often surpassing their more conservative opponents in severity. This bipartisan technocratic (“leave it to the experts”) conquest of the political sphere brought together an apolitical consensus, with little room for openly conflictual approaches. Speaking in the European context with its rather more developed institutional Left, Seferiades and Johnston argue that “in contemporary Western democracies, and on a variety of pretexts, official protest organizations, including several [social movement organizations], trade unions, and, above all, the parties of the Left, tend to approach contentious disruption as a relic of the past. Hoping to secure the consensual resolution of pent-up grievances, nominally contentious organizations are increasingly espousing (often in a dogmatic fashion) the modalities of an exclusively conventional protest repertoire.”20
The range of permissible political expression narrowed as previous movement leaders found themselves accepted into the institutions they’d once criticized and disrupted, and thus less apt to disrupt them. A culture developed within the Left favoring what scholar Doug McAdam calls a “pluralist prejudice,” which delegitimized and deprived the marginalized of their most, and perhaps their only, means of expressing their political interest:
[N]on-institutional protest was for a long time considered to be pathological owing to what may be construed as the pluralist prejudice: the axiomatic assumption that political systems (at least in the West) possessed sufficient expressive channels, which protesters, to their detriment, evaded quite simply because they were “irrational”: “Why would any group engaged in rational, self-interested political action ignore the advantages of such an open, responsive, gentlemanly political system?… [Because m]ovement participants are simply not engaged in ‘rational, self-interested political action.’” Incorporating insights from social theory and novel research findings (both historical and contemporary), political process and contentious politics approaches have problematized and eventually shattered the pluralist assumption: actors engaged in contentious, non-institutional collective action are not irrational; instead their departure from the proper channels reflects systematic channel deficiency and is, if anything, eminently rational.21
Such systematic institutionalization of dissent also resulted in what Katz terms “mimetic reform,” defined as “measures that respond to insurgent demands without devolving real power or redistributing significant resources,” most notably through a systematization of conflict which “not only absorbed the energies of insurgents, it also transformed their protests and rendered them harmless.… [It] substituted decentralization for community control, elections for protest, and ‘modest but sufficiently tantalizing distribution’ for redistribution.”22 Institutionalized dissent talks back to insurgent demands without actually answering them, neither serving their constituency’s interests nor allotting them power to do so themselves. The accumulated effects of decades of managed dissent have resulted in a crisis of powerlessness for social movement actors—regardless of the justice of their cause. Material power is replaced with a feeling of “empowerment,” which comes to mean just another kind of despair.
Indirect Rule
For many, increased minority inclusion in political representation—the election of a Black president, selection of a Black secretary of state and Supreme Court judges, and particularly the Black entry into municipal politics—has been the most palpable victory won by the civil rights movement. Notably, people-of-color representation among business leadership has continued to be considerably more constrained, which in any case hardly “trickles down” to racialized populations at large. In view of the worsening conditions for large numbers of minorities and the poor, such “selective incorporation” of token elites, by “constructing limited ladders of social mobility,” may well be viewed as an ultimately counterproductive strategy, working to confuse without essentially improving the reality of material inequalities and unequal access. Michelle Alexander, former Racial Justice director of the ACLU, for example, criticizes affirmative action programs for this reason, pointing out that their effect in creating small, visible elites may work to mask the widespread degradation in conditions, thus actually perpetuating it.23 In terms of the more public challenges confronted by social movements, the selective incorporation of holders of municipal public office bears particular significance.
This selective incorporation of marginalized populations did not occur in a vacuum. Housing policies first robbed these populations of assets and networks of influence by first driving them into deteriorating city centers during an explosion in suburban land values, which was policed by real estate covenants often with explicitly racist language. Then, gentrification went on to rob them of the considerable assets and networks they’d built up in these neighborhoods. In the midst of these massive schemes of dispossession through displacement, civil rights era struggles did away with some of the mechanisms that kept members of these communities out of office—primarily, however, only at the municipal level. Invoking a term from the colonialism’s vocabulary, Katz points out that this limited representation results in a form of “indirect rule,” as the faces of political and bureaucratic rule appear much darker than the faces actually setting policies and determining budgets at the state and national levels. “Like colonial British imperialists who kept order through the exercise of authority by indigenous leaders, powerful white Americans retained authority over cities through their influence on minorities elected to political office, appointed to public and social service bureaucracies, and hired in larger numbers by police forces.”24
State legislatures have retained effective control over finances, schooling, and housing, but more diverse representation at the city level “meant that civil violence or other claims on city government increasingly would be directed toward African American elected officials, African American public bureaucrats, and African American police.”25 This results in a perverse hesitancy for communities of color to manifest antagonism in the places they live, lest they lose the ambiguous gains won through long struggle; political elites, whatever good or bad intentions they may have, are thus able to demobilize dissent, as urban populations identify more closely with the faces, if not the actual forces, of rule. The contradictions in the practice of such management strategies can be seen in the example of Occupy Oakland, when Chinese American (and former neighborhood organizer and self-described communist) Mayor Jean Quan at first attempted to express sympathy with the movement by visiting the camp, only to order the deployment of near-lethal force by hundreds of riot police less than two weeks later. Quan justified her move by claiming that “white anarchists” were marauding through “our Oakland,” which, though misrepresenting the diverse composition of Occupy, seemed true if “our” referred to the racial makeup of the city’s political elites. The appeal of this claim must have been noticed by other politicians: on November 24, 2014, when Black Lives Matter protests erupted in Seattle and shut down the country’s largest interstate for a full hour, white mayor Ed Murray did not blush to claim that the freeway had been shut down by “a bunch of white anarchists,” even though, according to several eyewitnesses I spoke with, every one of those who actually made it on the freeway were Black youth (with the ironic exception of local white hip hop celebrity Macklemore). In both instances, a bizarre rhetorical situation was revealed: minoritized communities were apparently shut off from the sort of public disruption that had historically been a central means of influence, so that their “representatives” could actually claim public disruption to be evidence of privilege.
After decades of being assured that racial uplift can work by trickle-down, disprivileged communities are hesitant to stand up to and take on political leaders who, though ultimately lacking power, resemble the face of progress. The political quiescence resulting from such accumulated hesitation is central to disruptive deficits and has become a central challenge that movements are forced to confront.
Consumerism and Credit as “Hope”
Much of the recuperation and displacement of potentially disruptive drives in the neoliberal era has occurred outside the sphere of what is usually understood as political, as for example in the composition of the consumer economy. As the Free Association has brilliantly analyzed, the neoliberal era managed to defer the antagonism that might have resulted from declining real wages by substituting easy consumer credit; so long as one didn’t actually have to
