by Richard Farr
It’s a ritual now. Every Sunday morning I go into my garage and use marker pens and sticky tape to make a new sign. Then from noon to one I stand on a street corner near the Safeway, shoulder to shoulder with two or three hundred other would-be troublemakers, waving my latest slogan at passing cars.
Others are waving the Ukrainian or Canadian flag. Or Hire a Clown and Get a Circus. Or Support Our Troops: Fire Hegseth. In my small town we’re perhaps 2% of the population — not yet one of those mass movements to which the future’s textbooks will devote a chapter, but we are fearful enough to need the hope of that outcome. With America’s vaunted institutions and much-hyped freedoms on fire, we desperately want more people to (as one of my own signs says) Join Us Before It’s Too Late.
We try to take comfort from the fact that we occupy three corners of the intersection, greatly outnumbering the Trumpers, a dozen people blasting patriotic country music on the northwest corner. But we know the truth: the only consequence of our protests, at least until ICE comes to town and starts handing out free tickets to El Salvador, is that it buys us a little dignity, a little solidarity, a little courage in the face of disaster.
Some of us are “leftists,” which is American English for “centrist neoliberals who look back wistfully to the era of Barack and Hillary.” Some are “radical leftists,” which is American English for “people so naïve that they actually care about things like climate change, the minimum wage, Citizens United, Gaza, nuclear command and control, universal healthcare, starving Yemeni children, and Ukraine.” All of us are appalled that Donald Trump and his one-eyed yellow minions are vandalising central functions of the state, especially the ones that involve anti-corruption oversight.
So that makes us the statists and him the anarchist, right?
Obviously that’s not right. Trump is driven by a lust for power, and especially a lust for the wealth that his power is now raining down on him, a spectacular lack of business acumen having made him so much poorer up to now than he could easily have been. Abetted by a corrupt and ideologically unhinged SCOTUS (“Trump vs. United States”: satire is dead; you can’t make this stuff up!) he is busy freeing himself from nearly all constraints on his Croesian gold-bidet prerogatives. His ideal America is Putin-on-the-Potomac: absolute authoritarianism in the service of kleptocracy, with enough domestic enemies and foreign slaughter to keep people looking in the wrong direction. This is anti-anarchism. Though he despises the traditional institutions of the state as much as he despises kindness, honesty, integrity, humility, the rule of law, the Constitution, his own lapdog enablers, and his own perfervid supporters, there’s nothing he despises quite so much as the freedom of ordinary people to control the actions of their own government and the circumstances of their own lives. We on the other hand want to protect the state he’s attacking precisely because that state has, for all its bloat and overreach and other imperfections, protected to some degree the ordinary freedoms of ordinary people.
Which brings me to James C. Scott and anarchist calisthenics.
In a previous essay, Anarchy, State and Authority, I admitted to a fondness for some of the classic anarchist thinkers. They were idealists in the best sense as well as sometimes the worst sense. (Rarely noted: the best sense ought to stand very high in our esteem; the worst sense usually names a minor and forgivable flaw.) The idealism of the anarchists had one key focus: how to build a civilization that permits, to the greatest extent possible, something that most human beings have mostly lacked since at least the invention of agriculture: freedom from coercive manipulation.
Scott, a Yale anthropologist who died in 2024, devoted his career to studying populations that the modern panotic state had found it especially difficult to coerce or manipulate. He was fascinated especially by the beneath-the-radar “infrapolitics” of what Gramsci called “subaltern” people — peasants, mountain tribal people, ethnic and linguistic minorites, hunter gatherers at the fringes of agrarian states, and so on. If you have not encountered Against the Grain (which brilliantly rethinks the meaning of the agrarian revolution), or Seeing Like a State (which explains how our modern world emerged from an agrarian one and took its strikingly peculiar shape), I can only say I envy the feast that awaits you. Other titles speak eloquently of what Scott was interested in: The Moral Economy of the Peasant; Domination and the Art of Resistance; Weapons of the Weak.
As the title Two Cheers for Anarchism suggests, Scott is a friend of the anarchist tradition, not a family member. He agrees with us anti-Trump protesters that the state is worth protecting insofar as it “can, in some circumstances, play an emancipatory role” (italics original). But he sees also that anarchist ideas can be mined by everyone for clues about how illegitimate authority comes about, sustains itself — and can be seen for what it is and resisted:
Lacking a comprehensive anarchist worldview and philosophy, and in any case wary of nomothetic ways of seeing, I am making a case for a sort of anarchist squint.What I aim to show is that if you put on anarchist glasses and look at the history of popular movements, revolutions, ordinary politics, and the state from that angle, certain insights will appear that are obscured from almost any other angle.
I propose the following modest thesis: he is right – which may explain why the 140 rich, witty, unassuming pages of Two Cheers will entertain and challenge anyone who has from time to time held a political opinion. Now, with so many around the world discovering the sweet addictive Kool-Aid of authoritarianism, it’s an even fresher and more reviving read than it was when it was published in 2012.
Of many engaging little stories that he tells, two in particular I found striking – one about being a pedestrian and one about honoring or not honoring heroes.
Living in Germany during the 1990s Scott often had to cross a particular road intersection. It was in a flat area with good sight lines, little traffic, and poorly timed pedestrian lights. He repeatedly found himself in a small crowd at this intersection, watching the empty road and waiting for the light to turn green. Almost no one ever jaywalked. Scott seems uncertain what disturbed him more — this behavior or his own reaction to it:
It surprised me how much I had to screw up my courage merely to cross the street against general disapproval. How little my rational convictions seemed to weigh against the pressure of their scolding… I began to rehearse a little discourse that I imagined delivering in perfect German… “You know, you and especially your grandparents could have used more of a spirit of lawbreaking. One day you’ll be called on to break big laws in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it. You have to be ready… what you need is ‘anarchist calisthenics’. Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking… that way, you’ll keep trim and when the big day comes you’ll be ready.”
Still on the subject of insubordination as a virtue, Scott recounts that during the same period a local anarchist group was hauling from town to town a papier-mâché statue entitled Monument to the Unknown Deserters of Both World Wars. It bore the legend “This is for the man who refused to kill his fellow man.” That we should honor (and thank for their service to us) those who had the courage and made the required sacrifices not to fight — white feathers, furious vilification, excommunication, beatings, the firing squad — is a striking thought. Scott remarks that this “magnificent anarchist gesture” was “distinctly unwelcome. For no matter how thoroughly progressive Germans may have repudiated the aims of Nazi Germany, they still bore an ungrudging admiration for the loyalty and sacrifice of its devoted soldiers.” Here was a nationalist taboo the breaking of which could scarce be thought, and the public expression of which must be reviled and at once extinguished. For the population had absorbed deep into its bones what Wilfred Owen, in Dulce et Decorum Est, had called the “old Lie” about military sacrifice. Thus was nationalism protected from its deepest fear: “What if they gave a war and nobody came?”
There are many other themes here: the history of the invention of patriotism; the subtle authoritarianism hidden in the very idea of cost-benefit analysis; how the Bolsheiks among others conveniently rewrote their own history; the way the modern state’s obsessive measuring of behavior colonizes and changes the very behavior it measures, from Vietnam to the SAT; high modernism’s disastrously false conception of what we should count as rational in social and political life (one of the themes Scott explores so well in Seeing Like a State); the origin and significance of Marx’s wrong-headed contempt for the ‘petty bourgeoisie.’
It’s hard to resist great slabs of quotation on each of these topics. But in order to leave you with the flavor of his thinking on just one more — one that’s especially worth your time if you consider yourself, as I do in some vague and elastic way, liberal — I’ve allowed myself a few quotes below.
Liberal democracy has been around for a while. How effective is it? What if it functions mainly as a warm blanket of illusions for the college-educated classes about what actually works to make the world a better place?
Most of the great political reforms of the 19th and 20th centuries have been accompanied by massive episodes of civil disobedience, riot, lawbreaking, the disruption of public order, and, at the limit, civil war. Such tumult not only accompanied dramatic political changes but was often absolutely instrumental in bringing them about.
An astute colleague of mine once observed that liberal democracies in the west were generally run for the benefit of the top, say, 20% of the wealth and income distribution. The trick, he added, to keeping the scheme running smoothly has been to convince, especially as election time, the next 30 to 35% of the income distribution to fear the poorest half more than they envy the richest 20%.
The fact that democratic progress and renewal appear… to depend vitally on major episodes of extra-institutional disorder is massively in contradiction to the promise of democracy as the institutionalization of peaceful change.
To the extent that our current rule of law is more capacious and emancipatory than its predecessor were, we owe much of that gain to lawbreakers.
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As I mentioned last month, it’s usual to read Plato’s Republic as the most extreme model of Utopian Rationalist state-authoritarianism ever devised: “All will be well, as long as the philosopher-kings get hold of the Truth, everyone else believes the lies that this Truth requires the philosopher-kings to tell them, and in pursuit of that end everyone is dissuaded from independent thought or behavior of any kind.” Plato’s more surprising insights — for example that this will require us to banish art itself — are counter-intuitive enough that he has to mention them. On the other hand one senses that some things are pretty much a given, including the polis needing a supply of unmarked vans to mop the streets clean not only of committed anarchists with thought-inducing statues but also of ordinary people waving Dump the Runt banners outside the Safeway.
I mentioned also a refreshingly different reading of the Republic, namely that it’s really a parody of authoritarianism, of rationalism, and of philosophy’s pretentions to truth-finding generally. If this is the right way to read it, we know that Plato tragically overrated the average philosopher’s capacity to have, or detect, a sense of humor. But I can now reveal the truth: Plato was in earnest.
How I know this will become clear in a future piece, where I plan to share perhaps the most sensational journalistic scoop of all time — my interview in Hades, over a pot of tea and buttered crumpets, with Socrates.
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