This quite powerful book argues that liberal democracy’s evolution depends less than you probably think on regular party competition, the governance capacity of independent legislatures, and the struggle to maintain vigorous and impartial judiciaries—and rather more than you suspected on contentious, non-routine politics. Contentious politics means more than social movements, though the concept certainly includes them. The idea refers to the full range of sharp confrontations by contentious actors with authorities, both public and private. They can be violent or peaceful, short-lived or long-lived. They include sit-ins, sit-downs, emergency legal defense and mobilization, and the release by whistle blowers of secret documents. The democracy-developing (or weakening) part is this: Contentious politics forces established authorities to stand by and reaffirm liberal norms—or it entices them to violate these norms in order to strike back at contentious actors, particularly as these actors become more and more transgressive. Trangression can beget transgression. Because contention and liberal democracy are Siamese twins, liberal norms are continually violated and tested by the mainstream and the margin, for better or worse, in multiple and overlapping cycles that vary in their intensity and disturbance.
Tarrow underscores, too, that a second kind of disruption—war—also regularly tests liberal democracy. It tempts executives to forge states of exception from liberal norms. Thus, in the wake of Pearl Harbor President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the avatar of American social democracy, interned loyal Japanese-Americans residing on the Pacific coast. He did so on the grounds that they were ipso facto a fifth column despite plain evidence that they were no such thing.
Third, war often creates—and sometimes overlaps with—either domestic contention or the palpable prospect of linkage between internal and external enemies. When either (or both) of those correlates of war emerge then one can expect nominally democratic officials to improvise some variation on what Kim Lane Scheppele has called “the emergency script”: executive centralization, special emergency procedures and organizations, repression, censorship and propaganda, detention regimes disconnected from the rule of law, sharply heightened secrecy, and, at the extreme, anticipatory violence against internal enemies of the regime. The consequent tensions with democratic norms can be very deep—deep enough to betoken regime collapse or change.
But regime collapse is not inevitable. As officials fashion the emergency script during the searing intersection of war and domestic division they may also simultaneously write a “democracy script”: mobilizing citizens, articulating and elaborating new democratic ideals, and extending rights to new populations. The reason for that has to do with the Janus-faced nature of the democratic state. The democratic state’s officials can rapidly acquire and deploy top-down “hard power” common to all democratic states. But a democratic “infrastructure” surrounds these officials: dense webs of voluntary associations, public-private partnerships, and, not least, political parties. The leverage of these infrastructural actors may force democratic concessions, rights, and new kinds of transparency and oversight during or after the crisis.
In a brilliant series of narratives Tarrow traces several regime-testing and regime-making permutations of the emergency script. Officials invented utterly fascinating variations on it during the French Revolution, the American Civil War, Italy’s entrance into World War I, France’s war against Algerian nationalists, the division of American society and politics during the Vietnam War, and Great Britain’s sustained engagement with the IRA in Northern Ireland.
Tarrow then shows how 9/11 unleashed the emergency script here in the United States—and further shows that this permutation of the script has been quite unusual, for it was legalized and constitutionalized by President Bush’s lawyers (think here of John Yoo and Jay Bybee.) Indeed a capacity for fully re-activating “the 9/11 emergency script” now seems hard-wired into the American state. Parts of it (for instance asset seizure and financial system warfare) have fed into the complex webs of transnational organizations that we once called “embedded liberalism.” Though the Obama Administration came to office intending to roll back the 9/11 emergency script it did not do so (or, in the case of shutting down Guantanamo, could not.) President Obama has instead carried forward pervasive internal surveillance, resisted holding the CIA fully accountable for its earlier program of torture and extraordinary renditions, and engaged in anticipatory attacks abroad through drone warfare, including an attack on an American citizen operating in Yemen who was undoubtedly loathed by every member of the attentive public. Nor has the massive outsourcing of counterterrorist programs to the private sector been reined in. The Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and a wide panoply of smaller bureaucracies spend much of their time letting contracts, supervising them, and assessing them.
Tarrow ends his book with quick sketches of connections between decolonization experiences and the emergency script. But I happened to read the book after the ISIS-inspired Paris attacks, and it came as a genuine shock to realize that I perhaps held a guide to America’s near-term future in my hands. After all, American interventions have helped to spawn al-Qaeda in Libya, Mali, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, and the United States is slowly engaging ISIS. In a classic geopolitical pattern we face encirclement. The international effort to defeat ISIS is mired in deep divisions and quarrels, promising a very long and uncertain war. The illiberal, electric American responses to the Paris attacks—Donald Trump’s call for a Muslim registry and the rapid action by the House of Representatives and of most American governors to protest the Obama Administration’s agreement to absorb all of 10,000 Syrian refugees (a number that is not much larger than the size of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania)—are nothing in comparison to what may happen if the attacks in Paris are repeated here in the United States. If you read this book—and if you worry about liberal democracy then you must—you will see how it opens the curtain on potential developments here in the United States, and on what the United States will almost certainly do again internationally, if there is another mass terror attack inside the United States.
What, then, of the democracy script that emerged in the wake of 9/11? Tarrow draws on the work of his Cornell colleague Chan Suh to depict the rise of the Guantanamo bar and its struggle over habeas corpus rights. He mentions, too, Sen. John McCain’s opposition to torture—and a full discussion would have to include Sen. Diane Feinstein’s quest, still in process as of this writing, to demonstrate the extent of CIA-managed torture and its utter futility. Tarrow also shows why surveillance begat Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, raising the possibility that more digital whistle blowing by similarly (un)attractive figures lies in our future.
But the emergency is still with us. Sen. Marco Rubio’s statement in the wake of the Paris attacks—that we are living through a “clash of civilizations”—unhappily reaches for the apocalyptic bait of our enemy in Raqqa. Perhaps intuiting the whirlwind that might follow if he moved more forcefully, President Obama acts very cautiously, enraging the critics of his Middle Eastern policy.
An unsettling paraphrase of Trotsky may be this book’s bottom line: You may not be interested in the emergency script but the emergency script is very interested in you. Writing the democracy script in the face of that challenge is a task that will preoccupy Americans for some time to come.
