Bruce Baum

Millian Radical Democracy: Education for Freedom and Dilemmas of Liberal Equality

This paper returns to J. S. Mill to draw out democratic conceptions of education and equality that challenge still-current conceptions of intractable human inequalities. Mill acknowledges that individuals differ in abilities. Nonetheless, he develops a broad conception of ‘education for freedom’ and insists that only ‘wretched social arrangements’ prevent virtually all people from exercising capacities for self-government in citizenship, marriage, and industry. In the same breath, he qualifies his democratic egalitarianism with reference to a sub-class of working people whose ‘low moral qualities’ leave them unfit for such self-government. Modern liberal states largely dismiss Mills more radical democratic impulse. Meanwhile, they reiterate and refine his exclusionary one through new practices for constructing and managing inequalities – for example, IQ tests, educational ‘tracking’, and social science categories like the ‘underclass’. I reconsider this divided legacy of Mills egalitarianism as a basis for rethinking the limits of todays ‘meritocratic’ egalitarianism.

Hollywood on Race in the Age of Obama: Invictus, Precious, and Avatar

Three popular US movies released at the end of 2009, Invictus, Precious, and Avatar, work in related ways to lay bare and also reinforce prevailing ideas in the United States and beyond about the politics of race in the first years of the Obama administration. At first glance the three movies are extremely different. Invictus (Warner Brothers), directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, is set in South Africa at the beginning of the post-apartheid era; and it dramatizes a true story. Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire (Lionsgate), directed by Lee Daniels, is a stark and somewhat bleak independent film that features little knownactors, alongwith a couple ofwell-knownpopmusic celebrities (Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz) in understated roles. (Mo’nique, who plays Precious’s mother in the movie, won a well-deserved Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award for best performance by an actress in a supporting role.) Avatar, written and directed by James Cameron, was by far the most popular North American movie of 2009, and it won Golden Globe Awards for Best Motion Picture and for Best Director. It is a state-of-the-art, partially animated, action-adventure science fiction movie about the impending military and corporate conquest of the planet Pandora tomineapreciousmineral calledunobtanium.Avatarpits thehuman invaders and their environmentally exploitive economic and political practices against the planet’s natives, the Na’vi, blue humanoid beings, and their deeply ecological and spiritual connection to their world. It is also an inter-species (and symbolically inter-racial and anti-colonial) love story. At another level, all three films endorse a widely held—particularly amongwhite people—but problematic view of racial politics at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century: that countries like the United States and South Africa now have moved into a post-racial era. These three movies have generated considerable commentary, particularly Avatar and Precious, but little has been said about how they all fit smoothly into a popular end of racism political narrative. On this view, the achievements of the US Civil Rights movement, the struggle to the end of South Africa’s apartheid system, and the presidential elections of two black leaders, Nelson Mandela, in 1994, and of Barack Obama, in 2008, have ushered a truly democratic and post-racial era. In the latter case, this view quickly surfaced in a number of commentaries about how Obama’s election to the US presidencymarked the dawn of a new era. For instance, writing in the New York Times the day after the 2008 presidential election, Adam Nagourney declared, “Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.” New Political Science, Volume 32, Number 4, December 2010

Racially writing the republic : racists, race rebels, and transformations of American identity

Racially Writing the Republic investigates the central role of race in the construction and transformation of American national identity from the Revolutionary War era to the height of the civil rights movement. Drawing on political theory, American studies, critical race theory, and gender studies, the contributors to this collection highlight the assumptions of white (and often male) supremacy underlying the thought and actions of major U.S. political and social leaders. At the same time, they examine how nonwhite writers and activists have struggled against racism and for the full realization of America’s political ideals. The essays are arranged chronologically by subject, and, with one exception, each essay is focused on a single figure, from George Washington to James Baldwin. The contributors analyze Thomas Jefferson’s legacy in light of his sexual relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings; the way that Samuel Gompers, the first president of the American Federation of Labor, rallied his organization against Chinese immigrant workers; and the eugenicist origins of the early-twentieth-century birth-control movement led by Margaret Sanger. They draw attention to the writing of Sarah Winnemucca, a Northern Piute and one of the first published Native American authors; the anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett; the Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan; and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who linked civil rights struggles in the United States to anticolonial efforts abroad. Other figures considered include Alexis de Tocqueville and his traveling companion Gustave de Beaumont, Juan Nepomuceno Cortina (who fought against Anglo American expansion in what is now Texas), Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and W. E. B. Du Bois. In the afterword, George Lipsitz reflects on U.S. racial politics since 1965. Contributors . Bruce Baum, Cari M. Carpenter, Gary Gerstle, Duchess Harris, Catherine A. Holland, Allan Punzalan Isaac, Laura Janara, Ben Keppel, George Lipsitz, Gwendolyn Mink, Joel Olson, Dorothy Roberts, Patricia A. Schechter, John Kuo Wei Tchen, Jerry Thompson

Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World

This chapter and the next deal with distinctly activist impulses in popular culture in a way that subsequent chapters do not. That is, the cultural objects in question—music in this chapter and two movies in the next—embody the efforts of musicians and filmmakers to push against or beyond the prevailing American liberal imagination. Released in a moment of budding political ferment, they provide an opportunity to consider when, to what extent, and in what circumstances dissenting works of art and popular culture can challenge prevailing political values, perceptions, and imaginings.

Governing “Democratic” Equality Mill, Tawney, and Liberal Democratic Governmentality

This article examines tensions in the egalitarianism of J. S. Mill and R. H. Tawney alongside national education systems to develop a critical theory of democratic equality. Mill and Tawney advanced strong conceptions of democratic equality but with meritocratic elements that foreshadowed liberal governmental practices that have reconciled substantial inequalities in modern capitalist democracies with official commitments to the moral equality of persons. These practices include IQ testing, educational tracking, Taylorism, and the deployment by social scientists of the “underclass” category. While Mill and Tawney partly prefigured liberal governmentality, they also offered the basis for a compelling democratic egalitarian response.

Hollywood's Crisis of Capitalism 2011: Inside Job, The Company Men, and the Myth of a Good Capitalism

There is a revealing moment near the end of Inside Job (Sony Pictures Classics), the recent documentary film on the financial crisis. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), tells of a dinner that he attended, in the midst of the financial crisis, which was organized by Henry (“Hank”) Paulson, US Treasury Secretary at the time. The dinner included several officials and a couple of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) from the biggest banks in the United States. “And, surprisingly enough,” Strauss-Kahn says, “these men were arguing, ‘We are too greedy . . . ’ And they turned to the Treasury Secretary, saying, ‘You should regulate more because we are too greedy and we can’t avoid it. The only way to avoid it [that is, this unbridled greed] is to have more regulation.” At this, the writer and director of Inside Job, Charles Ferguson, remarks that he has spoken with numerous bankers and “this is the first time I heard anyone say that actually wanted their compensation to be regulated.” Then Strauss-Kahn responds, “Yeh, because it was the moment when they were afraid. And after, when a solution began to appear, probably they changed their minds.” Strauss-Kahn himself now appears to be a morally questionable figure. Nonetheless, his story raises a question that lies at the heart of Inside Job and of the second movie from 2010 that I am going to discuss, The Company Men (The Weinstein Company). Since capitalism relies on the pursuit of self-interest by “freely” contracting individuals to achieve worthy ends, is it predisposed to pervasive moral failings that are not merely “accidental” but “rather structurally necessary,” as Slavoj Žižek contends? For instance, were the financial crisis of 2008 and the massive British Petroleum (BP) oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, in

Music to Their Ears: Nancy Love’s Trendy Fascism, White Nationalism, and the Future of Whiteness

Nancy Love’s book Trendy Fascism: White Power Music and the Future of Democracy, about white nationalist music in the contemporary United States (US), speaks presciently to current events.1 The real estate magnate and reality TV celebrity Donald Trump has now been elected US president at the culmination of a vulgar populist campaign that garnered strong support among working class white Americans; his campaign invigorated white nationalists, including those in the so-called “alt-right” seeking to refurbish white nationalism; and Trump has chosen as his chief political strategist Stephen Bannon, head of Breitbart Media, who made the online Breitbart News “the platform for the alt-right.”2 Of course, these events build upon enduring trends in US politics.3 Yet, as Love notes, similar strains resonate broadly across modern states that struggle to meld liberal democratic ideals and capitalist globalization.4 Rather than taking the uncomplicated path of merely dismissing white nationalists as “deplorables,” as Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton did, Love takes a more challenging tack: she explores white power music to clarify how “the arts and popular culture, especially music, can catalyze either cultural conformity or cultural transformation,”5 and she considers how white nationalist identities speak to longings for meaning and solidarity. White power music, Love explains, is not so different from other forms of popular music in the United States that are infused with racism and sexism.6 Consequently, exploring how this music “plays with hate” sheds light on “the complex relationship between the cultural politics of white supremacy and liberal democracy.”7

Hollywood’s Crisis of Capitalism

There is a revealing moment near the end of Inside Job (2010), the award-winning documentary film on the financial crisis. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), tells of a dinner that he attended, in the midst of the financial crisis, which was organized by Henry (“Hank”) Paulson, US treasury secretary at the time. The dinner included several officials and a couple of CEOs from the biggest banks in the United States. “And, surprisingly enough,” Strauss-Kahn says, “these men were arguing, ‘We are too greedy. . . .’ And they turned to the Treasury Secretary, saying, ‘You should regulate more because we are too greedy and we can’t avoid it. The only way to avoid [this unbridled greed] is to have more regulation.”1 At this, the writer and director of Inside Job, Charles Ferguson, remarks that he has spoken with numerous bankers and “this is the first time I heard anyone say that actually wanted their compensation to be regulated.” Then Strauss-Kahn responds, “Yeh, because it was the moment when they were afraid. And after, when a solution began to appear, probably they changed their minds.”

“The Most Damage I Can Do”: Joel Olson in Political Theory, Political Critique, and Political Activism

The following essays were initially written for a roundtable in celebration of Joel’s work that was convened at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association in 2012.We set out to speak about the wide range of commitments and concerns that shaped Joel’s career as an activist-teacher-scholar: anarchism, the abolition of whiteness, the virtues of fanaticism, the dangers of corporate capitalism, and the necessity and joys of grass-roots action. Joel set so many forces in motion that what we hoped to accomplish by our engagement was not merely to look back in remembrance but to keep moving forward. Yet very few, if any, of us feel equal to the example that Joel set. From the beginning of his academic career at the University of Minnesota in 1991, Joel integrated political activism with intellectual inquiry. This is not to say that he bent ideas to serve political ends but that he posed questions to the history of political thought that would bring insights to his politics. Early on, that politics was anarchism and his political theory interlocutor was Hannah Arendt. A seminar that he took with me inspired him to a critical engagement with Arendt’s “council democracies” and the revolutionary committees of the Spanish anarchists. It first took shape as a seminar paper but Joel lost no time in asking me what it would take to develop it for publication. He was characteristically New Political Science, 2014 Vol. 36, No. 2, 238–265, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2014.894702

Apes, Humans, and Other Animals

One way that the liberal imagination has been profoundly challenged in the 65 years since Lionel Trilling published The Liberal Imagination is with regard to how liberals historically have construed the relationship between human beings and the nonhuman natural world. The liberal imagination typically has been anthropocentric, speaking of “rights of man” and how “all men” or all people are created equal.