Tyranny of the Majority

Howling into the Void

From Anthony Zurcher, "Shutdown Headache for Republican Speaker John Boehner":

The rebellious faction hails from solidly conservative, mostly rural areas across the country. They've been called the "weird caucus" by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the "suicide caucus" by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, in reference to a disregard for their party's survival. They sometimes refer to themselves as "wacko birds", adopting as their own the derisive label given to them by Republican Senator John McCain.

[...] 

They "represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular," he wrote. "Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed."

From Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America:

If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority, which may at some future time urge the minorities to desperation and oblige them to have recourse to physical force. Anarchy will then be the result, but it will have been brought about by despotism. 

[...] 

Jefferson also said: "The executive power in our government is not the only, perhaps not even the principal, object of my solicitude. The tyranny of the legislature is really the danger most to be feared, and will continue to be so for many years to come. The tyranny of the executive power will come in its turn, but at a more distant period."

Our democratic chickens have come home to roost.  Contrary to the calls of moveon.org to blame John Boehner and the Tea Party for shutting down the government, it's time to look in the mirror and realize that our wounds are self-inflicted.

What appears to be the hostile takeover of the rich white minority of sore-loser Republicans is not a coup, but rather democracy in action, the democracy that we have allowed to be dominated not by the Ted Cruz's and Michelle Bachman's of the world, but by the scourge of gerrymandering.  At a time when the Internet is allowing us evermore freedom to evolve beyond the borders of districts we are instead devolving into "wacko" districts to be ruled by "wacko birds."  When this works in our particular party's favor, we of course champion this anti-democratic power grab that our Democracy allows for, but now when it is seemingly the other party who has taken advantage of this system-gaming, we are outraged victims.

Unsurprisingly, The Daily Show argued this quite convincingly just the other night (though unfortunately they did not focus on how this isn't a Republican problem, but a problem of the current state of our Democracy as a whole):



So will we wake up to the true scourge—gerrymandering—and focus on putting a stop to the ghettoization of America or will we instead reinforce this ghettoization by continuing to blame the minority for tyrannizing the majority?

America the Basket Case

Furlough Prison Blues

From Jonathan Freedland, "Shutting Down the World?":

Perhaps this doesn’t matter much to American voters. They might not realize how closely the rest of the world—their economies as well as their media and popular culture—follow, react to, and are affected by the ups and downs of US political life. But they do. And right now, they look at the stalemate in Washington the same way they look at the periodic gun massacres that afflict the United States: with a bafflement that America, mighty America, for so long the most innovative, creative, energetic society on the planet, cannot solve problems that smaller, poorer, feebler countries cracked long ago. Americans might not realize it, but this shutdown, like the gun epidemic, reduces US influence in the world. It makes nations, and individuals, who still want to regard America as a model see it instead as a basket case.

Discursive Violence, Simone Weil, and "Asking Congress to Send a Message to the World"

What message is President Obama "asking Congress to send" here?

From the August 31st Statement by the President on Syria:

Here's my question for every member of Congress and every member of the global community:  What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price?  What's the purpose of the international system that we've built if a prohibition on the use of chemical weapons that has been agreed to by the governments of 98 percent of the world's people and approved overwhelmingly by the Congress of the United States is not enforced?  

[...]

Ultimately, this is not about who occupies this office at any given time; it’s about who we are as a country.  I believe that the people’s representatives must be invested in what America does abroad, and now is the time to show the world that America keeps our commitments.  We do what we say.  And we lead with the belief that right makes might -- not the other way around.

[...]

I’m ready to act in the face of this outrage.  Today I’m asking Congress to send a message to the world that we are ready to move forward together as one nation.

Much has been written about President Obama's decision to use retaliatory strikes against the Assad regime in Syria over the use of chemical weapons—because of just war theory, because the use of chemical weapons is a "game changer," because of the Responsibility to Protect—but I have not yet seen much of anything written about the intrinsic rather than consequentialist meaning of this decision.  In other words:

What does it mean to use military force "to send a message"?  What does it mean to kill or to be killed "to show the world that America keeps our commitments"?

Whether or not the retaliatory strikes achieve whatever desired effect Congress and the international community might hope for from them—ending the use of chemical weapons or tipping the balance of power in Syria—and whether or not the retaliatory strikes are even voted for by Congress and supported by the international community, discursive violence has already been done to Syria.

As George Yancy recently argued with regards to the Travyon Martin case in his piece entitled "Walking While Black in the 'White Gaze'":

Zimmerman later said: “Something’s wrong with him. Yep, he’s coming to check me out,” and, “He’s got something in his hands.” Zimmerman also said, “I don’t know what his deal is.” A black young male with “something” in his hands, wearing a hoodie, looking suspicious, and perhaps on drugs, and there being “something wrong with him,” is a racist narrative of fear and frenzy. The history of white supremacy underwrites this interpretation. Within this context of discursive violence, Zimmerman was guilty of an act of aggression against Trayvon Martin, even before the trigger was pulled. Before his physical death, Trayvon Martin was rendered “socially dead” under the weight of Zimmerman’s racist stereotypes. Zimmerman’s aggression was enacted through his gaze, through the act of profiling, through his discourse and through his warped reconstruction of an innocent black boy that instigates white fear.

According to Yancy, Zimmerman had already done grave harm to Martin before even getting out of the car just by how he saw and spoke of Martin.  This act of discursive violence, this act of "render[ing] 'socially dead'," is similarly what we are currently doing to the people of Syria.  By seeing and speaking of Syria as to-be-bombed we are putting the people of Syria in a situation tantamount to the box in which Schrödinger put his hypothetical cat.  While we debate, they are both simultaneously living and dead, for as President Obama declared, "this mission is not time-sensitive; it will be effective tomorrow, or next week, or one month from now."

However, whereas the lethal violence done to Schrödinger's cat was a "choice" made by the laws of physics, the symbolic violence done to the Syrian people is a choice made by us, and thus a choice that we need to think about in different terms than the consequentialist framing currently dominating this debate, for the very act of debating whether or not to strike is already an act of violence, is already a framing of human beings as worthy of being attacked, and moreover as worthy of being attacked in order to "send a message."

If, as President Obama declared, we view the use of chemical weapons as "an assault on human dignity," then we should "send a message to the world" not by perpetuating the degradation of human dignity by allowing it to be "rendered 'socially dead'" but by showing the world that we respect human dignity.  The members of the military who are to carry out these symbolic strikes and the people of Syria who are to be symbolically struck are not having their dignity respected in our current debate.  Dignity is not respected by forcing human beings to exist not knowing if their potential deaths will be "effective tomorrow, or next week, or one month from now."

An Encounter with Simone Weil

As Simone Weil wrote in her brilliant essay "The Iliad, or Poem of Force":

Here we see force in its grossest and most summary form—the force that kills.  How much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising in its effects is the other force, the force that does not kill, i.e., that does not kill just yet.  It will surely kill, it will possibly kill, or perhaps it merely hangs, poised and ready, over the head of the creature it can kill, at any moment, which is to say at every moment.  In whatever aspect, its effect is the same: it turns a man into a stone.  From its first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another, quite prodigious too in its own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive. 

[...] 

A man stands disarmed and naked with a weapon pointing at him; this person becomes a corpse before anybody or anything touches him.