The Democratic Ethos: Authenticity and Instrumentalism in US Movement Rhetoric after Occupy

The Democratic Ethos

MOVEMENT RHETORIC/RHETORIC’S MOVEMENTS

Victoria J. Gallagher

THE DEMOCRATIC ETHOS

Authenticity and Instrumentalism in US Movement Rhetoric after Occupy

A. FREYA THIMSEN

© 2022 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.uscpress.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

ISBN 978-1-64336-317-2 (hardcover

ISBN 978-1-64336-318-9 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64336-319-6 (ebook)

Front cover design by Adam B. Bohannon

‘I can’t believe what you say,’ the song goes, ‘because I see what you do.’

JAMES BALDWIN

CONTENTS

Series Editor’s Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE

The Democratic Ethos of Authenticity in the Occupy Wall Street Demonstrations

TWO

The Seattle Democracy Voucher Campaign and Ironic Instrumentalism

THREE

Bernie Sanders and Authentically Democratic Donations

FOUR

Amending the US Constitution with Transparent Deliberation

FIVE

Rural Community Democracy and the Radicalism of Instrumental Reason

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

The University of South Carolina series Movement Rhetoric/Rhetoric’s Movements builds on the Press’s longstanding reputation in the field of rhetoric and communication and its cross-disciplinary commitment to studies of civil rights and civil justice. Books in the series address two central questions: In historical and contemporary eras characterized by political, social, and economic movements enacted through rhetorical means, how—and with what consequences—are individuals, collectives, and institutions changed and transformed? How and to what extent can analyses of rhetoric’s movements in relation to circulation and uptake help point the way to a more equal and equitable world?

In her timely and engaging work, A. Freya Thimsen examines different conceptualizations of democracy in US political opposition to corporate rights since 2010, focusing particularly on the legacy of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Thimsen advances the case that the democratic ethos, as consolidated and disseminated by the Occupy demonstrations, is a flexible set of rhetorical tactics by which collectives (organizations, campaigns, and other groups) go about presenting themselves as being authentically committed to democracy. The book’s chapters illuminate the relationship between traditional and innovative rhetoric in contemporary politics and demonstrate that the democratic ethos is not a simple cultural ethic, attitude, or character trait but rather a flexible, repeatable set of tactics by which a collective discloses its own habits of self-composition as it simultaneously pursues persuasive goals.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was conceived and pushed along during a time of political upheaval. The analysis has benefited from all kinds of conversations, some of which happened well before even a sentence of the book had been written. My memories of these conversations had slipped away until a conceptual soft spot or knotty problem demanded that I return to them.

My time at the University of Pittsburgh gave me an unexpected appreciation for the questions and problems of the rhetorical tradition. The education I received at Pitt has shaped my thinking so thoroughly that I have trouble seeing that influence clearly. This specific project began in earnest at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Larry Grossberg and Carole Blair, whose vastly different but complimentary approaches to reading, guiding, supporting, challenging, and criticizing were endlessly important to how I related what I wanted to say to how I wanted to say it. Della Pollock is quite simply an inspiration—to me as to so many others. I wish I could claim to have done justice to the richness of her sense of performance. Many others made my experience of UNC a compelling one. Their voices and ideas will camp out and echo in my mind for many years to come: Brenda Balletti, Bill Balthrop, Grant Bollmer, Lucy Burgchardt, Rich Cante, Andrew Davis, Sarah Dempsey, Murat Es, Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Maggie Franz, Kate Harris, Marjorie Hazeltine, Elizabeth Hennessy, Rolien Hoyng, J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham, Srinath Jayaram, Chris Lundberg, Robert MacDonald, John McGowan, Alex Mcvey, Liz Mason-Deese, Jennifer Mease, Dennis Mumby, Julia O’Grady, Mike Palm, Kashif Powell, Adam Rottinghaus, Allison Schlobohm, Sarah Sharma, Tim Stahl, David Supp-Montgomerie, Jenna Supp-Montgomerie, David Terry, Armond Towns, Stace Treat, Eric Watts, Alia Wegner, Grover Wehman-Brown, Jes Speed Wiley, Shannon Wong-Lerner, Heather Woods, and Sindhu Zagoren. During my time teaching at Northeastern University, I learned a lot from my students and colleagues in Boston, especially Dale Herbeck, Pamela Pietrucci, and Anjali Vats.

I have been grateful to work in a supportive, intellectually rich community at Indiana University while writing the bulk of this book. This community has been populated, defined, lead, and nurtured by my generous colleagues at IU, who have supported me in many different ways. I have relied on and learned from Robert Terrill’s tremendous patience, John Arthos’s ability to dwell in ideas, Scot Barnett’s love of theory, Vivian Halloran’s generosity, Purnima Bose’s sharp insight and humor, Katie Silvester’s sympathetic ear, Rebekah Sheldon’s everything, Nikki Skillman’s gracefulness, Dana Anderson’s enthusiasm, and Patty Ingham’s determination. I’m also grateful for Stephanie Li, who unlike so many others fearlessly and repeatedly asked the question: How is the book going? My large and diverse department at IU has been a joy to me, particularly Michael Adams, Chris Ferris, Rae Greiner, Justin Hodgson, Ivan Kreilkamp, Joan Linton, John Lucaites, Monique Morgan, Walton Muyumba, John Schilb, Ranu Samantrai, Brando Skyhorse, Cindy Smith, Alberto Varon, and Shane Vogel. Thanks for everything, including all the help I know you would give if I were better at accepting it. It has also been my privilege and delight to work through ideas related to this project with the talented students at IU, including Caddie Alford, Collin Bjork, Sage Boyd, Phil Choong, Joanna Chromik, Erika Coe, Eryn Johnson, and Ben Luczak.

In addition to Laura Plummer and all the participants in the Scholarly Writing Program at Indiana University, I am grateful for everyone who has written companionably by my side in coffee shops, libraries, classrooms, meeting rooms, dining halls, lounges, offices, and kitchens. When you were there, it was more fun and I got more done.

I learned a lot from colleagues in the Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute workshop on democracy led by Pat Gehrke and Jeremy Engels as well as the workshop on ethos led by Pete Simonson and Carolyn Miller. Ira Allen and Zornitsa Keremidchieva have listened to me talk about the themes of this book on more conference panels than I care to admit. Z, your generosity and intellectual enthusiasm are infectious, and your creativity is boundless. Ira, you are right that liberalism is tired. Matt May gave me gentle, indefatigable counterpoints for many years. Megan Foley showed me what it means for intellectuals to follow their hearts. Ron Greene’s cheerleading and thoughtful perspective has helped me see a home for this work. John Lucaites, Bob Hariman, Purnima Bose, and Dave Tell each exemplified a commitment to rigor that helped me focus and refine this project. Barbara Biesecker’s commentary has proved both thought-provoking and delightfully honest. Ralph Cintron’s sympathetic skepticism about democracy has been bracing and made me see how this project might spark things I can’t yet see.

This project was supported by a fellowship from the American Association of University Women. Olivia Little and Bee Smale pitched in on hunting down some things for me. Laresa Lund’s patience, diligence, and precision have made this manuscript far more presentable than I ever could have achieved on my own. Kurt Zemlicka’s humor and support saw me through a decade’s worth of work on this topic. The final push would not have been possible without the companionship, love, silliness, and kindness of Baxter and Amma. They made it possible for me to finish this book during the most intense phase of quarantine.

Introduction

Radical-left academics loved Occupy, even when they loved to hate it. There is a decent argument to be made that Occupy basically was the street performance of radical-academic leftism, notwithstanding the substantial divisions within that group. The outpouring of radical-left love for Occupy was in part the result of how leftism in the United States had not translated easily into popular politics during the past half century. Yet the 2011 Occupy demonstrations in the United States affirmed the capacity of radically antistatist academic leftism, deeply influenced by anarchism, autonomist Marxism, and Latin American practices of horizontalidad (or horizontalism), to take to the streets in the twenty-first century.

Some left-leaning progressive and liberal intellectuals, however, were unconvinced that Occupy actually demonstrated the political viability of radically antistatist leftism. This dissatisfaction was often framed as a reaction to Occupy’s refusal to make specific, state-oriented demands.¹ Thomas Frank, for instance, wrote that Occupy was uncritical groupthink, the most over-described historical event of all time, and a failed effort that wasted its promise because it didn’t seek concrete reforms.² Frank’s critique encompassed the elitism of academic leftism, which (he argued) has ensured the increasing distance of academic leftism from what he imagines as the common people and their values and ways of thinking and speaking. Frank lamented, For all its intellectual attainments, the Left keeps losing. It simply cannot make common cause with ordinary American people anymore.³

From the vantage point of a decade later, Frank’s disappointment seems premature. Occupy continues to live on in the rhetorical forms that it consolidated and disseminated. As part of a larger, ongoing dynamic of innovation and ossification, Occupy has contributed a set of technologies, techniques, and epistemologies to the democratic repertoire of US politics. If Occupy is evaluated solely in terms of specific policy outcomes that happened in the year or two after the demonstrations, as Frank does, it cannot help but be found wanting. But the longer view now available suggests different questions about the lasting impact of the radicalism of the 2011 demonstrations.

This book argues that the performance of democratic values rooted in practices of left radicalism and horizontalism play an important role in the way that more mainstream contemporary US prodemocracy advocacy groups disclose their practices of self-organization to prove their commitment to democracy. More specifically, the democratic ethos consolidated and disseminated by the Occupy demonstrations is a flexible set of rhetorical tactics by which collectives (organizations, campaigns, and other groups) go about presenting themselves as being authentically committed to democracy because their commitment to democracy is performatively consistent; they don’t just talk the talk but also walk the walk. The democratic ethos is not a simple cultural ethic, attitude, or character trait. It is a flexible, repeatable set of tactics by which a collective discloses its own habits of self-composition as it simultaneously pursues persuasive goals. Unlike many conceptualizations of ethos, the democratic ethos is most fundamentally an ethos of a collective rather than an individual.

The democratic ethos is not new. Rather than generating something truly novel, Occupy consolidated a set of political tactics with long histories in radical leftism and made them more instrumentally effective than they had been before. The result has been a shift in the possibilities for cooperation and collaboration between left radicalism and left reformism. The democratic ethos that now appears in a variety of left and progressive organizations committed to democracy reforms is the result of an innovation in the longer history of what has been called prefigurative politics. The performance of the democratic ethos is derived from a radical intellectual and political tradition that rejects reformist compromises based on their problematic instrumental engagement with corrupt institutions. Unlike other strands of this tradition, however, the democratic ethos is visible in public persuasion and so incorporates a certain degree of instrumentalism wherein the means of political tactics and radical goals are distinct. The democratic ethos is an approach that responds to and departs from conventional liberal and neoliberal political rationalities but continues to negotiate with them.

The democratic ethos establishes a certain kind of radical credibility in the context of seeking reforms in compromised, corrupt, hierarchical political institutions. A strong democratic ethos invigorates the assumption that if a group is committed to democratic principles, it will be able to tarry with instrumentalism and pursue an agenda of institutional reform without losing its radical credibility and character. Occupy’s consolidation and invigoration of a democratic ethos was grounded in demonstrating something like authenticity through communication technologies and techniques. This democratic ethos is a political performance in which the processes of internally constituting an entity—its internal communicative practices—are put on display for an audience. For a collective entity, the process of performing a democratic ethos is necessarily also about how it forms itself and makes visible that process of self-formation.

In the process of mapping the diffusion of Occupy’s tactics and ideals, I have been struck by how prominent rhetorical theories of democracy, nearly all of which are grounded in liberalism, cannot account for many of the transformations in the US democracy movement I have been following for the better part of the last decade. The more research I’ve done on the vision of democracy performed in the Occupy demonstrations—and derived from the anti- or alter-globalization protests a decade before—the more and more obvious it has become that the renaissance in democracy we are witnessing in the United States is one that is substantially inspired, structured, and defined by the democratic practices and ideals of horizontalidad, Zapatismo, and their encuentros, cooperatives, and philosophies. For researchers of democratic rhetoric, it is no longer tenable to rely exclusively on thinkers such as John Dewey, Jürgen Habermas, Chantal Mouffe, or Jacques Rancière to theorize the rhetorical manifestations of democracy. Some rhetorical scholars have been justifiably skeptical of the status of democracy as what Kenneth Burke might call a god term that implies and justifies continued adherence to liberal (and even neoliberal) norms of citizenship, deliberation, and political action.⁴ This is particularly true when democracy is practiced by movement actors with obvious and avowed commitments to antiracist, queer, Indigenous, and decolonial knowledges, communicative practices, and values. Contemporary movements show us, however, that democracy is a concept and practice more than flexible enough to be reshaped and reinvigorated by illiberal or even antiliberal political traditions.

The chapters that follow map some of the specific theories and practices of democracy consolidated by Occupy and how they have disseminated into more reformist political rhetoric. Because of how these rhetorics are already deeply influenced by political theories of their own, it has been important to not impose an external theory (and particularly not a liberal theory) of those practices as an explanatory framework from the outset. As Darryl Wanzer-Serrano argues, theories of democracy must be decolonized in rhetorical studies—not only as a matter of principle but also because democracy is often conducted precisely by those groups who act outside of liberal democratic philosophical and political traditions.⁵ Although I cannot claim to have responded fully to this decolonial imperative, I have tried to let the performed sense of democracy appear as fully as possible rather than confine it to a pre-existing theoretical frame. It is widely accepted that the Occupy demonstrations were expressions of anarchist and autonomous Marxist understandings of democracy as an antistatist refusal of institutionalized representation and liberal governance.⁶ This was the assumption that I began my research with: that the diffusion of Occupy’s tactics and ethos was more or less the demonstration of the influence of a Marxist and anarchist radicalism that was nonetheless fundamentally modern and Western. This assumption was not wrong, exactly, but it has certainly turned out to be in need of serious revision. The democratic ethos of the Occupy demonstrations is not simply an extension of leftist radicalism as practiced in the United States and Europe over the last century. It is also, fundamentally, the performance of a conceptualization of democracy inspired by Indigenous and worker collectives in Latin America.

Conceptualizing the democratic ethos of the Occupy demonstrations is a theoretical process in the sense that it integrates other primarily speculative and abstract accounts of instrumentalism, democracy, rhetoric, and ethos. Theorizing the democratic ethos, however, also requires fidelity to what has emerged out of the movement rhetoric itself. Rather than applying any particular theory to explain the phenomena of the movement rhetoric, this book attempts to develop a theoretical account based on the self-understandings and activities of the movement actors. My aim is to perform a commitment to elevating and prioritizing the actually existing movement rhetoric and tactics above consistency and fidelity to any unified theoretical perspective on rhetoric or democracy. My hope is that the result will be a conceptualization of the democratic ethos faithful to the thrust of political actors who consolidate, disseminate, and adapt it in a variety of impure contexts and through a historic moment of great change.

The significance of the 2011 demonstrations in US politics has been affected by the emergence and ascendance of right nationalism, the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the protests following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020. Even before these events, however, the force of the right-wing nationalist political coalition created compelling, urgent incentives for liberals, progressives, antiracist activists, and radical leftists to seek out common ground and learn more about how to act together. This pressure has led to more complex and frequent encounters between horizontalism and more reformist, institutionalized forms of progressive politics. As we will see, these encounters have resulted in rapid mutations in the ways that organizations attempt to recruit and retain supporters, members, and organizers by acknowledging a greater diversity of left positions and communication tactics as they craft their collective ethos.

Occupy’s way of conceptualizing democracy as a radical left endeavor has had reverberations in left movement culture and progressive campaign rhetoric. Analyzing these reverberations begs the question of what the Left actually might be. I make no claim as to the unity, coherence, or consistency of an entity that self-identifies as the Left. Nonetheless, as Lawrence Grossberg has argued, in the United States the term still suggests a distance from procapitalist conservatives, moderates, and Democrats that is meaningful though indeterminate.⁷

The rise of right nationalism and the election of Trump has produced a second important dynamic in how the democratic ethos has been adapted by left, progressive, and even liberal actors. Trumpism represents and intersects with a deeply antiestablishment, libertarian strand in US right political culture.⁸ The resonance between this strand and the radical Left’s antiestablishment critique of plutocracy led a number of commentators to glibly refer to Occupy as the Tea Party of the Left, a comparison vehemently rejected by Occupy supporters.⁹ Nonetheless, the antiestablishment, anti-governmental rhetoric of Occupy is uncomfortably similar to Trump’s calls to drain the swamp of Washington, DC. Just as Occupy rejected the instrumentalist common sense of electoral politics, Trumpism and some other strands of right nationalism advocate the heedless, chaotic destruction of the federal government, regardless of consequences.

It is not difficult to quickly outline major differences between the Trumpian version of draining the swamp and far-left support for innovative, critical forms of democratic organization. Wendy Brown has effectively argued, for instance, that many ascendant forms of right nationalism, emerging out of a mutated form of Hayekian neoliberalism, completely reject the ideal of democracy and envision traditional morality and markets as the organizing principles that will replace state institutions in the wake of their destruction.¹⁰ The vehemence of right-nationalist antiestablishment rhetoric, however, has generated an urgent need for horizontalists (especially those of a more anarchist bent) to distinguish their advocacy from growing anti-immigrant, antifeminist, racist, procapitalist, and libertarian antiestablishment positions. Perhaps this has translated into higher tolerance for establishment and reformist leftism.

It also may be the case that emergent collaborations between horizontalist and liberal advocates of democracy are the result of how participants in the Occupy demonstrations witnessed firsthand some of the shortcomings of direct democracy. The potential problems with direct democracy, many of which are not necessarily instrumental failures, are voluminous and have been documented and theorized for decades. One of these failures, noted in some of the Occupy demonstrations, is what Jo Freeman called in the 1970s the tyranny of structurelessness, or the tendency of directly democratic decision making to implicitly privilege those with the most privilege to begin with, sometimes even enabling demagoguery.¹¹ The Occupy assemblies tried valiantly to counteract this tendency with various kinds of training and consciousness-raising, but in the end it was a struggle in many of the camps to counteract inequalities between participants resulting from stratifications in ability, gender, race, and class.¹² For participants with certain circumstances, experiences, and abilities, sitting outside and making their voices heard in hours-long meetings was not a viable way to participate in democracy. In the end, the most enduring legacy of Occupy may be that it pushed some supporters sympathetic to horizontalism to reconsider liberalism’s potential to foster equality of democratic participation through systems of representation.

The full spectrum of reasons why radicals and reformers find themselves increasingly making common cause is, in the end, unknowable. The best we can do is take note of the ways that coalitions are being formed and ask: What can we see and say about some of the ways that left reformism and radicalism have found common ground as a result of these lessons and pressures?

Democracy between Reformist Instrumentalism and Radical Prefiguration

Reformism and radicalism tend to differ in the way they approach performative contradiction. Reformist politics tolerate or even embrace performative contradictions between stated goals and tactics. When the disjunct between the means and ends of politics produce a performative contradiction, instrumentalism is ironic—but not all instrumentalism, as we will see, is ironic in this way. Radicalism, on the other hand, attempts to eschew such performative contradiction and even defines itself against the ironies that performative contradiction produces. Radical efforts to avoid performative contradiction are not always successful. Thomas Frank, for instance, dismisses radical perspectives based on the performative inconsistency between their commitment to inclusion, horizontality, and affective attachment and their willingness to exclude, marginalize, and hostilely reject would-be allies based on their lack of education in radical thinking and lifestyles.¹³ Reformism openly embraces a distance between tactics and goals in a way that radicalism does not.

In spite of accusations to the contrary, Occupy was a loosening and evolution in a type of insular, isolated radical politics that avoids instrumentalism at all costs. Occupy is strongly associated with an anti-instrumental leftism that extends and adapts a commitment to radical prefigurative democratic tactics. One of the most well known of these tactics are participatory deliberative procedures, documented by sociologist Francesca Polletta in her research on twentieth-century left organizations, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Students for a Democratic Society.¹⁴ The concept of prefiguration, however, extends well beyond participatory democratic decision making and encompasses a variety of ways in which leftist collectives self-organize according to political principles, relationships, and values. The origin of the concept of prefiguration is often traced to a 1977 article by Carl Boggs in which the author defines prefiguration as the embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal.¹⁵ For Boggs, and for many activists who embrace radical prefigurative politics, the radicalism of prefigurative tactics is precisely found in defining them against a more instrumental version of left politics in which the means and ends of politics are less closely aligned. Boggs claims, The prefigurative dimension of revolutionary politics has repeatedly clashed with the instrumentalism of bureaucratic power struggles.¹⁶ Boggs points out with some dismay that the prefigurative strategy has lacked a external element that would allow it to merge with more statist strategies.¹⁷ What is important to note about this claim is that here, in an early articulation of the concept, prefiguration is essentially presented as political strategy defined against instrumentalism, understood as political strategy that adopts expedient tactics merely to pursue institutionalized power. The practices that movements use to foster a certain culture, make decisions, and embody their values are prefigurative in that they are seen as an alternative to pursuing change by more instrumental means.

The contrast between radical prefiguration and reformist instrumentalism has been reflected in the persistent contemporary reintroduction of the question: Should left politics employ conventional, instrumentalist political tactics associated with liberal democracy and neoliberal political rationality? Political actors on the most conventional, instrumentalist, or reformist side of this question would answer yes—they see the US government itself as a democracy that has political potential grounded in the past vibrancy of liberal principles and institutions. From this perspective, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and the deregulation of finance capital represent concrete problems that can be more or less effectively solved by passing laws, amending the Constitution, electing more responsible representatives, and so forth. For instrumentalist reformers, state institutions may have been corrupted by capital, but democracy requires politicians to defy corporate masters so as to accurately represent public opinion by passing legislation that re-enables government to serve the interests of the people. Generally speaking, the reformist position is that liberal democracy should include fairer taxation policies, tighter and better funded regulations, and cleaner and better-informed elections. If certain radical principles have to be sacrificed along the way, so be it.

This instrumentalist and reformist position sees strategic value in strengthening communication that straightforwardly serves formal political equality and freedom from state interference, including opinion polling, checks and balances, rational legislative debate, truthful journalism, campaign donations, and voting. From this perspective, democracy is pursued by engineering better procedures of governance and decision making in hopes that they might one day become law. Within movement organizations, instrumentalist commitments lead collectives seeking change to identify concrete, achievable goals and use effective, efficient persuasive means to pursue them. What is essential to such approaches is that they accept and even celebrate a pragmatic division between the means of politics and the ends of politics. For such reformers, radical ends might require liberal or neoliberal persuasion.

Radical approaches to democracy attempt to theorize or create new, ideal forms of political practice that do not necessarily posit governmental reform and instrumental problem-solving as their telos. Departing from liberal common sense, left radicalism often assumes that no, conventional, instrumentalist, and institutionalized