I sit to write this Introduction having just returned from a long weekend at APSA's 2010 annual conference discussing the politics of hard times. In the background is the sound of one or another cable news announcer, reminding me, for the thousandth time, that this coming weekend is the ninth anniversary of “9-11.” Controversy still rages over the plans of Muslim American citizens of the US to build a community center in lower Manhattan, two blocks from “ground zero” (or is it “Ground Zero” in deference to its apparent sacralization?). At the same time, attention has recently turned to an obscure Florida pastor, one Reverend Terry Jones, who has declared his intention to publicly burn copies of the Koran in protest of Islam and “commemoration” of 9-11. His plan has caused an outcry of opposition from national and local interfaith coalitions committed to religious and social pluralism, and provoked denunciations from a range of groups that include the Vatican and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Numerous high-ranking Obama Administration officials, from Attorney General Eric Holder to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have loudly criticized the proposed Koran burning as an affront to the American commitment to tolerance. Perhaps the loudest critic has been General David Petraeus, the US Commander in Afghanistan, who has insisted that such acts seriously undermine the US military in its war against the Taliban. One of his assistants, Lt. General William Caldwell, nicely summed up this logic in a CNN interview: “There is no question about First Amendment rights; that is not the issue. The question is: What is the implication over here? It is going to jeopardize the men and women serving in Afghanistan.”
The outcry, and especially the responses of Clinton, Petraeus, and Caldwell, underscore the extent to which US domestic, foreign, and military policies have become inextricably linked in the wake of 9-11. For the “war on terror” presents challenges and poses questions not simply about military strategy and “homeland security” but about the quality of our public culture and the tenor of partisan debate. These are not simply hard times, but deeply insecure times. And insecurity does not always bring out the best in political communities.
This issue of Perspectives on Politics features many pieces that shed light on the political challenges borne of this insecurity.
The issue's first three research articles all deal with ways that the contemporary liberal democratic state faces challenges associated with human rights and the treatment of marginal groups. All three authors work at the intersections of political theory, legal theory, and public policy; address a specific practical public problem; and develop a theoretical understanding oriented towards a more sound or just outcome. In addition, while each piece takes its bearings from the experience of the US, each addresses a topic—the complexities of free speech, the challenges of multiculturalism, and the political consequences of criminal incarceration—of broad relevance to a range of liberal democratic states.
Corey Brettschneider's “When the State Speaks, What Should it Say? Dilemmas of Freedom of Expression and Democratic Persuasion” focuses on the legal and policy challenges that “hate speech” and expressions of hate more generally pose to liberal democracy. What should liberal democratic states do in response to hate speech? On the one hand, the core liberal commitment to freedom of speech and expression would seem clearly to recommend that the state respect the right of individuals to speak hatefully with virtual impunity so long as their speech does not immediately incite violence. On the other hand, the liberal commitment to the equal dignity of every individual would seem to imply that particularly demeaning forms of public expression ought to be limited by the state in the interests of those demeaned and threatened and on behalf of a broader public culture of mutual respect. Brettschneider neatly considers both the plausibility of each viewpoint and the inherent tension between them. He then proceeds to relieve this tension through an ingenious argument: that while liberal democratic states ought to be exceptionally reluctant to penalize much less limit “hateful” or demeaning public speech, the commitment to autonomy that grounds this restraint also requires liberal democratic states simultaneously to speak loudly and clearly on behalf of the equal dignity of every individual. As Brettschneider writes: “I suggest that we envision the state not only as a coercive power, able to place legal limits on hate speech, but also as an expressive power, able to impact beliefs and behavior by ‘speaking’ to hate groups and the larger society. On my view the state should simultaneously protect hateful viewpoints in its coercive capacity and condemn them in its expressive capacity.” As the current furor surrounding Pastor Jones indicates, this argument could not be more timely. And while it is doubtful that Attorney General Holder and General Caldwell were inspired by their reading of an advance copy of Brettschneider's article, their responses nicely illustrate the logic of his basic argument. The issues posed here go beyond speech narrowly construed, and beyond the specifics of Brettschneider's carefully focused argument, and they recall themes famously developed in 1937 in the pages of the American Political Science Review by Karl Loewenstein, who coined the phrase “militant democracy” as a way of considering the circumstances under which democracies might legitimately constrain civil liberty in the very name of protecting its institutional conditions. This of course relates a broader theme, “states of emergency,” which will be the focus of a review essay in our March issue. The challenges here are at once normative, constitutional, and profoundly political, and the recent rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in the US and throughout Europe is merely one sign of this.
Sigal Ben-Porath's “Exit Rights and Entrance Paths: Accommodating Cultural Diversity in a Liberal Democracy” deals with a closely related issue—the challenges posed to liberal democratic states by multiculturalism, and the lengths to which such states ought to go to incorporate the distinctive practices of cultural minorities. The piece is occasioned by recent media attention given to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and its controversial polygamist leader Warren Jeffs, and especially to controversies surrounding the removal by federal authorities of over 400 young women and children from Jeffs' compound on grounds of alleged forced underage marriage, rape, and child abuse. Ben-Porath focuses on the moral and practical limits of state efforts to enforce the exit rights of individuals, which are often little more than legal lip service, but sometimes involve the exercise of coercion in ways that are arguably illiberal. Like Brettschneider, Ben-Porath analyzes the tension between group claims and the rights of individuals; and she argues that minimal exit rights ought to be supplemented by much greater attention to “entrance rights”: “Entrance paths can be supported by policies that aim to reduce the cost of entry into dominant society by providing opportunities for exiting members of comprehensive communities to engage in work, leisure, and civic life. Only by sustained attention to and support for such paths can liberal democracies truly accommodate cultural diversity in ways consistent with liberal pluralism.” There are obvious differences between sects such as the Jeff's group; ethnic and religious immigrant minorities—such as Latinos in the US or Muslims throughout Europe; and “indigenous” groups. Ben-Porath offers no prefabricated blueprints, but rather an interesting set of general considerations relevant to the liberal democratic incorporation of such groups.
Mary F. Katzenstein, Leila M. Ibrahim, and Katherine D. Rubin's “The Dark Side of American Liberalism and Felony Disenfranchisement” focuses on the practice of felon disenfranchisement and its implications for the liberal tradition and the liberal democratic state. Taking its bearings from arguments about “American exceptionalism,” and particularly from Rogers Smith's argument about “multiple traditions,” the piece argues that the extent and persistence of felon disenfranchisement in the US exemplifies a “dark side” of American exceptionalism that implicates liberalism itself, understood as a public philosophy containing deep tensions: As they write: “Our principal purpose in this article has been to demonstrate how American liberalism, despite serving as a vital source of challenges to ascription, has paradoxically also provided justification for continued exclusion. Hidden from sight are the tensions within liberalism that only come to light once we move away from the abstract domain of liberalism's normative claims to a concrete assessment of its workings through the prismatic lens of ongoing issues of racial inequality.” Katzenstein et al bring to the surface these tensions, and conclude that the racially-inflected disenfranchisement of felons represents a “searing” indictment of US democracy.
All three of these articles are broadly framed around the question of rights, the abridgment and enforcement of rights, and conflicts between rights. Since this is both an important topic and the announced theme of the 2011 APSA Conference, we have decided for this issue to feature a special human rights section in the Book Review. As readers of the journal will note, we have been experimenting with such special review sections in the past four issues. They will henceforth be a regular feature of the journal. Such sections are intended as complements to the Review's inherited “four field” structure, designed to place books, ideas, and approaches into proximity with—and ideally conversation with—each other, and to highlight the important substantive interests that political scientists have in common. This issue's special section houses reviews of a range of interesting and important books dealing with human rights broadly construed, from Judith Butler's Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? to Carol Harrington's The Politicization of Sexual Violence: From Abolition to Peacekeeping, to a set of books on the ethics and politics of humanitarian intervention and just war. Books (and articles) such as these are not normally discussed together in our discipline. And this is a shame, for they clearly address common themes, and constructive engagements between them can only generate better political science. Conventional forms of labeling and pigeon-holing may serve certain purposes. But they typically obscure as much as they illuminate. A case in point is Christopher S. Parker's Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle against White Supremacy in the Postwar South—a book on American history that is also a book on race and politics, social movements and contentious politics, and the complex relationships between war mobilization and democratic enfranchisement. To characterize this book merely as a work of “American politics” is misleading in the extreme. And yet, as the articles discussed above make clear, the ongoing challenges of human rights and democratic inclusion are not merely matters of US “foreign policy,” but chronic problems of US political identity, especially at a time of insecurity and political resentment. And so we have treated Parker's book as a “human rights” book. At the same time, these issues also implicate institutional questions more conventionally treated in the American politics subfield.
On this score, we are thrilled to feature two essays that center on pressing challenges to consensus formation in contemporary American politics. Both essays focus on what journalist Jonathan Rauch termed “demosclerosis”—problems (pathologies?) of political gridlock that undermine the provision of public goods and thus exacerbate a political culture of resentment towards political opponents.
Amy Gutmann and Dennis F. Thompson's “The Mindsets of Political Compromise” is occasioned by the current partisan polarization in the US Congress. Building on their 1996 book, Democracy and Disagreement, Gutmann and Thompson discuss the differences between two competing “mindsets”—“uncompromising” and “compromising”—and argue that electoral politics American-style, centered around permanent campaigning, fosters public discussion and debate that is both shallow and callow, thus undermining serious partisan and legislative deliberation and the compromise necessary for legislation. David Mayhew, whose Congress: The Electoral Connection (1974) is a classic of legislative studies, addresses a similar set of issues in his “Legislative Obstruction,” a review essay on US legislative politics centered on Gregory Koger's Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate. Mayhew carefully deconstructs Koger's important multi-method account of the evolution of the filibuster, and of counter-majoritarian legislative tactics more generally, in the process also surveying important recent work by Gregory Wawro, Eric Shickler and Keith Kriebel. While focusing on the specific legislative procedures whose employment has enabled legislative obstructionists past and present, Mayhew also addresses some questions of broader political context, emphasizing that “race, sectional politics, and civil rights keep lurching to the foreground in an account of congressional obstruction,” and that “ideological activist groups and campaign funding networks have nested within each of the two parties in an unparalleled way recently, infusing special oomph and loyalty into the cores of each of the congressional parties.”
This general account of US politics is reinforced by a number of reviews published in our American politics section, especially Frances E. Lee's discussion of Alan I. Abramowitz's The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy and Morris F. Fiorina and Samuel J. Abrams' Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics; David Karol's discussion of Sean Theriault's Party Polarization in Congress; and Steven S. Smith's review of Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller's The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform. And Paul Pierson's discussion of Steven M. Teles's The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law and the anthology on Conservatism and American Political Development, edited by Teles along with Brian J. Glenn, underscores some of the broader strategies and tactics through which conservative legal networks, activists, and policy entrepreneurs have succeeded in reshaping legal culture and practice, thereby contributing to the mobilization of the Right.
This issue also includes a number of pieces that deal with a second theme—the way that political science, and US political science in particular, is situated in space and time, both enabled and constrained by the contexts in which it operates and the institutional obstacles and incentives these contexts provide.
Michael Mosser's “Puzzles Versus Problems: On the Alleged Disconnect Between Academics and Military Practitioners” presents a compelling and spirited critique of the tendency of academics to practice Kuhnian “puzzle solving” at the expense of real-world “problem solving.” More specifically Mosser—who served as an Assistant Professor at the US Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas—argues that it is important for both scholarship and national security that the divide separating academic scholars and military practitioners be bridged. Mosser's piece, while originally submitted as a research article, seemed much better suited to a “Reflections” essay. Indeed, the essay was so provocative that I proposed to the author that it serve as the basis of a symposium on the topic. The exchange features an extraordinary group of scholars from a number of different disciplines: Robert Albro (anthropology), Paul Bracken (political science, international business, and management), Craig Calhoun (sociology, President of the SSRC), Cynthia Enloe (peace studies, women's studies, political science), Ronald Krebs (political science) and US Army Lt. Colonel Paul Yingling. I think this is one of the best symposia we have run in the journal, and it nicely complements the symposium we ran in June 2008 on the US Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Its relevance to current events and arguments regarding the US Department of Defense's Minerva Program, and military and counterinsurgency policy in “Afpak” and beyond, is obvious.
A historical perspective on these issues is offered by our symposium on David C. Engerman's Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts, a genealogy of the rise of Soviet area studies during the Cold War. This exchange brings together three prominent scholars in the field—Karen Dawisha, Stephen E. Hanson, and Michael Kennedy—each of whom has weathered the field's eclipse in the wake of the USSR's demise, and each of whom has extensive experience running important area studies centers at their respective universities. Michael Kennedy's closing comments, on the dangers of focusing too narrowly on a single “center” of concern, are particularly apt in light of the Mosser symposium: “The rise of America's Soviet experts showed what could be done at a time when the Cold War animated our vision of global challenges and our imagination of how knowledge could be relevant. I have suggested that we should avoid repeating the ‘failure’ of Soviet studies by moving away from a preoccupation with ‘knowing the enemy.’ At the same time, we should take to heart the inspiration of Soviet studies' interdisciplinarity and its quest for collaborative learning alongside its relationship to academic and political authorities as we anticipate Soviet studies' successor in mobilizing knowledge for global public goods.”
Paul Goode's “Redefining Russia: Hybrid Regimes, Fieldwork, and Russian Politics” picks up where Kennedy leaves off, addressing the challenges of doing comparative politics research in a post-Soviet political space shaped by the authoritarian tendencies of the Putin regime. Goode argues that political scientists have insufficiently considered the ways that changes in regime type affect the appropriateness of commonly employed quantitative and qualitative methods of inquiry. In particular, as regimes become more authoritarian, the “high prestige” quantitative methods of polling, analysis of official statistical indicators, and analysis of electoral data become increasingly unfeasible or misleading, while the reliability of standard forms of qualitative analysis, such as interviewing or focus groups, becomes shakier as well. Goode worries that political scientists will tend over time to abandon the study of non-democratic regimes in favor of examining regimes with more pliable and reliable data. He argues that this is precisely what seems to have happened in the past decade or so of post-communist Russian studies, and maintains that it bodes ill for the political science of hybrid and authoritarian regimes, and also for knowledge of Russia, which remains a particularly important country on the world stage.
The upshot of these discussions is that we political scientists face a dilemma. As university-based scholars and teachers we are part of the world, and profoundly shaped by the world, and we can only benefit, pragmatically and intellectually, from a more self-reflexive and serious engagement with the world as a source of both opportunities and constraints. At the same time, there is a fine and yet essential line that separates such engagement from intellectual laziness or complicity or both. The warning of Nietzsche from his Untimely Meditations is thus apt (and what can be more “untimely” than to conclude a journal of serious political science with Nietzsche): “we have now adopted the characteristic phrase ‘to adapt ourselves to circumstances.’ But the man who has once learnt to crook the head and bow the knee before the power of history nods ‘yes’ at last, like a Chinese doll, to every power, whether it be a government or a public opinion or a numerical majority; and his limbs move correctly as the power pulls the string. If each success has come by a power of ‘rational necessity,’ then … down on your knees quickly, and let every step in the ladder of success have its reverence (Digireads.com Books, 2009, p. 123).” Scarred knees are ill-suited to a dignified scholarly profession. But no more appropriate is a posture of righteous superiority. In a deeply problematic world that indeed anchors our very inquiries, such a posture easily becomes a form of bad faith. We are thus condemned both to engage the world and to be wary of it, never sure about where to draw the proper balance. This is why it is so important that we nurture a scholarly public sphere where serious discussion of and argument about these questions can shared. Enjoy this issue of Perspectives!
