Mouffe in the Time of Trump

 A friend of mine at church briefly let me know he'd been thinking of my work with Braver Angels and the entire endeavor of talking to the other side. 

He was having a hard time with it lately. When a senator of ours was walking his dog through my friend's neighborhood, my friend rolled down his window and "said some unkind words."

I'm not a fan of unkind words per se. But I do see where my friend is coming from. Support for Trump--really, absolutely loving what he's doing--seems so foreign to me. 

This, my training tells me, represents a failure of my imagination. I remember my Chantal Mouffe. The classical trap is thinking your political opponents must be either irrational or immoral. They're deluded, poor things, misled by the right-wing mediasphere into believing the stories of immigrants flooding over the border to steal their jobs and infect their communities with fentanyl. Or they're just self-centered, ethically broken people who covertly or openly want a white supremacist (and patriarchal, anti-queer, anti-disabled, etc.) society. 

The hardest truth to swallow is that people just as intellectually and ethically sophisticated as you are hold very different values and believe very different things. They think the same things about your side: how could anyone believe what they do? Are they stupid or just evil?

 Our differences can't just be talked out. We can't just meet in the middle. Our struggle will determine the fate of democracy, the political and practical realities for everyone.

Mouffe argues that the challenge is to see such opponents not as antagonists--enemies we must crush utterly--but agonists--players in the same liberal democratic game. We play to win, not to draw. But winning does not mean annihilating our opponents. Nor does it mean breaking the system that allows them to play in the first place. That means anyone's victory is always partial, always temporary. The struggle continues. 

At least, that's ideally how it is supposed to go. 

I'm not sure Mouffe entertains enough the possibility that one set of players might operate via bad faith. I'm not sure she entertains the possibility that a majority of the populace may vote to do away with the fair-play rules altogether. Stanley Fish once wrote that democracy has a self-destruct button permanently installed inside of it. Any demos at any time could conceivably press it, abdicating rights and popular sovereignty in favor of monarchy or feudalism or something else.

It's hard not to see people who defend this administration's chaos and incompetence and pettiness and unlawfulness as mashing that button as hard and as often as they can. Does this make them evil? Deluded? Something else? 

I don't know. But Mouffian agonism seems unlikely to muster an effective response. The alternatives, though, promise even less appealing paths. 

All this to say: I don't know what Braver Angels has to offer right now. I've not yet been able to bring myself to watch some of the "debates" about Trump's first 100 days. I may need to summon some courage, if only to respond well to my friends--and my enemies. 

Agonistic dreams, Political nightmares

We seem to be in a Schmittian political nightmare at the moment. Republicans and Democrats disagree strongly about the impeachment inquiry of President Trump. Disagree strongly underplays things. We see the world entirely differently. We read the same summary of a transcript and come away either unimpressed (There's no "there" there) or unnerved ("I would like you to do us a favor, though..."). And both sides seem exasperated that the other side doesn't just see it, plain as day: just look at the transcript!

It's a twist on the Emperor's New Clothes, only with half the crowd insisting, What do you mean, he's naked? He's bundled up! Can't you see that? Deciding who in this analogy is who--well, that's another debate. (It seems obvious to me the GOP is insisting on seeing clothes that aren't there. Or half of them are insisting on that while the other half makes a straight-faced argument that Emperors are never naked, that they by definition don't require clothes to be clothed, or at least that Imperial nudity is never call-out-able. But the other side would likely allege that progressives will cry nudity no matter how elaborate the outfit.)

For Carl Schmitt, such disputes are irresolvable. None of the usual means humans rely on work. We can't just go to the tape and check the evidence. The debate concerns fundamentally opposed views of what the evidence says. We can't default to a shared sense of ethics. Both sides deeply doubt ability of the other side to engage in ethical deliberation. We're not even 100% in agreement that this process is legal or constitutional. (See David French on that here.)

We're divided, as Schmitt would say, into friend and enemy camps. There's no way out but direct conflict. For Schmitt's more recent, non-Nazi interlocutors like Chantal Mouffe, such conflict need not devolve into civil war. Mouffe distinguishes antagonism, naked animosity and no-holds-barred aggression between foes, from agonism, intense struggle within a shared understanding of the political parameters. In Mouffe's agonism, there's still friend/enemy struggles. You cannot, should not, attempt to avoid or mitigate conflicts. But agonistic participants recognize and honor the right of their enemies to disagree and struggle against them.

In agonism, I may (hopefully) win a political struggle, but I don't hold it existentially against you that you fought on the other side of the conflict. I do not, after winning, seek to disenfranchise, imprison, expel, or murder you. Neither do I, after losing, declare the entire system corrupt and go to war. I put work and trust into the powers of granted to the political minority, biding my time and adjusting my strategies so that one day I might regain the majority.

The weakness of Mouffe's argument (an argument I largely endorse), however, is the idealized ethos of struggle. She wants the uncompromising bite of Schmittian conflict without the lethal potentials.

So many political struggles today, however, feel existential in their stakes. We can't afford to lose. Or, instead: We can't afford to let them win. If you see the enemy's victory as the destruction of you and your way of life, then the agonistic approach is a sham. You can't just go along with the system if they win. Nor can you simply forgive and forget the enemy's stances even if you win. If the other side holds some version of "you aren't due full civic personhood," then there will be some lingering bad faith for a while that no single political victory will quite dispel.

The problem, though, is that existential stakes can too easily become a trick to make politics impossible. How dare you debate this or question me when doing so undermines my very being? There's also the fact that humans aren't always great assessors of existential threats, nor do we think clearly or behave at our best when we feel threatened.

The real sine qua non for agonism, it seems, is a mutual trust in your enemy (and in your allies) that they will take reasonable steps not to turn agonism into antagonism. That's a depressing thought, though, given the lack of trust in today's politics.