GLOBAL INQUIRIES IN FREEDOM AND TYRANNY
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PROJECT
It was assumed, until recently, that our commitment to democratic values made us all modern. Liberal democracy was thought to be the only political form suited to the highest realization of human aspirations. In fact, democracy was never simply a formal political institution or a system of elected government. It was a distinctively modern social imaginary: a voluntary contract between citizens in which justice—a world of freedom shared equally—was supposed to take precedence over mere peace.
But for better or worse liberal democracy, in its very striving for growth and consolidation, never ceased to steadily mutate into a system of unequal power. It became a system in which personhood was turned into the direct business of government. Not surprisingly, human identity and difference have today become arenas of strife over who controls the modern political narrative and its origin story.
We believe that an honest reckoning with the past and a realistic reimagination of the future of democracy requires an investigation not only of its normative and desired forms but also its malignant discontents. There might be no regeneration of democracy unless we are prepared to take a hard look at the implosive and explosive forms of anti-democracy that have become endemic in our time. Tragically, these implosions are often the work of those very participants who act in its name and while benefitting the most from its inequalities.
Perhaps no country has shaped the trajectory of democracy in the modern world more decisively and more enduringly than the United States of America. It is in America that the modern constitutional tradition is born, along with the ideal and institution of the Declaration of Independence, which many modern states would follow. America’s founding faith was anchored in the belief that a people, when bound together by a shared moral and political vision and restrained collectively by a common purpose and care, can indeed rule itself without the tutelage of human sovereigns or godly masters.
This wasn’t a vision rooted simply in the negation of England’s monarchical authority; America’s democratic vision put its faith in the people’s commitment to collective checks on illegitimate and unlimited powers and to formal equality in civic association, both guaranteed by the new republic’s written constitution.
Violence may repel us, but it also constitutes us, its temptation cutting to the soul of our very selfhood and identity. Here is the most paradoxical element of political violence: even as we theorize about it in classrooms and on campuses, it compels us to look away when we see it orchestrated against others in the world, thereby obscuring from our view the real structure and form of injustice that makes such violence possible in the first place. This denialism is the moral scaffold of violence. Without a lie, perjury, or just insincerity of those who claim to be superior, as James Baldwin repeatedly tells us, there would be no violence.
Political nonviolence is the art of unlearning this paradox. And in the most fundamental sense, political nonviolence is the craft of making the inequality of our world visible, on its own stark, unjust terms.
Freedom is unarguably the most fundamental idea in scientific and philosophical conceptions of human life. In truth, no investigation of our social and moral life can do without touching upon either the cognitive dimensions of freedom or the logic of force that physically constitutes it. What is it that makes the idea of freedom so vital to human existence and to the relationship between humanity and other life forms? Certainly, this vitality of the concept cannot be attributed solely to freedom’s cognitive and worldly value: for instance, the right of human beings to physically move and their liberty to think freely. Indeed, it is often claimed that freedom is our only truly universal moral imperative, expressed by every human collectivity and social formation as a normative claim that everyone ought to have such liberties to move and think.
Among the most rational elements of modern life is the discourse of “law and order.” But the rhetoric of law and order has also meant the endemic presence of police power in civic life and the shadow of paramilitary forces in public spaces: these forces whose brutality, even and especially in liberal democracies, is always discriminatory and unequally felt, enforced by our racial and caste-ridden history. There is a history of violence underneath our democratic life, in other words. Just as we cannot understand the power of Gandhi without the brutal history of empire against which he struggled from the 1910s onward, we cannot grasp the hope of the Obama era without the courageous nonviolence of those whose commitment to civil rights in the 1960s required them to spill and sacrifice their own blood in face of the most brutal police assaults on their bodies.
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