Matthew T. Witt

Conjuring the Holographic State Scripting Security Doctrine for a (New) World of Disorder

No current policy paradigm, however interdisciplinary, provides an adequate and coherent account of post-9/11 security doctrine for “a war with no clear end or scope.” Like the hologram, the image of the terrorist constructed by PATRIOT and kindred legislation appears vivid while defying a definitive grasp, just as the holographic image dematerializes on the hand reaching to touch it. This article sketches etiology for a new policy analytic paradigm that is coined here, the Holographic State, and explores its suitability for policy and administrative sense making under conditions where the epistemological and ontological foundations of policy inquiry have been made profoundly unstable.

Preventing State Crimes Against Democracy

This article analyzes U.S. vulnerabilities to state crimes against democracy (SCADs). SCADs are actions or inactions by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes and undermine popular sovereignty. Watergate and Iran–Contra are well‐known examples of SCADs involving top officials. SCADs in high office are difficult to detect and successfully prosecute because they are usually complex and compartmentalized; investigations are often compromised by conflicts of interests; and powerful norms discourage speculation about corruption in high office. However, liberal democracies can reduce their vulnerability to state political criminality by identifying vulnerabilities proactively and instituting policies for SCAD detection and prevention.

Counternarratives as Critical Perspectives in Public Administration Curricula

This article argues for the inclusion of critical perspectives in public administration curricula to explore the historical and contemporary processes that contribute to disparity and injustice. The counternarratives examined in the article include social construction, inclusive feminism, critical urban planning, and democratic cultural pluralism. Critical perspectives or counternarratives are presented as challenges to hegemonic scripts that will aid in creating a workforce that is not only equipped to operate within a global society but understands the economic and social context that operationalize “others” in society.

Pretending Not to See or Hear, Refusing to Signify: The Farce and Tragedy of Geocentric Public Affairs Scholarship

This article opens with an inventory of how popular culture passion plays are homologous to the stampeding disenfranchisement everywhere of working classes and the emasculation of professional codes of ethics under siege by neoliberal initiatives and gambits.The article then examines a recent example of contemporary,“deconstructive” scholarly analysis and inventory of presidential “Orwellian doublespeak.” The preoccupation among contemporary critical scholarship with “discourse analysis” and language gambits is criticized for displacing interrogation of real-event anomalies, as with the porous account given by the 9/11 Commission for what happened that fateful day. The article concludes by explaining how critical scholarship consistently falls short of unmasking Master Signifiers.

Sense Making Under “Holographic” Conditions: Framing SCAD Research:

The ellipses of due diligence riddling the official account of the 9/11 incidents continue being ignored by scholars of policy and public administration. This article introduces intellectual context for examining the policy heuristic “State Crimes Against Democracy” (SCAD) (deHaven-Smith, 2006) and its usefulness for better understanding patterns of state criminality of which no extant policy analytic model gives adequate account.This article then introduces papers included in this symposium examining the chimerical presence and perfidious legacy of state criminality against democracy.

Conspiracy Theory Reconsidered Responding to Mass Suspicions of Political Criminality in High Office

This article criticizes recent proposals for covert government operations against conspiracy-theory groups and networks. The article argues that fear of secret plots by political insiders is intrinsic to America’s civic culture, legal traditions, and political institutions. The appropriate government response to conspiracy theories is not to try to silence mass suspicions but instead to establish procedures for ensuring that suspicious events are thoroughly and credibly investigated. As it stands, investigations of assassinations, defense failures, election breakdowns, and other political events with grave implications for America and the world fail to meet basic standards for transparency, independence, and objectivity.

Sense making under 'holographic' conditions: framing research into SCADs

The ellipses of due diligence riddling the official account of the 9/11 incidents continue being ignored by scholars of policy and public administration. This article introduces intellectual context for examining the policy heuristic “State Crimes Against Democracy” (SCAD) (deHaven-Smith, 2006) and its usefulness for better understanding patterns of state criminality of which no extant policy analytic model gives adequate account.This article then introduces papers included in this symposium examining the chimerical presence and perfidious legacy of state criminality against democracy.

Midnight in the Garden of PA

Intellectual “traditions” are traceable to and from any number of sources made salient by the prescient historiographer. Distinctive from the arts and sciences from which it draws, public administration scholarship is inextricably defined by zeitgeist; for such scholarship must, one way or the other, come to terms with “what is to be done” in the face of any number of pressing, real-time dilemmas. In this respect, the Minnowbrook “tradition” derives in major part from soul-searching efforts among public administration scholars following the revelations of the Kerner Report of 1968 into “civil disorders” occurring over the previous few years in major metropolitan areas across the United States. These “disorders” were, in fact, the eruption of profound desperation and rage surging from decades of double dealing by U.S. and state governments in matters of race and civil rights. Not mincing rhetoric, the report found

Never Post-Racial: The Persistence of the Dual State

Following the riots of the 1960s in major U.S. cities and the 1968 Kerner Commission Report, some public administration scholars initiated a limited focus on race themes in public administration. Today, mass incarceration serves more purposes than the kettling and destruction of young men of color or capital accumulation through the private prison complex and real property appropriation. Through linkages to immigration and terrorism, race is now resurgent as a key signifier of state legitimacy. The Black Lives Matter movement now heightens the urgency for public administration scholars to renew examination of enduring themes of race and public service (Blessett, Gaynor, Witt, & Alkadry, 2016). Although there is substantial scholarship produced by critical race theorists on the role that race has played in forming and sustaining institutions in the United States (cf. Delgado & Stafancic, 2013), with few exceptions (Alkadry & Blessett, 2010; Stivers, 2007) mainstream public administration scholarship has not closely examined how historic influences reproduce racialized social stratification in the United States. This article identifies how institutional practices in the United States emerge from and serve “dual state” practices and commitments founded on and devoted to recapitulating a racialized social contract.

Economic Delusions and Denial

The ontology and epistemology of neoclassical economics exhibit little restraint in ideological and imperial extension to nonmarket application. The colonization of public administration by economic canon is a vexing epistemological issue, demanding critical reckoning of the “tribe,” and chorus, of economic “fellow travelers” marching to yet another sect of economics (Public Choice Theory [PCT]) and invoking a creedlike economic parable in a devoted, liturgical incantation of the virtues of the “free market.” From the mythical narrative embedded within the tablet of the “Pareto Optimum” (Pareto, 1972); the methodological fraud (Thurow, 1984) disguised within the “Theory of Revealed Preferences” (Samuelson, 1938); the cowardice of the retreat of economics into a mathematical labyrinth of “Physics Envy” (Streeten, 1999); the fiction of “principal/agent” delineations; the ideological projection of “rent seeking”; and the eschewing of any nonautogamous testing of “social realities” (Dixon, Dogan, & Kouzmin, 2004), the “Grand Inquisitorial” project of a postmodern persuasion would need to consider, as Eagleton (1996, p. 132) surmised, how “fragmented, postmodernism is susceptible to the restless, transforming and co-opting pluralism of Capitalism.” As Eagleton