Excavating Socialist Thought in Mormonism: Re-reading Hugh Nibley

 

[This is a slightly expanded version of a review essay cross-posted to the Religious Socialism blog here; it is the companion of another essay which reviews contemporary interest among liberation-minded Mormons here.]

Making a connection between American Mormonism as it presently exists and socialism is a serious stretch. Voting data have consistently shown that a large majority of the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the official name of the Mormon church) in America strongly identify with conservative causes and the Republican party. Mormon leaders–both political and ecclesiastical–have condemned all forms of socialism for many decades. The church is organized around an all-male priesthood--with homosexual behavior and gender fluidity officially denounced--and for most of the 20th-century that priesthood was explicitly forbidden to Black Mormons as well. While the globalization of the church, demographic shifts, and top-down policy changes have led to a moderation in the anti-radicalism which characterized the in the church second half of the 20th century, no one can look at, for example, former Republican presidential candidate Senator Mitt Romney, and conclude that his community will embrace socialism any time soon.

Still, times can change. The Mormon Church, like many other early 19th-century religious movements, rejected the capitalist forms which were then emerging alongside America’s expanding industrial footprint, and embraced Christian communalism instead. In both some of its earliest congregations in Ohio and Missouri, and then later even more robustly in Utah, following the church’s violent expulsion from its base in Illinois in 1846, many Mormons practiced, from the 1860s through the 1890s, what was called the “law of consecration,” “the united order,” or “the Order of Zion.” What this meant, in practice, were varying experiments, from one community to the next, with the collective ownership of property, unified decision making in economic matters, and the establishment of systems of stewardship and welfare; the goal was, in the words of an early revelation to Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, that all in Zion would be “of one heart and one mind,” and there would be “no poor among them.”

None of these experiments long endured the Americanization of Mormon society which followed after Utah’s admission to the United States. By the 1910s and 1920s, though socialist organizers saw much local success, among Utah’s miners and laborers, almost no connection was made between their party-building efforts and the communal orders which many Mormons had committed to only a few decades earlier.

Hugh Nibley, a long-time and famously contrarian professor of religion at the Mormon church’s flagship university, Brigham Young University, passed away in 2005. He never identified as a socialist, nor reconciled his church’s communalist history with its leadership’s subsequent denunciations of radical politics. But what he did do was interpret the scriptural and doctrinal teachings which motivated those early experiments, and used them to condemn the exploitative and environmentally destructive capitalist practices of most of the 20^th-century Mormon church’s American membership. His relentless criticism made Nibley popular with Utah’s small Mormon Democrat population--but aligning Nibley’s project with a possible Mormon contribution to Christian socialism is an unfinished project.

Last year, a group of young(er) Mormon scholars took up Nibley’s attacks on America’s capitalist ethos (many of which were collected in 1989 book titled Approaching Zion) in a small volume titled Reapproaching Zion. [Full disclosure: I am one of the contributors.] These writers are not necessarily sympathetic to socialism (some, in fact, are clearly opposed to it), but through their engagements, an outline of what a Mormon Christian socialism might involve can nonetheless be discerned.

While the authors examine Nibley’s ideas from distinct legal, economic, and philosophical perspectives, themes of pluralism, community, and limits are perhaps most important. By basing his condemnations of profiteering, careerism, and inequality on the various ways that early Mormon settlements constructed their distinct Zions--sometimes involving something as simple as storehouses of food which any member of the community had free access to, but sometimes involving collectivized working and living arrangements--Nibley’s writings underscore the perils involved in assuming any singular response to all economic evils. Building alternatives that truly empower people in their communities, but do not make those communities into exclusive localist tyrannies, is a tension-filled exercise.

Some of the authors speculate on the kind of arrangements that might enable diverse, yet still egalitarian, economic practices to extend beyond a single family, church congregation, or business, and how much localism, self-sufficiency, or even isolation might be necessary in order to preserve those arrangements. Others, grasping the hard nettle entailed by those possibilities, argue that Nibley showed how any committed Zion community--and, by extension, perhaps any committed socialist society--would have to accept a level of wealth that is lower that which profit-driven financial speculation and individual competition often generates. This idea is hardly new to anyone familiar with the intentional communities which Christian radicals have built over the centuries: a commitment to non-exploitative labor often means a commitment to work that is embedded in an equally shared common life, and such work is mostly incompatible with being outsourced, expanded, or specialized. Within Mormon circles, which has no tradition of monasticism or vows of poverty, the idea that economic limits are connected to the religious command to build a Zion community where there is no poor is a rare argument indeed.

Nibley himself notoriously lived out this rare ideal (Mormons tell the story of church president Gordon B. Hinckley speaking at Nibley’s funeral, and him observing that there wasn’t a single car in the church’s parking lot that day that wasn’t fancier than the 1976 Datsun Nibley drove for the last 30 years of his life). This gives rise to the accusation that Nibley idolized poverty, which some see as contrary to elements of both Mormon history and theology. Such claims introduce a connection to a longstanding socialist debate. For some, the promise of socialism is a more democratized distribution of the goods of wealth. But for others--and here the Christian socialist tradition speaks loudly--the socialist ideal is appealing exactly because it puts limits upon what the economist Joseph Schumpeter (borrowing from Marx) called the “creative destruction” of capitalist wealth-creation itself. In this sense, Zion--or any kind of Christian socialist community--is worth building in that it prioritizes social goods over distributable ones, meaning there will be more of the former and less of the latter. In attacking Nibley’s description of the Zion communities which Mormons ought to build as primarily small, agrarian, and static, and thus comparatively poor, some of his critics are misunderstanding exactly their point.

Finally there is the question of universalism. Socialist movements have long had their globalist as well as localist instantiations, from Marx’s “working people of all countries” to the Paris Commune. Nibley’s critique of commercialism involved a critique of the dependencies which extensive commercial transactions create, and how those connections can draw people away from the covenants that keep the faithful committed to the Zion ideal. But obviously, as a Christian faith shaped by the evangelical impulse, the drive to make expansive connections is essential to Mormonism, as their own missionary culture makes clear. The negotiation of those rival impulses suggest the need to reflect upon the proper political space for socialist development, whether national or local, and the variety of communal and egalitarian forms that may best reflect the level of economic democratization possible in on different spatial levels. Despite many arguments which lean heavily in the direction of the small, self-sufficient, egalitarian village, the ideal of Zion as Nibley sketched it out nonetheless integrated urban and rural environments. The socialist cause has a similar need to attend to the same diverse demands.

Religious socialism is by its nature an aggregation of insights, drawn from every tradition which recognizes that the integrity of individuals depend upon constructing communities which grant them equal economic and democratic power. Mormonism’s history has many such insights, though learning from them involves digging past close to 150 years of official disregard.

Hugh Nibley’s own intellectual excavations were in the name of a Zion ideal, which many might see--because of its religious foundation, sense of limits, and pluralist structure--as opposed to their preferred socialist one. I find this unfortunate. As Charles Marsh wrote regarding Christian influence on the civil rights movement, the drive to build “beloved communities” takes place “in, through, and outside the church.” To whatever extent scholarly reflections upon one Mormon troublemaker’s attempt to describe and urge upon his fellow Mormons a mostly lost communalist ideal can become part of such a collective building project, it is worth exploring--even if the church tradition out of which these reflections emerge may seem a most unlikely source.

Two Pedantic Problems with Representative Estes's Post

Dear Representative Estes,

Thanks for sharing your reasoning about your January 6 challenge to the Electoral College results, thus your challenge to the certification of President Biden's election. I am in complete sympathy with your statement that "all of us are appalled at the violence, destruction and loss of life that took place at the Capitol on January 6," and I heartily endorse your closing call for your readers to "join me in praying that our country has a renewed commitment to civil discourse." That is all very well said, and I appreciate your including it.

However, you also included a couple of statements that trouble me. Once is simply wrong, and the other misunderstands something that is implied by the first. So forgive me, but I feel a need to play the professor here for a moment. You wrote:

"The Founding Fathers did not want Congress to select the president. Nor did they want the judicial branch, or even governors to do so. That was the responsibility of the state legislatures."

Of course, this isn't correct; the people who wrote the U.S. Constitution stipulated that it was the members of the Electoral College chosen by the states that would select the president of the United States. Those electors are chosen in accordance with procedures established by the respective state laws which obtain in the different states, and since those laws are written by elected state representatives, I suppose you could argue that "state legislatures" are ultimately doing the selecting. But by jumping those steps, you set up the foundation for your action (specifically that "I, along with a majority of the Republican Party in the U.S. House of Representatives, raised objections in regards to what we believed was evidence that several states violated their own laws in administering the 2020 election as they pertained to the office of the president") in a way that side-steps an important truth.

That truth is that those state laws regarding the appointment of electors, just like the state laws regarding all electoral matters--voter registration, absentee ballots, etc.--are subject to constitutional challenge, such as any citizen (including yourself, Representative Estes) may bring. The rights laid out in the amendments to the Constitution have been extended and applied by the Supreme Court many times over the past 232 years to enable citizens to defend the principle self-government. And, of course, when citizens, or their elected representatives, bring forward such constitutional concerns, it is the place of judges in our system to make an adjudication as to the validity of the concerns so expressed.

What is the point of emphasizing this? Simply that when you allege that state legislatures "violated their own laws," what you are actually doing is alleging something constitutionally nefarious when elected representatives, or the election officials they appoint, adjust their statutory requirements (including deadlines and the like) regarding mail-in ballots, or ballot drop boxes, or more, during the pandemic. They did this not just to compensate for the change in voting patterns which the health concerns of the pandemic introduced, but also because if they didn't make such adjustments, they would be subject to exactly the sort of legal challenges which your own column vaguely refers to (though I note that, while you invoke the Constitution multiple times, you only ever call what the state legislatures or state election officials did "improper," not "illegal"). The whole point of these election laws is to support the exercise of constitutional voting rights by the people; when circumstances stand in the way of the exercise of those rights, officials of government are obliged to act. 

Now, if those actions themselves violate someone else's rights (as apparently former President Trump believed they did, since he insisted over and over that he'd won the election by a landslide, and had been robbed of his victory by electoral fraud), then they need to go to a judge and make their case. Which Trump's lawyers did, dozens of time, with a total of 46 out of 54 lawsuits being almost immediately dropped, dismissed, or ruled against for a complete lack of evidence (the rest are currently in the midst of the appeals process). Meaning, in short, that the system which we have determined, over and over and over again, that the claim that state legislatures had vacated their responsibility in regards to the means by which appointed electors make their selection is simply groundless. Rather, it was their view that election commissions, governors, state judges, or even committees of legislators themselves, in these several states, had acted responsibly in the determinations they made about statutory election requirements. In the eyes of the courts, there simply was no demonstrable constitutional harm done here. Which means that, strictly speaking, in accordance with how our constitutional system is supposed to work, your belief that, for example, "the Democratic majority of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania unilaterally violated the U.S. Constitution," is simply nonsensical, because the Supreme Court of the United State itself said so.

Of course, if you want to insist that your love of the U.S Constitution obliges you to disregard the judicial functions which that same constitutional system sets up, that's a political belief which you have every right, as a citizen, to advocate for, and you'd find me agreeing with you partly as well. (You and me, Representative Estes: down with the imperial judiciary, and down with the power of judicial review!) But note that I called that a "political belief," because that's what it is--a belief about what ought to have happened in our polity (which presumably is, in your case, at the minimum: "election officials shouldn't adjust statutory requirements for ballots in the name of supporting voting rights during a pandemic without a complete change in state law"--though maybe, to be frank, the political belief here is actually just: "Donald Trump should be president"). Which leads me to another concern I have with your column. You write:

"In America, we must be able to use the legal processes prescribed in the Constitution without fear of retribution by those who hold the levers of political power."

In your column you speak on a couple of occasions of the "legal and political processes" of government, and as a way of expressing a general point, that's fine. But if you're going to specifically refer to "the legal processes prescribed in the Constitution," then I have to remind you of everything in the previous five paragraphs: the actual "legal processes" which follow from applying the Constitution as written involve petitioning judges to consider potential constitutional violations, and they didn't find any (in fact, usually Trump's lawyers, knowing they had no evidence that met the standard of scrutiny and not wanting the get disbarred for lying to a judge, mostly averred that there wasn't any fraud at all). So you may want to rephrase this to speak of "political processes" alone, rather than legal ones.

Am I saying that when you and other House Republicans objected to certifying the Electoral College votes, that you were doing something illegal? Of course not; as a member of Congress, it was perfectly legal for you to vote however you wished. But the idea that you were legally obliged to so act, or that your actions followed any kind of legal necessity, is silly. You made a political stand, as is your right, but you had no legal rationale for doing so.

And remember, that making political stands--that is, standing up on behalf of a political belief--is a symbolic action. It's not necessarily just symbolic, of course: when one votes, or engages in a protest, or writes a column for a local newspaper like you did (or writes a blog post in response to it like I am), there are often real-world consequences in play: someone might get elected or not, someone might be arrested or not, someone might be persuaded or not. But even those real-world consequences exist in relation to the symbols and associations which surround them. You recognize this yourself; you associate your action with enabling "millions of Americans the ability to voice their opinion" and with honoring "my constituents and the Constitution." So let's think about the particular moment, and some of the other associations which were in play at that moment, when you stood up to be counted as challenging the legitimacy of electoral votes which dozens of courts (many of them filled with Republican judges) had found legitimate.

The Capitol Building, just hours before you voted, had been attacked by a mob determined to do what you did, only much more violently and directly: oppose the certification of President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory. Five people died as a result of that violent attack--the worst which the Capitol has experienced in over 200 years. There were people looking for the person who is in charge of the House you are a member of--Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi--with the apparent intention of kidnapping or killing her. Are you responsible for them? No! (Or at least, certainly not nearly as much as former President Trump, who fed them the delusional nonsense which led them to make the attack.) But in the final moment, I fear your actions fell symbolically on the same side of the rioters. After all, you were, at the very least, being motivated (or at least so you claim; I'm writing all this under the assumption that you were sincere in your column, and not just covering up the simple self-interest of keeping the Trumpist voters in the Kansas Republican Party on your side) by the same legally groundless political convictions about supposedly "improper" state electoral determination which Trump employed to fire up the mob in the first place. You may say that you were solely acting on behalf of Kansas Republicans who embraced Trump's dismissed claims about fraud, and you may genuinely believe that. But you can't wish away the symbolic weight which the House carried at that moment, in the wake of insurrectionary violence which was only a few steps logical steps removed from your political cause.

You could, I suppose, embrace this association, and simply insist that while the rioters were utterly wrong in their methods, they were not utterly wrong in their cause. I suspect you'd denounce that as a terribly unfair connection to make, and you'd probably be right. But is it an unreasonable connection to make? That, Representative Estes, I don't think is the case at all.

The 10 Best Books I Read in 2020

As always, in alphabetical order, by title.

The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice From the Civil Rights Movement to Today is a fantastic book, though not nearly the history of the relationship between religious faith (or even, more specifically, just author Charles Marsh's own Protestant Christianity) and the civil rights movement which the cover seems to promise. It is, essentially, a work of Christian theology and devotion, using three examples from the early civil rights movement to sketch out the ideal of "the beloved community" which he centers as the primary motivating ideal of the best which that movement had to offer, and then looking at various other attempts at social reform and arguments about such from the perspective of that ideal. It is thus a fairly narrow book (the Martin Luther King, Jr., who was a democratic socialist, or a savvy political operator, makes no appearance here), lacking in the kind of political reflection which might help better situate the religious impulse towards justice in our more secular moment. But as a pastoral call to do the work of Jesus in reforming society, I can think of no other book I've read lately which can compare.

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Injustice, by Frederik deBoer, is an odd book. Fundamentally, it's an impassioned attack on the ways in which the ideal of public education has been warped by capitalist imperatives, and the liberal elites whose mastery of those imperatives perpetuate that warping, even as they tell themselves and others that their goal is to make education more egalitarian. DeBoer's launches his attack through what he sees as that same meritocracy's refusal to address the cognitive science, behavioral genetics, and other research which has shown just how limited formal education is in the face of one's inherited abilities...which, to deBoer, is an obvious argument for getting rid of our vain hope for an educational system that will equally reward every on the basis of talents, and instead aiming to reconceive education in a way that doesn't depend upon measuring merit. Others, obviously, see any argument built upon the reality of our unequal inherited talents as exceptionally dangerous to the principle of equality. DeBoer's book doesn't address these challenegs as well as it should, but through its many claims, it at least puts the topic on the table, and for that readers should be grateful. (More thoughts on the book here.)

A Different Drummer, by William Melvin Kelley, was published over a half-century ago, and was essentially forgoteten about, despite having been praised by some of the great literary figures of the day. His race obviously had a lot do with that, but also the author's refusal the play the role which it seemed that every right-thinking, progressive African-American writer at the time needed (and was expected) to follow. A Different Drummer tells a hard story, one that lyrically weaves a kind folk-tale of racial vengence and redemption into an otherwise very realistic story of the late 1950s south. The story is essentially a fantasy, and parts of it feels like an almost pastoral one--until an act of racist violence at the very end hammers home the anger which motivated the author. A short novel, but one that invokes a haunting, parallel America very well.

I'll put together in this entry both The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women, which I read first, and Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, which I read immediately after it. Mormons like myself have no doctrinal reason to become familiar with early Christianity, given that ours is a restorationist tradition which has, for much of its history anyway, placed pretty much every Christian thinker who came after those included in the canon of the New Testament in the category of "apostate." I've thankfully escaped that mindset, but it is nonetheless the case that until this year, I'd restricted my devotional religious reading to the Biblical canon, the Mormon scriptures, and various translations and commentaries upon them, nothing else. Looking for something different, I pulled some old collections of the Apostolic Fathers and other early Christian writings off my shelf, and found them kind of fascinating. Wondering what I should do next, I asked some friends about advice for getting into the early Church Fathers, and several said: whatever else you do, read the Desert Mothers and Fathers! And so I did, and between these two books, my appreciation of Christian monasticism, my own membership in the Christian community, and my own sense of myself as a sin-wracked Christian, will never be the same. Strange, powerful, and spriritually transformative stuff.

I'm not an authority on Terry Prachett's Discworld, and I can't say that those novels of his based in that fantasy world--though I've liked, or even loved, all of them--make me want to become a completist. Maybe it's his sense of humor, which generally makes me smile rather than laugh. I adored his Tiffany Aching novels (the conclusion of the series was one of my favorite novels in 2016), but for the most part the other Pratchett novels I've read--Small Gods, Guards! Guards!, or Night Watch--have entertained, not enveloped me. That's absolutely not the case with Going Postal, though. This wild ride of a book--a fantasy, a caper story, a romantic comedy, a commentary on the costs of industrialism, a satire on politics, and much more--hyped me up with every twist and turn; it completely got me all caught up in the world of Moist von Lipwig, and had me laughing all the way. I don't often fall in love with genre characters, but I can't wait to read more about this guy.

Nany Rosenblum's thoughtful Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America has been on my shelf for years, and given my interest in localism, urban politics, and political theory, it's embarrassing that I didn't read it until this year. Rosenblum's analysis of the dynamics of neighborliness, and the categories she came up to enable us to analyze those dynamics and makes judgments about to relate neighborliness to all the other formulations of citizenship, are all simply brilliant. It gave me a moral language for thinking the idea of a community that isn't really--the neighborhood as a place of "decent folk" who recognize and respect and reciprocate to one another, but who also "live and let live"; they don't generate through their shared, proximate existence the kind of civic virtues, much less communal affection, which so much writing on social capital depends invokes, but it helps me see that there are vitures there all the same. Definitely a new member of my own private canon of studies in urban political theory. (More thoughts about the book and its claims here.)

Socialism: Past and Future, by Michael Harrington, is another book I should have read years ago. Harrington's importance as a socialist thinker and organizer is obviously well known--how could I be a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America and not know that? But until I read this book--which he completed just before his death--I didn't know about Harrington's thoughtful, in some ways conventional but in other ways quite heterodox, takes on Marxism, party politics, the role of the state, the real meaning of "socialization," and ultimately the almost "republican" character of a truly democratized--and thus socialized--society. After reading this book, I'm even more willing to defend the DSA against those who see the organization as compromised with its association with the Democratic Party; the fact is, its founder fully understood that in a free country you're going to have a plurality of organization forms, operating on a plurality of levels, reaching out to and organizing overlapping groups of people in a plurality of ways, and that's just plain wise. Scholars of Marx himself or other major figures and trends in European socialism probably have plenty of reason to critize Harrington's synthesis of ideas, but I found it deeply persuasive, and even inspiring, all the same.

The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien, is a tremendous read. It's easily the most powerful book on the Vietnam War experience I've ever read, but it's also much more than that. "Meta-fiction" doesn't stratch the surface; "postmodern" doesn't seem like the right fit, but maybe that describes the book as well as anything. Anyway, O'Brien, a Vietnam War veteran, is obviously telling his own story, but he's also inventing stories, and commenting on the invention of stories, and wondering about the ethics of inventing stories, both in terms of his own relationship to his art and, even more powerfully, in terms of how others who read and are moved by these stories relate to their own sanity. Please don't think that the result is a ponderous literary text; these are beautiful, sometimes funny and sometimes spooky, always brutal stories of Vietnam and war and death and youth and love and madness that cut to the bone--it's only afterward that you see the play in language and narration and intentionality (and if you don't see it, then O'Brien himself points it out to you). A great, great book.

Last year, before I began my current journey I mentioned above through early Christianity, I completed a re-read of The Book of Mormon, this time using a scholarly reproduction of the earliest available text. That read really opened my eyes to analytic and even theological possibilities within my own religious tradition that I'd long associated solely with the Bible (I wrote about some of my discoveries here). After I'd finished that read, I grabbed off my shelf Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide, a decade-old book whose arguments about reading The Book of Mormon from what I guess you could call a documentary perspective, looking at the book's own self-presentation regarding its assembly, have likely long since been absorbed by co-religionists of mine who are serious about these questions. So I'm late in getting a book read, once again? Well, that's nothing new. I really loved it, particularly the first two sections, as Grant Hardy skillfully, carefully, helps us figure out what the actual text of the Book of Mormon can tell us about the worldview and aims and opinions of Nephi and Mormon, which according to the book's own account are the two ancient prophets most centrally involved in its production and preservation over the centuries (the book's final section, on the prophet-editor Moroni, didn't strike as quite as interesting or persuasive). It's not a book that anyone who isn't willing to give the book's own claims seriously is likely to be able to get through without thinking its all just a massive work of fan-fiction, but for someone like myself, it was a great treat.

The 10 Best Movies I Watched in 2020

I seriously considered abandoning, or at least completely changing, this viewing list tradition of mine--between the pandemic, the general shift to streaming services, and the power of so much great television out there, shouldn't I just being thinking in terms of, say, "the 10 best things I watched on a screen in 2020"? Maybe. But in the end, despite The Queen's Gambit, Cobra Kai, and my delightful, months-long journey through every episode of the original series of Star Trek (plus the animated series, and the fan-made"Star Trek Continues" as well!), I decided to stick with just the 10 best self-contained cinematic productions I watched this year, wherever or however I watched them. As usual, this is stuff I watched this calendar year; the actual release dates are irrelevant. By title, in alphabetical order:

My movie-watching year was filled with documentaries, as this list reveals, but none really operated on me like films--as opposed to, say, straightforward cinematic documents, which is really all that even the most creative documentaries ever aspire to be--the way The Act of Killing did. It's very hard to sum up briefly what this audacious, offensive, utterly compelling film did, but basically: the movies creators, in profiling a handful of the now mostly elderly surviving perpetrators of a genocidal massacre of suspected communists (but mostly just thousands--possibly hundreds of thousands, possibly millions--of folks these self-identifying "gangsters" didn't like) in Indonesia 50 years ago, end up giving these mostly unrepentant villains the opportunity to dramatize their killings on film, and they jump at it, using all sorts of Hollywood genre tropes (Westerns, musicals, and yes, of course, gangster movies) along the way. Is this post-colonial exploitation? Is this a quasi-snuff film? So many unsettling questions. All I can say is, in their crude re-creations and celebrations--often bordering on comic self-parody--of their own past, the subjects of this documentary left a cinematic record that will haunt me for years.

I'm not a Spike Lee completist by any means, but I've seen enough of his movies to call Da 5 Bloods one of his very best, up there with Malcolm X or 25th Hour. Like both of those films--and really, like every Spike Lee movie I've ever seen--Da 5 Bloods--has an uncontrolled quality to it, with Lee playing around with all sorts of genre tropes and tonal shifts without the kind of discipline that, for example, the equally playful and bloody-minded Quentin Tarantino brings to his movies. But in place of that, Lee has a sense of moral purpose which the functionally amoral Tarantino pretty much entirely lacks. In this movie, making use of the wonderfully hoary tale of former soldiers going back to the battlefield to reclaim the remains of their fallen comrade (plus some handily buried gold!), Lee weaves a compelling war story into a film also about the place of the Vietnam War in the African-American experience, psychological trauma, Western imperialism, fathers and sons, and much more. Like the best filmmakers, even when you were certain of every betrayal, every landmine explosion, every tearful reunion, they all still appeared on the screen as brilliantly new. The best pure movie I saw all year.

Alex Honnold, the focus of Free Solo, a movie that captures in dizzing, sometimes terrifying detail his record-setting free solo (that is: no equipment, no partners, just his hands and limbs) climb of El Capitan, is basically a physical and psychological freak of nature, someone physically and mentally capable of impossible climbs and probably almost nothing else. Some have commented to me that Honnold's borderline inhuman character compromises the documentary's effectiveness; they prefer, for example, Dawn Wall, which records an arguably even greater physical feat of rock climbing by climbers like Tommy Caldwell (who appears in Free Solo as an advisor to Honnold) who have much more human and dramatic arcs to follow. Well, tastes differ. For my part, while the latter documentary impressed, the former simply scared me to death, in a good way, and I tip my hat to it, and to Honnold, for that.

Lady Bird was a total delight, and an unexpected one. I'd heard good things about it from friends and others, and after we watched Greta Gerwig's Little Women (which I liked a lot, but didn't love as much as I do the charming 1994 adaptation), we thought we'd give her earlier movie a try, even though the plot description didn't seem like much. What a revelation! There really isn't a single original moment in this film; it does exactly what you would expect a young woman's coming-of-age story to do, insofar as parents and friends and romance and sex and her own internal growth are concerned. All the John Hughes tropes are there. And yet, every single scene--thanks to the acting, the dialogue, and dozens of tiny but consequential plot choices--rang true. Once again: genre movie conventions endure because they work--or at least can be made to work when presented and acted out on film well, and in this wonderful tale, they do their job of entertaining and moving the audience (or at least me) with seamless skill.

I didn't know what to expect going into Last Black Man in San Francisco; it just seemed like such a striking idea for a movie: a young African-American man trying to reclaim--with great passion but without any legal cause--a beautiful old San Francisco house that he has tied up in his memory with his whole sense of family, identity, community, and direction in life. That's a lot of emotional complexity to get onto the screen, but the filmmakers pull it off, thanks to a lot of achingly beautiful cinematography, and a lot of subtle performances which enabled us viewers to see and hear a lot more than just what was said and shone. Not for everyone--it's a slow, painterly film--but absolutely worth the investment to see this quaint, quotidian story of a directionless but firely young person made gorgeous and large.

Matewan is a movie I should have watched years, decades, ago, but only got around to this year, as part of a film series I put together for a class I was teaching on radical politics (and which was, of course, completely upended by the pandemic). The respect which director John Sayles's movies hold is deserved; the man takes his time to produce intelligent, grounded stories that stand the test of time, and this nearly 35-year old film certainly does. Watching this story of mine owners in 1920s West Virginia suppressing unionization, first by attempting to turn white and black and immigrant laborers against each other, and later by direct violence, obviously plays upon different associations in our heads than it would have in 1987 when it was first released, but it's not some free-floating liberal signifier. This is a concrete tale, with the locals and the hillbillies and the hired detectives, the unexpected heroes and hidden villains and confused bystanders, all acting in entirely believable ways. A great cinematic invocation of some tragic, necessary history.

I'm not really sure how Me and Orson Welles ended up on my Netflix list; the description sounded somewhat interesting, I guess, but I knew basically nothing about it when it arrived, and thus I came to the movie without any expectations. Formally a kind of rom-com, it follows a young, callow, rich kid who--with a combination of real talent, artistic desperation, and what we would recognize today as elite privilege--manages to catch the eye of Orson Welles in 1937 New York City and land a role in his infamous Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar, and along the way has romantic adventures and learns about growing up. The casting is brilliantly smart, the dialogue wonderfully expressive, and the set design simply terrific--but for all that, 90 minutes into the movie I just thought I was watching something charmingly well-made, not great. Then director Richard Linklater recreates, as the film's narrative climax, some of the scenes of Welles's Caesar, of which there are only sketches and a few staged photographs as evidence of what it looked like. And it floored me. I know Julius Caesar pretty well, but man...the assassination of Caesar, and the murder of Cinna, gripped me as only the best live theater ever can. A good movie, but every theater fan needs to watch it just to see those wonderful, concluding scenes.

Parasite is everything everyone was saying it was last year: a shockingly blunt story of class conflict, an unsettling tale of shifting ethical burders, a showcase of brilliantly etched character moments, and a visually sumptuous depiction of wealth and poverty and the routines of life lived by those who inhabit both realms in South Korea today. Plus it's a mystery story, and a dark comedy, and almost a caper flick too. Bong Joon-ho's expertly recreated 1980s South Korea in Memories of Murder was one of my favorite films of 2013, and his sci-fi and horror flicks Snowpiercer and The Host have been great, off-beat productions as well. Going forward, he's definitely one to watch.

Paterson is definitely the oddest film on this list; quiet and subtle and plain, spending a couple of days accompanying a bus-driving, poetry-writing former Marine through his banal routines might seem like an almost experimental art film. The original poetry which flows across Paterson's mind and the screen is a beautiful device, and often provided a fascinating counter-point to the quotidian scenes they are super-imposed upon, but through prosaic encounters, daily ups and downs, and dramatic conflicts that end practically before they begin, it didn't seem to me to be adding up to anything significant. Then, at the movie's end, we are given a dramatic intervention by...what? One of the Twelve Muses? One of the Three Nephites? An angel? Who knows. All I can say is that, suddenly, Paterson's poetry matters--to him, to his world, to the movie itself--in a way it hadn't before, but also in a way that I wouldn't have appreciated if I hadn't watched all the quiet dailyness which had come before. A great accomplishment.

I stared this entry talking about how many documentary films I watched this year, and I end on the same note. Whatever combination of changes which streaming services, the wide availability of professional-level filmiing and editing technology, and just the zeitgeist of the moment has wrought upon us, one of the more pleasant results is that there is simply tons of pretty excellent movies out there documenting and recreating moments of our shared artistic and pop cultural history. No, such documentaries aren't aspiring to do anything as important as The Act of Killing or as thrilling as Free Solo, but dammit, learning all about the Funk Brothers in the wonderful Standing in the Shadows of Motown, or all about the making of the cult favorite Galaxy Quest in the actually moving Never Surrender was simply awesome, and anyone who says otherwise was either never a geek or is lying to you. Of all of the dozens of such musical and movie and cultural documents I watched this year, my award for the best has to go to What We Left Behind, a simply terrific and deeply loving tribute to--as well as an incisive exploration of--the strangest stepchild of the Star Trek family, Deep Space Nine. I don't deny my bias; DS9 is one of those few television shows that I can honestly say changed my life, or at least changed the way I thought about my relationship to art and story-telling and fandom and whatever fandom may choose to care about (and, given that DS9, during its seven-year run, took on a huge range of topics, that range of care-via-fandom was often huge!). In What We Left Behind many of those topics are addressed, sometimes with praise, sometimes with regret, and always with honesty. Plus, some of the conceits of the documentary are just delicious fun, like getting the old writers together to hash out an entirely hypothetical (OR IS IT?) reboot of the show, 20 years on, or having the irreplaceable Nathan Robinson, channeling Garak, his mysterious spy character from the show, show up every once in a while to provide snarky meta-commentary on the documentary itself. A wonderful work of cinema? Obviously not. But one of the best two hours I spent watching something all year? Oh yeah, absolutely.

Some Possibly Helpful Thoughts on Localism, Populism, and Proximity During a Pandemic

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

The departure of Donald Trump from the White House [crosses fingers] will assuredly not mean the departure of Trumpism from American life. The collection of grifters, paranoiacs, and devout (and, I think, devoutly misinformed) Christians who embraced Trump as the salvation of our broken liberal capitalist state may or may not stick with the man himself (or rather with the narcissistic tweetstorms that will no doubt continuously flow from his mansion in Florida), but the populist discontent which he channeled, the sense of technological alienation, socio-economic frustration, and constitutional disregard many justifiably feel in relation to our ever-increasingly unequal, undemocratic, and elite-driven country--that, I'm certain, we're stuck with. That can been as a threat requiring constant condemnation--or maybe, instead, we can dig into this discontent, find its constructive elements, relocate them, and use them to build a different, more local and less easily abused political foundation.

Of course, figuring out how to disentangle Trump from ideas embraced by, at the very least, hundreds of thousands of voters, is no simple matter. Populism--which, borrowing from The Oxford Handbook of Populism, I'll define minimally as "an ideology that posits a struggle between the will of the common people and a conspiring elite," and thus is, among other things, "a normative response to perceived crises of democratic legitimacy--is an alluring idol, the promise (one which many consider democratically dangerous) of making political connections with the imagined masses who feel alienated from or resentful towards those who wield social power within the dysfunctional mass democracies of today. I say "imagined" masses not because I reject the possibility of such alienation and resentment operating on a nation-wide scale; rather, I call it imagined because the populist articulations we see around us, whether expressed as a positive or a negative, are almost inevitably couched in a statist, collective context--and the pioneering work of Benedict Anderson decades ago has made it impossible, I think, for serious people to speak casually of national communities and their political expressions through states without recognizing their fundamentally "imaginary" quality, as things constructed through acts of affective identification and imagination.

Scholars who recognize this imaginary element in the politics of the contemporary democratic nation-state are often quick to suggest alternative stories which the inhabitants of such states could, or should, tell themselves, so as to short-circuit the lure of populist stories that, in the view of many of them, invariably cast the fight between the “common people” and the “conspiring elite” in dangerously ethnic or exclusionary terms. Their goal is to find a way to cast the affective identification and imagination at work in liberal capitalist states into the civic realm: hence, “civic nationalism” or “constitutional patriontism.” This effort, while it has had great influence in the scholarship on national identity over the past 30 years, has seemed less than wholly convincing as populist narratives have revived over the same period. Rogers Smith, while sharing the fear of these scholars regarding the threat to liberal democracy which populist narratives present, suggests that any political story which fundamentally rests on “pledging allegiance to an abstract creed” is doomed to struggle.

Instead, Smith argues that those stories which will lastingly engage the affective imagination of a people are the ones which focus on “a shared endeavor that participants can see as expressive of their identities and interests as well as their ideas.” This is not a denial of the constitutive role which acts of political imagination will invariably involve, but it suggests that such affective expressions need not be either “mechanistic” (which suggest unchanging laws or identities) or “teleological organicist” (which suggest an inevitable evolution towards a destiny or end-state); a people can also see itself constituted through “contextual accounts” which derive themselves from mapping “how the interactions of different units in [society] foster change in those units and in the society as a whole.”

Given Smith’s appreciation of the constitutive function which a story about the contextual interactions of different parts of aspects of a social group can serve for the group itself--an appreciation he deepens even further when he associates the best kind of national stories with “reticulation”: that is, they will “weave networks” that “transform jumbles of differences into more orderly and attractive arrangements that generally have more utility and durability”--it is unfortunate that he never seriously considers any group besides the nation state. After all, his talk of contextual accounts of a jumble of different subgroups and distinct social units being woven into a network which constitutes an appreciation of the whole has an obvious analog in a very important, though clearly not national, form of imagined community: the city. Consider the applicability of Smith’s considerations to Jane Jacob’s justly famous description of the “sidewalk ballet” of a thriving city in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: 

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance--not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations. 

That Smith does not recognize this obvious parallel is perhaps a matter of convenience; while he allows that our globalized and interconnected world allows for a cacophony of potential political stories, he sees “narratives of nation-states” as possessing a “simplicity, clarity, and authority” which “proponents of rival senses of political identity often can manage only with great difficulty.” Or it is possible that he sees that convenience as reflecting something natural and inevitable. William Galston, relying in part on the political theorist Pierre Manent, makes this point multiple times in his own recent attack on populist narratives; it is essential, he writes, to make a civic case for the pluralist and democratic nation-state, because only a government that is incorporated by national bodies can have the scale of representation to make genuinely “legitimate decisions about laws and rules,” and only a national body can incorporate enough resources to generate the sort of wealth that can reward the very human characteristic of “ceaseless effort and ingenuity in the service of material improvement.” Democracy at our present moment, according to this argument, requires a liberal capitalist nation-state, and since such states create elites, and elites can be depicted as threatening the common people by populist demagogues, the great task of theorists of democracy, in Galston’s and Smith’s minds at least, is to call for the sorts of stories and public policies that will prevent the populist narratives which are parasitic upon such states from gaining any political ground.

My concern, at this point, should be obvious: if the fundamental problem with populism--and the efforts which some theorists go to either counter or re-orient its appeal as a constitutive narrative of affective imagination--is the complicated fact of its appeal to the feelings of powerlessness and longings for popular control which exist in the contemporary nation-state, then what about focusing on the constitutive, people-building power of other, less statist scales of belonging? Of course, so long as our national governing bodies wield sovereign power, and our major media organs remain committed to casting every debate into terms of what effect said debate will have on the use or abuse of state power, any such alternative will face many practical obstacles. But those obstacles may not be insurmountable.

One particular way in which localism has taken on theoretical forms which potentially carry with them real possibilities for constituting a sense of popular identity is the family of ideas which are sometimes referred to as the “new municipalism” or “radical municipalism.” Heavily indebted to the “libertarian municipalism” of Murray Bookchin, but expressed in light of a more locally interconnected understanding of participatory democracy than his did, it is an attempt to think more seriously about what a politically empowered egalitarian commons would look like in a localized urban context. That such models can be productively imagined and politically built upon in relatively rural contexts is an understanding as old as Thomas Jefferson’s proposed ward system or Alexis de Tocqueville’s idealization of the egalitarian town meetings of 19^th-century America. The parallels between those associational forms and those spoken of by the Populists of late 19th-century America are strong--but considering how poorly the Populists fared in America's urban centers, that would only seem to further suggest the incompatibility between populist formations and the urban life most American citizens live.

Yet perhaps the distinguishing feature that municipalist narratives could offer, one which borders on the populist articulation of a defense of the common people and yet does not get hung up on inevitably statist definitions of citizenship and claims to a sovereign people--definitions which, in the 19^th century, became entangled with an anti-urbanism and an anti-immigrant ethnic sentiment, echoes of which continue to Trump’s so-called “populism” today--is their rigorous focus on the most basic phenomenological fact of urban life: bodies in proximity to each other (which is exactly the same central reality to Jacob’s sidewalk ballet). As Bertie Russell observed:

[The] municipalist movements have found themselves building on a unique potential of the urban--proximity. In its simplest forms, we can understand the quality of proximity the observation that...the local level is the place the space where shifts and changes can truly be transformative in terms of impacting people’s lives....[Their] initiatives are harnessing the potential of the urban scale through adopting a politics of proximity, the concrete bringing together of bodies (rather than of citizens, who already come with a [state-defined] territory) in the activation of municipalist political processes that have the capacity to produce new political subjectivities....[We] should understand the politics of proximity as attending to those forces that pull us together, as opposed to those forces that push us apart. Whilst contemporary urbanization is characterized by the ever-increasing massification of bodies...this same urbanization is driven by dynamics that pull us ever further apart. Perhaps it is precisely because of this contradiction that the municipality has been adopted as a key site through which a politics of proximity can be pursued. 

While the theoreticians of municipalism have thus far, to my knowledge, not thought to connect populist stories about constitutive identification (or their more civic equivalents) with the urban “subjectivities” that they see as emerging through the politicalization of the proximate bringing together and shifting and changing of human bodies, the parallels are, I think, obvious. The focus on the needs of human bodies, on organizing to maintain their proximate patterns of movement and change, or resisting those socio-economic forces which pull people apart, inducing alienation in the place of togetherness--that all can fit within a populist framework. Remember that Smith argued that the best stories of identification must incorporate some degree of “reticulation,” some respect for the pluralistic “patterns among the elements that constitute a larger whole.” In rural or suburban environments, it may correctly be the fact that the distance between bodies requires a narrative of affective and imaginary identification on a national scale, since locally there isn’t sufficient shifting and changing to prevent the craving for such stories to land upon exclusive, ethnic ones. But in cities? The requisite reticulation which the constituting story needs to making human plurality into a part of one’s imagined community, rather than an obstacle to it, will be as obvious as the foot traffic on the sidewalk outside one’s front door (or at least potentially could be, anyway).

Margaret Kohn's work on the "urban commonwealth" provides a specific example of putting this kind of imagined subjectivity--a non-statist, urban sense of the common people united against those who would alienate and privatize them from one another--to direct political work. Kohn refers to the theoretical construct she explores as “solidarism,” but at one point in her analysis the populist parallel is made explicit. Using the urban uprisings of a decade ago--Occupy Wall Street being the best known in the United States, but with parallels all around the world--as her model, she suggests that life in cities today is increasingly teaching more and more people to rethink how they see themselves as bodies which occupy public, democratically articulated spaces. In association with that particular urban education, Kohn postulates a greater awareness of how it is that those spaces, and the means by which they are "common" to those who live and move and change within them–speaking here of the roads and parks and playgrounds and markets through which healthy urban activity is expressed--are separated from them, thus making them, presumably, something that people can feel no politically identifying affection for.

Enabling this awareness are the operations of, in Kohn’s words, "two very different understandings of the term 'public.'" The first she calls the "sovereigntist model, which identifies the public with the state," and the second the "populist model, which sees the public as a force which emerges outside of state institutions in order to challenge policies and publicize issues that do not make it onto the government’s agenda.” Predictably, the sovereigntist model requires a regulative state in order for the urbanites to find identification through their actions in their spaces: “A public space is one that is owned, authorized, or regulated by the state.” Whereas the populist model defends the contentious interaction of persons, with their always shifting associations, as a necessary component of persuasion; it justifies “the public as a force that emerges outside of state institutions in order to challenge policies and publicize issues that do not make it onto the government’s agenda.” In short, Kohn is pointing to a kind of populist imaginary which comes from the same space as the subjectivities which radical municipalism invokes: finding oneself constituted as a community through the practice of “extralegal” action, putting bodies into public space “as a way of ensuring that the law does not protect the interests of the elite at the expense of the common people."

Obviously, talk of the people being able to exercise political force in regards to public places "outside of state institutions" is terrifying to those who consider state-enforced property rights to be sacrosanct. Such urban and local populist formulations do not necessarily take a clear position on the place of private property (Kohn herself doesn't, recognizing that the idea of "social rights" or the "right to the city" are far from fully developed), but again, the key point is not contesting every particular argument being made as part of this intellectual shift. Rather, the point is taking up the discontent which issues in the whole drive to politically express oneself through in connection with one's collectively self-articulated people and place, and explore the possibilities of the shift itself.

It is my belief--and, with a little creative re-interpretation, perhaps a belief which aligns with the theoretical work done by the theorists and activists mentioned here--that populism, the popular engagement of people against elites, can be made relevant to political formulations outside of national imaginaries. And if the rhetoric of populism really can be theoretically articulated as a local and urban matter, then perhaps exclusive national narratives, whatever their effectiveness, could also be understood as invoking a language which is parasitic upon the embodied place where populist feeling mostly actually resides. To be certain, it is ridiculously unlikely that a conceptual exploration like this one could be persuasive enough to be even just a small part of making incoherent any further Trumpist and state-dependent abuse of the valid populist sentiments out there. But given how likely it is that our national pre-occupations will allow bad actors like our soon-to-be-former president to continue to turn legitimate frustrations with the elite disregard of our  proximate (and, for most of us, urban) places in nationalist, exclusivist directions, any rhetorical and intellectual resistance, however small, is worth doing.