Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Glam, Metal, and Regime Change

    I recently had the opportunity to guest lecture in my colleague Mona Krewel‘s course Politics and Music. The title of my lecture: Wind of Change: Glam/Metal, Protest, and Regime Change from Berlin to Tahrir Square. You can see the slides here (PDF).

    Although it is certainly fun to play “Heroes” and “Youth Gone Wild” to a room full of nineteen year olds,* I found it much more challenging to prepare this lecture than I had expected. It’s easy to read lyrics and see how they are political, and it’s easy to show videos of bands performing during important political moments, but teaching good social science about how music affects something like regime change is hard.

    The approach I followed is this. Start with what we know about regime change: what causes it? Under what conditions do regimes collapse? That gives us a series of analytical approaches and causal pathways that have regime change at the end. From there we can ask, where does music—of any sort—fit into those causal pathways?

    My preliminary thoughts are that we can think about glam and metal as having three roles in creating and sustaining oppositions to authoritarian rule. Glam or metal can function as a regime defier, a type revealer, and a coordination device.

    1. Regime defier: the music itself—both lyrics and performance—undermines ideological hegemony or social conformity
    2. Type revealer: listening to glam or metal is a signal of what you believe or value, and allows others to infer whether you share common characteristics
    3. Coordination device: performances serve as focal points, and the creation and distribution of illicit music creates interpersonal trust and develops movement expertise

    Now we have at least some analytical purchase over how glam and metal might matter for regime change. But it always pays to be skeptical, so I concluded the lecture by inviting the students to question everything that I’d told them. Specifically, I invited them to ask

    1. Is glam/metal special or unique? My guess is no: rap, punk, hip hop, and other forms of music could probably do the same thing.
    2. Is glam/metal incidental? There’s a good case that it is. Think of it this way: did the cassette player cause the Iranian revolution?
    3. When does glam/metal help and when doesn’t it? There is much more metal out there than there is regime change.
    4. Is glam/metal fundamentally democratic? Aside from the obvious point that, say, Nazi black metal is pro-Nazi, I think that there is a good argument that metal’s characteristic focus on power could easily be used for illiberal or anti-democratic purposes.
      The case for glam is different. I’m willing to bet that glam’s characteristic focus on gender non-conformity makes it fundamentally liberal as a musical genre.**

    NOTES

    * It is also interesting to think about how both metal and glam emerged from the same late 1960s U.K. psychedelic rock scene.

    ** David Bowie’s Nazi period may be evidence against this proposition.

  • On American Exceptionalism and its Colonial Past

    This past weekend I participated in a fascinating conference entitled A Republic, if We Can Keep It, sponsored by Cornell’s Center for the Study of Inequality and New America. Participants included academics, journalists, analysts, and others, all brought together to debate the state of American democracy—with particular emphasis on understanding American democracy in comparative perspective.

    One issue that frequently comes up in such discussions is American exceptionalism. For the purposes of that particular discussion on the state of American democracy, the relevant question is, does the United States have some sort of exceptional quality that explains the durability of its democratic institutions over more than two centuries? The link earlier in this paragraph gives plenty of examples of what that exceptional quality might be: its religious history, its English cultural roots, the specific nature of the founding, the tradition of republicanism, and so forth.

    As someone whose research focuses on comparative politics (i.e., the rest of the world), I am duty-bound—professionally-speaking—to be skeptical of any claim of American exceptionalism. But there is one way in which I think that the United States really is exceptional, and it does matter for understanding American democracy, past and present. Specifically, the United States is the world’s only settler colony endowed with an enduring legacy of plantation slavery.

    It is possible to speak, in general terms, about two types of colonies. Settler colonies such as Canada, Australia, and Uruguay featured large-scale migration of Europeans, coupled with the near complete annihilation of their indigenous population. These are colonies in which European settlers were able to recreate European social and political institutions. Another type of colonial economy relied on large-scale plantation labor or commodity extraction, almost always supported by slavery (as in the Caribbean and Peru), significant forms of labor repression (as in Indonesia and Angola), or general neglect (as in Malaysia). These are colonies in which indigenous or African slave populations outnumbered the European population.

    The idea that there were difference in colonies based on whether or not Europeans settled en masse there is certainly not new. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson’s landmark work on “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development” relied on a simple distinction between those colonies where Europeans could settle (and hence built European institutions) and where they could not due to disease (and hence built extractive institutions).

    My point, however, is not about the origins of development or the mortality of settlers. It is about the legacies of such social structures after independence. The United States is unique—it is exceptional—in the specific sense that it combines both the institutions of settler colonialism and the legacy of large-scale plantation slavery. The closest analogues for the United States would be Brazil and (to a lesser extent) South Africa, and Anthony Marx’s Making Race and Nation takes up this comparative project explicitly. Other settler colonies, like Argentina, have slave histories but relatively few descendants of African slaves as a proportion of their total population today.

    Understanding American exceptionalism this way matters for understanding American democracy today because it reminds us that democratic institutions can coexist with racially exclusive policies and institutions, and that American democracy has always had to deal with this legacy. No other settler colony must confront a legacy of slavery in this way. Scholars of American politics from Hochschild, Weaver, and Burch to King and Smith have used the term “racial order” to describe “the beliefs, institutions, and practices” that define race and politics in the United States. In principle, every country has its own racial order; America is exceptional in how its racial orders must confront both European political institutions and the legacies of plantation slavery at scale.

    That confrontation between European institutions and plantation slave legacies has generally not favored the latter, and understanding why allows us to characterize just what it is that American democracy represents. Prior to the abolition of slavery, and then again under Jim Crow, and in various ways until today, American democracy has operated by restricting the very citizenship of black Americans. Dankwart Rustow’s argument that democracy requires mass agreement on who the members of a political community are has the uncomfortable implication that it might be that mass agreement about the non-membership or non-citizenship of certain groups provides the foundation for durable democratic institutions. But these democratic institutions do not represent all denizens of a given territory.