Shades of Green

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

By Jim Miles
OpEds

Annamie Paul at the podium.

Election Non-event
Canada’s recent election proved mostly that Canadians are more or less set within their provincial agendas.  The ruling Liberals gained three seats, the Conservatives stayed the same, the Bloc Québecois gained two, the Greens lost one, and the NDP gained one.  (There were five independents before the vote).  In sum, nothing changed, a lot of money was wasted - or contrarily contributed to the GDP generously.  The main excitement concerned the Green Party and its internal squabbles - arguments that in themselves reveal a fair bit about the Greens and a fair bit about Canadian identity politics.

The Greens campaigned with a new leader, Annamie Paul, who personifies three degrees of identity politics:  a woman, a black, and a Zionist Jew.  Her main problem was the latter, her full-on support of apartheid Israel - she did not put it in those terms, but she did proclaim herself to be Zionist, and that is where the party split in spite of her attempts to deflect the problem to racism and misogyny.  While there are elements of racism and feminism, Zionism was the focal point.  The end result was a party torn apart by its internal attempts to control different factions.

The Greens officially support the two-state solution, recognizing that chances for achieving such are rapidly diminishing.  Their program [https://www.greenparty.ca/en/sgm-2016/voting/resolutions/s16-p013]
is quite progressive compared to the two main parties (Liberals and Conservatives), quite similar to the NDP position, and was decided on within a membership vote.  Beyond that, a set of polls by IJV, UNJPPI, and CJPME of Canadians [https://www.cjpme.org/survey2020_r3] demonstrate that the majority of Canadians are supportive of some form of sanctions against Israel, the upholding of the several UN declarations, the application of humanitarian and war law, and support the intervention of the ICC.

You cannot be green if….
The problem some of the greens demonstrate is a lack of understanding of how geopolitics shapes their “green-ness”.  In a recent internet column, a number of comments indicated that the party should stick to only environmental issues and not become involved with other issues or issues outside Canada.  Unfortunately, that is not possible if the workings of the current geopolitical setup are understood clearly.

In general geopolitical terms, being “green” is denied by several factors.

First, if you support settler colonialism and its impact on the environment and on the indigenous people then you are not green.  Settler colonialism is a racist extractive system that destroys one set of people and applies restrictions on their usage of the environment even though, as indigenous people, they understand their own environment much better than the colonialists.

Indigenous rights in Canada, while receiving much commentary currently, are still subject to the racist Indian Act incorporated into the Constitution, and are still subject to military-style interventions to support corporate extraction over the objections of the indigenous people on their unceded territory.   Israel is a colonial settler state, with parallel laws limiting indigenous activity while maintaining military control over the Palestinians and annexing and using the land and water resources for their own profit and benefit.

If you support the military it is impossible to be green for various reasons.  As above, militaries are used mainly to support corporate powers and their allied governments in order to extract materials and profits from indigenous territories.  Importantly as well, militaries are the largest institutional users of carbon energy and dangerous chemicals in the world.  Regardless of a personal belief in the current mantra’s of “terrorism” or “aggression” by ‘others’, it becomes cognitive denial to then side with the Greens.

“It’s the economy, stupid.”  (Bill Clinton)

Obviously related to all this is the economy in general.  Neoliberal economics operates on an extractive profit motive - it is definitely not green.  The externalities of corporate extraction - pollution, damage to land and water resources, the destruction of inidigenous farmland/resource lands, necessitating a turn to wage-slave status or worse - are never accounted for when costs and profits are tallied.  Israel and its military industries operate within this paradigm, trading their expertise (”field-tested”) to countries around the world, with ordnance, hardware, and security applications.  Many of their companies profit from cheap Palestinian labour within the West Bank, and the externalities as indicated, are imposed on Palestinian land.

Most of the above refers to an industrial economy where something is actually produced.  A form of neocolonialism takes place with the modern financialized economy where profits are made through the rentier extraction of money from the majority through our current system of debt obligations.  The structural adjustment programs imposed on much of the developing world and its resultant austerity and debt problems are designed to keep those countries locked into financial subservience to the Washington consensus of financial institutions - the IMF, World Bank, BIS, et al.  Domestically, a financialized economy exists where governments subsidize industry leaving the citizens to contend with their domestic consumer/debt problems.

More directly concerned with the Green Party is Canada’s foreign aid.  Part of this foreign aid is designated to the PA for training its ‘police’ within its role as supporting Israel’s suppression of the Palestinian people.  Beyond that, much of Canada’s foreign aid is used in order to support Canadian corporations, many of them destructive mining operations, working within third world countries.  [https://yvesengler.com/2021/05/09/ugly-canadian-mining-policies-continue-with-trudeau/ [1] ]

Shades of green
In order to be green without cognitive dissonance, the above concerns need to be addressed.   Only a cognitive dissociation will allow a “green” to support our current political-financial-military-industrial system of for-profit corporate power.   For Canada’s Green Party to be led by a Zionist is contradictory to both the official party line and creates possible dissonance to an individual member’s comprehension of global geopolitics.

[1]  While this article criticizes Trudeau specifically, the Conservatives also support this system

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of  The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience. 

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The theory of intersectionality emerges out of racist, colonialist ideology, not radical politics—Rethinking the CRT Debate Part 3

ridicuous postures

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

by Patrick Anderson
MONTHLY REVIEW

Posted Sep 13, 2021 

Recent debates about Critical Race Theory (CRT) have been abysmally uninformed at best and utterly inaccurate at worst. From corporate media and right-wing rags to independent left media, almost everyone has misrepresented or misunderstood the origins, histories, and theories of what is today known as CRT. This three-part series corrects these misunderstandings. Part 1 provides an overview of works of Derrick Bell, the “father of critical race theory.” Part 2 provides a detailed intellectual history of CRT. Part 3 presents a critique of intersectionality as an idealist, liberal iteration of CRT.

***

The Critical Race Theory (CRT) frenzy has been in full swing for months now, and in the rush to make sense of this intellectual tradition, corporate media have repeatedly flocked to one individual more than any other to provide their account of CRT with the cover of authority and rigor. That person is Kimberlé Crenshaw, a legal scholar who is recognized as one of the founding figures of CRT and who is credited with coining the very term “critical race theory.”

Before the recent controversy over CRT, Crenshaw was predominantly known as the scholar responsible for coining the term “intersectionality” and providing intellectual orientation to a type of feminist theory that sought to account for race and gender simultaneously rather than separately, as intersectionality theorists have accused other social theories of doing.

Yet when the scholarly origins of Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality are excavated, it becomes clear that it is rooted not only in philosophical idealism but also in racist and colonialist ideology.

The first step in understanding Crenshaw’s version of CRT and the intellectual origins of intersectionality is to understand her as part of the idealist strain of CRT. Unlike the realist theorists of CRT, such as Derrick Bell, who place racism in an economic context, approach the study of racial histories from an empirical perspective, and present anti-colonial and anti-imperial critiques of Amerikan society, idealists like Crenshaw argue that racism is largely a psychological issue, a problem with white consciousness that is best addressed through education and the evolution of language and symbols. Idealists also tend to be more reformist than radical, preferring to claim so-called “American Values” as their own, rather than fundamentally question the nation’s imperial history and present.

Such idealism and reformism are both present in Crenshaw’s work. In her 1988 essay “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law,” a foundational text of the CRT tradition and one of Crenshaw’s earliest publications, Crenshaw unquestionably stakes out her political reformism and idealist methodological orientation. Much of the article is dedicated to criticizing the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) scholars of the day for neglecting the role of race in social oppression and for too quickly dismissing the utility of liberal legal reforms, including rights-based reforms, for Black people in the U.S.

As Crenshaw explains, CLS scholars wanted people to question the structure of society from the ground up, and according to the CLS writers, the only way to get people to question society in this way was to disabuse them of all the illusions of the liberal capitalist order. This process included disabusing the public of the idea that law is socially and politically neutral. For this generation of CLS scholars, if people continue to think that claiming rights is a viable strategy for liberation, then (as Crenshaw puts it) “the legitimacy of the entire order is never seriously questioned.”

According to Crenshaw, this radical demand to fundamentally question Amerikan society requires us to overlook “the transformative potential that liberalism offers.” Claiming that “People can demand change only in ways that reflect the logic of the institutions they are challenging,” Crenshaw concludes that a “pragmatic use of liberal ideology” can help protesters and scholars resolve the racial contradictions of Amerikan society and advance the cause of Black freedom by winning and defending Black “rights.”

How would such a transformation commence? In Crenshaw’s view, it “must begin with beliefs about Blacks in American society, and how these beliefs legitimize racial coercion,” especially white race consciousness. She distinguishes between “symbolic subordination,” which denies Blacks social and political equality, and “material subordination,” which denies Black economic, health, and other material benefits of society. Importantly, in a direct inversion of the materialism of realist CRT scholars like Bell, Crenshaw says that the former causes the latter: “Symbolic subordination often created material disadvantage by reinforcing race consciousness in everything from employment to education.” In other words, if we change white people’s minds and rid them of anti-Black ideas, material change will necessarily follow.
In Crenshaw’s idealist worldview, then, CRT is about demanding that “America” become what is (supposedly) truly is: a diverse and inclusive democracy. And this goal is achieved by using law strategically and teaching white people not to be racist. It is from within this idealist, reformist context that intersectionality emerged.

Since Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” approximately three decades ago, it has become a lexical staple of much left, progressive, and liberal politics. For most such groups today, those who refuse to be “intersectional” have morally failed to be properly inclusive and have epistemically failed to adopt the most advanced social scientific paradigm.

But behind the progressive veneer of intersectionality lies an unquestionable racist and colonialist intellectual history, a history that is only beginning to be excavated and acknowledged.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, affiliated with Columbia Law School, first on the left (of the picture, not politics!).

Crenshaw originally developed the theory of intersectionality in two law papers. In the first, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”(1989), Crenshaw sets out to solve a very specific legal problem, namely, that “women” and “Black” are considered protected classes under anti-discrimination law, but “Black women” are not. In a review of relevant court decisions, Crenshaw observed that the courts rejected Black women’s claims of discrimination unless they could show that they were victims of more general discriminatory practices against “women” as such (including white women) or against “Blacks” as such (including Black men). So to the courts, if Black women claimed racial discrimination but Black men in the same workplace did not, the case was dismissed. Likewise, if Black women claimed sex discrimination but white women in the same workplace did not, the case was dismissed. Crenshaw’s solution was to “acknowledge” that Black women had been and could be discriminated against as Black women. To remedy the problem, the law should account for the “intersection” of race and sex and make Black women a protected class distinct of women of other races or men of the same race. As a reformist legal strategy, intersectionality is not only a clever solution to the problem it is meant to address, but it is also consistent with Crenshaw’s overall liberal philosophical perspective.

However, intersectionality become seriously problematic in her follow-up paper, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color ” (1991), where Crenshaw attempts to take intersectionality out of the realm of law and transform it into a generalized theory of society. The basic assumption of intersectionality is that all “previous” theories are “single-axis” that account for only one dimension of oppression at a time. Feminism accounts for sex or gender. Critical Race Theory (of the original realist school) accounts for race. And Marxism account for class. The innovation of intersectionality, as we are told, is that it brings together the insights of these theories to account for “race, gender, and class” simultaneously (though class is never present in so-called intersectional analyses). And notice the title: intersectionality is no longer about Black women; it is now about that ever-nebulous and ill-defined group “women of color.”

Notwithstanding the absurdity of the claim that Feminism, Marxism, and realist CRT are “single-axis” theories in the way that Crenshaw describes them, there are even more problematic aspects of intersectionality, problems that originate in the history of feminism. Drawing on the recent scholarship of philosopher Tommy Curry, we can trace out the racist and colonialist origins of intersectionality.

Crenshaw’s “gender” analysis is derived from her reliance on the work of Catherine MacKinnon, a leading second wave feminist legal scholar who argued that the basic power dynamic of society is grounded in sex difference. This male dominance theory claimed that, in Amerikan society, (all) men had structure power over (all) women. This structure is usually called patriarchy.  Crenshaw believed that MacKinnon’s male dominance theory provided a theory of sex domination similar to Derrick Bell’s realist CRT theory of racial domination, which posits that the basic power dynamic is white over Black, and perhaps other racial minorities. Even though the basic assumptions of MacKinnon and Bell’s respective theories are fundamentally contradictory, Crenshaw sought to combine them. This contradiction has never been resolved, which is why so many scholars and intellectuals today claim that neither race nor gender is “foundational.” Such platitudes merely allow the speaker to leave the contradiction within intersectionality unresolved.

The interesting thing is that this theory of patriarchy, this idea that all men have power over all women, was invented by white women in the 1950s to claim that they were just as oppressed as Black men in a society run by white supremacy. In books and essays including Alva Myrdal’s “A Parallel to the Negro Problem” (1944), Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), and Helen Hacker’s “Women as a Minority Group” (1955), white women scholars observed the conditions of Black men under western colonialism and racism and said: white women should think of themselves as a similarly oppressed group. Before the essays, white women were seen primarily as members of the dominant race, even by white women themselves. In fact, even white feminists saw themselves in this way, as historian Louise Michelle Newman demonstrates in her book White Women Rights. Yet in the 1950s, white women began to claim that they were oppressed in a manner analogous to Black men.

For the idea that “women” as such constituted an oppressed class subjected to “men” as such to become the dominant paradigm, feminists needed to discard the kinship theory of patriarchy.
Even into the 1970s and 1980s, feminist anthropologists and sociologists adopted the classical social science view that patriarchy had a familial and generational aspect to it. However, while this kinship view was compatible with the earlier theories that saw white women as part of the dominant racial group, it was incompatible with the idea that women constitute a singular coherent class of oppressed people. Why? Because if patriarchy depends on family relations, and Black people (especially Black men) are prohibited from joining the family relations of whites, then Black men cannot be members of a generally patriarchal class of “men.” The paradigm text where this argument is made is Sylvia Walby’s Theorizing Patriarchy (1990), which was published in the very same intellectual milieu and shared the same assumptions as MacKinnon’s male dominance theory.

As Curry summarizes, “the white woman used the body and experience of the Negro, specifically the Black man, as the template by which she created the idea that she was in fact a minority group despite the power and violence she imparted on racial and ethnic groups such as Blacks and Jews.” Curry adds that “the definition of patriarchy that emerged from these debates were driven by the need white feminists had in constructing themselves as a class external to—and victimized by—white patriarchy. The feminist definition of patriarchy was constructed to protect feminist ideology, not to explain the oppression of various groups throughout history.”

Thus, Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality relies on a paradigm of feminist ideology that constructed by white women to minimize attention to their racial power and amplify attention to their sexual vulnerability. And to construct this view of patriarchy, they had to throw out decades of social scientific scholarship even though there was no empirical evidence that debunked that former scholarship.

As if this were not enough to question intersectionality, there are more problems with Crenshaw’s formulation of this now-popular theory. Like MacKinnon, Crenshaw argued that when power is based on biological sex, the sex in power—males—use sexual violence as a means of social control. To put it in no uncertain terms, men rape women as a means of perpetuating their control over women.

In her 1991 essay, Crenshaw states that “the use of rape to legitimize efforts to control and discipline the Black community is well established in historical literature on rape and race.” Though she claims this fact is well established, she cites only Joyce Williams and Karen Holmes’ 1981 work The Second Assault: Rape and Public Attitudes. As with MacKinnon’s theory of patriarchy, however, we can trace the history of Williams and Holmes’ work back to fundamentally racist origins.

In their 1967 book The Subculture of Violence, Martin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti introduced the “subculture of violence” theory, which argues that subordinated groups, such as Black people in Amerika, had a distinct culture separate from mainstream white culture, and that this Black subculture was the cause of Black men and women’s supposed pathologically self-destructive behavior. Anyone familiar with right wing politics in the United States today should find this argument familiar, for the subculture of violence theory is the basis for all right-wing apologetics regarding police murders of Black people (“They are killing each other” etc.).

In 1971, Wolfgang’s student Menachem Amir expanded the subculture of violence theory in his book Patterns of Forcible Rape. According to Amir, Black men become rapists because “Negro culture” was pathological and the Black family structure was improper. Because Black fathers were absent, because Black mothers were unfit parents, and because Black culture prioritized sensual pleasures over civilized ones, Amir claimed that Black men developed a psychological need to overcompensate for their feminized self-image. Thus, they became rapists. If this also sounds like a contemporary right wing racist view, it’s because it is.

“White feminists adopted Amir’s view of Black masculinity throughout their texts,” Curry explains. In Against Our Will (1975), Susan Brownmiller insisted that “The single most important contribution of Amir’s Philadelphia study was to place the rapist squarely within the subculture of violence.” This book is considered a classic and still-relevant feminist text today.

Interestingly, Amir rejected the 19th and early 20th-century view that Black men primarily raped white women. Yet he replaced that view with a new theory that claimed that Black men primarily raped Black women. This transition from view Black men as inter-racial rapists to viewing them as intra-racial rapists is a key development in this racist history. Yet one more transformation in this feminist ideology was necessary.

In the mid-1970s, Lynn Curtis published several works, including the book Violence, Rape, and Culture, transforming the subculture of violence theory into a theory of Black male pathology. Unlike Amir, who argued that Black male rapists were the product of the savagery of Black culture, Curtis argued that Black male’s became rapists because in their quest for masculinity, the emulated white male patriarchy and the sexual violence such patriarchy relies upon. Unlike Amir’s theory, in which Black women play a role in transmitting the supposedly deficient values of Black culture, Curtis’ theory positions Black women as neutral or innocent bystanders to the brutality of pathological Black males trying desperately to join the patriarchy they have been excluded from. On this view, white male patriarchy is more sophisticated and Black male attempts at patriarchy are more savage—but they are fundamentally the same.

When Williams and Holmes wrote The Second Assault, they cited the work of Curtis and developed it further. In their own articulation, Williams and Holmes state that Black men became rapists not because Black culture is savage but because Black men imitate the patterns of white male patriarchy. The supposed sameness of Black males and white males (a male body) was thought to be the grounds for such imitative behavior, and the supposed sameness of Black women and white women (a female body) was thought to be the grounds for their respective vulnerability to sexual violence. Interestingly, The Second Assault was poorly received by scholars, with one reviewer noting that the quantitative data presented in the book did not support—nay, contradicted!—the conclusions presented.

Thus, when Crenshaw cites Williams and Holmes to claim that “the use of rape to legitimize efforts to control and discipline the Black community is well established in the historical literature on rape and race,” she is relying on a book that not only emerges directly out of white supremacist theories of Black life (perpetuating the myth the Black male rapist in a new form) but a book that presents conclusions in contradiction with its evidence.

Again, Crenshaw’s “gender” analysis is not revolutionary, nor progressive—it is barely liberal. It is based on racist scholarship that was motivated by the political needs of elite white women rather than historical and sociological evidence. And it is only a few degrees away from the racist bile spewed by contemporary anti-Black right-wing pundits.

The racist, colonialist mentality embedded in Crenshaw’s intersectionality should not surprise us. Remember what she said in 1988: People can demand change only in ways that reflect the logic of the institutions they are challenging. Because intersectionality was created to make change within racist and colonialist institutions, it is only fitting that intersectionality reflects that racist and colonialist logic. This is where idealist versions of CRT take us.

Intersectionality is not going away. Since their publication, Chrenshaw’s 1989 and 1991 articles have approximately 21,000 citations and 27,000 citations respectively. Now that intersectionality has been hitched to the current CRT wave of popularity, and given that Crenshaw is widely considered the foremost authority on CRT, we should expect calls for this theory of intersectionality to spread even more.

To be sure, almost no present-day proponent of intersectionality knows anything about the history of the term or the roots of the theory. Almost none of these self-described advocates of intersectionality knows how to perform an “intersectional analysis.” For most, the word “intersectionality” is—like “critical race theory” itself—an empty slogan used to signal that they have the right moral orientation; many people say “intersectionality” to prove they oppose racism, sexism, and so on. But when Black feminists of the 1990s are caught repackaging white supremacist ideas from the 1890s, we should probably reconsider not only the slogans we think are progressive but also the scholars we think are authorities on radical change.

This series on CRT is dedicated to Glen Ford, who was a deeply inspirational revolutionary thinker and who will always have my utmost admiration and appreciation. Thank you, Glen.

Monthly Review does not necessarily adhere to all of the views conveyed in articles republished at MR Online. Our goal is to share a variety of left perspectives that we think our readers will find interesting or useful. —Eds.
The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of  The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience. 

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SEVEN THEORIES OF POLITICS: THE REHABILITATION OF A LOADED VICE WORD

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.


By Bruce Lerro

BY BRUCE LERRO / PERSPECTIVES / 31 AUG 2021

 

Part I Foundational Questions and The Centrist Politics: Old Institutionalists, Civic Republicans and Weberian Political Economists

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.” Pericles, 430 BC

Orientation

Politics is a slippery set of actions

We normally think art and literature are different from politics, but how do we explain what the difference is? There are occasions when art and literature are banned by the state. What happens to make them political?

Which of these are political examples demonstrate that, and why?

  • House of Commons debating a Bill
  • U.S. ambassador mediating between warring states in the Middle East
  • Elders deciding on the day a nomadic tribe should move on to the next pasture
  • Salesman wondering how to counter a rival’s advertising campaign
  • Man beating his slave
  • Priest giving a sermon
  • Family deciding whether to have a holiday abroad this year or not
  • Small boy pleading with his older sister to buy him an ice cream

Linguistic obstacles to defining “politics”: Politics is a loaded, vague, and ambiguous word

“Politics” is one of those words which is loaded. Whatever your opinion about politics, it is likely to be “charged” and is a good bet to get you to rev your engines. As Adrian Leftwich points out in What is Politics? the word “politics” has gotten bad press. Here are some associations and their implied opposites: Politics can be:

  • Hypocrisy – baby kissing (not saying what you feel)
  • Wheeling and dealing (as opposed to following through on promises)
  • Fraud (as opposed to honesty)
  • Unpleasant squabbles (as opposed to agreeableness)
  • Can be violent (as opposed to being non-violent)
  • Done by professionals (as opposed to by the average person)
  • Character assassination (as opposed to sticking with the issue)
  • Unnecessary “don’t get political” (as opposed to a necessary activity)
  • Temporary (intrinsic and functional activities which are not political)
  • Distasteful “It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it” (as opposed to enjoyable)

Those who claim to hate politics probably draw from at least some of these associations. However, these reservations still have embedded in them their own definition of politics. Even those who claim to be “apolitical” still have a vague definition about what politics is in order for them to decide to withdraw from it. Lastly, many of those who claim to like politics often have a very narrow and conventional definition of what it actually is.

Besides the word “politics” being loaded, it is also one of those words that everyone thinks is commonly agreed upon. I am not talking about specific political positions, for instance conservative or liberal. What I mean is a simple working definition of the word. The word politics is vague in the sense that the borderline between it and other related terms in sociology is murky.

As Leftwich points out:

There are institutional jealousies, border police, with well-placed and often concealed booby-traps, diversions and dead ends. Some people who attempt to work in such areas never seem to emerge alive. Those who do, often re-emerged tattered and in such a state of shock that they never seem able to say anything about any concrete politics of problems of the world again. (117)

Politics is often used interchangeably with “power”. This term “power” is another hornet’s nest to define which I will take up in an article in the near future. What political theories disagree about are its origins, sources, basis, forms, distribution, measurement, and interpretation. Another sign of vagueness in the word “politics” is to try to identify what the opposite of politics is. If you try this, you will probably see it is not an easy exercise.

Finally, the word politics is ambiguous, meaning it can be categorized in many different ways. Here it is less a question of murky boundaries as it is a choice as to how broad or narrow a range to cover

Seven theories of politics and my sources

There are seven theories of politics: Old Institutionalists; Civic Republicans; Weberian political sociologists; Marxian political economy; Rational Choice Theory; Radical Feminism; and Bio-evolutionary. I have divided this article into two parts. In Part I, I ask twelve foundational questions that all seven of these theories must address. I then cover the more centrist political theories, namely the old Institutionalists, the civic republicans, and the Weberian political sociologists. In Part II I cover the more extreme versions of politics: Radical Feminism and Marxian political economy on the left and Rational Choice Theory and Bio-evolutionary Theory on the right. At the end of Part II there is a table which compares how the seven theories answer each of the twelve questions. My sources for this book include Politics by Andrew Heywood; What is Politics, Edited by Adrian Leftwich; and Invitation to Politics by Michael Laver.

As a prologue to a definition of politics, the following twelve questions need to be answered. Once we have a more solid foundation of how they can be answered, then we will be able to link them to at each of seven different schools of politics. Here are the categories and the questions that follow.

Twelve Questions for Determining What Politics Is

Temporal reach – How far back into human history does politics go? Does politics go back to pre-state societies? Or does politics begin with state societies? Is politics possible before there were political parties?

Cross species scope – Is politics confined to the human species or does it ooze into the life of other species? If so, which ones? If politics crosses species, is it social species that are political? Is it possible to have animal societies which are social, such as lions or wolves but not political? Does a species need to be social to be political? Is being social a necessary but not sufficient condition for politics? Is being social a necessary and sufficient condition for politics? Or is being social neither a necessary nor sufficient condition? In other words, is it possible for a non-social species to have political relationships?

How much does evolutionary biology impact politics? At a macro level, how does natural adaptation impact human politics? In terms of men and women, how much does sexual selection determine politics? At the micro level, how much do genetics and brain chemistry determine the level and the interest and skill in politics? Or is politics primarily a creature of the socio-historical level of reality?

Spatial reach – Where does politics take place? Many political scientists limit politics to what is taking place within states. Is that casting the net too narrowly? Can there be politics through discussions in public space? Is it politics when I get into a discussion about the viability of capitalism while I am at the unemployment line waiting for my check? Are there politics within families? Are there politics between lovers? Or are politics only about public affairs?

Political agency – Who does politics? Is politics done only by politicians? If I argue with my neighbor about police brutality in my neighborhood, are my neighbor and I political beings in this discussion? Do I become political only when I vote on the issue in the next election? Do I become political when I bring police brutality to a town hall meeting next month? Or is the only person who is political the mayor who decides whether or not to make it part of his platform for his campaign next month.

Political actions vs strategies – How are political actions different from strategizing? If I go to the laundromat to do my laundry and I give a stranger two dollars to put towards the dryer while I go back to my house to grab another load, is that political? If not, how could the situation become political? In the previous example, I think we can agree that in families members engage in strategies as to how do deal with other family members. But are all strategies political? Lovers strategize and negotiate about when the first-time sex might be undertaken. Is this political? If not, what would need to happen to make it political if at all?

The degree of influence in interpersonal processes – Am I being political if I ask my partner if she wants to go to the movies and propose a movie and she agrees to both proposals, is spontaneous agreement political? Suppose she says she wants to go to a movie but prefers another movie. We debate about it, and one of us persuades the other. Has the discussion become political? Suppose you and I are riding bicycles. We reach a crossroads where we have to decide whether to turn left or right. We each want to go in a different direction. Is the process of deciding political? Let’s say we are moving and are lifting boxes to put in the moving truck. Are the mutual complaints about whether or not the other is pulling their weight or whether to stop for a rest political?

Let’s say we both want to go to a movie but neither of us can persuade the other to go to the movie we each want, so we flip a coin. Is flipping a coin political? Suppose we can’t agree and we negotiate. I will go to this movie this time and you promise to go to a movie of my choice next time. Is that political?

Does it make a difference if our disagreement about movie choices has to do with our different race or class origins? Will those influences make our disagreement political? Suppose our discussion about movies became heated. If I recognized that if I get too hot under the collar, she might not want to make love with me later that night and so I calm down. Is that political? if I threaten to not accompany her to her friend’s birthday party (whom I don‘t like) and then she doesn’t go the movie I want, it that politics?

We have seven possibilities. Notice that these topics are not political in a traditional sense. So, the question here is not whether the content is political, but if the interpersonal process is political.

  • a spontaneous agreement
  • a persuasive argument
  • a standoff, which is settled by a chance mechanism
  • a negotiation
  • a standoff based on race or class differences
  • an instrumental strategy for other ends
  • a withdrawal of rewards

Are any of these processes political? Which one or ones (if any)? Where are you drawing the line and why?

What is the relationship between politics and power? Can you have politics without having power? Can you have power without having politics? If power and politics are related, how? Are politics and power interchangeable? Is one a meansto another? Is power the means and politics is the end? Is politics the means and power is the end?

Politics, force and coercion Let’s go back to this movie issue.  Suppose Sandy has been drinking, and in the past, she has been bad-tempered to her partner. She starts drinking while they are deciding on a movie. Sandy’s partner starts worrying and gives in to the movie Sandy wants to watch prematurely to avoid the risk of being potentially yelled at. Is that politics?

This example is a small slice of a larger issue: what is the relationship between politics and force or the threat of force? Is violence an inherent part of politics or is politics what you do to win someone over without being violent?  Some political theorists like Bernard Crick say that politics is the art of compromising when you know you cannot get what you want. Others say that the whole political system is based on violence because the entire class system is based on exploitation and force. All attempts to change things must come up against this militaristic force which protects the rulers. Some say that only force is political and that the state is the ultimate political actor because it has, in Weber’s words, a monopoly on the means of violence.

Interdisciplinary span of politics How (if at all) is politics related to economics? What is the relationship between technology and politics?  Does the economy dictate politics? Does politics determine economics? Does technology determine politics or does politics determine technology? The same question could be asked about religion or mass media.

What, if any, is the relationship between theories of politics and the schools of political sociology? Is there a relationship between our answers to these political questions and schools of political sociology? In other words, are there consistent answers to these questions which are given by political pluralists? Is there a consistency in the managerial/elitist point of view that answers the same questions? Is there a thread which runs through the classperspective which will answer these questions quite differently?

What, if any, is the relationship between theories of politics and political ideologies? Is there a relationship between a consistent set of answers to these questions and whether you are a liberal or conservative? How will the answers of social democrats, communists and fascists be different than that of either anarchists on the left or libertarian capitalists on the right? We will see that the answers the schools of political sociology give to these questions will have overlap but are not the same as the answers political ideologies might give. For example, the bio-evolutionary reading of politics has, in the past, been connected to fascism. However as feminist evolutionary psychologists point out, it is possible to have a Darwinian take on answers to political questions and be a conservative, liberal or even a Marxist in political ideology.

As it turns out these questions can be answered with some consistency and coherency by seven different theoretical tendencies within the study of politics. We will now turn to these schools and their theoreticians.

Old Institutionalists (mainstream political science)

If you care to recall your high school or college civic classes, the manner in which politics was presented was probably derived from the institutional theory of politics. Of all the schools of politics, the institutionalists address the twelve questions above in the narrowest way. Politics for this school involves only state organs and state processes.

State organs: government

Institutionalists focused on government organs – constitutions, legal system, the branches of government, political parties, pressure groups and elections. The early institutionalists referred almost exclusively to the political institutions of the United States and western Europe. These “democracies” were taken to be the best of all possible worlds, and were taken as given, rather than studied critically. The old Institutionalist understanding of historical change was based on modernist assumptions of gradual linear progress with Western “democratic” politics at the apex. This has changed somewhat in recent years. Government is seen as the vessel of politics.

State processes: governing

The process of politics is governing. Governing is a larger process which refers to general patterns and interlocking systems across both public and private spheres by which all social life is organized and managed, whether it be a monarchy, aristocracy or a democracy. Governance is a process; government has institutions for implementing and sustaining that process. Some scholars say that there can be governance without government and that networks might replace them. Institutionalists counter that networks are incapable of coping with conflict and reconciling collective goals.

Governing involves two tasks:

  • deciding on collective goals for society
  • devising mechanisms through which those goals can be attained

These two tasks must satisfy four conditions:

  • policy setting – setting collective goals for society and reconciling competing wants and demands by prioritizing goals and acquiring resources to realize those goals. This is done by representative political process. When policies are not worked out, governing bodies will work at cross purposes. One example would be, the simultaneous funding of subsides for tobacco farmers and anti-smoking advertisements.
  • decision-making steering – this involves making concrete decisions and implementing them efficiently by using a public bureaucracy and administration.
  • coherency – which involves the coordination among the institutions. Often when coordination problems are not resolved, governments fragment and involve unnecessary duplication. Sections of governments perpetrate themselves, maintain their own budgets and pursue their own policy latitude in the face of perceived threats
  • monitoring and acquiring feedback – acquiring mechanisms for detecting and assessing the action of the governance system as a whole.

Politics is limited to the state

While government cannot exist without governing, institutionalists do not believe that governing can exist without government, more specifically the state. If the state is a necessary condition of government and all politics must include the state, then societies in social evolution without a state, that is, tribal societies, are pre-political. So too, spatially, issues that come up in family and in public discussions are not seen as political.

Politics is limited to competitive elections

Furthermore, politics only occurs in state societies with competitive elections. From a Marxist point of view, this is bourgeois democracy. While societies without bourgeois democracies may have politics, typically they are seen in an unfavorable light, and labeled as authoritarian, totalitarian, dictatorships and despotisms.

Liberty as private rather than public

For institutionalists, liberty is a private pleasure which exists only through state protection. This goes back to social contract theory which has its roots in conservative individualism and in the work of Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy.

Political science excludes economics, history, and anthropology

In an interdisciplinary sense, politics generally excludes economics and historical factors. The only people who are political are professional politicians who win elections, and the only political issues involve the four processes of governance – goal setting, steering coherency, and monitoring.

Authority rules, power is violence

As far as the use of power goes, institutionalisms act as if power could be dissolved into authority. In other words, whatever regime is in office wields political authority. Anyone challenging political authority is behaving in an extra-political way, that is – violently. For institutionalists, strategizing only becomes political when it is involved in public affairs which affect an entire community. What is public is inseparable from the state. Any interpersonal processes such as convincing and persuading which is done outside public institutions of the state is not political. Relations with family and lovers is outside the bounds of politics and is more in the domain of sociology.

Political sociology of pluralism; political ideology of liberals and conservatives

The political sociological school which corresponds to the old institutionalists is political and functional pluralism. The work of Robert Dahl and Gabriel Almond are classic examples. It also goes with the political ideology of conservatives and liberals. For institutionalists, politics is the provision of direction to the economy and society through goal setting and steering which brings coherence and monitoring. Institutionalism has focused more on the processes that make political systems stable. It has had a difficult time explaining how political processes change.

Civic republicans

Politics as the art of the possible

For the second theory of politics, civic republicans, the arena in which politics occurs, at least in its initial stages, is not in states in political debates between professional politicians. Rather it takes place in the city in debates among citizens. Yet politics is a very complex, dense process rather than merely giving reasoned arguments and listening to opposing sides about public issues. Argument becomes political when:

  • collective policy-making is necessary (rather than optional)
  • resources are at stake
  • the conflict is at a stalemate
  • the perceived costs of continuing the conflict are too high
  • withdrawal is not an option
  • coercion, force or violence is not an option – as in dictatorships or despotisms

Under these conditions, politics is the art of compromise, negotiation, and persuasion – what Bernard Crick calls “the art of the possible”. For civic republicans, politics and force, threat, bribery are opposites. Where compromise is abandoned, so is politics.

What is the relationship between politics and power?

For institutionalists, the ability to do work to get things done is authority, not power. Power is understood by institutionalists as outside of politics because it uses force. For institutionalists all revolutions are illegitimate assaults on politics. Civic republicans have a more positive view of power. Power is the ability to get things done, but politics is both the process and result of the political use of power. If extrinsic motivators – force, coercion, bribery, or manipulation are used to reach ends, politics has been corrupted. The use of violence demonstrates lack of powerrather than power.

Civic debate humanizes humanity

Civic republicanism is best typified in the political writings of Aristotle, in Hannah Arendt’s work as well as the work of Bernard Crick in his In Defense of Politics.According to Aristotle, life in cities frees the citizen from the blood relations of family, kin group and village where they can think critically without the ignorant and superstitious, emotional practices which are at play in sexual and familial life. Engaging strangers with different perspectives from other regions are the seeds for the best political debate. Civic republicans, like institutionalists, have little patience with any claims that politics can be familial or sexual. Politics begins where the family and sex end. It is becoming political which makes us human. Those who refuse to identify with politics are not quite human, according to Aristotle.

Republicanism vs institutionalist democracy

For civic republicans, an active citizenry practicing politics in city debate is a precondition for democracy. Republics are not just logically prior to democracy; they are historically prior. Classical Greece, early Rome, the 16th century Italian and German city-states, and the 17th Century Dutch society were republics, not democracies.

If the institutionalists ideal is a liberal democracy, for civic republican theoreticians the ideal is a republic. Civic republicans are broader than institutionalists in that the ultimate political actors are an active citizenry, rather than professional politicians. The place where this active citizenry engages is not in elections but in public debates, with or without legislative bodies. Lastly, each has a different conception of individual liberty. For democratic institutionalists, liberty for the individual is to engage in private pleasures and guaranteed protection from the state. This is rooted in Hobbes version of a social contract as an agreement between miserly, self-subsisting individuals. For civil republicans, following Rousseau’s version of the social contract, the ultimate liberty is politics in public discourse using rational persuasion. Please see Table A below.

 

Like institutionalists, civic republicans tend to be less sensitive to history and they make a separation between politics and economics. Among political sociology schools’ civil republicans are matched easily with political pluralists. On the political spectrum, civic republicans are most likely to be liberals.

Weberian political sociologists

Peter Nicholson argues that in defining politics we should strive for a criterion which is comprehensive, distinctive and fruitful. It must include all politics, exclude everything else and suggest areas for research. Some definitions fail because they include too little and exclude too much while others fail because they included too much and exclude too little.

Definitions which are too narrow

For example, Nicholson argues that Marxists define politics too narrowly because they limit it to class societies. This excludes tribal societies. At the same time, civic republicans define politics too narrowly by limiting it to rational discussion leading to persuasion and assent rather than violence and compulsion. This means that politics can only occur in a truly representative democracy. This excludes dictatorships and authoritarian rule from politics. For civic republicans as for institutionalists, politics depends on whether a society is democratic or not.

Institutionalists claim that all politics is synonymous with government. But schools and banks have governance too. It is also insufficient to say that all politics is decision-making for there are also non-political decisions. Politics is also wider than the allocation of resources, for resources are allocated outside politics too, such as in businesses and families.

Definitions which are too wide

On the other hand, some political theorists cast their nets too widely when they say that spontaneous agreement or coming to a consensus is political too. With these standards, everything would be political and then it becomes questionable why we even have the word at all. Others may reign in their nets a little and say that disagreement and conflict need to be present for there to be politics. But can’t there be politics even when there appears to be no explicit conflict? Can’t there be disagreement which has nothing to do with politics such as mathematicians contesting a proof?

Politics as coercion and force directed at the public as opposed to conflict and decision-making

The political sociology based on Max Weber’s work are more pessimistic than either the Institutionalists or the civic republicans about what politics is about. The distinctive mark of a political action is that it can be directed and enforced towards all members of society. Every kind of law, directly or indirectly, can potentially involve the exercises of force. In tribal societies coercion or force existed at a group level. With the rise of the state, the means of violence is monopolized which means that force is legally used to settle certain conflicts, sanction certain rules, back certain decisions, and guarantee certain policies.

Some counter that other groups and individuals use force as well as the state. What about rebels, armed robbers or a parent chastising or battering a child? The difference is that this is private force. Not all members of society are affected by this. Politics is the force or coercion used by the state in public affairs.

Force differs from conflict as a criterion of politics. There is no room for two or more exercises of force. By the very nature of force, only one body is able to consistently back its will by force. Certainly, there can be more than one kind of decision-making coexisting in the same society. But only those decisions which are backed by force are political. The running of businesses, trade unions, schools, universities, banks, churches and families certainly disagree, and come into conflict.  However, none may use force legally except with the permission of the state. All strategizing by groups in society is not political because convincing and persuading does not use force. Only when force is used does it become political and that force must be monopolized by the state.

Politics is about power, not authority

For institutionalists, politics is a process and the result is the authority of the state. In the case of civil libertarians, politics is the process and the result is power to get things done by the civic community. For Weberians (Max Weber), all politics is rooted in power and power is based on force or coercion. Furthermore, all force is concentrated in the state. Authority is one kind of power, but it is not the ultimate source. Legitimate authority and charisma are other kinds of power. If anything, power is the end and politics is the means. Unlike the institutionalists, for Weberians, professionally elected politicians may or may not be the ones doing politics. The real politics is going on not in debates in parliament but behind the scenes in the wheeling and dealing of elites competing with each other.

Unlike either institutionalists or civic republicans, Weberians are more sensitive to changes in politics over the course of history. So too, they do not make an absolute separation between politics and economics. While they understand all politics involves economics, they think that the maneuvering among elite state actors controls the economy.

In political sociology Weber represents what has been called the “managerial” school, both political and functional wings. Weberians are difficult to classify in terms of political ideology. On the one hand they are radical in their critique of the existing order. But on the other, there is a pessimism about the working class or the lower class’s ability to participate in democratic process or public civil discussion.

Conclusion

At the beginning of this article, I pointed out how difficult it was to define politics, both in political actions and political theory.  I then posed twelve questions that all seven theories have to answer. I then named and described three theoretical schools of politics: institutionalists, civil republicans and Weberian political economists. Despite their differences, all three theories occupy the centralist section of the political spectrum. That is, all three theories are liberal or conservative. In Part II of this article, I will address other theories of politics. Radical feminist and Marxist theories will represent the revolutionary left side of the political spectrum, that is socialist theories of politics. On the right side of the political spectrum, we will rational choice theories and bio-evolutionary theories of politics. Rational choice theory would be right libertarian, as would Darwinian theories of politics.

Bruce Lerro has taught for over 25 years as an adjunct Professor of Psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to the three books he’s written, found on Amazon. Read more of his articles and get involved at Planning Beyond Capitalism.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of  The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience. 

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Cancel Culture and the Bankruptcy of Liberalism

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by Roger Harris

Kovalik: Bete Noire of all stupid liberals, these days the vast majority.

Dan Kovalik, professor of human rights law at the University of Pittsburgh, is the accomplished author of books skewering US foreign policy on Venezuela, Russia, Iran, international human rights, and interference in elections abroad. His latest, Cancel This Book, takes aim at the domestic progressive scene and its “cancel culture” aberration.

His is a from-the-ground view based on 26 years as a lawyer for the United Steelworkers union and from other personal experiences, including demonstrating for Black Lives Matter and his friendship with anti-war activist Molly Rush, to whom the book is dedicated.


Molly Rush: canceled by the cowards and hypocrites that should be supporting her.


After a courageous lifetime of service to peace and justice causes, the octogenarian Molly Rush tweeted a statement in favor of non-violent protest, which was unfairly construed as racist. For this supposed transgression, she was “canceled” by former comrades, devastating her and the peace movement in Pittsburgh.

Being canceled entails anything from public shaming to losing one’s means of livelihood for expressing an unpopular opinion. “Cancelling,” Kovalik describes, “is not to educate or to advance the cause of social justice, but to punish and ostracize.”

Cancel culture is a form of intolerance that privileges form over substance and often substitutes a narrow identity politics to the detriment of the underlying issue of class. Kovalik argues that it is on the basis of class that working people of all races can unite in common struggle. This element is “conspicuously missing” from the cancel culture discourse.

c Kovalik comments: “the left of the political spectrum are excited about the new round of censorship being imposed by corporate giants such as Facebook and Twitter” against Trump and his supporters. “This type of censorship,” he adds, “will be mostly turned against the left…. But sadly, many on the left in this country have not learned this lesson and are calling for measures that will ultimately lead to their own suppression.”

“The biggest danger,” Kovalik admonishes, “is that people will simply self-censor rather than discuss issues, though of critical importance, for fear of getting themselves into trouble.”

Not one to be intimidated for expressing dissident views, Kovalik is critical of the efficacy of diversity training and how the pandemic lockdowns were implemented. “Conservatives tend to be more open-minded,” based on his experience, “than liberals.” The BLM protests initially showed “great promise” but ultimately “represented a huge lost opportunity.” And anarchists are often part of the problem when they individualistically engage in adventurist activities that may endanger the larger movement.

In his personable and anecdotal style, Kovalik compellingly revisits some of the better-known excesses of cancel culture. High school senior Mimi Groves, for instance, posted a 3-second Snapchat using a taboo word four years ago. For that youthful mistake, she has now been publicly humiliated, physically threatened, and forced to withdraw her application to college.

Cancel is full of gems unearthed by Kovalik, such as his exegesis on Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Twain is among the most canceled books, because of its use of the contemporary idiom of the pre-Civil War period in which it is set. Quite notably, Twain, in his essay Complexions, wrote: “Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare…. Where dark complexions are massed, they make the whites look bleached-out, unwholesome, and sometimes frankly ghastly.”

Kovalik is a dedicated leftist critical of the Democratic Party. “We as the American electorate,” he observes, “are never given anything but the choice between sociopaths for President.” Kovalik comments further: “I for one am quite alarmed to think of what a Biden policy of ‘getting tougher’ with Russia would look like, and what kind of catastrophe it could bring about…. It simply boggles the mind how the mainstream media and the Democratic Party elite are willing to compromise world peace and public health all in the interest of political gain.”

Kovalik takes particular umbrage about the tendency epitomized by Hillary Clinton’s comment about the “deplorables,” which renders the entire white working class in the US as dumb and racist. The dismissive condescension by more affluent and better educated whites – associated with the Democratic Party by Kovalik – explains a large part of the blowback of the white working class and its attraction to right populism.

He favorably quotes historian Thomas Frank, author of Listen, Liberal: “liberalism has become a politics of upper-class bullying and of character assassination.”  Kovalik documents how the liberalism of the Democratic Party has drifted into a full-throated support of imperialist war. The promotion of Russiagate by the Democrats has “captivated liberals for years and won over their hearts and minds to the idea that the CIA and the FBI were the defenders of democracy and liberty in our country.”

Cancel This Book describes the lamentable rise of the cancel culture and the degeneration of liberalism. I look forward to the next book from the perceptive and prolific Dan Kovalik, which could go further and illuminate the dynamics of the underlying forces rising at this historical junction associated with the bankruptcy of liberalism and the failure of neoliberalism to serve its constituents. The first step in addressing the problem of cancel culture is understanding why it came about at this time.


Roger Harris is on the board of the Task Force on the Americas, a 32-year-old anti-imperialist human rights organization.

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The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020)

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By Tom Carter
WSWS.ORG

Tom Carter has produced a comprehensive and properly nuanced analysis of this divisive event.

Ginsburg: Neither saint nor sinner, but a small cut above the filthy level of habitual US politics.

The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday has occasioned an around-the-clock artillery bombardment of tributes from sections of the American media aligned with the Democratic Party. These tributes present the late Supreme Court justice as a “progressive icon,” praising her to the skies and crediting her with significant responsibility for the social gains of women towards equality over the past half-century.

This is not the American population’s first experience with such nationwide canonization campaigns, which have coincided with the deaths of John Lewis, Antonin Scalia, Ronald Reagan, Nancy Reagan, John McCain, and numerous others.

It is not a question of “speaking ill of the dead” but of maintaining a standpoint of independence and objectivity, and of not getting swept away by the deluge of official propaganda.

These campaigns of official mourning are a ritualized spectacle of American political life. The deceased is inevitably held up as an “icon,” a “towering figure” and a “legend.” Every bourgeois politician and media personality is expected to line up to render the proper obeisance, with each individual politician “paying respects” becoming a news item in itself.

The accomplishments of the decedent, sometimes real and sometimes invented, are spun out of all proportion to reality. The propaganda campaign functions as a sort of loyalty test, with anyone who is not willing to recite the official slogans flagged as a possible traitor.

The New York Times proclaimed Sunday that the “nation mourns” the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a “trailblazing feminist.” Ginsburg has been eulogized as a “progressive icon” (NPR, Washington Post), “feminist leader” (Vox), “feminist icon” (New York Times, NBC News), and a “jurist of historic stature” (Los Angeles Times). President Trump himself issued a statement calling Ginsburg a “titan of the law.”

The New York Times went so far as to claim that Ginsburg “transformed the roles of men and women in society.” The increasingly implausible and even absurd claims that are now being made about Ginsburg were anticipated by the release of two propaganda films within a one-year period, which have been part of a major effort by the Democratic Party and its media affiliates to paint a holy aura around the most senior justice on the Supreme Court’s ostensibly “liberal” wing.

The real Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a more complex figure than the national saint being presented in the media.

At the time of her appointment to the Supreme Court in 1993, Ginsburg was not considered a “progressive icon” but a “moderate-to-conservative” judge, occupying “center” positions acceptable to both Democratic and Republican parties of the time. On her nomination, President Bill Clinton stated, “Ruth Bader Ginsburg cannot be called a liberal or conservative. She has proved herself too thoughtful for such labels.” She was confirmed by a Senate vote of 96-3.

The New York Times, which is now hailing Ginsburg as a hero of radical and trailblazing reformism, was far more restrained in its own coverage of her nomination. In an article published in the Times on June 15, 1993, journalist Richard L. Berke presented Ginsburg as occupying a “center” position between Republicans and Democrats: “In her 13 years on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the 60-year-old Brooklyn-born judge has occupied an unpredictable center on a panel that has grown into rigidly hostile ideological camps. She has ruled in favor of abortion rights, but has also criticized the 1973 Supreme Court decision that made abortion a Constitutional right [i.e., Roe v. Wade], saying it went too far, too fast.”

As a Supreme Court justice since 1993, Ginsburg proved herself a reliable steward of the longterm interests of American imperialism, with her jurisprudence conforming to that same “moderate-to-conservative” inclination for which she was known on the D.C. Circuit.

In 2014, for example, Ginsburg joined a 9-0 unanimous Supreme Court decision granting qualified immunity to the police officers who killed Donald Rickard and Kelly Allen.

Police had attempted to pull over Donald Rickard in July 2004 because he had only one working tail light. Rickard unsuccessfully attempted to flee, his car eventually spinning out into a parking lot where police tried to box him in with their cruisers. When Rickard maneuvered his car in an effort to drive away, police opened fire with a hail of 15 bullets, causing the car to crash. Rickard was struck by gunfire and killed, and so was Kelly Allen, who was seated in the passenger seat.

Rickard’s daughter sued the police for wrongful death, alleging that the use of lethal force was excessive and unreasonable. The police claimed “qualified immunity,” but both the federal district court and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Rickard’s family in allowing the case to proceed.

When the police appealed to the United States Supreme Court, the Obama administration sided with the police, with Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr. filing a brief arguing for immunity.

In May 2014, the Supreme Court unanimously granted qualified immunity to the police, and Rickard’s daughter’s case was thrown out of court without a trial. In the context of already endemic police brutality, the decision was a green light for more police killings. Together with supposed “progressive icon” Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the unanimous decision was also joined by Obama appointees Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

In addition to the Rickard case, Ginsburg joined a decision in 2014 expandingthe doctrine of qualified immunity from police to paid agents of the state who are not full-time employees, and in 2017, signed off on a decision permittingDonald Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban to go into effect.

In February 2012, Ginsburg traveled to Egypt on behalf of the State Department. At that time, Egypt was ruled by a US-backed military junta, which had been installed in the wake of mass protests that deposed dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Ginsburg’s role, which she discussed with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and which was announced by State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, was to lend credibility to the junta’s promise to develop a new constitution and make a “transition to democracy.”

In reality, what followed was not a “transition to democracy” but mass executions of dissidents and political opponents. In just one day in 2014, 700 death sentences were handed down.

In recent years, Ginsburg occasionally wrote opinions dissenting from the more extreme reactionary decisions of the far-right majority, such as the 2013 Supreme Court decision gutting the landmark Voting Rights Act. For emphasis, in accordance with the Supreme Court custom, she would sometimes read these dissenting opinions from the bench.

Juxtaposed with the fascistic grunting of Supreme Court justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, if Ginsburg’s dissents appear as more reasonable, that is only an indication of how far the American political establishment has traveled to the right over the span of her tenure on the court.

During her first decade on the Supreme Court, Ginsburg occupied a position to the right of John Paul Stevens, who had been appointed by Republican President Gerald Ford. Asked how a Republican appointee had wound up on the far left “liberal” wing of the Supreme Court, Stevens would say that he had not moved, but that the Supreme Court had shifted to the right while he had remained in place.

Similarly, to the extent that Ginsburg ended up writing occasional dissents criticizing the far-right majority that emerged in the first two decades of the 21st century, it is only because the court had shifted so far to the right that a “moderate-to-conservative” judge of the early 1990s wound up constituting the far left wing.

Many of the media tributes to Ginsburg refer to her work in the 1970s as an advocate for women’s rights. She cofounded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1972, and before becoming a judge in 1980, she litigated a number of significant cases challenging legalized discrimination based on gender.

It is not to diminish the democratic significance of overturning legalized discrimination to point out that by the time of Ginsburg’s feminist legal advocacy, the outcome of these cases was already a foregone conclusion. At the time, the United States was lagging behind many other countries in terms of abolishing openly discriminatory laws, a point that Ginsburg herself made repeatedly in her arguments from this period.

In the context of the ideological campaign against communism and the Soviet Union, it was increasingly considered an international embarrassment to the United States that openly racist and sexist laws were still on the books in many parts of the country. If anything, the scandal is that it took so long to abolish them. The Supreme Court did not strike down Louisiana’s so-called “Head and Master law,” which gave sole control of marital property to the husband, until 1981.

Ginsburg’s rise through the ranks of the legal profession coincided with the ebbing of the wave of social struggles that had culminated in the protests against the war in Vietnam and in the civil rights struggles to end segregation and Jim Crow apartheid in the South. Just as an effort was made to bring the more conservative sections of the civil rights movement under the wing of the Establishment, exemplified by the trajectory of John Lewis, Ginsburg’s elevation represented an effort to bring “women’s liberation” into the service of American imperialism.

This trajectory is best exemplified by Ginsburg’s decision in the case that is most often held up as her great accomplishment, a famous 1996 Supreme Court opinion permitting women to attend the traditionally all-male Virginia Military Institute.

Known as the “West Point of the South,” VMI is a historic bastion of bigotry and reaction, where students would traditionally sing “Dixie,” salute the Confederate flag, and pay their respects to the tomb of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

As Ginsburg wrote in her opinion, “VMI cadets live in spartan barracks where surveillance is constant and privacy nonexistent; they wear uniforms, eat together in the mess hall, and regularly participate in drills. ... Entering students are incessantly exposed to the rat line, ‘an extreme form of the adversative model,’ comparable in intensity to Marine Corps boot camp. ... Tormenting and punishing, the rat line bonds new cadets to their fellow sufferers and, when they have completed the 7 month experience, to their former tormentors.”

Noting that “[w]omen cadets have graduated at the top of their class at every federal military academy,” Ginsburg reasoned that there were no constitutional grounds to deny women admission into the institute.

This was the logical end point of the “trailblazing feminism” of Ginsburg: women in command of invading and occupying armies, women with the codes to launch nuclear missiles, female torturers, female assassins, female war criminals, and women and men brutalized together in the barracks.

Ginsburg is often quoted as saying, “women belong in all places where decisions are being made,” and this quotation sums up her particular brand of feminism. Her objection is not to the capitalist system, or to the rotten and criminal social order, but to the fact that the positions of power, prestige, and influence within that system are not as accessible to women as they should be. In this regard, it is necessary to take note of her uncritical endorsement of the “#MeToo” campaign, a media-instigated witch hunt that ran roughshod over the presumption of innocence.

It is also necessary, in the context of any review of her tenure on the Supreme Court, to mention her close personal friendship with Antonin Scalia, an arch-reactionary and bigot whose antics disgraced the Supreme Court from 1986 to 2016. This friendship, which the media celebrated as a demonstration of “bipartisanship” and “civility,” extended to regular trips to the opera, where they made their appearances in Washington society, as well as travel abroad. In one particularly notorious photo, they were shown riding an elephant together in India.

Ginsburg was by no means the most villainous character on the American political scene, which is teeming with unsavory characters. She was among the last Supreme Court justices who was able to write in language that still echoed, however faintly, the democratic legal traditions that could be traced to the American Revolution and Civil War. (In the VMI case, she wrote, quoting historian Richard Morris: “the history of our Constitution ... is the story of the extension of constitutional rights and protections to people once ignored or excluded.”)

And in her writings and public appearances, Ginsburg conducted herself with relatively more prudence, thoughtfulness, and decency than is otherwise common in American politics, which as a general rule is abysmally degraded and filthy.

One senses that the media has manufactured and then exaggerated a great deal of Ginsburg’s supposed popularity, but to the extent that any such popularity genuinely exists, it was these qualities that contributed to her appeal.

Ginsburg displayed open contempt for Donald Trump when he began his campaign for president, and was later compelled to confess that her conduct was “ill advised.” She had not thought it possible that a semiliterate real estate swindler would actually win the nomination and the election. The unfolding political crisis in America seems to have crashed over this aging liberal in the twilight of her life, as she witnessed her doctrine of patient and incremental change being overtaken and shattered by events she had not foreseen.

As her death approached, Ginsburg reportedly dictated a statement to her granddaughter: “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

There is a note of dismay and panic in this highly unusual and even tragic last testament. Indeed, the abrupt news of her death was greeted with the sound of thousands of daggers being unsheathed in Washington, D.C. Her body was likely still warm when Christian fundamentalists and leading figures in the Republican Party began celebrating shamelessly and publicly, proclaiming their intention to ram through a replacement before the November elections.

Tom Carter is a senior analyst with wsws.org, a Marxian publication. 

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