Ev

(Michael, “Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics,” p. 85-87)

But political power construed as Arendt does masks its true nature and its capacity for control and domination—again, concepts foreign to all of Arendt's musings. There is little point of emphasizing the ways that coun- cils or the wards could act as "disruptive" spaces—the reality of the matter is that without establishing some protective covering by the state, there is no way to guarantee the security and the protection of those within decentralized locales.

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This leads to a more contentious question in democratic theory: Specifi- cally, does the council and ward System provide a populist-conservative or a disruptive-progressive force? There seems no answer to this question among her intellectual supporters, who instead seem to simply repeat it uncritically without noting its obvious diGculties. Patchen Markell, for instance, argues that "from the point of view Of mainstream accounts of democracy as a form of rule, Arendt's invocation of the ward system and council movement would look like a call—perhaps nostalgic and unrealistic—for a return to direct popular decision-making. For much radical democratic theory, the wards would seem instead to be mechanisms of popular unruliness." "The Rule Of the People: Arendt, Arc", and Democracy." American Political Sci- ence Review, vol. 100, no. I (2006): 1—14, 13. "lhis kind Of reasoning is deeply unrealistic and highly detached from the historical and the sociologi- cal realities of how power operates in societies. Once we consider that Arendt welds this political-institutional argument with her thesis about the nature of opinion and judgment. With enhanced "popular unruliness" comes any number of political forces: conservative as well as progressive. The key must be—and this is something Arendt and her supporters do not face—how to prevent the kind Of localism that can threaten personal interests as well truly common goods. Without appeal to a common power, the as secure local can all too easily succumb to particularist interests rather than general interests and welfare. Indeed, the real issue is that the council movement as well as the ward System were conceived as alternatives to the State, not simply as counterweights to it. Indeed, in American political history, it is most often particularist interests that have sought to go against federal state power for particular ends, not progressive ones. Obvious exceptions would be the attempts Of Northern states before the Civil War to pass laws protect- ing fugitive slaves and the like. However, the California Alien Land Law Of 1913 (passed by referendum), the attempts to Stave off civil rights legisla tion in Southern states, and corporate interests everywhere have consistently used local and State level political power to advance their interests. Viewed historically, localism can scarcely be seen as a secure sphere for enhanced democratic-progressive politics.

***End footnote 30***

Most recently, the Occupy Wall Street demon- strations strove for just these kinds of local places Of engagement and Isonomic deliberation, and its failure was largely due to the fact that no common purpose, aim, or political goal could be articulated. More espe- cially in the age of industrial and postindustrial societies, the more we localize politics, the less likely it will be to challenge corruption and erful sociopolitical actors. Her privileging of the Jeffersonian model dis- plays a penchant for unrealism. Indeed, Hamilton's argument in Federalist 70—73 is still salient: that the more local, the smaller the unit of political power, the less likely that individual freedoms can be protected. To this should be added Madison's thesis that decentralized political power leads only to more centralized private power, a view well defended by Grant McConnell in the 1960s: lhe cult of decentralization is based upon a desire to abolish power. Nev- ertheless, the local elites are readily brought together on a federal basis and their differences are easily reconciled, since these differences are usu- ally only that and not conflicts. Within each sphere of policy, power is not abolished but rather enhanced by decentralization. At the same time, decentralization means weakness of public oficers in contests with private organizations and the elites they represent.31 "Power" of the people is therefore not enhanced by Arendt's schemes. Power of elites is, however, and it is here that Arendt's weaknesses as a political thinker have made her influence problematic. For now, politi- cal theory, touched by her influential writings, distracts the main, core concern of politics away from view. It detaches its ideas from the insights of the social sciences even as it ignores the ways that politics is braided with other facets Of social life, culture and economics making it an inher- ently thick phenomenon. What kind of world would it be if politics were localized around the so-called political concerns Arendt prizes? In a world of corporate dominance, de ficto racial exclusion, reified consciousness, and involuted social networks, lacking an active state to protect rights and to constrain the powerful would mean a bleak world indeed. To be sure, concrete power, the capacity for certain members of the community to dominate others, to control them and their life courses and their ability to shape the public good for their own ends—none of this can be cap- tured in any satisfring or sufficient way through Arendt' narrow view of politics. twin pillars of her political theory—the reconstructed polis-ideal and an existentialist phenomenology of consciousness—disable her from dealing with these problems. 'fre Greeks did not deal with this problem explicitly or in any satisfactory sense, their reliance on the institution of slavery dulling their conception of domination; and the influence of Jaspers and Heidegger shape a concept of freedom that is overly philo- sophical and nonrealist. Rights, law, justice—none of these concepts achieve any concrete meaning outside of the power of the state to insti- tute them. Without question, the anarchic and communitarian implica- tions of her thought need to be challenged and we must accept that the post-Hobbesian concept of the state still possesses real validity. The need to rejuvenate politics through more citizen participation is indeed an impor- tant goal; but the structural form it takes also needs to be kept in view. Arendt's dismissal of the modern state places her ideas in an even more precarious relation to the needs of real politics. She views the state as one of modernity's assaults on the "political." The state mitigates against the kind of freedom that she sees as essential to the public, agora-like spaces of the polis. It is within those spaces that power is created, solidar- ity formed, and true equality and freedom are able to have sway. But any realist theory of politics will lead us to the conclusion that democracy requires the state.32 It requires the state because it is the only institution that can be used to counterbalance the kinds of inequalities and injustice that inevitably spring up in societies that have even the slightest degree of inequality in social power, whether based on property, privilege, capital, tradition, or whatever. aim of radical politics must therefore be to democratize the state and to democratize state power, i.e., to orient it toward common, public ends. To be sure, justice cannot be fostered by friendship alone; and it is doubtful that the kind of friendship that Arendt sees at the core of her conception of the "political" has any real basis historically or sociologically. lhis does not, Of course, minimize the view that social movements are a crucial vehicle for social change, but it does categorically invalidate the view that councils and wards are the proper institutional ends of any kind of modern politics. e