not simply a negative absence of power. It is the power to act together with others to build a public world. To be free and to act, she writes, are the same. Arendt worries that large bureaucratic states will over time detach the power to act from the people and lead to the loss of freedom: Representative government itself is in crisis today, partly because it has lost, in the course of time, all institutions that permitted the citizens’ actual participation, and party because it is not gravely affected by the disease from which the party system suffers: bureaucratization and the two parties’ tendency to represent nobody except the party machines.13 Because large and bureaucratic democracies tend toward centralization of power and the disempowering of citizens, democracies will need to experience perennial episodes of refoundation. Such moments of refounding are central to the democratic spirit of the United States. And Arendt (citing Alexis de Tocqueville) finds in the civil disobedience of the civil rights movement a modern reemergence of the American tradition of political action: As soon as several inhabitants of the United States have taken up an opinion or a feeling which they wish to promote in the world, or have found some fault they wish to correct, “they look out for mutual assistance, and as soon as they have found one another out, they combine. From that moment, they are no longer isolated men but a power seen from afar, whose actions serve for an example and whose language is listened to.” It is my contention that civil disobedients are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.14
For Arendt, civil disobedience must be nonviolent for the simple reason that civil disobedience, unlike a revolution, seeks to revolutionize the world, but it
1. Joanna Freeman, Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and Road to Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). 2. Keith Mines, “Will We Have a Civil War?” Foreign Policy, 10 March 2017. 3. Hannah Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harvest/HBJ Books, 1969), 69–70. 4. Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Stripe Press, 2018), 175. 5. Emily Badger, “Estranged in America: Both Sides Feel Lost and Left Out,” New York Times, 4 October 2018. nytimes.com/2018/10/04/upshot/estranged-america-trump-polarization.html. 6. Hannah Arendt, “Is America by Nature a Violent Society?” in Thinking without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2018), 355. 7. Ibid., 356. 8. Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” xx. 9. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Who Designed the March on Washington?” pbs.org/wnet/africanamericans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/100-amazing-factswho-designed-the-march-onwashington/. 10. Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement,” Commentary 39 (February 1965): 64ff. 11. Ibid., 65. 12. Arendt, “Civil Disobedience,” 74. 13. Ibid., 89. 14. Ibid., 95. 15. Ibid., 75.
HA
Reflections on Civil War and Civil Disobedience
Civil disobedience is an act of citizenship by which minorities can change the minds of majorities. Thus, disobedient minorities—those groups who collectively dissent from majority opinion—are not traitors or rebels, but are part of the fabric of democratic government. The rise in civil disobedience is a sign of a revolutionary situation. But revolutionary situations rarely lead to revolution. More often, they lead to counterrevolution, or to nothing at all. •••
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ultimately accepts the frame of established authority and the system of laws. Violence can change the world; but violence, as one of the West Point cadets said in our debate last night, opens a Pandora’s box of unpredictable and uncontrollable evils. Or, as Arendt writes, violence may change the world. But more often, violence leads to more violence. “The civil disobedient shares with the revolutionary the wish ‘to change the world,’ and the changes he wishes to accomplish can be drastic.”15 But in the end, the civil disobedient affirms that shared world. The challenge in our particular moment is that so many concurrent organized minorities are battling to have their own view of fundamental American values prevail. From #antifa, Occupy, #metoo, Black Lives Matter, and sanctuary cities, to the Tea Party, Border Patriots, #fakenews, and fundamentalist bakers in Colorado, the tradition of American political association is being reinvigorated as form of mass political citizenship. Amidst this struggle of opposing yet concurrent minorities there is a tendency to turn political adversaries into political enemies. I want to suggest this is a mistake. I am not arguing that we need a centrist politics of compromise. Nor am I calling for the discovery of a rational consensus that somehow resolves and mitigates the real differences that define the various communities of opinion that comprise the present United States. The aim of an Arendtian democracy is not one that produces a thick consensus on fundamental values. Instead, I am arguing for a political democratic ideal of active citizenship.
Citizenship and Civil Disobedience
Roger Berkowitz
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