Languages of the Unheard: Why Militant Protest Is Good for Democracy

Stephen D'Arcy Languages of Unheard: Why Militant Protest Is Good for Democracy Toronto: Between Lines Press, 2013Reviewed by Howard A. DoughtyIt was, perhaps, hyperbole, but in giddy atmosphere of a successful insurrection and not long before world's first new nation had ratified its constitution, its most eloquent advocate wrote to William Stephens Smith, an American diplomat on November 13, 1787 as follows:The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.Times and opinions change. Now, many liberal democracies are less willing to imagine need for insurrection and eager instead to repress it. The fact that there are people who think of them as is barely comprehensible. They regard themselves as above reproach and dismiss those who argue against them as tyrants and terrorists.It had been almost two hundred years since American Revolution when social scientists pronounced American experiment to be an unmitigated success. In one of signature books of era, William Kornhauser addressed question of democracy in The Politics of Mass Society (1959). In it he safely concluded that poverty no longer a problem. Prosperity, though inconsistent and occasionally unfairly distributed, nonetheless growing and broadening. It would not take long for Michael Harrington (1962) to publish his ground-breaking book, The Other America: Poverty in United States which, in turn, became an important prompt for Lyndon Johnson's much praised War of Poverty-a war that lost in jungles of Vietnam.Tyranny at home also no longer deemed a problem, for Kornhauser and other pluralists confidently announced that any vestige of ruling had been supplanted by a series of circulating elites, none of which held absolute power and all of which represented different sectoral interests. This illusion soon shaken by people such as Henry S. Kariel's The Decline of American Pluralism (1961) and G. William Domhoff's Who Rules America? (1967), now in its seventh edition and newly subtitled The Triumph of Corporate Rich, revealed something akin to truth about power in USA. For pluralists, however, belief remained firm that no one permanently excluded in continuing political game that authoritatively allocated values and in which government acted as an unbiased referee in sorting out question of who gets what, why and how. Social class effectively neutralized as a source of conflict as race and gender did not even merit a mention. Kornhauser stated flatly, was wrong (p. 232).This not to say that its boosters thought that United States was, as Seymour Martin Lipset (1960: 403) would say just a year later, the good in operation; there were indeed social problems, but they were social or, more often, psychological in nature-not political and certainly not economic. Oddly, Kornhauser focused on alienation, one of Marx's core concepts to build his case against Marx, but he defined it so narrowly that it lost its explanatory power. Instead, he relied on idea that what really troubled America result of dissolution of feudalism and rise of atomized individual. The security of identity so easily found in traditional had to be replaced with a new sense of community. Apathy, alienation and anomie were important problems, but Kornhauser convinced that mass society and risk of mass movements a by-product of transition from feudalism to modernity. It would be overcome.The subjects of Languages of Unheard ... include Red Army Faction, Los Angeles rioters, Zapatistas, Mohawk Warrior Society, Black Bloc, Quebec student strikers, Occupy movement. ... Stephen D'Arcy takes political militancy ... seriously.In intervening half century, irrelevance of pluralist analysis has become clear. …

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