only by its potential use…”193 If environmental activists defined the set of resources available to them only in terms of how these are already defined or in their current use, they would find little foothold for a movement in the state. What are these resources? They are the abundant motivational sources at play in the state. Presenting an environmental project to those who hold these motivations is problematic when Kansans do not define themselves as environmentalists. But by looking at these resources in terms of their potential, activists can find new ways to engage. Yet activists in Kansas would need to demonstrate real courage in these engagements because they would know that their pre-conceived ideas about environmentalism would at least be subject to the potential for changing into something new out of these engagements. Yet, that is both the cost, and the potential benefit of opening a process that substantively affirms the equal citizenship of those with different ideas about environmentalism or justice.

It is likely that originality in using those resources was not only necessary for

Kansan activists in their engagements across the state, but is also a way of sustaining and building momentum around what comes out of these interactions. That momentum has the possibility to become a social movement. So, in starting a movement like this, these activists took up resources where they found them and put them together in novel ways.

One activist explains what could have otherwise been a fateful conundrum: “In Kansas, and I would argue elsewhere throughout the country, climate change became a politically polarized issue, it was seen here, early and increasingly, in a sense, as a liberal issue, as an environmental issue, and people here in the heartland do not consider themselves

193 Levi-Strauss, Claude (1962) The Savage Mind. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago. pg. 17.

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either liberal or environmentalists.”194 Rather than taking this as an indication to not proceed, activists looked towards the potential use of the many already-existing motivational sources in the state. According to one activist, “…we really meet people where they are…it’s important for us to be thought of as an organization who respects their values, who is honest and open, and it really doesn’t matter to us whether they believe in climate change…we’re trying to find common ground.”195 In fact, I think the organization does more than find common ground. Rather, they create new ideas about environmentalism that did not previously exist before their engagements. Let us take a moment to consider this important point.

This important point about how they combine their courage with originality can be seen in the way environmentalism comes to be understood as a result of their engagements. In talking with people in the state about their values they were confronted with cultural narratives like those concerning faith, agriculture, business, the military, and so on. I find the military to be an especially interesting example because it is so at odds with the hippie environmentalist stereotype that Kansans would be likely to resist.

According to one activist, “We are a military state, we send a lot of young men and women overseas to fight, and have done so for generations…so there was a real emotional sense that we don’t want…to send our ‘boys’ to be buried in the prairie we want to have turbines on the prairie.”196 The importance of engaging with people about the military for activists was not to convince them to believe in global warming but to

194 ClimateandEnergy. (2012, March 29). Common Ground – Kansas Climate and Energy Project Connects with the Heartland [Video File]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RywTWSfUKSs&feature=c4-overview&list=UUFCgj5C- nEPCpkh47ecLKQw 195 Ibid. 196 Ibid.

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find out where that concern might be transmuted in a way to become supportive of care for the earth. Looked at this way, this engagement is not a matter of simply using rhetoric about the military but rather to really manifest a bricolage of new ideas it would be necessary to infuse the activist with a new sense what care for the earth means. In this case, it meant appreciation for protecting soldiers. Arising out of engagements that reveal motivational sources in support for the military, all of the sudden environmentalism is not a program we try to bring others on board with, but we in part become advocates for the military because that is what care for the earth means in a place like Kansas. In Kansas, we take care of the environment in part because we are pro-military. Working on care for the earth in part means developing our commitment to the military in ways that its initial proponents and environmentalists may not have initially considered.

And yet, sources of motivation found in respect for the military is only one piece of an emerging bricolage because alone it would likely not be enough for a movement.

Instead, environmentalists find themselves slowly becoming pro-business, pro-military, agriculturalists with a sensitivity to religion because that is what care for the earth means in a place like Kansas. In fact, the appeal of wind turbines is an example of how this kind of movement leads to new approaches that might have not been previously envisioned in that it comes to represent a stewardship of resources (the wind), rather than a conservation approach that other environmental movements might more directly emphasize. Just because Kansas is a windy place does not mean environmentalism was destined to build wind turbines there without an ancillary idea about the meaning of resources that might motivate support for that policy in some particular way. All through this process of movement-building, activists remain committed to care for the earth, but

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loosen their own bonds of identity in their engagement with others to figure out and in fact create what this means. Doing so takes a great deal of courage and originality as well as a kind of commitment through our engagements that surpasses the kind of tension that

Coles supports. As a result, it manifests a new kind of political bricolage similar to the assemblages described by Connolly but more dynamic as a movement because it truly meets people where they are, taking their motivational sources more seriously, but not simply accepting these as they are either. Instead, like Levi-Strauss suggests, activists come to see these sources as having potential for something different when combined in new and unusual ways. Only by opening themselves to a process that does not forestall manifesting that bricolage can those benefits be realized in some new manifestation.

The manifestation of this kind of bricolage would be no different a kind of result of the agent who acts for justice, only that the commitment he or she brings would be something different from environmentalism. Instead, it would need to be characterized by the concern for equal citizenship that defines justice. In the political economy, activists would have to start with real engagements that elicit the kind of radical curiosity described by Coles. What this means is that activists ask others what concerns they have in their lives and identify the motivational forces at work like those in the Kansas case. In doing so, they may find new tools and materials with which to transfigure and develop the meaning of justice in the political economy. Yet, they do more than find tools that can be transfigured into new rational incentives. Rather, by approaching interaction with others with the right ethos, they begin to create a new assemblage. The creation of a new assemblage is especially important for justice because it involves a shared spirit of taking each other seriously. When we take each other seriously we do not presume allegiance to

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particular political economies is necessary for justice. However, we instead act with the courage and originality that gives life to a process that we can affirm together. Doing so might manifest a new bricolage of justice or some other value, but that manifestation is secondary in importance to the shared spirit that comprises our micropolitics of justice.

That micropolitics, which may create an assemblage, requires an ethos that can get us there.

The activists at the start of the Occupy movement are a good example of how this might come to develop. Initially, a small group of activists concerned about rights and liberties reacted to a call in Adbusters magazine featuring a ballerina on the Wall Street bull with the question stating “what is our one demand?” followed by a hashtag and a date and the call to “bring tents.” What is most striking about this ad was its call for discussion and engagement. Rather than state a demand to rally around, it posed the question, and seemed to call for an extended meeting of sorts, long enough that one might need a tent. It hinted at the possibility that some bricolage of justice might result from these efforts, but its focus called for a new togetherness from which that might result.

And of course, it would require courageous and original action by a few who were dedicated enough this idea of justice to come together and make this possibility real. The looseness of this togetherness is likely one reason why Occupy could originally spread so far and wide across the country. In Providence, one activist described his initial experience this way:

It was exciting. We had a really diverse group of people right from the beginning. There were between 30 and 50 people there at the early organizing meetings held at the Roger Williams National Memorial, and everyone was so eager to listen and share their hopes and dreams for the nascent movement with each other. It was really pretty utopian (in a democratic/anarchist way) at the beginning, and I was surprised by the patience people

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had with one another. We were very deliberate from the beginning, and the relationship that we developed very early with the broader Providence community and even the City Administration was inspiring. Move in day was epic. It felt for all the world like we were going to do important things and change the system to make it more responsive to the people.197

It was clear from this account that the movement did not bring folks together by promising incentives or setting out demands in advance, but rather by promising and attempting in very real ways to make a commitment to equal citizenship in our interactions as a way of finding a new meaning for justice. That effort represented an attempt to take seriously the kinds of actual consent justice requires in processes of engagement, and it worked to build an assemblage out of the energy brought to meetings and general assemblies. Nothing in the prevailing ‘cable news’ political culture could have produced something like this. Instead, especially in its very beginnings Occupy exhibited the kind of citizen action that could underlie something like a micropolitics of justice.

A common criticism of Occupy was that it resulted in too much discussion, and too little action, mirroring Coles’ view perhaps more than something like the example in

Kansas. However, this is simply not true. Although street violence in places like Oakland may have garnered the most media attention, other activists around the country took up the call for discussion on a broader scale because of the impetus and national discussion fostered by Occupy, and used it to further a commitment to rights and liberties and equal citizenship. For example, activists in Maryland following the onset of Occupy travelled the state listening to the concerns of hundreds of small business owners and community

197 Collins, Abel. Occupy Providence. Personal Interview, 9/15/2013.

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groups in an effort to better understand and re-transfigure the political economy around justice in that state.198 In short one-on-one meetings with independent business owners they learned about what concerns related to an economy in which the state attracted large corporations with tax breaks and other give-aways, while small businesses are taken for granted. More importantly, they found resentment at the way small business was invoked by state leaders to support those give-aways. The driving idea behind the campaign was to turn support of small business into a rallying point for more equal lending policies for people hurt by the recession, eliciting their right to those resource in the political economy. In doing so, activists had to start by loosening their commitment to a political divide that makes being ‘pro-business’ synonymous with conservative doctrine, while manifesting a bricolage of different business owners and other folks who could come to see grassroots activism as part of being pro-business. Thus, the key behind this kind of effort was not simply in identifying a shared economic interest – that already existed before the campaign – rather it was to play with the way groups in the state were signified as motivational sources to a different set of policies than had otherwise prevailed.

This is just one example and many others exist and many other forms of taking action on justice in the political economy are possible. Yet, for many activists these engagements require some suspension of the favored aesthetics and rhetorics associated with their preferred causes. Those rhetorics are good cable news talking points but they make for bad political engagements. Despite the divide between the Occupy and Tea

198 Bednar, Adam. “Business Owners Want Maryland to Bank Local,” North Baltimore, MD Patch, February 28, 2012. http://northbaltimore.patch.com/groups/politics-and-elections/p/keep-it-local- 303f1e52

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Party movements, at least in their incipient forms they placed a heavy emphasis on discussion and meeting to work out new ideas. Arguably these groups started out as emergent political bricolages that have been mostly monopolized by advocates for relatively leftist or right-wing messages since that inception. What this suggests is not so much that these initial efforts failed, but that the original and courageous action that marks an ethos for justice cannot be reduced to a set program in advance of politics.

Rather, it has to come out of actual engagements that attempt to carry through a commitment to equal rights and liberties. The resulting forms these take may not be the most economically efficient, reasonable, or abstractly-grounded, but as Levi-Strauss presciently points out, they are no less socially legitimate in their constitution than these other efforts, and likely more so. If carried out with a commitment to taking a stand for equal rights and liberties, they hold the potential to confer the strength of that legitimacy to the cause of justice.

Conclusion

Connolly, White, and Coles each offer differing conceptions of how an ethos could infuse our politics to realize generosity in our relations with each other and avoid the worst pathologies of modernity. I have argued that Levi-Strauss’s idea of the bricoleur can illuminate what is at work in these kinds of efforts and suggest what would make them work better for justice. Specifically, what would make them work better comes through engagements entered by those following an ethos infused with courage and originality.

For that effort to have relevance for justice, those virtues must be tied to a commitment to equal rights and liberties. Yet, while originality makes the potential for a new political bricolage possible that might resignify our sources of motivation, it requires courage to

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take a stand through those engagements while realizing that our understanding of what justice requires might not be the same after that effort. It requires an agent who can take a stand for an idea of justice that is actually open-ended because he or she realizes that real courage means finding ways to listen to and engage with creatively with others around that commitment rather than defending an entrenched view.

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Conclusion: Towards a New Solidarity?

Where We Are Now

It is my claim that justice requires dynamic and creative social movements that can operate in what would otherwise be a gap of democratic legitimacy for our terms for justice. Doing this presents a challenge because it is premised on the idea that justice, at least in the political economy, does not have one form that we can understand in advance of political engagement. Rather, because of the relative gap in what underlies our principles for justice like equal citizenship in the economy, we find ourselves needing greater democratic legitimacy for whatever form those principles take. Abstracted to too great a degree, we will find ourselves facing a circular argument concerning the requirements of justice in the economy. This is essentially the same difficulty Rawls finds himself in when he can either jettison the difference principle as part of a free-standing political conception based on equal citizenship, or delineate more deeply its institutional configuration and its supposed appeal. In Justice As Fairness he attempts the latter but I argue that he fails in doing so. As a result, we are left with the question of how we might ground our shared terms for political economy in the context of contemporary liberal democracies.

The Habermasian alternative to ground the legitimacy of our shared terms in procedures of radical democracy based on co-original formulations of those terms both

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adds key insights but also has important shortcomings. On the one hand, Habermas’ insight that democratic grounding both gives real form to our norms and at the same time achieves greater legitimation is very important because it demonstrates why those concerned with justice need to take more seriously the role of actual consent in those norms. Grounding norms in popular consent gives those norms a motivated support that is otherwise lacking in more hypothetical accounts of consent, like Rawls.’ It gives those norms more motivated support because they come to be understood by citizens when these citizens discuss those norms. According to Habermas, this process requires the rational will formation that arises from the exchange and critique of validity claims about our shared world. Those claims can be accepted when they reflect our objectively shared world, but rejected when distorted. The latter kind of claim represents an imposition in our social world of unlegitimated administrative or economic interventions. The job of citizens in the periphery of civil society is to contest these interventions. Often it is social movements that do that job best.

Yet, Habermas’ suggestion that social movements might advance shared norms for justice in this way presents its own legitimation problem that becomes a tricky issue for Habermas. Taking on the moral point of view in norm deliberation, Habermas suggests that citizens take this view back into their conventional contexts, replacing parts of that context to greater and greater extents. This is Habermas’ own democratic legitimacy problem and its implications are still unresolved in debates about his theory.

Some, like Abizadeh have suggested that rhetorical mediation may be sufficient to combat the otherwise difficult question about whether Habermas must displace much of the pre-existing ethical world with considerations from the moral viewpoint. If it is the

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case that deep down citizens affirm the moral view due to shared interests discerned through the exchange of validity claims, it may be the case that rhetoric provides the mediation necessary to translate our validity claims in ways that help us better approximate that shared view. Yet, if it is the case that this shared view is not necessarily forthcoming, but that some forms of distorted views will ultimately continue to prevail, then Habermas still has a challenge to realize democratic legitimacy if discourse theory is unaltered in any way.

Based on the existence of emergent groups like the Tea Party movement in the US which holds deeply divergent views about the political economy from those held by more mainstream groups, I suggest it is critical that we examine the implications of the role of distorted views in discourse. I argue that this consideration is important because it is not obvious in any a priori sense that Tea Party economic claims are illiberal, especially considering the more or less narrow range of grounding of an overlapping consensus that is at issue for Rawls in Political Liberalism. If they are not illiberal, then we may find ourselves in a situation in which shared reasons for public justification are not emergent even under liberal democratic conditions. If this is in part due to “distorted” influences, those cannot be removed without doing great harm to the pluralism liberalism strives to protect. Therefore, I suggest that as one way forward to retain a commitment to Rawls’ principled concern for equal citizenship and Habermas’ concern form motivation, we might still be able to achieve legitimation around justice through the exchange of reasons if we alter the truthfulness requirement in Habermas’ validity conditions to be more amenable to types of distorted claims. There is no reason, I suggest, that those who have been influenced by interventions in the lifeworld to hold different views about the

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economy can be ruled as untruthful. In fact, to do so may be to crystallize our oppositions. In that case, validity claims that impute shared objective concerns may have only an alienating effect.

Yet, on the examination of that Tea Party case there is also much that should be ruled out of this compromise. Racism, paranoia, and lies are not in keeping with the aspirations to give our interlocutors the benefit of the doubt in order to give ourselves a point of departure for discourse. These elements reflect something entirely at odds with what might constitute a principled micropolitics around justice. In taking on a widened conception of truthfulness in order to find ways to start discourse, we will find ourselves on the terrain of micropolitics because that form of politics refers to engaging abstract ideals on the level of belief. The case I discuss of certain enterprising environmental activists in Kansas is a good representation of this kind of micropolitics. These activists place an emphasis on finding shared meanings around environmentalism rather than attempting to impose preconceived solutions to problems of climate change. In fact, on closer examination what is really happening here is that they are doing justice to those involved in the political economy of the environment. Their success legitimizes an effort to discern the principles behind their engagements with each other. I suggest that these principles include looking to each other, appealing to shared beliefs, agonistic compromise, and constructing beliefs. Applied directly to the case of social justice in which groups like the Tea Party are at play, we may find that if actual consent must be a supplement to our hypothetical concerns, then these principles of micropolitics have an important role to play in a world in which distorted views are constitutive prevailing conditions of pluralism.

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My argument then is that in that gap of democratic legitimacy, a principled micropolitics of justice may come to constitute justice in important ways. It constitutes justice in important ways because it represents a treatment of each other as equal citizenship in our efforts to engage and listen, and may lead to the construction of norms and policies as a result. These are two pillars of stability that mirror Habermas’ concern for co-originality, but are mediated by a micropolitics due to the persistence of distorted, though not pernicious views. This kind of idea of justice surely indicates and calls for the need for a constant searching, exploring, and listening for different voices. Like Coles’ politics of tension, it should temper any efforts around justice in the political economy with the possibility that there are more voices that might need to be heard. That effort will require an activist engagement because of the otherwise entrenched differences that constitute our politics. Activists courageous enough to risk a change to their own understandings of principles of justice for the economy will need to take original efforts around economic views to combine and act on these in novel ways to appeal to different constituencies. In doing so, these activists will need to retain a commitment to equal citizenship that does not assume some particular outcome of norms. Instead, activists that exhibit an ethos of this kind of courage and originality around a commitment to equal citizenship will be able to engage in a principled micropolitics of justice, listening for and acting on truthful claims, but also prepared to challenge racism, lies, and paranoia. The kind of stability around justice this represents will be ultimately open-ended and ongoing.

Thus, while this effort should realize different historicized norms and policies around social justice at different times, the most important parts of my argument are the commitment to equal citizenship and the commitment to a process of micropolitics.

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These, to different degrees represent what I hope is a more measured combination of efforts around rightly achieving hypothetical and actual consent in that gap of democratic legitimacy for justice.

Towards a New Solidarity?

Where does this lead us as partisans of justice? Although we may wish to achieve some final utopia of justice, we should be wary of this way of thinking. Rather, my argument would lead us towards an ongoing effort to build social movements and assemblages that could better realize the principled effects of our micropolitics of justice. Realizing those principles indicates a more legitimate grounding of our terms in consent. As equal citizens in liberal polities, this is in fact what we should expect. Although hypothetical efforts alone to delineate and figure out the abstract of conditions of justice are insufficient alone and will run aground without consideration of how these terms might be received, we should not give up on the importance of consent.

Not giving up on consent in this way might signal the possibility for a new solidarity around justice. According to Habermas, “…solidarity is a political act and by no means a form of moral selflessness that would be misplaced in political contexts.

Solidarity looses the false appearances of being unpolitical once we learn how to distinguish obligations to show solidarity from both moral and legal obligations.

‘Solidarity’ is not synonymous with ‘justice,’ be it in the moral or legal sense of the term.”199 Solidarity is a political act of togetherness. Habermas and his interpreters have historically taken that form of action to hinge on the insights of objective validity claims

199 Habermas, Jurgen. “Democracy, Solidarity And The European Crisis,” Social Europe Journal, July 5, 2013.

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in discourse theory. However, perhaps if we loosen the terms of those claims we may still act together politically in assemblages that advance a shared concern for justice. Doing so might indicate a togetherness based on the respect and shared efforts generated by a process like a micropolitics of justice. That might be a new solidarity that could lead to exciting new advances for justice in theory and in the real world.

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