The Rise and Fall of Anti-Democracy, Part Two

This is a re-review of a prior book. The original review appears at The Rise and Fall of Anti-Democracy.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point

When Levitsky and Ziblatt published this book in 2023, it seemed reasonable to discuss the Trump Administration in the past tense. The once and future President lost his midterm election overwhelmingly, then became the first sitting president to lose his reelection bid in nearly thirty years. He left office with the lowest approval rating in polling history. Although Trump retained a loyal following, reasonable observers and political pundits assumed history had passed its final judgment.

The forces Levitsky and Ziblatt describe have, unfortunately, become relevant again. A plurality of American voters compared Donald Trump to an accomplished, eloquent, public-spirited Woman of Color, and decided they wanted Trump back. At this writing, Americans prepare to see which of Trump’s anti-democratic, authoritarian promises he intends to follow through on, and which will fall victim to sectarian infighting. American democracy really depends, now, on how incompetent the incoming administration actually promises to be.

Our authors describe how prior democracies shuddered and died. Their descriptions of France between the World Wars, and the anti-democratic forces that halted the legislature, seem chillingly like the swarms of angry insurgents who invaded and vandalized the Capitol Building on January 6^th, 2021. The Peronists’ inability to comprehend their electoral loss in Argentina in 1983, despite their concrete pro-worker platform, remind readers of the Democrats’ inability to comprehend their loss in November of 2024.

But it’s difficult to avoid noticing that Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t delve much into the strong anti-democratic tendency in American politics. Not that it’s absent: they do mention, say, Joseph McCarthy, who would’ve gladly overturned the entire government to purge Communist influences. They excoriate the filibuster rule, which allows only one or two Senators—in a legislative house that already protects poorer, less populous—to stop debate and kill bills with just a quick email.

But America has always had an aggressive anti-democratic contingent in its electorate. Around the same time Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote this book, Rachel Maddow wrote that a number of non-profit and civic organizations took money from the German government before World War II. These groups campaigned actively to weaken America’s small-D democratic institutions, bolster White supremacist government, and join the wrong side of the looming war. As with Trump himself, most pro-Reich conspirators went unprosecuted.

Steven Levitsky (left) and Daniel Ziblatt (via Harvard University)

It’s not that Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t address anti-democratictendencies preceding Donald Trump. Quite the opposite, they run out quite a laundry list. The way that, for instance, the Klan arose in direct opposition to the Reconstruction effort to enfranchise newly freed Black Americans. The way White leaders in Wilmington, North Carolina, overthrew the city government and installed their loyalists, the only successful coup d’etat in American history so far. Our authors acknowledge these happened.

Rather, they treat these events as atomized, existing within their own sphere. They don’t go beyond events to draw conclusions about why this happens, why every attempt to increase American democracy consistently generates violent resistance. Whenever Americans have attempted to give People of Color the right to vote, we’ve witnessed a countervailing move to make voting harder and more exclusive. It keeps happening, because it represents something deeper and more fundamental than the event itself.

In no small part, it represents a deification of the past because it’s the past. As Jason Stanley writes, great thinkers of prior eras—including the authors of America’s Constitution—have much to teach us. But we can only learn when we regard them as askers of important questions. When past masters become too important to question, their accomplishments sacrosanct and beyond the domain of doubt, a different dynamic sets in. We ourselves become fossilized.

America’s Constitution is approaching 250 years old, and at this writing, hasn’t been amended in 32 years. It’s become an artifact, something that demands preservation simply because it’s old, not because it provides us meaningful guidance in answering today’s questions. A major contingent of American lawmaking believes we need to preserve the vision of White slaveholders in powdered wigs and knee breeches simply because that which is older is necessarily more valuable than the present.

Levitsky and Ziblatt are responsible social scientists, limiting themselves to what happened, and what they can quantify. They trust readers to draw conclusions. But the 2024 electoral results, when a plurality of Americans chose the anti-democratic Presidential candidate, demonstrate that Americans broadly can’t identify patterns and draw conclusions. Real-world evidence shows that Americans don’t need scientists, we need pop philosophers, like Tocqueville and Burke, to go beyond the evidence and draw out the deeper story.

Jesus in the Living Empire

1001 Books to Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 113
Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

Dedicated Christians believe Jesus Christ’s message holds true in all times and all locations. But Jesus himself existed in a specific place and time: Galilee and Judea, in the narrow window between Roman conquest, and Rome’s expulsion of Jews from their homeland. Jesus spoke to a powerless and occupied nation, delivering a message emphasizing how to live when society and empire wouldn’t permit painless living. Jesus’ original audience understood this.

Dr. Howard Thurman began life in segregated America, raised by a grandmother born into slavery. Concepts of empire and occupation weren’t metaphorical to him. Therefore, he read Jesus’ teachings as approaches to living in a nation that wrote inequity into its laws, and maintaining one’s dignity and creativity in adverse conditions. Though perhaps less well-known than peers like Dr. King or Fannie Lou Hamer, his insights are equally relevant today.

Thurman, who pastored America’s first intentionally multiracial congregation and later became America’s first Black dean of a majority-White seminary, In the wake of World War II, he published an article comparing Jesus’ historical context with the the-current conditions of Black Americans, a comparison that seems obvious now, but was probably scandalous. This short (barely 100 pages) book emerged from that article and the discussions surrounding it.

In this book, Thurman breaks down the common, intuitive ways occupied peoples in conquering empires handle their occupation. Though the responses often take nuanced form in response to specific situations, Thurman organizes them into three categories: Fear, Deception, and Hate. These categories correspond to mainline Hebrew responses to Roman violence, though they’re not uniquely Hebrew, nor are they necessary to Jewish identity. They’re just how ordinary Jews handled the situation.

Against these three categories, Thurman describes Jesus’ prescription: Love. This seems counterintuitive. The opposite of Fear is Courage, isn’t it? Not so, according to Thurman. Courage is respected in powerful people, but in conquered populations, it makes one a target. Instead, Thurman proposes Jesus’ response that cannot be broken. Those who have humility cannot be humiliated. Those who love their enemies don’t carry hatred’s frequently toxic weight.

Howard Thurman

Throughout, Thurman alternates between Jesus’ historical context, and Thurman’s own times. His examination of Jesus’ life and times isn’t an abstracted sociological experiment. Rather, Thurman published in 1949, as American wars in Germany, Japan, and later Korea enflamed national sentiment. As Thurman notes, racism frequently increases in America whenever official outlets gin up “patriotic” sentiment.

This insight isn’t original to Thurman. Historians like Greg Grandin have noted that, whenever American soldiers return from overseas wars, the homeland almost immediately sees increases in racially motivated violence. America’s commitment to World War II and its bastard offspring, the Korean War, segued directly into the racialized violence that motivated Dr. King, Malcolm X, and Kwame Ture. This book precedes the formalized “Civil Rights Movement,” but is unitary with its social conditions.

Thurman, a pastor first and therefore a veteran author of sermons, reinforces his exegesis with sermonic illustrations. He describes a sojourn in India, for instance, where he shared coffee and insights with a certain unnamed Hindu leader. Thurman elides any identifying details, but this leader may be Mahatma Gandhi, who Thurman met, and with whom he maintained a lengthy correspondence. Gandhi’s activism contributed directly to American Civil Rights, and Thurman was one important point of contact.

I don’t make the sermonic analogy flippantly. According to Thurman’s preface, much content within this short book began life as a series of lectures he delivered on multiple occasions, refining and clarifying his insights with each telling. His prose is thematically dense, but not impenetrable, and he writes without scholarly reliance on frequent source citations. His tone, rather, resembles a beloved teacher expounding important points you’ll need sooner than later.

This title’s current Beacon Press edition includes a foreword from historian and activist Vincent Harding. Dr. Thurman, like Jesus, addressed his teachings to a specific audience, which isn’t us. Professor Harding situates Thurman’s writing in his historical context, with the personalities and situations that Thurman’s original audience would’ve simply understood. Sadly, though our world continues changing, the underlying problems plaguing it don’t always change.

Yes, the world has changed since 1949, and American Christianity with it. But many problems remain fundamentally similar. The concerns of Black Christians which Thurman describes, are now understood to extend likewise to Hispanic, Native American, and LGBTQIA+ Americans who see themselves as part of the Christian fold. They too live, as Thurman puts it, with their backs against the wall. And they too have much to teach Christians.

The Poor are Coming to Save Christians

Miguel A. De La Torre, Liberation Theology for Armchair Theologians

Jesus Christ began His ministry by standing up in congregation and proclaiming “good news to the poor,” quoting the prophet Isaiah. So why does Christianity, as an institution, spend comparatively little time and energy on the poor? Beginning mostly in the late 1960s, a growing body of parish priests and ordained pastors began shifting focus off heavenly topics, and onto saving bodies. This focus became known as “liberation theology.”

Iliff theologian Miguel De La Torre, himself a late contributor to liberation theology, offers a thumbnail summary of the movement’s beliefs and history. This isn’t always easy. Liberation theology arose from a specific historical circumstance, the peak of the Cold War, when rich nations used poor nations as chess pieces. Liberation theology sought to emphasize that poor people existed separate from American or Soviet influence, but as human beings with souls.

De La Torre’s overview therefore begins with politics. This will irritate some Christians, who think religion is somehow apolitical. De La Torre can’t survey liberation theology without talking about America’s proxy wars in Latin America, the geographical space where this movement was most public. He sometimes goes entire pages without once mentioning religion, God, or transcendence. I can already imagine the stuffed-shirt responses likely to emerge from this angle.

However, that’s the very message liberation theology conveys. Those invested in this world’s power structures must, of necessity, overlook the poor, the hungry, the dispossessed—those Jesus called “the least of these.” Telling poor indigenous people, driven off their lands by imperial ambition, to “be of good cheer” because they’ll go to heaven when they die, denies those people’s innate humanity. It tells them their struggles only matter on another plane.

Liberation theology, by contrast, doesn’t begin with right belief. It doesn’t tell people to understand esoteric concepts correctly, and everything else will follow. Instead, it starts with people’s real needs, where they live right now. As De La Torre puts it, Jesus doesn’t favor the poor and the oppressed because they’re better or more holy people; Jesus favors the poor and oppressed because they’re poor and oppressed. By extension, we should too.

Miguel A. De La Torre

Liberative theologies begin by assuming religion gives us, not an abstracted goal regarding a disembodied God, but a mission to live in this life. Jesus became embodied and walked among Jews, an occupied people and aliens in their own land, because we’re supposed to do likewise. This means resisting oppressive governments, economies, and racial hierarchies. Christians, this precept holds, are supposed to get dirty with the rest of humanity.

This book’s largest space deals with Latin American liberation theology. This is, after all, where the movement took shape, and the place where it had the largest and most cohesive identity. De La Torre, a Cuban exile and adult convert, discusses the social forces that forced liberation theologians, mostly (but not exclusively) Catholic priests, to reject theology based on “right belief,” and focus instead on how we live this life.

But De La Torre also spends time discussing other theologies from other regions. In North America, Black Liberation theology deals with ways Christians stand in solidarity against White supremacy, while feminist theology stands similarly against patriarchy. And womanist theology (a term I’ve previously misunderstood) overlaps the two, emphasizing that Black women have distinct Christian needs different from either Black men or White women.

Finally, De La Torre addresses liberative “theologies” from other religions. Sufi Islam, for instance, has a long history of opposing kings and potentates, and Gandhi’s liberative politics were informed by his Hindu beliefs, as well as the goulash of other religions he encountered walking India’s streets. Even humanist philosophies have what De La Torre considers “theologies” connecting work among the oppressed with truths that transcend human scale.

Not everyone will appreciate liberation theology. Christians who consider religion to important and pure for grubby old politics have historically disliked this approach; post-Vatican II, the Catholic Church, with its anti-communist commitments, actively silenced liberation theologians. As a Lutheran myself, I anticipate cries of “works righteousness,” my tradition’s leading wail, for a theology which insists that Christians have a responsibility to do, not just to believe.

But De La Torre’s introduction provides persuasive evidence that Christians have a God-given responsibility, not only to have a right heart, but to express that right heart through how we treat those who can do nothing for us. De La Torre not only provides a short (150 pages) introduction to why we should think this way, but also provides an extensive reading list for other sources that go into greater depth. Because if we believe, but don’t act, what do we really believe?

And the Truth Shall Set You

Austin Channing Brown, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

Austin Channing Brown wants White people to understand what it takes to survive a day in her skin. She wants us to think about how our unspoken assumptions narrow her choices, how our demands for understanding impinge upon her freedom. For her, this isn’t an academic exercise in statistics and probabilities. As a Black woman working in White spaces, the implications of Whiteness are a challenge she faces daily.

Brown uses her own autobiography, as a career activist in a Christian outreach ministry, to commence her story. In this, Brown’s story overlaps thematically with other activists I’ve read recently, including Danté Stewart and Ibram Kendi. However, Brown places the autobiographical content front and center: her writing is deeply positional. By that I mean this isn’t everyone’s story, it’s Brown’s, coming from her position as both Black and a woman.

From this position, she identifies patterns in her life starting with individual incidents. Her childhood, in a primarily White Christian school, where her teachers’ “colorblind” optimism clashes with students who harbor, and speak, profound hatred. Her multifaceted religious upbringing, and the collision between White and Black expressions of Christianity. Her professional activism career, as frequently the only Black person in overwhelmingly White spaces.

As Brown’s story unfolds, patterns become clear: White people make her responsible for their feelings. When confronted with the atrocities which racism has wrought, White people come blubbering to her, begging for absolution. When racism’s lingering presence threatens White people’s sense of self, White people lash out, expecting her to absorb their anger. Whatever happens, Brown finds herself constantly managing White people’s feelings.

Brown’s memoir of interactions with White people and Whiteness includes events that are sometimes frightening, but most often heart-wrenching. From well-meaning people coming to grips with their own inherited privilege and unexamined prejudices, to others refusing to come to grips and instead displacing their feelings into rage, Brown conveys the feelings which others bring to her. The problem is, managing others’ feelings shouldn’t be her responsibility.

Austin Channing Brown

Throughout her narrative, Brown’s Christianity informs her story. She describes how, in attending her first minority-Black church, she discovered an ethic of service and celebration that motivated her subsequent life— an ethic sadly missing in many majority-White congregations. (I can relate.) Her willingness to serve, and to reach across racial lines to build consensus in workplaces, schools, and other public places, comes explicitly from her Christianity.

This Christian ethic has limits, however. At what point does Brown get to stop maintaining others’ feelings? When White people react adversely to being challenged on America’s existing system, when is she allowed to refuse the battle? She recounts her story with a mix of emotions: great love for those who need her guidance, but also great fatigue at having to repeat the same battles ceaselessly. Surely God respects her weariness.

It’s difficult to synopsize this book without short-changing Brown’s story. Though the book is itself short for its genre, under 200 pages, she leads her readers through enough changes that the book feels epic, without feeling long. She moves from intimate recounting of her own story, to broader themes, and back again with ease. This is Brown’s personal story, but she emphasizes, it’s also the story of millions of Black Americans daily.

I read widely about race in America today. Stories like Brown’s aren’t new to me. Yet she makes clear something that’s percolated silently in my brain, without previously finding expression: that despite whatever progress we’ve made, our system still sees Whiteness (and, less explicitly, maleness) as America’s default position. People like me might sympathize mightily with Brown’s story, but the system allows us to forget. Brown doesn’t have that freedom.

Like Stewart or Kendi, Brown writes not only to convey her life lessons, but to present those lessons in one place, permanently. Instead of having to teach the same lessons time after time, she can present her book. And it’s important for us readers, too: though Brown says little I haven’t read in other writers, it’s good to hear it again. Because though I already believe her, I also have the privilege of occasionally forgetting.

Brown’s story is brief without being scanty, and personal but not sentimental. We can read her memoir with an open heart, or give copies to our loved ones who need to understand what “the system” means. Her Christian thread also makes her book valuable in churches, a space nominally dedicated to liberation, though we often lose sight. She takes us on an important, necessary journey.

What's With People Driving Cars Into Crowds?

A driver plows into a Seattle BLM protest, summer 2020 (source)

This Monday, a Tennessee woman was arrested after driving her car into a COVID-19 vaccine kiosk at the local mall. Though nobody was injured, reports indicate she narrowly missed seven workers. Witnesses report she screamed “No vaccine!” while swerving around orange road cones set up to prevent actions like hers. Police charged her with seven counts of reckless endangerment, though I can’t figure how she escaped attempted murder charges.

The Tennessee event (I won’t honor the assailant by sharing her name) fits a pattern we’ve become sadly accustomed to over the last five years. At the notorious Charlottesville, Virginia, “Unite the Right” rally, an Ohio White supremacist plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotestors, injuring nineteen, and killing Heather Heyer. During the BLM protests following George Floyd’s murder, police and civilian drivers repeatedly struck crowds on camera.

American conservatives have apparently developed a sense of entitlement that permits them to deliberately, even maliciously, attack others using their cars. The specific attachment of antiprogressive sentiment with cars seems curious. I know even other conservatives notice, because several Republican-controlled state legislatures have proposed or passed laws which functionally legalize driving cars into protestors. They basically admit they’re doing it on purpose.

Why cars, though? Why this specific affinity for resisting calls for change by deliberately attacking massed populations with motor vehicles? These attackers must realize that, like the photos of Bull Connor releasing the dogs, or the weeping girl at Kent State, these images of willful, deliberate carnage will only embolden protestors. Some other motivating force must apparently motivate their eagerness to drive cars into crowds… but what?

When mass-market cars first hit the American market, the general populace distrusted them. Consider Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, in which narrator Nick Carraway uses Jordan Baker’s reckless driving to indicate her general disdain for others, and Myrtle Wilson is killed by Jay Gatsby’s car. Or Action Comics #1, which features Superman destroying a car, symbol of the gangsters’ destructive style. Cars, once, belonged to innately bad people.

A century of advertising and PR have amended that perception. Images of SUVs winding through picturesque mountain roads, or overbuilt family sedans doing figure-8s on the Bonneville Salt Flats, have persuaded Americans that cars represent the pinnacle of independence. Locked inside your car, serenaded by your favorite tunes, with your hands on the wheel and your feet on the pedals, you’ve taken ultimate control of your destiny. Congratulations.

NYPD vehicles striking BLM protesters, apparently deliberately, summer 2020 (source)

Recent American myth-makers, including Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, and Ayn Rand, preach that America’s great destiny is complete, atomized self-control. Entrepreneurs and billionaires are lauded as champions of individuality. Activities like wilderness camping or hiking the Appalachian Trail have become symbols of accomplishment: disconnecting oneself from society and living like a truly autonomous individual. Few people actually do these things, but we celebrate that we could.

Cars have become the apotheosis of American radical individualism. We completely disconnect from others, steer ourselves to our destinations, and captain our destiny, for a few minutes anyway. Would-be leaders, like Elon Musk, openly disparage public transportation, which leaves us dependent on others’ equipment and schedules. Cars, more than houses, more than entrepreneurship, embody American ideals of individualism and self-reliance.

We know this belief is untrue if we consider more than five minutes. Most roads aren’t as empty as test roads or salt flats; especially in cities, car dependency yokes us to long commutes for even routine errands. American car culture leaves us dependent on OPEC oil and imported car parts. If we blow a gasket or lose a spark plug, we’re stranded, especially in most bedroom suburbs, where relief can take hours to arrive.

As a myth, though, car-based independence remains remarkably persistent, evidence be damned. We feel independent while driving. For people who perceive independence and individualism as paramount values, preserving that independence comes first. And when the world tells them that they have to change, that they need to not breathe pathogens on strangers, or that they need to pay a little money to offset the damage from centuries of racism, basically, that threatens their cars.

If Freud lived today, and analyzed the influences driving American society, he might forget the phallus altogether. In certain circles, sex is subordinate to the ethos of independence. (Which might be why the ostentatiously independent keep having inappropriate sex, Matt Gaetz.) And our cars have become the public embodiment of that independence. So a Tennessee woman has to value others and their health, and she lashes out with the natural weapon: her car.

Racism, the Individual, and Society

Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It's So Hart For White People To Talk About Racism

When confronting racism in America today, it isn’t enough to simply ban expressions of personal bigotry. That’s a statement most race scholars can probably accept, but which remains controversial among the general public. Even in American law today, “racism” means personal bigotry; SCOTUS took systemic racism out of consideration with McCleskey v. Kemp, in 1987. American sociologist Robin DiAngelo wants to reverse this trend. But I fear she goes too far in the other direction.

DiAngelo, who works mainly as a diversity consultant for high-dollar corporations, starts with a simple question: why do well-paid White executives, in mostly-White offices, turn defensive, even wrathful, when consultants note their companies’ racial breakdowns? Who do White people refuse to believe that racism includes the inheritance of centuries of inequality, manifested by the fact that Black Americans disproportionately don’t own their homes? Why do Whites refuse to even consider the possibility that racism perseveres?

I synopsize DiAngelo’s extensive conclusion: because naming and discussing systems violates America’s master narrative of individualism. We White Americans want to believe ourselves unbound by limitations of race, class, sex, or the kitchen sink. To suggest that systems exist, from which Whites have profited at others’ expense, offends our core sensibilities. That’s why we respond with defenses of “I’m not racist” or “I’m not responsible for my ancestors’ crimes.” We’re simply making everything individualist again.

DiAngelo finds this unsatisfactory. When White Flight and its doppelgänger, Gentrification, continue shaping urban landscapes, this isn’t individual. When access to good schools and good jobs requires demonstrated proficiency on standardized tests, which mostly evaluate what well-off Whites consider worth knowing, bootstrap ingenuity isn’t good enough. When 55% of White Americans believe anti-White racism is widespread, but few report experiencing it, this reflects a culture-wide phenomenon. And we can only address it together, collectively, systemically.

So far, so good. I agree with DiAngelo’s take on systems, perhaps because I’ve read her position before, in authors like Michael Eric Dyson and Ibram Kendi. (Which reflects another problem: the White people likely to read this book are Whites like me, who already essentially support her position. But I digress…) The legacy of redlining, shoddy education, and mass incarceration continues shadowing Black and Hispanic Americans’ opportunities, even though outright discrimination is now unlawful.

Robin DiAngelo

My problem is, DiAngelo insists racism is only systems. From the beginning, and periodically throughout the book, she repeats the message that individual bigotry isn’t really racism, that only systems which structurally inhibit BIPOC opportunity should count as racism. Even as she recounts narratives from her executive consultancy of Whites refusing to consider their ingrained bias, even while they talk over Black colleagues or otherwise demonstrate personal prejudice, DiAngelo insists racism is nothing but systems.

Perhaps this reflects DiAngelo’s background in academia, and her work with business executives. She mostly interacts with people who’d rather die than openly speak the N-word, or otherwise express individual bigotry. Such people cannot comprehend that systems manifest in their behavior, because they believe their education and economic standing have purged intolerance from their hearts. Because America’s well-off often believe they achieved greatness through their individual efforts, they’re perhaps ill-prepared to believe systems even exist.

But, having divided the last decade between assembly-line work and construction, I’m willing to attest that bigotry still exists. That young BIPOC strivers, desperate to escape their inherited straits, really do hear the N-word spoken aloud among their White peers and co-workers. That even if racism originates in systems, it becomes ingrained among individuals, who pass their bigotry onto their children. And that poor Whites, desperate for any advantage, sometimes still actively push African-Americans down.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I agree with DiAngelo’s beliefs about systemic injustice. But, in stating that individual behavior is socially conditioned, DiAngelo functionally denies individual agency. I can’t do that. Experience teaches me that humans are products of their conditions, and individual beings, at the same time. Without individual agency, nobody can effectively overcome obstacles, or challenge unjust systems. This doesn’t mean systemic racism doesn’t exist, only that individual racism exists too, and needs confronted.

DiAngelo never says anything out-and-out wrong. Her words simply reflect her academic and professional background, as my words reflect my background. For anti-racists interested in how the individual and the systemic interact, I recommend Ibram Kendi, whose positions overlap with DiAngelo’s, but go into much greater depth. DiAngelo’s book overlooks important nuances. I suspect she wrote it as a companion to her consultancy business, not realizing it would take on a life of its own.

Common Decency as Radical Resistance

This stock art shows how companies want us to think their call centers
run: orderly, efficient, and generally positive in mood

My co-worker loves receiving robocalls. Seriously. When he receives a robocall at work, he takes great pleasure in putting the call on speaker and finding ways to antagonize and provoke the poor minimum wage earner on the other end. It can be pretty funny to watch him prod the poor, hapless human operator… if you forget the worker, who probably needs the job pretty badly.

Back in the 1990s, when landlines still mattered, I spent a year working in a call center. That work is handy for desperate people, because it's one of the few remaining jobs where you can apply, get hired, and start training, on the same day. But it also makes you massively unpopular with customers. I had strangers compare me to a pickpocket, a prostitute, and Lt. William Calley.

In my day, most insults directed at telemarketers were class-based, attacking us for being poor. Nowadays, as advanced technology let's calls travel cheaply from places like Lahore and Mumbai, my co-worker has shown me an added component of telemarketer hatred: racism. My co-worker regularly dumps on callers for being brown, living outside America, and having an accent. That's where things get especially cringey.

Though I admit these insult comedy shows have their moments, I can't ignore that he's dumping on poor, off-white, and international workers for not resembling him. It's racist, classist, and ethnocentric. Worst of all, while reducing his targets to impotent rage (most aren't allowed to hang up; some don't even have a disconnect button), he isn't hurting the people who profit from this commercial-grade annoyance.

Then I remember Eunice.

More than twenty years later, I don't remember whether Eunice was even her name. Maybe I’m imputing that upon her. I remember her voice sounded old, even slightly frail, when I called her, which was relatively late in my shift. Because of the two-hour time zone difference, I probably reached her approaching sundown in her area. After all this time, I only clearly remember one thing:

She engaged me in a conversation running nearly ninety minutes.

Let me emphasize that, lest you miss the importance. An aged woman named (possibly) Eunice kept me talking, in a friendly and convivial but completely aimless manner, for nearly an hour and a half. I don’t know whether Eunice was lonely.  Maybe she hadn’t had a meaningful, low-pressure conversation in weeks. Maybe I was the first person to talk like a friend in ages.

As the conversation wound down, about fifteen minutes before my shift ended, Eunice said the one thing I remember most clearly: “Thank you, sir. You seem like a nice young man. I hope you find what you’re looking for.” Of course, at that moment, I wasn’t looking for anything besides my paycheck. But looking back, I suspect Eunice knew something about life’s arc that I had yet to learn.

In real life, call centers are chaotic places. Emotional breakdowns are common.

My co-worker thinks he’s performing some bizarre kind of resistance against robocalls by antagonizing the human operators who eventually pick up. In my telemarketing days, potential customers I called thought they did likewise by calling me insulting names or slinging vulgarities. Yet none of these loud, angry demonstrations even registered with managers who pressured us to perform or risk returning to unemployment.

Eunice, by contrast, actively stopped the system for ninety minutes. Did Eunice know I was forbidden, by company policy and FCC regulation, to hang up before she did? Probably not. But she knew, if she kept me talking, I wasn’t making more calls, annoying more people, running up profits for management. For ninety minutes, Eunice successfully lowered my stress level, while running up costs for management.

That, friends, is positive resistance. Eunice transformed a routine call, an annoyance for her and a drudgery of late capitalism for me, and transformed it into a humane connection. She didn’t shout, unload, or act boorish. She didn’t attack me for needing a paycheck. She simply hijacked an impersonal action of cube-farm enterprise, and turned it into a moment of pure, unadulterated humanity.

I didn’t realize Eunice performed an act of resistance for nearly fifteen years. Only looking back later did I realize how radical, anti-capitalist, and anti-establishmentarian an act it was for her to have an unscripted conversation with a stranger. My need for money allowed me, under company guidance, to turn her into a commodity… and myself into a machine. She turned me back into a human. Then she let me do likewise for her.

Only years later could I recognize how revolutionary that really was.

The Inevitable Patterns of American History, Part 3

A portion of America's southern border fence (New York Times photo)

Reading Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth and Richard Gergel’s Unexampled Courage simultaneously left me with a sense of bleak fatalism… at first. Professor Grandin talks about how America’s frontier and overseas wars have consistently resulted in racial violence at home. Judge Gergel describes one such act of violence, when a decorated soldier, going home, found himself beaten blind for no greater offense than being born Black.

The continuity of patterns probably wouldn’t be lost on either author. What Grandin describes in the broad sweep of history, salted with specific examples, Gergel approaches from the specific, broadening out into larger structures. Reading these books, I can’t help the chill of recognition that America has a longstanding scheme to channel our aggressive tendencies outward, then act surprised when the aggressive people come home more prepared for violence.

However, as tempting as it becomes to see American history as an irresistible trend toward racism, violence, and war, these books offer readers an opportunity to see history’s living dynamic. We aren’t beholden to the past, because we can change; we have changed. And it has happened because individuals, motivated by the belief in their own rightness and America’s stated principles, have demanded Americans do what we know is right.

Professor Grandin writes that military intervention has historically channeled America’s racial animus outward. Much racial language that still permeates our national vocabulary originated in war; I grew up hearing my father repeating Vietnam-era racial descriptions (a fact that, to his credit, now embarasses him) which I considered simply “normal.” Because inevitably, veterans come home, bearing the propaganda they’ve learned with them.

Nor can national officials claim they don’t this. Judge Gergel writes that Sgt. Isaac Woodard’s beating, which motivated President Truman to desegregate the military and federal government, came amidst a rash of postwar racial violence. Sgt. Woodard stood out only because he survived his attack. Truman felt pressed to do something because he remembered the outbreaks of racial violence following World War I, in which he served.

But Truman also felt pressed to do something because activists pressed him. Truman sat down with activist leaders, including Walter E. White and Thurgood Marshall, intending to repeat his advisors’ official line that the federal government couldn’t do anything precipitous. We need to act gradually, to introduce legislation and deliberate upon it with modest speed, Truman’s official script went. Until activists confronted Truman with facts, and he rejected his script.

America's frontier myth, as depicted by Currier and Ives

I have difficulty reading this history without seeing everything America’s faced since 2001. Faced with an aggressive desire to do something, though we’re not too sure what, following a national tragedy, America did what it’s always done. It sent troops overseas. Maybe America needed to topple the Taliban; maybe Saddam Hussein overstayed his welcome on the world stage. But the issues in these cases were inarguably domestic American issues.

Except, Grandin writes, this overseas intervention went pear-shaped in ways no prior American military entanglement had. Our invasions of the Philippines in 1898 or Vietnam in 1965 dragged on and became massively unpopular at home, sure. But with disasters like Fallujah and Abu Ghraib, we’d never seen things go as spectacularly wrong as they did in our post-9/11 interventions. These became truly historic cock-ups.

Thus we had veterans, steeped in racist propaganda (and don’t pretend Abu Ghraib was either not racist nor not sanctioned), dropped into a postwar America ill-prepared to handle their experiences. Many formed civilian “border patrol” vigilante groups, whose documented activities uncannily resemble Klan lynchings. America’s history of being afraid to harvest the seeds it’s sown continues. If only bold leaders dared to step in and say, “This isn’t my America.”

Sadly, we had three successive presidents, representing both major political parties, who were unwilling to pull a Truman and place justice over expediency. Our current President has actively fanned these flames. Circumstances probably would have changed little had the 2016 election gone the other direction; it’s been less than six months since Hillary Clinton suggested nations should appease their racist elements. Violence begets violence, irrespective of political party.

So yes, America has a history of racism, one that we’ve seen writ large since 2001. And we have presidents, and presidential candidates, urging gradualism, just as Truman’s advisors did. But we have one other thing Truman also had: the American people, believing, however tenuously, in the principles of our founding documents. That’s why, despite the patterns, I can’t surrender to fatalism. Because the patterns of American history aren’t as inevitable as they seem.

We Need To Talk About Race In Church

F. Willis Johnson, Holding Up Your Corner: Talking About Race In Your Community
Will Willimon, Who Lynched Willie Earle?: Preaching to Confront Racism

As a preacher in Ferguson, Missouri, Reverend F. Willis Johnson served on the front lines when the Michael Brown case exploded. He marched with local clergy and community members when the case stalled. And when things turned violent, Reverend Johnson interposed his black body between panicked protesters and police armed like a counterinsurgency corps. Yet he realized, eventually, such camera-friendly direct action wasn’t enough.

Johnson’s first book draws its title from the biblical story of the paralytic who, unable to approach Jesus directly, had four other men lower him through the roof so Christ could heal him. Christ healed this man through his faith, Johnson says, but also the faith of his four friends, who needed to each take their corner of his mat. Likewise, if we call ourselves Christ followers, we must assume responsibility for getting society’s least powerful through the door.

To achieve his goals, Reverend Johnson expounds his Empathic Models of Transformation, or EMT—the abbreviation is deliberate. EMT requires Christians to Acknowledge, Affirm, and Act. This means those who have standing in American society, the wealthy, white, male, and heterosexual among us, must reject our encultured White Savior complex and genuinely listen to the oppressed, where they are, regardless of our discomfort.

Despite promising to talk about race in his title, Johnson’s EMT becomes more inclusive. He’s concerned with society’s “othering” process, where our power structures categorize people into insiders and others. This includes people we’ve “othered” for their sexuality, gender identity, and more. Once we understand how power structures, often invisible, lift up some while marginalizing others, Christians can mobilize the Gospel into acts of radical resistance, just like the Apostles did.

This slim volume is part of a congregational study challenging Christians to explore the countercultural impulses of their faith. Johnson demonstrates how Scripture boldly opposed power structures of its day, and how modern Christians, inspired by that message, stand firm in defense of the powerless and oppressed. He invites congregations to join difficult conversations about painful topics, but he reminds us we don’t fight alone. We follow the One who brought Good News to the poor.

Bishop Will Willimon didn’t discover the Willie Earle lynching until he was in college, though it happened in his South Carolina hometown. From that point, the spectre of racial violence hung over his thinking, as he proceeded through seminary, ascended the ecclesiastical ladder, and eventually became a Duke University professor. Now he commences from Earle to question how white pastors can counsel white parishes on contemporary American racism.

Early in his book, Willimon unpacks the history. After a crowd of whites was unanimously acquitted for lynching Willie Earle, Reverend Hawley Lynne of Pickens, South Carolina, preached a fiery sermon to his white Methodist congregation. Whether it changed much, Willimon doesn’t address; what matters is that a Christian leader used the church to challenge the powerful in their high places, in the Wesleyan tradition.

Reverend F. Willis Johnson (left) and retired Bishop Will Willimon

Willimon relates this to today’s environment. Though most denominations condemn overt racism, white Christians remain reluctant to address systemic inequity that prevents poor non-whites improving their station in America. But Christianity’s root demand that believers address injustice. The white Protestant illusion that Christianity only preaches getting to heaven when you die makes little sense to African-Americans and other people genuinely oppressed.

Directly addressing congregational ministers, Willimon expresses his opinion that Christian leaders must address structural injustices. If Christians are a people of mission, we cannot extend that mission only to people like ourselves, those who already share our values or whose experiences resemble our own. A congregation that doesn’t reach outward doesn’t represent the Christ-like model, and from the parable of the sheep and goats, we know how that ends.

Though Willimon intends this book for preachers, and others conducting organized ministry, it offers plenty of insight for serious-minded Christians engaged with today’s world. What does Christianity mean, Willimon asks, when we see someone bleeding by the road? More important, when it’s us bleeding? Willimon doesn’t answer these questions directly. Rather, he challenges Christians to go inward seeking answers. Because only when we know Christ can we change.

These books have some commonalities. Both authors are United Methodist clergy: Johnson, a pulpit minister and church planter, Willimon a retired bishop. Both teach in seminaries, so they have the “teaching and preaching” halves of ministry covered. And both books run under 100 pages, plus back matter. But they aren’t identical in theme or approach, and have different intended audiences. I recommend reading both books together.

Debating the Past in America's Largest Slave Port

Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy

Historians and preservationists sometimes call Charleston, South Carolina, “the Cradle of the Confederacy.” As colonial America’s foremost southern port, the majority of Africans imported for the slave trade entered through Charleston. South Carolina’s resolution to secede from the Union passed in Charleston, making this city the beginning of the Civil War. And Fort Sumter sits on an island in the harbor just off Charleston’s shores.

Ethan Kytle and Blain Roberts, a spouse team specializing in 19th Century American history, tackle here an unusually specialized subject: how one city has struggled, since 1865, to remember its past. Focusing on Charleston, a remarkably well-preserved city which has maintained much of its antebellum charm, allows the authors to focus very narrowly. But one needn’t read very long to realize, this book is still about the present.

Both before the war and after, Charleston was a majority-Black city. The Citadel, which remains one of America’s leading military colleges, was originally founded in Charleston to provide a reliable cadet corps in case of slave uprisings, like Denmark Vesey’s thwarted 1822 rebellion. Charleston held its last public slave auction just weeks before Union forces overran the city, so confident did city fathers remain in their city’s durable forced-labor economy.

When Union forces first occupied Charleston, Black residents celebrated; our authors describe parades, street festivals, and Union soldiers greeted as liberators. Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day, was first celebrated to mark the occasion when liberated slaves decorated the graves at a former POW camp outside the city. For twelve years, Charleston served as liberated Black America’s unofficial capital and cultural touchstone.

Then Reconstruction ended, and Union forces went home.

Kytle and Roberts describe an intricate, years-long PR campaign to manage how Charlestonians remembered the war and the slave era. While former slaves remembered brutality, isolation, and fear, they mostly weren’t literate, leaving oral histories behind. Literate whites, controlling the newspapers and other printing, cultivated an image of paternalistic slaveholders and jolly slaves. Most relevant to today, they also nurtured the myth that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery.

The city landscape became the most active battlefield for city memory. What city leaders chose to memorialize became part of Charleston’s identity. “Philanthropic” organizations, including white churches, erected multiple memorials to prominent slaveholders, including former Vice President and pro-slavery firebrand John C. Calhoun. Sites associated with Black history, like Denmark Vesey’s house, got demolished. In essence, the history worth saving became the history worth having.

Ethan J. Kytle (left) and Blain Roberts

Remarkably, this isn’t only about racial politics. Women took point in funding and building the Calhoun memorial, including replacing it when the first memorial looked comical. Our authors make a throwaway comment that really grabbed my attention: women took this lead because Southern society considered women innately apolitical. Thus an explicitly political statement became somehow innocent by being feminized. Neo-Confederates used gender politics to disguise their ugly racial politics.

Again, Kytle and Roberts consider this a throwaway statement, in the midst of a larger discussion of public appearances. But for me, it became the emblem of how intricately micromanaged the effort remains to normalize racism, excuse slavery, and make the Confederacy somehow heroic. At a time when women couldn’t vote or own property, their very presence served to exonerate racist patriarchy from its most violent outburst in American history.

This isn’t a history of a place, a city. It’s a history of history, of the ways residents have struggled for how to remember their past. As George Orwell observed seventy years ago, forces who control the past control the present: we define our current identity by the stories we tell about what we’ve done and who we’ve celebrated in days gone by. Though certain events clearly happened, how we define those events, and the people behind them, defines us.

Our authors describe this 150-year battle in plain English, fortified with maps, black-and-white photos, and other visual aids for non-specialist audiences. They have a panoply of sources, which treat liberated slaves’ oral history as seriously as literate whites’ massive documentation. Where we don’t have hard-and-fast facts on historical events, such as freed slaves’ elaborate but unprinted dance celebrations, they offer informed speculation backed with sources.

Kytle and Roberts write about one violently contested American city. But like the best literature, this book is also undeniably about us. History, for them, isn’t an inert list of facts, but a debate which the living still engage. And they invite us to see that debate, often concealed, made plain. What they reveal says everything about us.

How To Have a Career In Outrage

Seriously, this is a thing. Click to enlarge

Early Thursday morning, while checking my regular websites, I had one of those weird moments made possible only by algorithm-driven electronic communications. Several Facebook friends, mostly graduate students or recent degree holders, shared various forms of outrage about Calvin Trillin’s newest poem, “Have They Run Out Of Provinces Yet?” Immediately below one such diatribe, Facebook ramrodded video clip from their tragicomic new Moto-Dojo ads. Apparently without ironic intent.

ICYMI (as the kids say), Trillin’s poem lists the various Chinese regional cuisines that have been aggressively marketed to Americans throughout his lifetime, each putatively hipper and more authentically Chinese than the last. When I first read this poem, before the shitstorm erupted, I interpreted it as a satire on how marketing gurus have commodified China, usually denuding it of history and accuracy in the process, for dumb-tongued Western audiences.

Moto-Dojo has no such, even hypothetical, justifications. It shows a white guy with a Fu Manchu mustache displaying supremely bad martial arts moves, in what appears to be his mother’s basement. This segues in various ways into some display of Motorola’s new mobile phone features. I’m unclear whether this chintzy, broadly imperialistic campaign comes from American-owned Motorola Solutions, or from Motorola Mobility, a subsidiary of China’s Lenovo Corporation.

For whatever reason, the sort of university-based umbrage-mongers who get upset at “cultural appropriation” have selected Trillin as this week’s receptacle of moralistic outrage, while politely overlooking Motorola. Critics have forced Trillin onto the defensive, making him explain what I considered obvious, that it’s “written about food snobs” and not about Chinese people. Motorola, by contrast, has been characterized with terms like “extremely comical” and “all in good fun.”

Calvin Trillin (AP photo)

This makes me wonder: who decides which villainies merit our anger? Is Trillin’s poem worse than Motorola’s ads because Trillin is an artist, supposed to have pure motives, while we accept such vulgarity from venal for-profit corporations? Our selective blindness about truly offensive situations, while seeking persecution where little exists, says something about our national psyche. Critics disparage some populations for seeking mass-market victimhood. But that’s becoming our entire society.

The Moto-Dojo advertising campaign looks like plain old yellowface, the same form of cross-cultural usurpation that made Hollywood movie studios think they could trowel “Oriental” makeup on Peter Ustinov and let him play Charlie Chan. I've complained about "cultural appropriation" accusations before, claiming the term is overused to demonize ordinary situations where art movements achieve mainstream acceptance. But this looks like a situation where it clearly applies.

Perhaps the abruptness of the reaction tells us something important. Though Trillin’s poem was included in a The New Yorker issue which shipped last week, and had been online for nearly a week before the outrage explosion, the reaction blew up late Wednesday evening and into Thursday morning. Nothing about the poem or its presentation changed on Wednesday. Just suddenly, for no visible reason, countless people became rashly angry.

Just as the explosion happened so fast, it ended almost as quickly. After I started writing this essay, I paused to, y’know, go earn a living. By Thursday evening, the furor had petered out; by bedtime, it had vanished entirely. Though some stray tubthumpers might still be posting somewhere in the twitterverse, the momentum of outrage had passed back to usual election-year targets, like Donald Trump or the Clinton legacy.

This hasty reaction, and its equally swift evaporation, says something. The social media echo chamber, fueled by what British journalist Mick Hume calls “full-time professional offense-takers,” prompts many contributors, eager to appear right-thinking, to jump on every bandwagon of moral umbrage, however specious. Because a certain fraction of outspoken Chinese-American dignitaries saw trespass in Trillin’s poem, media figures and graduate students followed suit, possibly without anticipating the ramifications.

The New Yorker issue which
contained Trillin's offending poem

Please don’t mistake my intent. Serious outrages do happen; sometimes, public figures deserve our scorn. The blowback last week over the Kenyon Review posting two cack-handed “Indian” poems online reached heights enough that the magazine eventually pulled the poems. (They claim it happened because the poet violated editorial guidelines, but c’mon.) Sometimes people get angry because bigwigs do something stupid, and earn the consequences they endure.

But this isn’t that case. High-minded crowds turned on Trillin because they behaved like a schoolyard mob over a vanishingly insignificant offense. And like such people do, they became so enwrapt in fake umbrage that they missed legitimately offensive behavior right in front of them. The effects of such viral outrage should frighten observant people. Because like all mobs, this one could turn on you.

The Revolution In Reverse

Jay F. Hein, The Quiet Revolution: An Active Faith That Transforms Lives and Communities

I admit accepting this review book for one quirky reason: the title recollects Shane Claiborne’s The Irresistible Revolution, a book I enjoy and admire. I find the idea of revolutionary Christianity exciting, as the ongoing liberal/conservative divide in contemporary politics overlooks the poor, sick, and imprisoned Jesus calls believers to serve. But it’s hard to imagine a book less similar, a message less concordant, than this book.

Jay F. Hein headed President George W. Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives during Bush’s second term. He oversaw government partnerships with religious charities. As you’d imagine, that partnership drew secular outcry, and occasionally still does, as Barack Obama has maintained this office into his administration. But the news eventually abandoned the hue-and-cry when its practice proved uncontroversial and frankly banal.

I’m divided about Hein’s thesis. I generally concur with his insistence that secular government can profitably cooperate without violating the First Amendment. He mentions (rather, name-checks) numerous innovative charitable institutions that pursue general social ends, just coincidentally driven by spiritual motives, which the Bush administration aided. These weren’t proselytizing missions; these were social charities driven by love of God or the gods.

Simultaneously, though, I cannot overlook what Hein doesn’t mention. Dead silence on President Bush’s longstanding refusal to address the processes which make people poor to begin with. Even as Bush chaperoned this new public/faith cooperative into America’s consciousness, it oversaw tax cuts during preparations for war—a combination of elevated spending and truncated revenue unprecedented in American history.

That’s saying nothing about Hein’s relentlessly glowing encomium to President Bush personally. He fleetingly mentions Presidents Clinton and Obama, besides occasional nods to Carter and Reagan, but repeatedly dedicates pages and pages to President Bush and his relationship to OFBCI-funded charities. One needn’t read long to realize, Hein isn’t praising Christian charities, he’s fundamentally praising George W. Bush… and, implicitly, Jay F. Hein.

Jay F. Hein

Hein writes that the Bushes “used their White House platform to show that government can help place problems before the public, but it is only the heroic work of community partners who can solve them.” In other words, despite vibrant praise for President Bush giving heartwarming speeches and showing up to shake occasional hands, he delegated to volunteer charities responsibilities once willingly accepted by professional public servants.

Practically speaking, the OFBCI’s greatest liability wasn’t its partnership with religious charities. Rather, it changed the tone by outsourcing civic responsibility to private organizations, which by definition lack government’s pan-social influence. Hein mentions tweaking tax codes to encourage and reward charitable giving. What about tax codes that tax investment dividends and monetary flips at half the rate of wages? That seems problematic.

Moreover, kicking active responsibility to independent charities redoubles the burden upon private givers. Recall Paul Piff's 2012 report that, despite occasional high-profile philanthropic largess, the poor actually give to charities, as a percentage of income, at nearly twice the rate of wealthy Americans. Moreover, while poor giving largely goes to religious and civic action groups, the rich substantially give to research endowments, higher education, and the arts.

I cannot reconcile Hein’s “cut a check to charity” ethos with Claiborne’s gritty Christianity. Claiborne relinquished his middle-class white birthright to live among Philadelphia’s poorest, most disfranchised denizens. His modern monastery sits between two brothels; desperately poor prostitutes and junkies comprise his core congregants. Claiborne has courage I lack. Hein, by contrast, encourages part-time Christianity. I recall the Parable of the Widow’s Mite.

The worst consequence I imagine is: what if religious charities become too dependent on government money? Even as outsourcing makes America’s poor more dependent on charity, the charities need more government money. This makes charities more compliant to government demands, less likely to challenge injustices—in short, it turns religious activists into government representatives. It makes the church a government bureau.

Shane Claiborne describes one protest: when Philadelphia outlawed sleeping in parks, to criminalize homelessness, his group had a mass sleep-in. The resulting court case overturned the legislation as unconstitutional. Christianity needs that rebellious streak, that Bonhoeffer-like willingness to challenge the powerful in high places. Could Doctor King have defied Alabama law if Alabama signed his paychecks?

The “Quiet Revolution” Jay F. Hein advocates isn’t a revolution in charity, it’s a revolutionary subservience of church to state. When Church and State become entwined, State arguably gains moral heft, but Church becomes a government bureau. This defangs the largest organized body capable of challenging state-based injustice. That means a shrinking of opportunities for everybody who can’t purchase power.

Weeds in the Children's Garden

Johann Christoph Arnold, Their Name Is Today: Reclaiming Childhood in a Hostile World

Johann Christoph Arnold’s manifesto for renewing childhood’s infinite potential really excites this ex-teacher’s ideals… at first. I like his principles of nurturance and play as tools to develop well-rounded human beings. His exhortation for adults to spend time around children, insisting this gives us opportunities to rediscover life’s wonder. As Arnold asserts, humankind’s philosophical and religious traditions reward people who see life through the eyes of a child. Through childhood, life makes all things new.

Yet Arnold repeatedly undercuts otherwise masterly arguments by failing to recognize nuance. Presumably writing for middle-class parents besotted by modernity’s flush suffusion of distractions, he urges us to forego self-seeking behavior, much loved in today’s technological society, and dedicate ourselves to childrearing as a nigh-religious vocation. He apparently doesn’t recognize the many working-class families who, despite noble efforts, cannot dedicate copious hours to their children’s well-being. Many would desperately love to do so, but can’t.

Who wouldn’t admire Arnold’s vision of classical “kindergarten,” where children encounter a mix of guided play and incremental responsibility, as means to improve their minds without deadening their souls? Were such options readily available, this childless ex-teacher would gladly volunteer his skills. (Arnold’s “kindergarten” survives today mainly in Montessori schools.) The problem isn’t that nobody wants these opportunities, or disdains them; it’s that, at society’s bottom rungs, such opportunities exceed hardworking parents’ ability to pay.

Arnold perhaps doesn’t realize how hurtful some statements appear. He writes: “When we sit texting on a playground bench while our kids play alone, whose time are we saving?” Okay, we’ve all known parents whose children raise themselves because their noses remain buried in an iPhone. I've read the documentation. But everyone has individual circumstances. What of overworked blue-collar parents whose only personal minutes happen while kids run free? They aren’t neglectful; they’re just poor.

Some parents certainly neglect their children because they’re preoccupied with moddish distractions. Some. But Arnold entertains no other explanation at any length; for him, all failure to provide hands-on childhood nurturance stems preponderantly from bourgeois self-absorption. Many of my factory colleagues, many with working spouses and second jobs, would desperately love more time with their kids. But Arnold’s rebukes seem particularly hurtful, because my colleagues can afford neither hip smartphones, nor time at the park.

Too many blue-collar workers castigate themselves because they cannot spare childrearing time like they remember from their parents. Since falling backward on society’s economic ladder, I’ve watched co-workers reduced to rage or tears because they must entrust children to older siblings while they work graveyards, then to schoolteachers and paid caregivers while they sleep by day. They live paycheck to paycheck, unable to bequeath much when their kids hit adulthood. They don’t need further guilt.

Though Arnold resists mere instrumental valuations, and I understand why, the fact nevertheless remains that children are costly. Children require fed, clothed, sheltered, entertained, and educated for fifteen years or longer before they’re capable of making more than salutary contributions to family coffers. Certainly this doesn’t make children worthless; unless you’re Ayn Rand, all humans have value beyond simple economics. But it does force working-class parents to budget money, time, and other finite resources appropriately.

But wait—humans, including children, certainly do have economic import! Writing the above paragraph, I remember something Richard Stearns of World Vision wrote, that when his charity dug communal wells through bedrock in isolated African villages, families found themselves suddenly free to limit procreation, because they didn’t need children to fetch and carry water. Pre-industrial agrarian societies encouraged large families because children constituted the farm’s labor force. Until recently, children had innate value only laterally.

Therefore, Arnold’s vision of lost childhood inherently requires degrees of economic autonomy not shared equally. Even in economically stable America, families who don’t resemble the supposed aggregate find themselves unable to dedicate time to their children like they’d prefer. And lumping overworked, cash-strapped parents together with their negligent or heedless peers essentially serves to shame poor people for being poor. I’m sure Arnold doesn’t mean that. But his failure to differentiate nevertheless produces this result.

I applaud Arnold’s ethical framework. Many women and men, even lacking their own children, share Arnold’s vision, and dedicate lives and careers to education, advocacy, and enlightened childrearing. I taught for four years, and would’ve continued if I could’ve afforded the penurious wage. But Arnold paints with a broad brush, apparently unaware that individuals have differing motives for superficially identical actions. A society-wide problem requires a society-wide solution, not chiding individuals regardless of their circumstances.

The Charitable-Industrial Complex

Peter Dauvergne & Genevieve LeBaron, Protest Inc.: The Corporatization of Activism

Greenpeace began in 1970 as a wildcat protest against nuclear tests in the North Pacific. Forty-some years later, Greenpeace has a corporate charter, a CEO, an investment portfolio, and strict rules preventing grassroots members from going off-script. Dauvergne and LeBaron boldly question: what costs do change agents pay by organizing along a capitalist corporate model? The answers they uncover are harrowing, but not particularly unexpected.

Though they return to the Greenpeace example periodically, our authors take an expansive view of organized activism. Many formerly radical groups have adopted structures modeled on Fortune 500 companies, including well-paid executive boards and diverse, aggressive investment strategies. This includes sinking donor money into capitalist enterprises, and permitting large-scale donors to demand “return on investment” for putatively philanthropic giving. Whether this facilitates real, fundamental change, matters little to paid leaders.

Corporatized charities thus become beholden to money and other status quo influences. Rather than demanding actual systemic, radical changes (radical, from Latin: root), corporate charities accept superficial changes while letting underlying conditions fester unchanged. Bigness, briefly, encourages activist schizophrenia. Groups like Greenpeace, World Vision, and Amnesty International promise revolution to street-level members, while essentially appeasing their corporate and government allies. Activists buy into the system they claim to oppose.

Dauvergne, a Canadian, and LeBaron, from Britain, come from political science backgrounds, but we’d more accurately call this book political philosophy. They have distinct ideas about what charities, NGOs, and other activist groups should do: such organizations should resist crushing forces of wealth, power, and cozy arrogance. And they perceive their beloved change agents failing in their tasks. Thus their book mixes manifesto, goad, and plan of action.

Traditional protests, like the Chicago Haymarket demonstrations or Civil Rights marches, demanded unified group action. But corporations see groups as conglomerations of individuals, and corporatized charity encourages what Dauvergne and LeBaron call “compassionate consumption.” Rather than act together, corporate charities encourage us to spend separately, which makes individuals feel vaguely ennobled, but makes real challenges, like global warming and financial malfeasance, look too imposing for real, meaningful change.

While large-scale corporate charities essentially sell themselves to “crony capitalism,” governments and private security forces increasingly treat rank-and-file protesters as terrorists. Nor is that an exaggeration: since 9/11, government documents openly characterize environmentalists, labor organizers, and urban monks as equal to al-Qaeda. Violence has become the first resort in handling demonstrators. The NYPD, with FBI connivance, used military tactics and technology to disperse #Occupy encampments.

This dualism has chilling effects—literally, as citizen passions dissipate. Large, essentially conformist groups get corporate and government assistance, including both manpower and money. Actual dissidents and True Believers can expect arrest, or worse. Thus the very principles of democracy, including Constitutional American guarantees of free speech and assembly, become hallmarks of outlaw insurgents; law-keepers violently terminate unauthorized but completely legal public gatherings. Demanding answers from elected officials becomes criminal.

Our authors never quite say it, but when wholly legal protests get treated as “national security issues,” governments essentially declare their people enemies of the state. This changes the very foundations of Western civic authority. Protecting the charitable-industrial complex while silencing civilian dissent, governments redefine us as customers, not citizens. We’re free to buy and spend, whether altruistically or selfishly; but we’re banned from questioning our government and corporate overlords.

But not everything feels bleak. Recent social changes (cf. Jeff Speck’s Walkable City) have gradually reintroduced community ties that encourage collective action. Authentic radicals are abandoning corporate charities for grassroots activism. Simultaneously, new leaderless protest models, including the geographically diffuse #Occupy model, encourage small-scale management, responsive to local needs. Fervor lives at the street level, and while maintaining that passion remains difficult, only such naked anti-authoritarian rebellion encourages real change.

Though the authors dance around the topic, they essentially confirm one of my pet issues: bigness and bureaucracy cause complacence. Small, community-level movements retain vigor. As they describe the push-pull between transnational, corporatized “charities” and grassroots protesters, Dauvergne and LeBaron describe the true movement of civic authority: leaders would concentrate power at the top. But real activists can re-channel energy by where they dedicate their loyalties.

Real citizenship requires every citizen’s active, informed involvement. Turning the impetus for change over to corporate charities has proven as numbing as entrusting such authority to governments or capitalists. Dauvergne and LeBaron demonstrate how free Western nations have lost the compass of true democracy; but we can reclaim our direction by exercising our wits, numbers, and legitimate citizenship. It’s never all lost; sometimes we just forget our own power.