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Capitalist Ethos and Imperatives Corrupt Liberal and Democratic Education

Jacob Lawrence, The Library (1978)

Prelude

Literacy in the U.S.

• Nationwide, on average, 79% of U.S. adults are literate in 2022.
• 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2022.
• 54% of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level.

*          *          *  

“In 1789 and for long afterward, in France and elsewhere, a single word often sufficed to explain the origins of the French Revolution: books. Just days after the fall of the Bastille, the radical journalist and politician Bertrand Barère wrote, ‘Books did it all. Books created opinion, books brought enlightenment down into all classes of society, books destroyed fanaticism and overthrew the prejudices that had subjugated us.’ Even counterrevolutionaries who saw the Revolution as a catastrophe agreed with Barère as to its cause: it was books or, sometimes, ‘philosophy’—by which they meant the great movement of ideas we now call the Enlightenment.

No serious historian today would attribute this kind of power to books alone. We recognize that the French Revolution occurred for many reasons. But no serious historian today would discount the importance of books either. This revolution, one of the greatest in history, did not just replace one king with another. It attempted to establish an entirely new regime, grounded in principles that authors had widely discussed before 1789: equality before the law, the sovereignty of the nation, religious toleration, the ‘rights of man.’ Books mattered.”—David A. Bell, “From Readers to Revolutionaries,” The New York Review of Books, June 27, 2019

What follows below is from an article “on the working class and the meaning of education,” Kenan Malik’s column in the Observer last month (31 July): “If education is all about getting a job, the humanities are left just to the rich.” It so happens that there is an equally cogent and compelling review essay at Jacobin by Kieron Monks on a new biography on C.L.R. James that in several respects complements Malik’s piece: “C. L. R. James loved seeing workers take ownership of culture that was thought to belong to their betters. He believed in the creative talents of workers, just as he believed in their power to secure their own liberation without direction from above.” In Monks’ words, James

“took satisfaction from seeing the proletariat take ownership of cultural forms thought to belong to their betters, from West Indian steel bands playing Rimsky-Korsakov to young cricketers from the barrack yards beating the English at their own game. James believed in the creative talents of the working classes just as he believed in their power to secure their own liberation without direction from above, a view that informed his rejection of Stalinism and the Communist Party. He idealized the direct democracy of ancient Greece as the most perfect system. [….]

And now Malik:

‘We rented a garret, for which we paid (I think) 25s a year, bought a few second-hand forms and desks, borrowed a few chairs from the people in the house, bought a shilling’s worth of coals… and started our college.’

So remembered Joseph Greenwood, a cloth cutter in a West Yorkshire mill, about how, in 1860, he helped set up Culloden College, one of hundreds of working-class mutual improvement societies in 19th-century Britain. “We had no men of position or education connected with us,” he added, “but several of the students who had made special study of some particular subject were appointed teachers, so that the teacher of one class might be a pupil in another.”

Greenwood’s story is one of many told by Jonathan Rose in his classic The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, a magnificent history of the struggles of working people to educate themselves, from early autodidactism to the Workers’ Educational Association. For those within this tradition the significance of education was not simply in providing the means to a better job but in allowing for new ways of thinking.

‘Books to me became symbols of social revolution,’ observed James Clunie, a house painter who became the Labour MP for Dunfermline in the 1950s. ‘The miner was no longer the “hewer of wood and the drawer of water” but became … a leader in his own right, advocate, writer, the equal of men.’ By the time that Rose published his book in 2001, that tradition had largely ebbed away. And, in the two decades since, so has the sense of education as a means of expanding one’s mind.

Last week, Roehampton University, in south-west London, confirmed that it is going to fire and rehire half its academic workforce and sack at least 65. Nineteen courses, including classics and anthropology, are likely to be closed. It wants to concentrate more on ‘career-focused’ learning. It is the latest in a series of cuts to the humanities made by British universities, from languages at Aston to English literature at Sheffield Hallam. These cuts mark a transformation in the role of universities that is rooted in three trends: the introduction of the market into higher education; a view of students as consumers; and an instrumental attitude to knowledge.

The 1963 Robbins report into British higher education argued for expansion of universities on the grounds that learning was a good in itself. ‘The search for truth is an essential function of the institutions of higher education,’ it observed, ‘and the process of education is itself most vital when it partakes in the nature of discovery.’ The 2010 Browne report on the funding of higher education took a very different approach, viewing the significance of universities as primarily economic. ‘Higher education matters,’ it insisted, because it allows students to find employment with ‘higher wages and better job satisfaction’ and ‘helps produce economic growth.’

The utilitarian view of education is often presented as a means of advancing working-class students by training them for the job market. What it actually does is tell working-class students to study whatever best fits them for their station in life. So, philosophy, history and literature increasingly become the playthings of the rich and privileged.

There is another way, too, in which the relationship between the working class and education has changed. A report last week from the think-tank the IPPR revealed the paucity of diversity among MPs, a subject of much debate recently. The IPPR says there is a 5% ‘representation gap’ on ethnicity – 10% of MPs have a minority background compared to 15% of the general populace. For women, the gap between prevalence in the population and in parliament is 17% and for the working class it is 27%. The biggest gap, however, comes with education – 86% of MPs have been to university compared to 34% of the population at large. The cleavage between voters and those who govern them is expressed through the class divide but even more so through the education gap. The proportion of women and minority MPs has increased over the past 30 years while that of working-class MPs has fallen dramatically. In the 1987-92 parliament, 28% of Labour MPs had a manufacturing, manual or unskilled job before entering parliament. By 2010, that was 10%, rising to 13% for the 2019 intake. For Tories, unsurprisingly, the figure was consistently below 5% and fell to just 1% in 2019.

Part of the reason for the decline in working-class MPs is that the institutions that gave workers a public platform, in particular trade unions, have waned. The RMT’s Mick Lynch, and his success in defending workers’ rights, has caught the public imagination. Fifty years ago, there were many Mick Lynches because the working class was more central to political life.

At the same time, education has become a marker of social difference in a novel way. As Western societies have become more technocratic, so there has developed, in the words of the political scientist David Runciman, ‘a new class of experts, for whom education is a prerequisite of entry into the elite’ – bankers, lawyers, doctors, civil servants, pundits, academics. The real educational divide is not ‘between knowledge and ignorance’ but ‘a clash between one world view and another.’ So, education has become a marker of the Brexit divide.

All this has led some to claim education, not class, is Britain’s real political divide. It isn’t. Education is, rather, both one of the most significant expressions of the class divide and a means of obscuring it. ‘If there is one man in the world who needs knowledge,’ wrote the Durham collier Jack Lawson in 1932, ‘it is he who does the world’s most needful work and gets the least return.’ That is as true today as it was 90 years ago.”

Relevant Bibliographies

• Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education
• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• Paulo Freire: A Reading Guide
• C.L.R. James: Marxist Humanist and Afro-Trinidadian Socialist
• The History, Theory and Praxis of the Left in the 1960s
• The Political Philosophy of Liberalism
• Marxism
• Mass Media: Politics, Political Economy, and Law
• Otto Neurath & Red Vienna: Mutual Philosophical, Scientific and Socialist Fecundity
• Progressive Philosophy of Education and Pedagogical Practices
• Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law

Sherry F. Colb 1966-2022 — In Memoriam

I routinely check out the blog posts at Dorf on Law, and this morning I came across something completely unexpected (although her illness was known to others) and heartbreaking news: Professor Dorf’s “co-blogger, co-author, colleague, best friend, and wife for over 31 years—died this morning.” Here is the notice at Cornell Law School where Sherry F. Colb was the C.S. Wong Professor of Law. In the words of Bridget Crawford at The Faculty Lounge, “Professor Colb will be missed by so many. May her memory be a blessing.” Speaking for myself and on behalf of my co-bloggers, we offer our deep condolences to Michael C. Dorf and his family.

Update: For links to one of Professor Colb’s books as well as her work available online, please see here and here at Larry Solum’s Legal Theory blog.

Morally and Politically Responsible Rhetoric: how does reason persuade?

       

Arguments are effective as weapons only if they are logically cogent, and if they are so they reveal connexions, the disclosure of which is not the less necessary to the discovery of truth for being also handy in the discomfiture of opponent. — Gilbert Ryle (qtd. in Garver below)

The title of my latest bibliography is (yes, it’s a mouthful) “Toward Assessing the Apparent Imperatives and Possible Constraints of Digital Media and Artificial Intelligence (AI): communication, speech, and rhetoric in a fragile technocratic capitalist and constitutional democracy.” Whenever I compose these lists, I try to read a substantial amount of what appears by my lights to be the crème-de-la-crème of the literature in English. Hence this quote from Eugene Garver’s indispensable work, Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (University of Chicago Press, 1994):

“Reasoning does not automatically persuade, yet, if artful rhetoric [which speaks to or implies character] is argumentative, nothing but reason persuades.”

As Garver elsewhere explains, it is “obvious why character or ēthos persuades: the end of rhetoric is belief or trust, and belief and trust attach primarily to people whom we trust, and only derivatively to propositions which we believe.”

Garver now states something which I suspect rubs more than a few professional philosophers the wrong way insofar as they hope or believe that sound, valid, or even quite plausible (i.e., coherent or well-formed) arguments should have some corresponding measure of persuasive capacity (I am not saying they fail to distinguish valid or sound arguments from persuasive ones, only that there is a tendency to think the former has some necessary connection to the latter):

“There is no reason to expect a correlation between degrees of persuasiveness and degrees of validity or coherence, or any other strictly logical value, as there is for ēthos and pathos [emotion or passion, for Aristotle, with regard to emotions in the Rhetoric, did not refer to any or all emotions but certain emotions in particular].”

       

There is of course more to this argument but suffice here to say that perhaps philosophers who profess belief in the values and purposes intrinsic to democracy (which has of late exposed its weaknesses and fragility in this country), especially those keenly interested in moral psychology and ethics, “public reason” (John Dewey, John Rawls, Gerald Gaus, Amartya Sen, et al.) and the various forms of communication in a—participatory, deliberative and representative—democracy, will come to appreciate and thus help cultivate the possibilities for and the various fora of morally and politically responsible public rhetoric.

       

Democracy and Digital Technology

       

I’ve put together a short reading list that speaks to questions that arise from “democracy and digital technology” (democracy in theory and practice, and in participatory, deliberative, and representative modes, all of which are essential to ‘open democracy’ in Landemore’s sense). It is intended to be part of a forthcoming larger list that will include material on “artificial intelligence” (AI) while widening the scope to address issues that arise within a democratic society that in significant and often insidious ways is malformed by capitalist political economy (as evidenced in our earlier post on Zephyr Teachout’s NYRB article). It will also contain works more philosophically and ethically oriented (reflecting my critique—some of which is here—of the many extravagant claims often made on behalf of AI):

• Aaker, Jennifer and Andy Smith (with Carlye Adler) The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Drive Social Change (Jossey-Bass, 2010).
• Allan, Stuart. Online News: Journalism and the Internet (Open University Press, 2006).
• Baldwin-Philippi, Jessica. Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital Campaigning and the Construction of Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2015).
• Bennett, W. Lance and Alexandra Segerberg. The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
• Bernholz, Lucy, Hélène Landemore, and Rob Reich, eds. Digital Technology and Democratic Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2021).
• Bimber, Bruce. Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
• Boler, Megan, ed. Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times (MIT Press, 2008).
• Coleman, Stephen and Jay G. Blumler. The Internet and Democratic Citizenship: Theory, Practice, and Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
• Cowhey, Peter F. and Jonathan D. Aronson. Transforming Global Information and Communication Markets: The Political Economy of Innovation (MIT Press, 2009).
• Cram, Ian. Liberal Democracy, Law and the Citizen Speaker: Regulating Online Speech (Hart Publishing, 2022). 
• Deibert, Ronald, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain, eds. Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering (MIT Press, 2008).
• Deibert, Ronald, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain, eds. Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace (MIT Press, 2010).
• Ess, Charles. Digital Media Ethics (Polity Press, 2nd ed., 2014).
• Fenton, Natalie, ed. New Media, Old News: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age. (Sage Publications, 2010).
• Franda, Marcus. China and India Online: The Politics of Information Technology in the World’s Largest Nations (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
• Gerbaudo, Paolo. Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (Pluto Press, 2012).
• Henry, Neil. Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media (University of California Press, 2007).
• Hindman, Matthew. The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2009).
• Howard, Philip N. and Muzammil M. Hussain. Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Lessing, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (Penguin Press, 2004).
• Lynch, Michael Patrick. The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data (Liveright Publishing, 2016).
• Mandiberg, Michael, ed. The Social Media Reader (New York University Press, 2012).
• McCaughey, Martha and Michael D. Ayers, eds. Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2003).
• Murthy, Dhiraj. Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age (Polity Press, 2013).
• O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Broadway Books, 2016).
• O’Neil, Onora. A Philosopher Looks at Digital Communication (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
• Packard, Ashley. Digital Media Law (Blackwell, 2010).
• Papacharissi, Zizi A. A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age (Polity Press, 2010).
• Pasquale, Frank. The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press, 2015).
• Persily, Nathaniel and Joshua A. Tucker, eds. Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
• Pickard, Victor. Democracy without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society (Oxford University Press, 2020).
• Solove, Daniel J. The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age (New York University Press, 2004).
• Smith, Justin E. The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning (Princeton University Press, 2022).
• Teachout, Zephyr. “The Boss Will See You Know,” The New York Review of Books, August 18, 2022. [This is a review of four books about digital surveillance, tracking, and performance monitoring of millions of workers in an affluent capitalist but deeply inegalitarian society.]
• Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (MIT Press, 2005).
• Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2011).
• Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (Penguin Books, 2016.
• van de Donk, Wim, Brian D. Loader, Paul G. Nixon, and Dieter Rucht, eds. Cyberprotest: New Media, Citizens and Social Movements (Routledge, 2004).
• Zittrain, Jonathan. The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (Yale University Press, 2009).
• Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (PublicAffairs, 2019).

Please note: relevant bibliographies are appended to our prior post.

Digital Surveillance, Tracking, and Performance Monitoring of Workers in the U.S.

The following is from selected parts of Zephyr Teachout’s “The Boss Will See You Now” (New York Review of Books, Aug. 18, 2022), a review essay of four recent titles about digital surveillance, tracking, and performance monitoring of millions of workers in an affluent capitalist and deeply inegalitarian society (conditions that amount to what Elizabeth Anderson terms ‘private government’).

With wholly atomized workers, discouraged from connecting with one another but forced to offer a full, private portrait of themselves to their bosses, I cannot imagine a democracy.

*          *          *

[….] “As it happened, the 1980s and 1990s were a major turning point in surveillance, the period when companies went on their first buying sprees for electronic performance-monitoring. In 1987 approximately six million workers were watched in some kind of mediated way, generally a video camera or audio recorder; by 1994, roughly one in seven American workers, about 20 million, was being electronically tracked at work. The numbers steadily increased from there. When videotape technology was supplanted by digital devices that could scan multiple locations at once, the cameras first installed to protect businesses from theft shifted their insatiable gaze from the merchandise to the workers.

The second big turning point in electronic performance-monitoring is happening right now. It’s driven by wearable tech, artificial intelligence, and Covid. Corporations’ use of surveillance software increased by 50 percent in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, according to some estimates, and has continued to grow.

This new tracking technology is ubiquitous and intrusive. Companies track for security, for efficiency, and because they can. They inspect and preserve and analyze movements, conversations, social connections, and affect. If the first surveillance expansion was a territorial grab, asserting authority over the whole person at work, the second is like fracking the land. It is changing the structural composition of how humans relate to one another and to themselves.

Some long-haul truckers have to drive a fifty-foot flatbed truck six hundred miles a day with a video camera staring them down the entire time, watching their eyes, their knuckles, their twitches, their whistles, their neck movements. Imagine living in front of that nosy boss-face camera for months on end as it scans your cab, which serves as your home most of the time. On one of many angry Reddit forums about driver-facing cameras, a trucker wrote that he’d put up with one only ‘if the company owner gives me a 24/7 unrestricted stream in to his house.’ ‘Those few hundred miles a day is the only time I completely have to myself and I feel as if it is being tainted,’ added another. ‘I just want to pick my nose and scratch my balls in peace man.’ A bus driver described the human desire to ‘pull a weird face or talk to yourself or sing along with a song…. I could feel how much less cortisol was flowing through my body in my second job where the buses were older and did not have cameras inside. It makes you unhealthy and run down.’

Employers read employees’ e-mails, track their Internet use, and listen to their conversations. Nurses and warehouse workers are forced to wear ID badges, wristbands, or clothing with chips that track their movements, measuring steps and comparing them to coworkers’ and the steps taken yesterday. The wristbands that now commonly encircle your skin, caressing your median nerve, might in the future be used to send signals back to you or your employer, measuring how many minutes you spend in the bathroom. Amazon, which minutely tracks every moment of a warehouse worker’s activity, every pause and conversation, has a patent for a wristband that would, the Times reported, ‘emit ultrasonic sound pulses and radio transmissions to track where an employee’s hands were in relation to inventory bins’ and then vibrate to steer the worker toward the correct bin. A ‘SmartCap’ used in trucking monitors brainwaves for weariness.

Off-the-shelf human resources software can monitor workers’ tone of voice. One major firm, Cogito, touts its product as ‘the AI-informed coach [that] augments humans through live, in-call voice analysis and feedback.’ While workers are making fifteen dollars an hour fielding angry consumer complaints in a cubicle, they must pay heed to a pop-up screen that starts flashing if they talk too fast, if there is overlap between their voice and the customer’s voice, or if a pause is too long. ‘Empathy at scale,’ the company boasts.

In one sense, intimately tracking behavior is old news: the business model of tech companies like Facebook and Google, after all, relies on tracking users on- and off-site. The commodification of data is in its third decade. But surveillance and automatic management at work are different. Workers can’t opt out without losing their jobs: you can’t turn off the camera in the truck if doing so goes against company policy; you can’t rip the recording device off your ID card. And worker surveillance comes with a powerful implicit threat: if the company notices too much fatigue, you might get overlooked for a promotion. If it overhears something it doesn’t like, you could get fired.

The political implications of ubiquitous employment surveillance are monumental. While bosses always listened in on worker conversations, they could only listen rarely—anything more was logistically impossible. Not now. Employees have to assume that everything they say can be recorded. What does it mean when all the words, and the tone of those words, might be replayed? Whispering has lost its power.

In many cases, worker surveillance is installed for ostensible safety reasons, like the thermal cameras installed to protect customers and coworkers from a worker who has a fever. But it is not, it turns out, good for our well-being. Electronic surveillance puts the body of the tracked person in a state of perpetual hypervigilance, which is particularly bad for health—and worse when accompanied by powerlessness. Employees who know they are being monitored can become anxious, worn down, extremely tense, and angry. Monitoring causes a release of stress chemicals and keeps them flowing, which can aggravate heart problems. It can lead to mood disturbances, hyperventilation, and depression. Business professors from Cornell and McMaster Universities recently conducted a survey of electronic monitoring in call centers and showed that the stress it caused was as great as the stress caused by abusive customers. Workers felt that monitoring was used for discipline, not improvement, and that the expectations were unreasonable and the use of monitoring unfair. They preferred a human boss to an ever-present robot spy with the power to affect their paychecks.

Is it any surprise that truckers’ mental health is suffering? Or that call center employees are breaking down? Truckers and call center workers report a kind of destabilizing fog, a constant layer of uncertainty and paranoia: which hand gesture, which bathroom break, which conversation was it that caused me to lose that bonus? ‘I know we’re on a job, but, I mean, I’m afraid to scratch my nose,’ an Amazon driver told Insider for a story about the company’s driver-facing cameras. She didn’t share her name for fear of reprisal. [….]

All of this is demoralizing and dystopian, but what does it have to do with democracy? Elizabeth Anderson’s lively and persuasive 2017 book, Private Government, offers a partial answer. Anderson, a political philosopher at the University of Michigan, shakes the reader by the shoulders to get us out of the strange rigidity that pervades public discussion of government. Employment is a form of government, she argues, one that is far more relevant and immediate for most people than the Washington, D.C., kind.

A powerful company like Amazon, for instance, sets its own terms of employment—and in so doing impacts those of UPS drivers and the broader logistics industry. Private employers with industry-wide influence have coercive power—what Anderson calls governing power. Private government, personified by private guilds or by state-sanctioned economic monopolies in soap, salt, and leather, was the central target of intellectuals and activists like John Locke and the Levellers. Anderson sees in Locke, Adam Smith, and others a belief that the arbitrary power to debase and discipline is a threat to a free society, wherever it appears, and that public, accountable government should protect against private tyranny.

Many modern ‘thinkers and politicians,’ she argues, are ‘like those patients who cannot perceive one-half of their bodies:’ they ‘cannot perceive half of the economy: they cannot perceive the half that takes place beyond the market, after the employment contract is accepted.’ As a result, companies are generally treated as wholly private. Many private-sector workers, Anderson writes, live under ‘dictatorships in their work lives. Usually, those dictatorships have the legal authority to regulate workers’ off-hour lives as well—their political activities, speech, choice of sexual partner, use of recreational drugs, alcohol, smoking, and exercise.’

For her, service workers who clock out, or technicians and realtors and cooks who seem endowed with substantial freedoms, are burdened by a legal system that allows corporations to fire a worker based on off-the-clock activity. The speech rights of workers are practically nonexistent except as they explicitly relate to labor organizing, which, Anderson argues, is effectively a dead letter these days because of the difficulty of enforcement and the fear of challenging the boss’s tactics.

How did things get so bad? Anderson believes the root issues that enabled the current dystopian workplace go back generations. When the Industrial Revolution shifted the ‘primary site of paid work from the household to the factory,’ it imported the long tradition of wholly arbitrary power within the household, in which children did not have freedom vis-à-vis their parents, and wives had limited freedom vis-à-vis their spouses. The Industrial Revolution could have provided an escape from the private tyrannies of home life, but instead it replicated them. During the heyday of the Ford Motor Company, its Sociological Department began inspecting workers’ homes. Anderson writes: ‘Workers were eligible for Ford’s famous $5 daily wage only if they kept their homes clean, ate diets deemed healthy, abstained from drinking, used the bathtub appropriately, did not take in boarders, avoided spending too much on foreign relatives, and were assimilated to American cultural norms.’

Anderson points out that while Apple does not visit people’s homes today, it does require retail workers to open their bags for inspections before coming into work. We take this for granted, she notes, but should we? Nearly half of Americans have undergone a suspicion-less drug test. And many workers have no protection from getting fired for what they say on social media. To those who claim the workplace isn’t government because you can quit, Anderson retorts, ‘This is like saying Mussolini wasn’t a dictator, because Italians could emigrate.’

Anderson isn’t focused on surveillance, but her work suggests two things. First, that to address the constant spying, we should focus on power, not just the technology. Labor rights and antitrust enforcement must be first-level responses to the current—and worsening—structures of power. Second, we should treat employer surveillance as we do any governmental surveillance—in other words, with deep suspicion. It is a truism that governmental surveillance chills speech and debate and erodes the public sphere; once we can perceive the workplace as a site of government, we can perhaps build a political movement for greater freedom in the places where working Americans spend most of their waking hours.

To make sense of the reality we are in, we need to be able to talk to one another without fear of our conversations being used against us. The private conversations among workers—and friendships, debates, questions—are part of the cohesion and connection that enables not just labor organizing but public life. When everything we say is being listened to—especially by a smaller and more powerful cadre of employers—it can become easier not to speak. This is not unlike the political totalitarianism that Hannah Arendt warned against, where the state aims to disintegrate both the private and the public by submerging the private into the public and then controlling the public. The logical conclusion of workplace surveillance is that the private sphere ceases to exist at home because it ceases to exist at work, where visibility into the worker’s life is unrestrained. [….]

It is no coincidence that routine work surveillance followed closely on the heels of the Reagan antitrust revolution and the collapse of private sector unionization. Nothing except unionization or new laws would stop an employer from taking all the data it is gathering from sensors and recordings and using them to more precisely adjust wages, until each worker gets the lowest wage at which they are willing to work, and all workers live in fear of retaliation. This is no more sci-fi than Facebook and Google serving users individualized content and ads designed to keep us on their services.

Tracking technology may be marketed as tools to protect people, but will end up being used to identify with precision how little each worker is willing to make. It will be used to depress wages and also kill the camaraderie that precedes unionization by making it harder to connect with other workers, poisoning the community that enables democratic debate. It will be used to disrupt solidarity by paying workers differently. And it will lead to anxiety and fear permeating more workplaces, as the fog of not knowing why you got a bonus or demotion shapes the day.

This matters because work is not an afterthought for democratic society; the relationships built at work are an essential building block. With wholly atomized workers, discouraged from connecting with one another but forced to offer a full, private portrait of themselves to their bosses, I cannot imagine a democracy.”

 Relevant Bibliographies

• Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing
• Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education
• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• Health: Law, Ethics and Social Justice
• Human Rights
• The Political Philosophy of Liberalism
• Marxism
• Mass Media: Politics, Political Economy, and Law
• Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law

 Image found here.

The attempted murder of Salman Rushdie and generalizations about "Islam"

Reflections on the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie as it relates to widespread perceptions and characterizations of, and generalizations about, “Islam.” See too this statement from Suzanne Nossel of PEN America. Update: Nossel’s opinion piece for The Guardian.

Perhaps not surprisingly, more than a few folks on the internet are using the occasion of the assault/attempted murder on Salman Rushdie in New York to spread or reinforce rash or hasty generalizations (and the informal fallacy of ‘converse accident’) that serve to confirm their ignorance of Islamic traditions and embolden their biases and prejudices about “Islam” while also indulging in a kind of virtue signaling that brings virtual applause in its wake. These generalizations concern “Islam” as a religious worldview and philosophy as well as those who are self-described or identified as Muslims. There is nothing peculiar about Islam vis-à-vis other religious worldviews and ideologies or other secular worldviews and ideologies that stands apart in this case provided we understand that individuals, groups, movements, sects, authorities, institutions, and so forth will often invoke their worldviews or ideologies to motivate, justify or excuse actions that we generally hold to be immoral and criminal. In other words, these ideologies and worldviews can be used for good or ill, rightly or wrongly, for peace or violence, and so forth: there is a spectrum of reasonable and rational rationalizations at one end, and irrational, immoral, or perverse rationalizations at the other end (‘rationalization’ in a pejorative sense).

To be sure, some ideologies are morally problematic ab initio, so to speak, such as fascism or Stalinism or Maoism. At other times and places, religious and secular worldviews (examples of the former: Poland, India, the U.S., Sri Lanka, Myanmar, etc.; …of the latter: Party-State Socialism /Communism, Nazism, etc.) become paired with forms of nationalism, and in such cases we find religious beliefs and identity harnessed toward non-religious, non-spiritual and immoral or unethical goals or ends (and thus we have a manifest contradiction between means and ends, wherein there is a failure to recognize the choice of means can distort or destroy otherwise justifiable ends). And of course in the history of religious and secular worldviews and ideologies, we are likely to find occasional currents, periods, places, etc. in which what occurs in the real world, on the ground as we say, bears little or no relation to a normative model or picture of the principal beliefs and values and virtues found in these worldviews. It is simply unavailing and uninformative to refer to these ideologies and worldview in toto without the necessary distinctions and specifications that history and the social sciences can provide alongside the relevant immediate conditions and circumstances that allow us to make sense of an action or event. In short, there is nothing significant or important or meaningful we can infer about “Islam” as such from the stabbing of Salman Rushdie. And nothing I have said diminishes our horror and disgust over this egregiously immoral and criminal act of personal violence.

Alas, fatwas have become a fairly indiscriminate legal category, with opposing religious authorities and jurists formulating fatwas that suit their interests and the majority of Muslims are left to their own devices, so to speak, when it comes to acknowledging or assessing their validity or significance. The Wikipedia entry has some excellent discussion of this in the latter half of the article. The young men (and occasionally women) that resort to these acts of violence around the world suggest, it seems to me, that this is not, strictly speaking or peculiarly, about religion, but about their sense of individual and collective identity, moral psychology, recognition and self-worth, in which case one can find justification, warrant, rationalizations, what have you in any number of ideologies and worldviews, secular or religious, political or nationalist, for such acts of violence (hence the many mass shootings in this country). On occasion of course, ideologies and worldviews appear to be altogether missing from the motivational structure, in which case one looks closer to home and upbringing for causal variables (some grievance, slight, disrespect, abuse, and so forth). This is not to say some fatwa or prospect of reward played no role whatsoever in the attempted murder of Rushdie, but we need to account for why some individuals choose to go this route while many others would never even consider doing such things: what sorts of individuals are readily moved to the tipping point?

*     *     *

As for fatwas [fatāwā] (an incredibly complex topic in Islamic jurisprudence), this snippet from the Wikipedia entry on same is informative:

[….] “In Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini used proclamations and fatwas to introduce and legitimize a number of institutions, including the Council of the Islamic Revolution and the Iranian Parliament. Khomeini’s most publicized fatwa was the proclamation condemning Salman Rushdie to death for his novel The Satanic Verses. Khomeini himself did not call this proclamation a fatwa, and some scholars have argued that it did not qualify as one, since in Islamic legal theory only a court can decide whether an accused is guilty. However, after the proclamation was presented as a fatwa in Western press, this characterization was widely accepted by both its critics and its supporters, and the Rushdie Affair is credited with bringing the institution of fatwa to world attention. Together with later militant fatwas, it has contributed to the popular misconception of the fatwa as a religious death warrant.

Many militant and reform movements in modern times have disseminated fatwas issued by individuals who do not possess the qualifications traditionally required of a mufti. A famous example is the fatwa issued in 1998 by Osama bin Laden and four of his associates, proclaiming ‘jihad against Jews and Crusaders’ and calling for killing of American civilians. In addition to denouncing its content, many Islamic jurists stressed that bin Laden was not qualified to either issue a fatwa or declare a jihad. The Amman Message was a statement, signed in 2005 in Jordan by nearly 200 prominent Islamic jurists, which served as a ‘counter-fatwa’ against a widespread use of takfir (excommunication) by jihadist groups to justify jihad against rulers of Muslim-majority countries. The Amman Message recognized eight legitimate schools of Islamic law and prohibited declarations of apostasy against them. The statement also asserted that fatwas can be issued only by properly trained muftis, thereby seeking to delegitimize fatwas issued by militants who lack the requisite qualifications. Erroneous and sometimes bizarre fatwas issued by unqualified or eccentric individuals in recent times have sometimes given rise to complaints about a ‘chaos’ in the modern practice of ifta [to give an (often legal or religious) explanation].

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, a group of Middle Eastern Islamic scholars issued a fatwa permitting Muslims serving in the U.S. army to participate in military action against Muslim countries, in response to a query from a U.S. Army Muslim chaplain. This fatwa illustrated two increasingly widespread practices. First, it drew directly on the Quran and hadith without referencing the body of jurisprudence from any of the traditional schools of Islamic law. Secondly, questions from Western Muslims directed to muftis in Muslim-majority countries have become increasingly common, as about one-third of Muslims now live in Muslim-minority countries.

Institutions devoted specifically to issuing fatwas to Western Muslims have been established in the West, including the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA, founded in 1986) and the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR, founded in 1997). These organizations aim to provide fatwas that address the concerns of Muslim minorities, helping them to comply with sharia, while stressing compatibility of Islam with diverse modern contexts. The FCNA was founded with the goal of developing legal methodologies for adopting Islamic law to life in the West. The ECRF draws on all major schools of Sunni law as well as other traditional legal principles, such as concern for the public good, local custom, and the prevention of harm, to derive fatwas suitable for life in Europe. For example, a 2001 ECRF ruling allowed a woman who had converted to Islam to remain married without requiring her husband's conversion, based in part on the existence of European laws and customs under which women are guaranteed the freedom of religion. Rulings of this kind have been welcomed by some, but also criticized by others as being overly eclectic in legal methodology and having potential to negatively impact the interpretation of sharia in Muslim-majority countries.

The needs of Western Muslims have given rise to a new branch of Islamic jurisprudence which has been termed the jurisprudence of (Muslim) minorities (fiqh al-aqallīyāt). The term is believed to have been coined in a 1994 fatwa by Taha Jabir Alalwani, then the chairman of FCNA, which encouraged Muslim citizens to participate in American politics. This branch of jurisprudence has since been developed primarily, but not exclusively for Muslim minorities in the West.

[….] In the pre-modern era, most fatwas issued in response to private queries were read only by the petitioner. Early in the 20th century, the reformist Islamic scholar Rashid Rida responded to thousands of queries from around the Muslim world on a variety of social and political topics in the regular fatwa section of his Cairo-based journal Al-Manar. In the late 20th century, when the Grand Mufti of Egypt Sayyid Tantawy issued a fatwa allowing interest banking, the ruling was vigorously debated in the Egyptian press by both religious scholars and lay intellectuals.

In the internet age, a large number of websites has appeared offering fatwas to readers around the world. For example, IslamOnline publishes an archive of ‘live fatwa’ sessions, whose number approached a thousand by 2007, along with biographies of the muftis. Together with satellite television programs, radio shows and fatwa hotlines offering call-in fatwas, these sites have contributed to the rise of new forms of contemporary ifta. Unlike the concise or technical pre-modern fatwas, fatwas delivered through modern mass media often seek to be more expansive and accessible to the wide public.

Modern media have also facilitated cooperative forms of ifta. Networks of muftis are commonly engaged by fatwa websites, so that queries are distributed among the muftis in the network, who still act as individual jurisconsults. In other cases, Islamic jurists of different nationalities, schools of law, and sometimes even denominations (Sunni and Shia), coordinate to issue a joint fatwa, which is expected to command greater authority with the public than individual fatwas. The collective fatwa (sometimes called ijtihād jamāʿī, ‘collective legal interpretation’) is a new historical development, and it is found in such settings as boards of Islamic financial institutions and international fatwa councils.

As the role of fatwas on strictly legal issues has declined in modern times, there has been a relative increase in the proportion of fatwas dealing with rituals and further expansion in purely religious areas like Quranic exegesis, creed, and Sufism. Modern fatwas also deal with a wide variety of other topics, including insurance, sex-change operations, moon exploration, beer drinking, abortion in the case of fatal foetal abnormalities, or males and females sharing workplaces. Public ‘fatwa wars’ have reflected political controversies in the Muslim world, from anti-colonial struggles to the Gulf War of the 1990s, when muftis in some countries issued fatwas supporting collaboration with the US-led coalition, while muftis from other countries endorsed the Iraqi call for jihad against the US and its collaborators. In the private sphere, some muftis have begun to resemble social workers, giving advice on various personal issues encountered in everyday life.

The social profile of the fatwa petitioner has also undergone considerable changes. Owing to the rise of universal education, those who solicit fatwas have become increasingly educated, which has transformed the traditional mufti–mustafti relationship based on restricted literacy. The questioner is now also increasingly likely to be female, and in the modern world Muslim women tend to address muftis directly rather than conveying their query through a male relative as in the past. Since women now represent a significant proportion of students studying Islamic law and qualifying as muftiyas, their prominence in its interpretation is likely to rise. A fatwa hotline in the United Arab Emirates provides access to either male or female muftis, allowing women to request fatwas from female Islamic legal scholars.

The vast amount of fatwas produced in the modern world attests to the importance of Islamic authenticity to many Muslims. However, there is little research available to indicate to what extent Muslims acknowledge the authority of various fatwas and heed their rulings in real life. Rather than reflecting the actual conduct or opinions of Muslims, these fatwas may instead represent a collection of opinions on what Muslims ‘ought to think.’”

  *     *     *

Readers wanting to investigate or explore some of the relevant material brought up in this post might look at the terms “fiqh” and “Sharī‘ah” in my study guide for Islam as well as my essay on “Democracy and Islam” (the latter is a bit dated here and there), both of which are freely available (to read or download) on my Academia page. It also helps to be conversant in the cross-cultural and comparative study of worldviews (religious and secular), a subject I have broached several times over the years at this blog.

Relevant Bibliographies

• The Modern Arab World
• The Bedouin
• Modern Iran
• Islam, the Arts, and Aesthetic Experience
• Islam and Jurisprudence
• Islam and Muslims in the U.S.
• Islamic Studies
• The Prophet Muhammad
• The Qur’ān (Translations, Commentaries, Studies)
• Sufism
• Theology and Philosophy in Islamic Traditions

Abortion and the Judicial Role

The Supreme Court’s abortion decision exhibits a fundamental misunderstanding of the judicial role and our system of government. First, the majority primarily relies on a case involving assisted suicide which says that liberty rights must be “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition” (Washington v. Glucksberg) and proceeds to devote page after page showing that abortion was a criminal offence at various stages of our history.

What this amateur foray into abortion history misses, as the majority well knows, is that the Court has specifically denied that rights must be deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition. In upholding same sex marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges, disagreed with the Glucksberg test and pointedly observed that “rights come not from ancient sources alone. They rise, too, from a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era.” See also Lawrence v. Texas (same sex relations constitutionally protected). Griswold v. Connecticut (right to use contraceptives constitutionally protected).

The Court says that the rights to use contraceptives, to engage in same sex relations, and to same sex marriage are not in danger because they do not involve pre-natal life. This is a puzzling claim. The majority claims to be neutral about fetal life and abortion. It is not at all clear how neutrality is compatible with the majority’s claim. More important, the deeply rooted language is out of the bag. Why would anyone believe the Justices would not trot it out again?

Judges are just referees, say the conservatives, not policymakers. And there the Court steps into outer darkness. I am reminded of Friedrich Nietzsche dictum: “To have a system is to lack integrity.” A system in which judges do not make policy decisions is either a prescription for outdated stupidity (e.g., giving excessive weight to a history of racism or sexism) or an occasion for cheating on the system. Take my word for it. Prominent areas of conservative cheating include cases involving the First, Second, and Eleventh amendments.

Moreover, the conservatives are excessively romantic about the legislative process. All too often legislative decisions are made because money talks. So far as I am aware, the judicial process proceeds without legalized bribery. And elections are often personality contests where voters cannot focus on single issues in ways that judges can.

Finally, the conservatives apparently believe that wise political judgment and partisan political preferences are the same thing. In the area of abortion, the liberals refer to the right of privacy, or the right of bodily autonomy, or a general liberty right. This allows liberals to formulate outcomes that are consistent with fundamental human needs.

One of the conservative responses tells it all: “Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like.” Really? Is there anyone who thinks that the liberals would create such rights? Of course not. Judges exercise judgment. They are not just calling balls and strikes. Judicial policy making is not foreign to the Constitution. Indeed, Justice Felix Frankfurter was closer to the mark “Five justices of the Supreme Court are molders of policy rather than impersonal vehicles of revealed truth.”

The fascist cult of Trump v. participatory, deliberative, and representative democracy (Addendum, Aug. 7)

   

We should not indulge in denial, nor deceive ourselves, in other words, we should not look away (i.e. deliberately ignore) from what is before our eyes and ears: the fascism of the cult of Trump is not going away anytime soon; a conclusion that is neither alarmist nor simply reflective of partisan hyperbole. If you believe otherwise, you are not paying sufficient attention. I am—or will be—quite happy to be proven wrong and welcome reasonable arguments that attempt to persuade me that I am indeed mistaken.

In early spring of last year I stated that the so-called Grand Old Party has morphed into a political party of imaginary and delusionary grievance, of crass and cartoonish schtick, of denial and desperation, of repugnance and regression, of illusion and irrationality, of empty gestures and vain cynicism, of authoritarianism and (actual and aspirational) fascism, of obscene wealth and amoral power, of sycophants and cults, of self-deception and phantasy, of white supremacy and narcissistic privilege, of Christian nationalism, a faux populism of bread and circuses that has failed to conceal, let alone contain, a degraded and debased political practice mired in a toxic dump of greed, corruption, and sleaze. It is a politics that lacks any meaningful disposition to truth and evidences no concern whatsoever for either Liberal constitutionalism or democracy. The anti-democratic and now nakedly fascist “Trump effect” shows few signs of going away, despite the surprising if not encouraging defeat in Kansas of the referendum proposal for a state constitutional amendment that would end protections for abortion. Recent primary results in Arizona and Michigan are disappointing for those of us hoping more Republicans would openly disavow the fascist cult of Trump. People still shrink back from characterizing Trump, his ideologues and many if not most of his followers as “fascist,” yet there is abundant evidence testifying to the aptness of this descriptive characterization, one piece of which follows:

“He has extolled the value of racial purity, is vehemently anti-immigration, has cultivated close ties with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and is a speaker at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC, in Dallas. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, 59, is widely criticized around the world for systematically dismantling his country’s nascent democracy during his 12 years in power — but that hasn’t stopped him from emerging as a darling of many on the right in America.

Former President Donald Trump and his onetime chief strategist Steve Bannon are also speaking at CPAC, America’s top conservative conference. And both are fans of Orbán’s. Trump endorsed Orbán in January, three months before he was re-elected to a fourth term, and Bannon called the Hungarian leader ‘Trump before Trump’ in a speech in Budapest in 2018.

While Trump was voted out, Orbán, the first European Union leader to speak out in support of Trump’s campaign in 2016, looks unassailable, with control over the media, the legislature and the judiciary in Hungary. Meanwhile, the fractured left-wing, centrist opposition is marginalized.

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who has interviewed Orbán and hosted his show from Budapest for a week in 2021, describes Hungary as a ‘small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us.’ In January Carlson released a documentary titled ‘Hungary vs. Soros: Fight for Civilization’ — a reference to George Soros, 91, the Hungarian-born Jewish businessman and philanthropist who has become a scapegoat for Orbán and his allies. One Hungarian writer, Balázs Gulyás, said that in praising Orbán, Carlson had depicted Hungary as a ‘conservative Disneyland.’

Ahead of this week’s conference, Trump released a picture of him and Orbán together. ‘Great spending time with my friend,’ Trump said in a press release. ‘We discussed many interesting topics — few people know as much about what is going on in the world today. We were also celebrating his great electoral victory in April.’” — Patrick Smith for NBC News today (Aug. 4, 2022)

   

Recommended Reading

• Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, revised ed., 1991).
• Alford, Ryan. Permanent State of Emergency: Unchecked Executive Power and the Demise of the Rule of Law (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017).
• Auestad, Lene, ed. Nationalism and the Body Politic: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia (Karnac Books, 2014).
• Breuilly, John. Nationalism and the State (University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed., 1994).
• Brudner, Alan. Constitutional Goods (Oxford University Press, 2004).
• Cagé, Julia. The Price of Democracy: How Money Shapes Politics and What to Do about It (Harvard University Press, 2020).
• Cassam, Quassim. Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political (Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Coady, C.A.J. Morality and Political Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
• Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Polity Press, 2001).
• Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, revised and expanded ed., 1970).
• Cohn, Norman. Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (Yale University Press, 1993).
• Collins, Adela Yarbro. “The Book of Revelation,” in John J. Collins, ed. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, Vol. 1: The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity (Continuum, 2000): 384-414.
• Dahl, Robert A. How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (Yale University Press, 2^nd, 2003).
• Desai, Meghnad. Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (Verso, 2002).
• Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction (Verso, new ed., 2007).
• Elster, Jon. Ch. 8, “Ideologies,” in Elster’s Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge University Press, 1985): 459-510.
• Fromm, Erich (Barbara Weinberger, tr. and Wolfgang Bonss, ed.) The Working Class in Weimar Germany: A Psychological and Sociological Study (Harvard University Press, 1984).
• Glass, James M. Psychosis and Power: Threats to Democracy in the Self and the Group (Cornell University Press, 1995).
• Gordon, Robert J. The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton University Press, 2016).
• Greenberg, Karen J. Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State (Crown, 2016).
• Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism (Routledge, 1991).
• Griffin, Roger. Fascism (Key Concepts in Political Theory) (Polity Press, 2018).
• Gruen, Arno. The Insanity of Normality—Realism as Sickness: Toward an Understanding of Human Destructiveness (Grove Press, 1992).
• Harcourt, Edward, ed. Morality, Reflection and Ideology (Oxford University Press, 2000).
• Hasen, Richard L. Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy (Yale University Press, 2020).
• Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009).
• Hirschman, Albert O. The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991).
• Hobsbawm, E.J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
• Jamieson, Dale. Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford University Press, 2014).
• Keane, John. Violence and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
• Larrain, Jorge. Marxism and Ideology (Macmillan Press, 1983).
• Lee, Bandy, ed. The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, expanded ed., 2017).
• Lefebvre, Henri (John Moore, trans.) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1 (Verso, 1991).
• Lefebvre, Henri (John Moore, trans.) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday (Verso, 2002).
• Lefebvre, Henri (Gregory Elliott, trans.) Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 3: From Modernity to Modernism (Verso, 2005).
• Lernoux, Penny. People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism (Viking Penguin, 1989).
• MacLean, Nancy. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (Viking Penguin, 2017).
• Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• Marlin, Randall. Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (Broadview Press, 2002).
• Mayer, Jane. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Anchor Books, 2017).
• McGinn, Bernard, ed. The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism: Vol. 2: Apocalypticism in Western History and Culture (Continuum, 2000).
• Piketty, Thomas (Arthur Goldhammer, trans.) Capital and Ideology (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).
• Przeworski, Adam. Crises of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
• Robin, Corey. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (Oxford University Press, 2011).
• Seidel, Andrew L. The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism is Un-American (Sterling, 2019).
• Stanley, Jason. How Propaganda Works (Princeton University Press, 2015).
• Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works (Random House, 2018).
• Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).
• Straub, Michael S. Madness is Civilization: When the Diagnosis was Social, 1948-1980 (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
• Taylor, Gabrielle. Deadly Vices (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Therborn, Göran. The Killing Fields of Inequality (Polity Press, 2013).
• Tismaneanu, Vladimir. Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton University Press, 1998).
• Urbinati, Nadia. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, 2014).

   
Several relevant bibliographies (embedded links):

• After Slavery & Reconstruction: The Black Struggle in the U.S. for Freedom, Equality, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Capitalist Agribusiness: Toward Agroecology & Food Justice
• Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization
• Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing – A Reading Guide
• Beyond Punitive Liberal Capitalist Society
• Capitalist and Other Distortions of Democratic Education
• Constitutionalism
• Democratic Theory and Praxis
• Ecological and Environmental Politics, Philosophies, and Worldviews
• Elections and Voting
• Global Distributive Justice
• The Great Depression and the New Deal
• Toward Green Democratic Socialism
• Health: Law, Ethics and Social Justice
• Housing
• Human Rights
• Immigration & Refugees: Ethics, Law, and Politics
• The Political Philosophy of Liberalism
• Marxism
• Marxism and Freudian Psychology
• Mass Media: Politics, Political Economy and Law
• Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory
• Public Health: Social Epidemiology, Ethics, and Law
• Punishment and Prison
• Social Security and the Welfare State
• Sullied Sciences
• Utopian Imagination, Thought, and Praxis
• Workers, the World of Work, and Labor Law

   

Addendum

Please see, “‘Fight the Barbarians’: The MAGA Movement Lays Out a Warpath at CPAC”

By Tim Dickinson, for Rolling Stone, Aug. 6, 2022

First, my brief comment by way of an introduction, followed by highlights from the article.

These “dark, militant speeches” are not “thinly veiled calls for violence,” but the nakedly fascist rhetoric of those calling upon the Right to use violence against Democrats, whom they demonize in the kind of public rhetoric we find in incitement to genocide (which goes beyond ‘hate speech’) wherein in those one disagrees with, one’s political opponents, are characterized in Manichean (demonizing) and dehumanizing terms that place them beyond the pale as it were. This, to put it mildly, it is the anti-Liberal and anti-democratic rhetoric favored by fascists and authoritarians. It is an intensification and militarization of the insurrectionist language that preceded the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. And it is an exquisite exemplar of what psychologists term projection.*

• “Capitol Hill rioters [are] victims of a “Democratic Gulag.”
• “We are at war,” Bannon told the MAGA faithful. “We are in a political and ideological war.” Repeating the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, Bannon insisted that Joe Biden is an “illegitimate imposter.” Calling on Republicans to send “shock troops” to Washington, Bannon promised the crowd they had an opportunity to “shatter the Democratic party as a national political institution.” He alleged that the party has been overrun by “radical, cultural Marxists” and “groomers” who “want to destroy the Republic.” Bannon insisted the GOP must pursue absolute victory over “power-mad and lawless” Democrats, asserting: “There can be no half measures anymore.”
• Orbán — the Hungarian strongman fond of Nazi-style rhetoric against race mixing — received standing ovations for his stark address to the MAGA faithful on Thrusday. Orbán described European parliament and the federal government in Washington as “the two fronts in the battle being fought for Western civilization,” warning, “today, we hold neither of them, yet we need them both.” Orbán called on CPAC attendees and the far-right in Europe to forge a global movement. “We should unite our forces,” Orbán said, to “take back” Washington and Brussels.
• Ted Cruz … inveighed against what he called the “power hungry, abusive totalitarian nitwits” of the Biden administration and the Democratically controlled Congress. Cruz likened his service in the Senate to that of a gladiator: “It’s like the old Roman Colosseum where you slam on a breastplate and you grab a battle axe and you go fight the barbarians,” he said of his Democrat colleagues. “As they say in the military world,” Cruz continued, “it is a target-rich environment.”
• Cruz told the crowd, “We’re on the cusp of something extraordinary in this country … And each of you are the vanguard. You are the dangerous radicals. Like the men who signed the Declaration of Independence … like those who died at the Alamo, you are the courageous heroes,” he insisted, “fighting for liberty in our country.”
• [CPAC] welcomed to its stage Jack Posobiec, the Pizzagate conspiracy theorist recently denounced as a hate extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center for his ties to “white nationalists, antigovernment extremists, members of the Proud Boys, and neo-Nazis.” Posobiec took his turn in the spotlight to promote the New Right (effectively the latest rebranding of the hateful “alt-right”). And he, too, painted the coming conflicts of the culture war in militaristic terms: “Are you ready for new ideas to actually take the fight to the front lines,” he asked, “because that’s where we live and we’re not stopping.”
• “We have an invasion at the border,” Kari Lake [the GOP nominee for governor in Arizona] insisted, referring to undocumented immigrants and refugees. Lake then vowed that, after being sworn in, she would mount a military response, even lacking approval from the Biden administration: “As soon as my hand comes off the Bible, we’re going to send the Arizona National Guard troops to the border,” Lake said. Insisting on the “sovereignty” of the states, she insisted: “We will take the fight to the federal government. We’re not going to be victims of what they’re doing to us.”
• The rhetoric of revolution and frontline confrontation went hand-in-hand with other speakers and presenters who cast the American left as demonic, evil, and destructive — in other words the kind of enemies who deserve to be dealt with harshly.
• In between speeches, CPAC promoted a documentary, hosted by chair Matt Schlapp, called The Culture Killers, which inveighs against a “great desecration” perpetrated by the left. ”Anything that’s good, anything that’s holy, anything that’s truthful is being attacked,” Schlapp insisted on video. The documentary describes America as “under siege from an enemy within,” with one voice insisting, over images of burning cars, “There is no end. These people will never stop, until you stop ’em.” 
• [Florida Sen. Rick Scott, head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee] railed against Democrats as literally “evil” for pursuing an agenda he described as socialism.
• While damning the Democrats in terms that seemed to encourage political violence, CPAC speakers consistently minimized the actual political violence perpetrated by the MAGA movement on Jan. 6. Avowed “Christian nationalist” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), for example, slammed Liz Cheney — chair of the committee investigating the Capitol insurrection — for pushing a “lie about Jan. 6.”
• [A] panel called “You’re Next: The Rise of the Democratic Gulag,” … presented Jan. 6 defendants not as alleged perpetrators of riot and insurrection, but as victims of a rigged judicial system.
• Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) … claimed that Jan 6. defendants have been the recipients of “Soviet-style justice” — alleging without evidence that prosecutors, defense attorneys, and federal judges have been “colluding” to secure predetermined convictions. The congressman insisted that “all of the institutions in the United States have been weaponized, not unlike the former Soviet Union” to create an “American Gulag.”
• [CPAC’s] … latest incarnation has become manifestly dangerous — more fascist than farce. It is holding up alleged perpetrators of political violence as martyrs. It is demonizing its domestic political opponents as diabolical “enemies within.” And it is giving MAGA supporters a militaristic frame for their charge to the “front lines” of America’s culture wars. In short it is playing with fire. But it’s the rest of us who may get burned.

* For brief definitions and more extensive introductions, see the term in Burness E. Moore and Bernard D. Fine, eds., Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (The American Psychoanalytic Association and Yale University Press, 1990): 149-150; as well as a more historically and theoretically oriented entry in Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans.), The Language of Psychoanalysis (Karnac Books, 1988 [Hogarth Press, 1973]): 349-355; and, relatedly, the term “projective identification” in Elizabeth Bott Spillius, et al., The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (based on A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought by R.D. Hinshelwood [1991]) (Routledge, 2011): 126-146.