Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Re-Reading Imagined Communities for the 1000th Time

    Some books just stick with you. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism is one of them. It was one of only two books that I was assigned to read in multiple classes in college. At Om Ben’s memorial service, my colleague Isaac Kramnick called it the “second-most important book ever written by a Cornell faculty member.”* And it’s a standard entry on any syllabus dealing with nationalism and national identity.

    I recently assigned Imagined Communities for the N-th time in my own class, and I was struck—once again—by how dense it is. Every time I read it I discover something new, or remark upon a flippant turn of phrase or a spicy footnote that I hadn’t noticed before. This time was no different.

    The standard two-word summary of Imagined Communities is “print capitalism.” This is shorthand for Anderson’s argument that the spread of mass literature in vernacular languages, motivated by the capitalist impulse to sell penny dreadfuls to as many people as possible, created the idea of a community united by a common language. But the last two times I re-read Imagined Communities, I was struck more by his focus on the idea of what he and others term “simultaneity.” That is idea of what a reader (or generally, a person) conceives of the temporal dimensions of the social world. Writes Anderson,

    What has come to take the place of the mediaeval conception of simultaneity-along-time is, to borrow again from Benjamin, an idea of ‘homogeneous, empty time,’ in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar.

    I won’t pretend to have nailed down what specifically this distinction is,** but the idea is that mass vernacular fiction did not simply create a common experience of people-like-me-reading-things-that-only-we-can-read but also that the nature of the mass market novel shifted people’s cognitive map from a medieval to a modern form. That’s much more than just “print capitalism.”

    The other thing that I noted is Anderson’s gleeful recitation of racial epithets, designed to make the point that

    it is remarkable how little that dubious entity known as ‘reverse racism’ manifested itself in the anticolonial movements.

    He writes in a footnote

    I have never heard of an abusive argot word in Indonesian or Javanese for either ‘Dutch’ or ‘white.’ Compare the Anglo-Saxon treasury…

    and then goes on to list them. This is wonderfully interesting for two reasons. First off, in his posthumously published memoir, Anderson not only talks about the common “abusive argot word” in Indonesian for “white” (= bule) that everyone knows, but also he claims to have invented it as a derogatory term for Caucasian person.***

    Second off, it is interesting because Caroline Hau—a very fine author of both fiction and nonfiction—recently gave a lecture at Cornell entitled “For Whom Are Southeast Asian Studies” in which she urged us to remember the audiences for whom our books are written. In Anderson’s own telling, Imagined Communities is for an English audience. Not English-speaking, but specifically from England. Perhaps that explains why one would argue such an odd and plainly untrue thing? Hard to say. But a Southeast Asian audience would happily supply him with the treasury of colonial racial epithets for colonizers.

    NOTES

    * Here is the winner for Kramnick’s most important Cornell faculty book.

    ** Anderson cites Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and Walter Benjamin for these ideas.

    *** He claims to have coined the term in the 1960s, to be clear, so the timing does not work (Imagined Communities is from 1983). As colorful as that linguistic history might be, I think he is plainly incorrect.

  • Regime Cleavages and Democratic Imperfections

    I recently published a piece at Politico on America’s emerging regime cleavage. In comparative politics, a central concept in the study of democratic politics is the notion of a “cleavage structure,” which refers to the basic axis of political conflict within a society. Some countries have a class cleavage: upper versus lower class, bourgeoisie versus working class, and so forth. Others find themselves with an urban-rural cleavage: the cities versus the countryside, urban wage laborers versus peasants, or something similar. Still others have racial or religious or ethnic cleavages: Malays versus non-Malays in Malaysia, Protestants versus Catholics in much of Europe in the 16th through 20th centuries, whites versus non-whites in the United States and South Africa, etc. And yes, these dimensions often intersect in interesting ways: urban/rural non-Malay/Malay in Malaysia, white/nonwhite rural/urban blue collar/white collar in the United States.

    But democracy can survive—even thrive—with any of these kinds of cleavage structures just so long as the participants respect the institutions of democracy. Regime cleavages are different. Here, the axis of political conflict is about democracy itself. Those are not healthy conditions for the rule of law and the constitutional order, because one side favors democracy and the other side opposes it. Sure, it’s always the case that some individuals may oppose the rule of law or legal institutions because they don’t like them. But that’s not a regime cleavage. A regime cleavage emerges when for ordinary people, across society, the main political conflict is about democracy and its defense.

    That is, I argue, where the Trump presidency is leading American politics. And that is why the president needs to be impeached and removed, to show Americans that there is cross-partisan support for the American constitutional order. If not, and the president’s assault on the constitutional order metastasizes into a fully-formed regime cleavage,

    it will not be possible to elect a president who can “end the mess in Washington” because both sides of the regime cleavage will argue that the other is illegitimate and undemocratic. Voters, understandably, will lose what faith they have left in the value of democracy itself. In the worst-case scenario, presidents and their supporters would be entirely unaccountable to Congress, while their opponents would reject the legitimacy of the presidency altogether.

    But there’s one thing I didn’t touch on in that essay, which I want to address here. That is how to think about democracy in countries beset by deep, enduring cleavages that are not regime cleavages. Let me pose the question bluntly: what sort of democracy is it when, say, African Americans are unable to exercise their constitution rights in ways comparable to white Americans, because one (of not the) axis of political conflict is a racial cleavage?

    We all ought to agree that that is far from a perfect democracy. And we all ought to agree that questions of democratic legitimacy should be raised under such circumstances. For whom is democracy legitimate? And what does defending that kind of democracy imply about citizenship, political equality, and the so-called “common good”?

    Nevertheless, the striking observation is that those sorts of imperfect democracies do survive as imperfect democracies. They may survive because those excluded from full political participation are relatively powerless, disenchanted, demobilized, or actually detained, but they do survive just until that racial cleavage becomes a regime cleavage. One way to think about the Civil Rights movement, in fact, is as a strategy to create a regime cleavage out of a racial cleavage, to force the constitutional order to reckon with race rather than considering it just another deeply-felt political divide. In that case, the order evolved as a result, and the regime cleavage evaporated (even if the racial cleavage persisted).

    Those are the stakes for thinking about America’s emerging regime cleavage. Defending the regular constitutional order ought not be mistaken for defending some idealized version of American democracy. It should, however, be understood as defending a system that allows for those excluded from full equality to use the tools of American democracy to press for their interests without destroying those institutions along the way. That is an imperfect democracy worth defending.