American Political Thought

An Alternative View

Jonathan Keller, Alex Zamalin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317213864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The twenty-first century presents unique political challenges, like increasing concern over racially based police brutality and mass incarceration, continuing economic and gender inequality, the rise of conservative and libertarian politics, and the appropriate role of religion in American politics. Current scholarship in American political thought research neither adequately responds to the contemporary moment in American politics nor fully captures the depth and scope of this rich tradition.

This collection of essays offers an innovative expansion of the American political tradition. By exposing the major ideas and thinkers of the four major yet still underappreciated alternative traditions of American political thought—African American, feminist, radical and conservative—this book challenges the boundaries of American political thinking about such values like freedom, justice, equality, democracy, economy, rights, identity, and the role of the state in American life. These traditions, the various authors show in different ways, not only present a much fuller and more accurate characterization of what counts as American political thought. They are also especially unique for the conceptual resources they provide for addressing contemporary developments in American politics.

Offering an original and substantive interpretation of thinkers and movements, American Political Thought will help students understand how to put American political thought into conversation with contemporary debates in political theory.

Part I

African American and Feminist Political Thought

1 African American Political Thought, Democracy, and Freedom

Alex Zamalin

The long tradition of African American thought has always had a complex relationship to the American tradition. On the one hand, key African American thinkers like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr. sometimes embraced arguments about American moral exceptionalism, invested faith in, and expressed deep commitment to the ideal of progress and accepted politically liberal visions of freedom and equality. On the other hand, these figures—along with others like Maria Stewart, Martin Delany and Malcolm X—maintained an oppositional and critical relationship to America, highlighting the way that domination was integral to the American experience, how race and racism were whitewashed from political-theoretical critique and how problems that afflicted marginalized populations were insufficiently addressed in both theory and practice.

Notwithstanding these divergent perspectives, commentators (Dawson 2001) have nonetheless insisted that the various traditions of African American political thought—from radical egalitarian, disillusioned liberal, and black Marxist to black feminist, black nationalist, and black conservative—though broadly situated within the boundaries of American liberalism, collectively push and expand these boundaries in significant ways. This occurs through African American political thought’s focus on the African American experience, its embrace of communal approaches, its spiritual component and view of theory and practice as organic. Others (Shulman 2008; Marshall 2011) have located unique theoretical innovations within African American thought like prophecy, which entails a tradition of radical truth-telling and critique, focused upon naming and calling upon citizens to address racial injustice or others forms of so-called political evil. Still others (Turner 2012) have contended that the African American tradition contains a powerful alternative to American individualism, replacing the pick one’s self up by the bootstraps idea that stresses self-reliance and personal responsibility with one that casts responsibility as based in identifying one’s own moral apathy and struggling to end collective injustice for all citizens.

Without question, the historical position of African Americans in America, which is centrally defined by the experience of slavery and Jim Crow, economic marginalization, racism, and white supremacy, has provided African Americans a unique vantage from which to consider American politics and to develop alternative political concepts and ideas. There is always the temptation to assess how these visions fit into existing political ideologies and traditions. And yet, rather than ask how African American political thought could be understood in relation to, or simply transposed into, the existing grid of American political thought, another approach is to study its own original insights in ways that are irreducible to it. This chapter attempts a brief survey of how African American thinkers advance reinterpretations of four important American political ideas—the nature of political thinking, the political power of race, the meaning of power and freedom. Less driven by the aim of exegetical analysis, this synoptic overview—drawing from thinkers across two centuries—is concerned with the political present: to excavate some underappreciated ideas that might be serviceable for developing a more democratic society.

The interpretative choice connects with much of the spirit of African American thought. African American thought shares with American thought a concern with solving political problems—with devising a theory that is less concerned with philosophical coherence and more with the world as it is with all its hierarchies. But unlike much of canonical American thought, African American thought is explicitly concerned with remaking the world in ways that allow for it to be less oppressive and more viable for marginalized populations.

The Nature of Political Thinking: Embodied Experience, Citizenship, and Love

African American political thought brings forth a unique perspective on political thinking. Arguably the first if its systematic political theorists, Frederick Douglass, himself an ex-slave, knew full well that the particular experience of degradation would lead anyone to recognize that abstract, disembodied political thought—that claimed to speak for a universal “we”—was nothing more than a dream. In Douglass’ famous “Fourth of July” speech (1852), he asserted that political thinking needed to begin with historical experience. As he memorably declared,

I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.

(Douglass 1999, 194)

On the one hand, the speech is a patriot’s take on America; a lover’s wish to redeem a beloved “young nation” that never made good on its founding promise of equality—a point that would be famously echoed in the moving lines of the great poet, Langston Hughes’, “Let America Be America Again” (1935). As Hughes put it, “O, let my land be a land where Liberty/ Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,/ But opportunity is real, and life is free,/ Equality is in the air we breathe” (Hughes 1994, 191). On the other hand, as the poetic speaker of Hughes’ poem declares (speaking on behalf of workers, disenfranchised African Americans and colonized Native Americans) this means sometimes sympathetically identifying with, or taking the worldview, of the vulnerable person.

Douglass and Hughes challenge a prominent strain of procedural democratic thinking, which argues that democracy (Dahl 2006) is about individuals exercising their sovereign judgment when electing those who rule over them, and a strain of social democratic thinking, which argues it is about creating a society in which all are allowed to realize their fullest potential (Dewey 1991). In contrast, democracy, for both Hughes and Douglass, is much more of a critical enterprise, marked by an ethos of citizenship in which one becomes attentive to limitation and takes seriously the perspective of those who are socially vulnerable. Echoing this view, later black difference feminists like Audre Lorde (2007) and the Combahee River Collective (2015 [1974], 210–219) would argue that identity matters politically. It should be used to frame the strategies of social movements and activists who are agitating for greater freedom and representation. Any political project concerned with emancipation thus needs to know what becomes excluded.

All these figures imply that democratic citizenship is about knowing that citizens could be wrong in what they believe—and would have to accept something they never thought possible—and recognize that democratic political thinking must begin with the stories and dreams of exposed, naked and hurt bodies rather than, as Plato (2004) and Madison (2003, 40–46) both imagined, with able-bodied philosopher-kings ready and willing to rule virtuously.

Beyond Hughes, the other great twentieth-century African American heirs of Douglass’ project, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, did not simply recreate his unwavering love of and attachment to America. They actually transformed Douglass’ feeling of love—with all its attendant struggle, heartache and exposure—into the metaphor for politics. Politics, for them, could not be modeled on a theory of competition that saturated Madison’s Federalist, no. 10 (2003), nor based in individual dedication and resilience made memorable in Benjamin Franklin’s words (2008).

In King’s essays and speeches, this capacious theologically infused Christian love, which he called Agape, was modeled on the way God loved all of his children, a love that was non-instrumental and based in a form of “understanding, redemptive good will” (King 1986, 19). For Baldwin, writing in his classic The Fire Next Time (1963), in contrast, love was modeled on the way that two lovers were naked to each other, who would tell the truth to one another about their failures at all costs. “If you’ve loved anybody,” Baldwin wrote, “you gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort” (Baldwin 1998, 291).

Indebted more to Baldwin than to King, Morrison’s novel, Beloved (1987), which fictionalizes the way an African American community living in 1870s Cincinnati deals with the traumatic legacy of slavery, makes vivid the complex power of love. On the one hand, love can become monopolizing and debilitating—the novel’s main character, Sethe, is so overwhelmed by love for the daughter, Beloved, that she killed to protect her from slavery, who returns as a ghost, that she withdraws from the outside world and refuses to struggle politically. On the other hand, unconditional love in the form of social assistance, empathy and solidarity—without any stipulations, which resists paternalism and is concerned with the flourishing of those toward who it is directed—becomes the very thing in Beloved that allows the community to persist in the face of immeasurably difficult circumstances.

King’s notion of love promoted an enlarged sense of interracial empathy; Baldwin’s encouraged a commitment to prophetic social critique; Morrison’s encouraged the ability for individuals to socially flourish. Nonetheless, in all three of their accounts, a politics modeled on love resists traditional American formulations of political behavior. Politics, like love, is about the division of sovereignty rather than the indivisibility of power; about mutuality rather than rational self-interest; about shared collective responsibility rather than moral apathy; the shared commitment to collective growth rather than individualism.

Race, Domination and Community

In making race central to their theoretical analysis, African American political thinkers also exposed the fundamental way in which emotions defined political and social inequality. Not surprisingly, unlike much of mainstream American thought, race had always been at the forefront of African American thought. Many African Americans acknowledged the core paradox of racism: it was at once a fantasy, but an instrumental thing that had cash value for white Americans. Du Bois’ famous argument in Black Reconstruction in America (1992 [1935]) was that racism carried a psychological wage that gave white Americans a sense of much-needed superiority in a world where their status could be threatened at any moment. Baldwin, however, went a step further. Whites projected their fears and desires upon blacks to ground a stable sense of self of themselves. As he put it in The Fire Next Time,

These tensions are rooted in the very same depths as those from which loves springs, or murder. The white man’s unadmitted—and apparently, to him, unspeakable private fears and longings are projected unto the Negro. How can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not … live the way they say they do.

(Baldwin 1998, 342)

Racism unleashed a vicious emotional cycle (affecting both black and white Americans) that helped to foreclose interracial communication and solidarity. Using the racial stereotypes of Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemima to describe how racism functioned, Baldwin wrote in “Many Thousands Gone” that:

There was no one more forbearing than Aunt Jemima, no one stronger and more pious and more loyal or wise; there was, at the same time, no one weaker or more faithless or more vicious and certainly no one more immoral. Uncle Tom, trustworthy and sexless, needed to drop the title “Uncle” to become violent, crafty and sullen … they had a life—their own, perhaps a better life than ours—and they would never tell us what it was. At the point where we were driven most privately and painful to conjecture what depths of contempt, what heights of indifference, what prodigies of resilience, what untamable superiority allowed them so vividly to endure, neither perishing nor rising up in a body to wipe us from the earth, the image perpetually shattered and the word failed. The black man in our midst carried murder in his heart, he wanted vengeance. We carried murder too, we wanted peace.

(Baldwin 1998, 21–22)

Baldwin articulated a crucial political-theoretical insight: injustice was as much a product of political institutions as it was of everyday feelings. Racism emerged from the white American’s fear to confront the darkest parts of themselves, but racism also created a condition in which black Americans felt humiliated and enraged. The implications were dire: white fear and shame, on the one hand, and black anger and resentment, on the other hand, regulated the boundaries of American community and stifled the possibility of a vibrant democratic community.

Baldwin’s insights were captured in Du Bois’ famous anecdote that begins what is undoubtedly one of the great prophetic works of the twentieth century, The Souls of Black Folk (2007 [1903]), which tells of a young Du Bois’ anguish when he is refused a trading card by a white girl, who looks at him with pity. As he writes,

The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance … it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.

(Du Bois 2007 [1903], 3)

For Du Bois, this emotional rejection makes clear the heavy veil of race, but his larger theoretical point is that racism creates feelings of white apathy that render invisible not only black subjectivity but the very problem of racial inequality itself. Nowhere was this idea exposed more magisterially than in Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man (1995a [1952]). Ellison’s depiction of a young black man struggling to be made visible in a white supremacist society that denies him visibility anticipates the grim reality of young black men today—disproportionately incarcerated, seen as socially dangerous and dispensable and always subject to violence, either in their community or because of law enforcement. From the novel’s opening line, “I am an Invisible Man,” (Ellison 1995a [1952], 1) to every major moment in the novel’s trajectory—as Invisible Man moves south to north, from a student in an all-black college to the Harlem district organizer of an organization, the Brotherhood, which is committed to the idea of social equality for all citizens—his perspective is marginalized and his social marginalization intensified.

Sometimes, however, African American thinkers would use emotion creatively—to try to evoke responses in their audience so that they could struggle against injustice. The anti-lynching advocate, Ida B. Wells, following in the footsteps of Douglass in his “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?” speech and Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk and anticipating King in “I Have a Dream” (1963), would try to instill in Americans a sense a shame about the gap between their self-proclaimed democratic aspirations and the fact of racial injustice. As Wells claimed ironically, in response to the brutal lynching of the African American, Eph. Gizzard, who was

dragged through the streets in broad daylight, knives plunged into him at every step, and with every fiendish cruelty a frenzied mob could devise … [this was] A naked, bloody example of the blood-thirstiness of the nineteenth-century civilization of the Athens of the South.

(Wells 2014, 68)

American myths of benevolence and justice were betrayed by the degraded black body; talk of transcendent ideas made little sense.

The Many Faces of Power

African American political thinkers have also developed a unique perspective on power. Power is not simply that which is concentrated and indivisible; it is malleable and protean. Its meaning depends on those over which it exercises dominion and those who exercise it. On the one hand, power can become oppressive in unique ways. In one of the earliest black American radical abolitionist texts, David Walker’s Appeal (2016 [1829]), we see how this process takes shape. Walker, reflecting on the way enslaved people internalize habits that only perpetuate their subordination to slaveholders, suggested that “ignorance, the mother of treachery and deceit, gnaws into our very vitals” (Walker 2016 [1829], 24). Slaves assisted their masters by helping them look for runaway slaves; they engaged in physical brutality toward other slaves or even their own family members. The slave master, in Walker’s view, no longer had to compel slaves do his bidding through force or compulsion; power worke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction American Political Thought: An Alternative View
• PART I: African American and Feminist Political Thought
• PART II: Radical American Political Thought
• PART III: Conservative Political Thought
• Index