Writing Democracy

The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era

Shannon Carter, Deborah Mutnick, Stephen Parks, Jessica Pauszek, Shannon Carter, Deborah Mutnick, Stephen Parks, Jessica Pauszek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429889936
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era calls on the field of writing studies to take up a necessary agenda of social and economic change in its classrooms, its scholarship, and its communities to challenge the rise of neoliberalism and right-wing nationalism.

Grown out of an extended national dialogue among public intellectuals, academic scholars, and writing teachers, collectively known as the Writing Democracy project, the book creates a strategic roadmap for how to reclaim the progressive and political possibilities of our field in response to the "twilight of neoliberalism" (Cox and Nilsen), ascendant right-wing nationalism at home (Trump) and abroad (Le Pen, Golden Dawn, UKIP), and hopeful radical uprisings (Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring). As such, the book tracks the emergence of a renewed left wing in rhetoric and activism post-2008, suggests how our work as teachers, scholars, and administrators can bring this new progressive framework into our institutions, and then moves outward to our role in activist campaigns that are reshaping public debate.

Part history, part theory, this book will be an essential read for faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in composition and rhetoric and related fields focused on progressive pedagogy, university-community partnerships, and politics.

1 Introduction

What Does Democracy Look Like?

Shannon Carter, Deborah Mutnick, Stephen Parks, and Jessica Pauszek

Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

–Karl Marx (1858)

Throughout the history of this country, democracy has always been practiced as a democracy of the minority, a democracy of the property owners, a democracy of the racially dominant. […] We cannot allow “democracy” to be colonized by those who assume that democracy is always a democracy of the elite (emphasis added).

–Angela Davis (2014)

Beginnings

What does democracy mean? And what does it mean to work toward its fulfillment? These questions inspire and inform the essays in Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era. In concert with others, two of us—Shannon and Deborah—founded Writing Democracy (WD), a seat-of-the-pants response to the Great Recession, in 2010, and began to trouble the meaning of the term “democracy” soon thereafter when it became clear that discussions we had convened in various settings produced more questions than answers about its definition. This volume continues those conversations in print, bringing to the surface what were often muted disagreements not only about the role of democracy in U.S. history and its current manifestations and deformations but also about the place of these questions in composition and rhetoric—our field—as well as across the disciplines and in ongoing political struggles for social and economic justice. That we all seemed to support the goal of social and economic justice yet had different perspectives on what that meant and how to achieve it, much less how best to address the even murkier question of its role in the classroom, gave WD direction as Steve, Jessica, and others joined in planning for annual workshops at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). In 2013, we explicitly called for a “political turn” to “deepen the conversation about democracy that began in 2011 and continued at the 2012 CCCC Workshop,” asking “How can we contribute to the unfinished project of ‘writing democracy’?” While we have focused our attention on the public and pedagogical role of teachers, specifically those in composition and rhetoric, we have consistently drawn insight and strength from historical struggles for social and economic justice in labor, civil rights, Black Power, women’s rights, and national liberation struggles, and emergent movements, such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, climate justice, and Me Too.

It will be useful at the outset to state clearly what we mean by a “political turn” and why we invoke the trope of turns here. First, we are proposing a political turn (a left turn) informed by Marx’s theory of historical materialism and his critique of capitalism as inherently exploitative and unequal. However, we take to heart Marx’s own profound understanding that as the material world evolves so will our conceptions of reality and our methods by which to investigate it. Second, we do not see our call as entirely new to the field or to higher education, even though its invocations have been relatively sporadic and peripheral (see Trimbur in this volume), and we thus pay tribute to the many who pave the way for those who follow (e.g., Ohmann 1987; Smitherman 1999; Hunt 2015). Third, we recognize and are heartened by vibrant signs of political consciousness in pedagogical, theoretical, and activist insights in our field and across disciplines rooted in earlier, pioneering theory and critique, especially with respect to race, gender, indigeneity, and the painful legacies of Western colonialism, imperialism, and slavery (e.g., Combahee River Collective 1977; Horner et al. 2011; Ruiz and Sánchez 2016; Condon and Young 2017). Fourth, we note that the phrase “political turn” has been invoked before (e.g., Wiley et al. 1996; Blyler 1998), sometimes disparagingly (e.g., Donoghue 1989; Fish 2008).

Mark Wiley et al. (1996) invoke the idea of a political turn to describe the direction the field took in the 1980s, noting that “the number of articles that seem overtly political appeared in journals with increasing frequency from mid-1980 onward. Some might call this the ‘political turn’ in composition and rhetoric” (417, emphasis added). He goes on to describe how the social turn might have inevitably led to a political one given increasingly heated debates about writing instruction as access to higher education expanded to masses of first-generation, immigrant, black, Latinx, and working-class students. These blurred boundaries between the far more influential social turn (Bizzell 2009), as well as cultural, linguistic, and public turns, and our call for a political turn reflect the complicated intellectual and political history of the late 20th century, inflected by Cold War anti-communism that chilled academic freedom and further troubled by postmodern rejections of “grand narratives” of history, including Marxist theory (Lyotard 1979), and black critiques of Marxism as replicating Western history’s racialized, white supremacist ideologies (C. Robinson 2000).

We cite these critiques here to encourage left-leaning scholars and activists who may have renounced Marxism to reconsider a historical materialist perspective, especially now, in a time when it has much to offer by way of explaining the crises we face and guiding political activism. We thus hope this book will encourage teachers and scholars to study these complex theoretical histories and assess whether previous academic “turns,” despite their acuity in some respects, have often obscured rather than clarified the historical tasks of achieving true democracy. We hope, too, that it will foster efforts to work through often contentious disagreements and differences in order to forge unity and common cause where possible and develop new understandings that inform what and how we teach, write, and seek to change the world.

Our book’s overarching aim is to contribute to efforts to reclaim (or redefine) democracy as an egalitarian, inclusive political economic system that supports human and all planetary life and well-being. Yet, such a world seems all but impossible in light of the 21st-century global exigencies of climate change, unprecedented economic inequality, deeply rooted racist, sexist, and homophobic ideologies, and resurgent fascist movements and world leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. The “political turn” underscores our view that solutions to these escalating world problems will mean economic restructuring of global inequalities intensified by capitalist accumulation and dispossession, tenacious colonial legacies, and political cultures that sow difference as division locally and globally.

In addition, this book is both a collective effort to analyze the current conjuncture and a call to build academic alliances across disciplines, institutions, and levels of education, as well as with social movements and political struggles committed to fully inclusive, participatory democracy and a truly democratic, sustainable economic structure. In this effort, we are joined by authors who represent a range of higher education institutions, labor pools, and student populations, and whose contributions illuminate the challenges and possibilities for ongoing struggles for democracy. Together, we portray the complex identities and contexts out of which such collaboration must grow with the aim of mapping out a political turn that highlights variations of what we can do and offers concrete examples of how such work might be done.

It would be presumptuous to imply that our collective work to date in WD or any other academic forum has generated definitive answers, formed more than embryonic collectivities, or attained more than the most modest goals in relation to the monumental tasks that confront us. Likewise, we acknowledge the absence of international perspectives here even though we presume that comprehending our situation in the U.S. means addressing global capitalism and its effects. That we focus on U.S. contexts and feature U.S. authors thus reflects not our analysis of the problems but rather the constraints of addressing both the broader context of what Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen (2014) call “the twilight of neoliberalism” (vii) and the specific moment of the 2016 presidential election. Chapters situated in the contexts of Chilean history (Alvarez) and the visa application process across U.S.-Colombian borders (Marko) are included, and we look forward perhaps to a sequel that further develops the idea of a political turn through international dialogue. As Audre Lorde (1984) reminds us, “Revolution is not a onetime event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other’s difference with respect” (140–141). We want this collection of voices to enact such vigilance and concern and to animate possibilities for future collaborations and collectivities.

First, however, we believe that it will be useful briefly to discuss the current conjuncture in light of the rise of neoliberal capitalism over the last 50 years and the theoretical framework that informs our response to that economy, as well as how both led to the WD project and our call for a “political turn.”

How We Got Here: The Rise of Neoliberal Capitalism

For the past 50 years, we have existed within a neoliberal global marketplace. As a governing practice, neoliberalism initially emerged in the 1970s beginning with Augusto Pinochet’s economic policies in Chile, migrating to Margaret Thatcher’s policies in the United Kingdom, then informing Ronald Reagan’s policies in the U.S., before ultimately expanding into a global framework inclusive of institutions, such as the World Bank, and treaties like NAFTA. Neoliberalism is an interlocking network of state and transnational government and extra-governmental entities. As a set of policies and practices, neoliberalism stands for laissez-faire economic measures, including austerity, deregulation, financialization, and privatization, linked to a conception of society as consisting of individuals, whose interests eclipse those of collective identities. From a neoliberal perspective, political and economic equality is supposedly produced by integrating the profit motive into all aspects of society, which is then assumed to be the best lever for raising the living standard for the greatest number.

Consequently, neoliberalism strips “democracy” of values such as the “public good,” human and civil rights, and relative economic equality to allow for a free-market economy in which individuals are supposedly free to gain unlimited amounts of wealth. As policy and practice, then, neoliberalism works to undo many of the collective gains of the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement, such as progressive tax structures, bank regulations, social welfare programs, and voting rights, as well as to privatize remaining government functions through outsourcing to for-profit businesses. It protects capitalism by maximizing accumulation for the transnational capitalist class and leaves virtually nothing for the 80% of the world’s population that faces increasingly precarious conditions of existence. Neoliberalism reminds us, if we grasp its fundamental goal, of the underlying forces and relations of production that have always required capital to expand and seek profits and militate against social welfare reforms.

These policies have significantly increased both social unrest and Western governments’ exercise of power through staggering levels of militarization. The U.S. dedicates more than half its entire budget to the military, insisting its actions are designed to protect “democracy” and “freedom” instead of lining the pockets of the global elite. Meanwhile, the wealth gap, coupled with shrinking social programs, has produced significant unrest at home and abroad. In response, over the past 50 years, the U.S. has armed police forces with military equipment and expanded police powers not only to search and seize property without cause but also to use deadly force with reckless abandon. The “war on drugs,” declared by President Richard Nixon in 1971, led to spiraling incarceration levels of people of color that Michelle Alexander (2010) famously called the “New Jim Crow,” accompanied by a steady stream of extrajudicial murders that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013. At the same time, neoliberalism disenfranchises minority voters through racial gerrymandering, criminal records, and voter suppression laws.

Globally, in response to World Bank demands to “modernize,” this same set of neoliberal policies has been forced upon the Global South producing huge income disparities and a youth population with few economic opportunities. The Arab Spring, in part, grew out of this disenfranchisement and called for a democratic state that ensured social welfare and economic equality. The ultimate return of dictatorial states in this region, such as in Egypt, and a global refugee/humanitarian crisis, such as in Syria, speak to the inability of neoliberalism to address such calls for democratic and human rights, a pattern we see repeating in Venezuela as we prepare to go to press, which some Latin American scholars are describing as at risk for “Syrianization” (William I. Robinson 2019, email) and others as a linchpin in global climate justice give its oil reserves, the largest in the world, now under threat of extraction by American oil companies (Schwartzman and Saul 2019).

These decades of intensifying neoliberal policies (and their effects) at home and abroad, we believe, explain the forces that led to the election of President Trump. When the housing bubble burst in 2007 and the stock market crashed the following year as a result of decades of deregulation, unemployment levels spiked and banks assumed to be “too big to fail” predictably went under. Rather than respond with government programs to reshape the economy and the government role in supporting collective rights and welfare, state and international bodies “backstopped” financial organizations, allowing individuals to suffer bankruptcy and homelessness. Since then, people worldwide have experienced an increasingly obscene wealth inequality not seen since the Gilded Age. According to Oxfam, “In 2015, just 62 individuals had the same wealth as 3.6 billion people”—more than 50% of the entire world population (Oxfam). The impact of this astounding wealth gap can be seen in deteriorating conditions for masses of people here and across the globe. In America, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, nearly 40 million people live below the poverty line.

Into this massive dislocation of opportunity for the majority, Trump entered with a populism premised on white supremacist nationalism and demonization of the “other.” In response to damage wrought by neoliberal globalism, he nostalgically offered to “make America great again,” appealing to key constituencies within the Republican base as well as energized elements of the electorate and working-poor adults who had sat out prior elections. Since the election, Trump has only heightened the nationalist and racist elements of his platform, and yet, as we write, he has failed to pass significant legislation with the exception of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Job Act, neither of which benefit working poor. However, he has, of course, significantly altered the judicial branch, including the Supreme Court, and used his executive authority to persecute undocumented im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Images
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: What Does Democracy Look Like?
• Part I Mapping the Political Turn
• Part II Variations on the Political Turn
• Part III Taking the Political Turn
• Index