On David Brooks, Haiti, and "Intrusive Paternalism"

David Brooks' most recent Sunday New York Times column has caused a firestorm in liberal and progressive circles. Partly a diatribe against the "backwardness" of Haitian culture, partly an attack on micro-lending and anti-poverty programs, Brooks' article is sure to offend just about everyone. But what's received comparatively little attention is Brooks' explicit call for a new form of "intrusive paternalism". The ideology of paternalism figures prominently in most versions of political thought, but is rarely discussed openly. After all, paternalism is usually considered something of a pejorative term, at least in the contemporary United times. That Brooks is willing to invoke paternalism (twice!) in his essay is somewhat remarkable.

Brooks argues for "replac[ing] parts of the local [Haitian] culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement — involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance." According to Brooks, such a system would modeled after programs like the American "No Excuses" charter schools network, known for their strict disciplinarian classrooms and rigid standards-driven performance measures. Extrapolate that model across other social institutions and you have some idea of the massive cultural intervention Brooks has in mind.

It's no accident that, for Brooks, the most repressive wing of the charter school movement emerges as a template for running society. After all, by calling for paternalistic governance (literally, "government as by a father over his children") Brooks is essentially demanding that Haitians be treated as (school)children by a parental state.

The concept of paternalism dates back at least to the thinking of 1st century Roman philosopher Arius Didymus, who claimed that the father should exercise absolute power over his children just as the king rules over his minions. Later, paternalism was embraced by old-guard monarchists writing amidst the emerging Western European democracies. Outspoken opponent of the French Revolution Louise Ambriose argued that the state should mirror familial relations, with the sovereign inscribed as the father and his subjects, children.

So why have liberals and progressives been so reluctant to call out Brooks' defense of "intrusive paternalism"? Perhaps it's because they are themselves adherants to their own brand of of intrusive paternalism. After all, since the 19th century paternalism has been reclaimed (in practice if not in name) by the Left/liberal camp under the guise of the welfare state. Whatever its accomplishments may be, the welfare state remains -- in the final analysis -- a mechanism of social control. The Left/liberal vision for Haiti may be less blatantly cruel than Brooks' model but it is no less paternalistic (or intrusive!)

It should also be no surprise that three former US presidents, in a rare joint appearance, could agree on the necessity of rebuilding the Haitian state, with heavy US involvement. For would-be paternalistic rulers, disaster represents an unique opportunity. Much like the father who reasserts his authority with an even heavier hand after his kid gets into trouble, Haiti's catacylsmic earthquake represents a perverse opportunity for a new round of intervention (couched as "aid"). It's already become clear that "humanitarian" efforts and the militarization of Port-au-Prince are part of the same interventionist project. Even if we assume good intentions, such paternalistic intrusion -- whether cloaked by liberal or by conservative rhetoric -- is likely to exacerbate Haiti's problems.

Throughout its history, whether suffering under the heel of a colonial power, an occupying army, or a homegrown dictator, Haiti's problems stem from too much paternalism, not too little. How might Haitains throw off the yoke of paternalistic social relations? In her essay "Down With Childhood!" the feminist critic Shulamith Firestone offers some possibilities. Firestone argues passionately against the very concept of childhood, writing "The myth of childhood flourishes so widely not because it satisfies the needs of children, but because it satisfies the needs of adults...Children are repressed at every waking minute! Childhood is hell!" While kinder parenting can't hurt, true freedom hinges on the abolition of childhood as such.

Still make no mistake: This is not a call for a new Haitain nationalism. For Haitians to cast off the old father and replace him with a friendlier one in a moment of Nietzschian ressentiment would only reinscribe the basic family unit. To call for an end to to paternalism is to explode the category of child, both in the family and in the larger social sphere. This is the task at hand.

The Battle of St. Paul

"If the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain's resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry Left never will." – President George Bush, addressing the RNC via satellite feed, September 1, 2008 
"I Am The Angry Left."  -- T-Shirt seen at demonstration outside RNC, September 2, 2008 
      For casual observers on the east coast, the most enduring memory of the 2008 Republican National Convention is probably the chorus of Republicans who interrupted McCain's acceptance speech chanting "Drill, Baby, Drill" while pumping their fists up and down, like a sea of oil rigs on the Alaskan tundra.   For 19-year-old Elliot Hughes, one of 800 protesters arrested during four days of street protests outside the convention hall, the memories are likely to be somewhat different.  Speaking at a press conference immediately following his release from jail, he told reporters, 
six or seven officers came into my cell, and they took—one officer punched me in the face…. And the officer grabbed me by the head, slammed my head on the ground [points to a visible gash on his forehead].  And I was bleeding everywhere.  They put a bag over my head that had a gag on it. And they used pain compliance tactics on me for about an hour and a half.
When asked about the incident, Ramsey County Sherriff Bob Fletcher neither confirmed nor denied the allegations, but noted Hughes was “extremely disruptive in jail,” and, “it took some force to control him.”
Elliot's experience was but one of the more dramatic examples of an exceedingly brutal police reaction to militant protests that turned downtown St. Paul into a virtual war zone for four days and nights.  While in recent years most police departments have become increasingly reliant on de-escalationtactics and so-called "soft" repression, the RNC seemed to signal the reversal of this trend.  The RNC certainly marked the most aggressive policing of a US demonstration since the 1999 WTO Riots in Seattle, and probably the most fiercely contested political party meeting since infamous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  Police unleashed their full arsenal of "less-lethal" weaponry, deploying tear gas cartridges, pepper spray canisters, smoke bombs, concussion grenades, and rubber bullets with little restraint, not to mention the liberal use of nightsticks.  In one of the most of the most widely reported incidents, police used snowplows and dumptrucks to trap a group of 300 protesters on a bridge and ordered them to lie on the pavement with their hands over their heads as they awaited arrest.  Most disturbing, police seemed to deliberately target the alternative media, shutting down the offices of the Twin Cities Independent Media Center and raiding I-Witness video, a NYC based video journalist collective with a record of documenting police brutality at mass demonstrations – three times.  Democracy Now radio broadcaster Amy Goodman was also arrested in the course of the demonstrations, along with two producers, one of whom was bloodied in the process.
      A bit of context is necessary here: All major party conventions are now deemed National Special Security Events, which means they are allocated special funds and overseen by the Joint Terrorism Task Force – a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Homeland Security components (Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, and the Secret Service) and state and local law enforcement.   In preparation for the festivities, the city temporarily deputized 3,000 officers from across the state to supplement its 600 regular officers.  Meanwhile, 1,200 members of the Minnesota National Guard – many fresh from a tour of Iraq – waited in the wings in case things got testy.  To fund these expenditures, St. Paul asked for and received $50 million from Congress.  On top of that, the Republican National Committee had bought a $10 million insurance policy from the St. Paul police, pledging to spend its own money to stop any civil rights lawsuits.  This insurance policy seemingly gave the police free license to engage in activities that were likely to get them sued.  As another blogger wrote, if past practice is any guide, "the host city may eat some hefty fines, but not before harassing the crap out of the rabble with the aim of incarcerating them and/or intimidating and impoverishing them through legal fees and court appearances." 
      I attended the convention as a member of a political marching band known as the Rude Mechanical Orchestra.  Our role was mainly ancillary: we would stand on sidewalk and pump out tunes to diffuse tense situations while our friends in the street did the dirty work.  We would drown out the Republicans' fascist squawks with our joyous noise.  Our repertoire ranges from a cover of 80's glam-metal band Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It" to a reimagining of Beyonce's "Crazy In Love" (with anti-war lyrics).  Oh, and we have some originals too.  We rolled up to St. Paul in a veggie-oil-powered school bus, after having logged some 1500 miles en route from New York.  Upon our arrival in the Minnesota capitol, we were swiftly greeted by St. Paul's finest, who interrogated our driver as part of a "routine traffic stop".  On day two of the convention, our bus was surrounded and barricades by riot police for a four hour stretch, until they realized they had no justification to detain us.  Both times, we got off scot free.  Others were not so lucky.
      The ironically named RNC Welcoming Committee was formed as "an information and logistical framework for radical resistance to the RNC."  The WC did not actually organize the demonstration, but instead provided a support structure for protesters coming to the Twin Cities. But because the WC was the public face of the demonstrations, police quickly labeled it an "organized criminal enterprise" with plans "to utilize criminal activities to disrupt and stop the RNC."  Even  before the festivities began, the local police were already conducting preemptive strikes against known organizers.  In mid-August the WC opened a "convergence center" – a space for protesters to gather, eat, share resources, and build network of solidarity. On Friday, August 29th, 2008, as folks were finishing dinner and sitting down to a movie the Ramsey County Sheriff's Department stormed in, guns drawn, ordering everyone to the ground. This evening raid resulted in seized property (mostly literature), and after being cuffed, searched, and IDed, the 60+ individual inside were released.  The next morning, on Saturday, August 30th, the Sheriff's department executed search warrants on three houses, seizing personal and common household items and arresting 5 suspected leaders.  And affidavit released several days later revealed that police operatives had successfully infiltrated the WC as early as one year before the convention, gathering information that led to the preemeptive raids and arrests.  (Many of the allegations in the affidavit are patently false and strain the imagination, such as the claim that anarchists planned to kidnap delegates and blow up tunnels leading to the convention center).  A spokesperson for the National Lawyers Guild, which defended some of the protesters, told the press, "This is a political prosecution in its purest form, because no one is actually accused of physically doing anything that would be violent...They're being prosecuted specifically for their political activities and what they advocated."
      Although some of the more prominent organizers had been taken out, the WC's decentralized structure made it invulnerable to decapitation. The WC had divided Saint Paul into 7 sectors, so that organizing bodies throughout the country could coordinate their actions and blockade as many access points as possible. Operating in small, autonomous cells known as affinity groups, protesters with the stated goal of disrupting the convention blockaded highway on-ramps and busy intersections and destroyed corporate property.  Others improvised barricades out of street signs, road closures, and newspaper bins.   At one intersection, protesters dragged a dumpster into the street and overturned it, filling the street with trash and debris.  Peace Officers from the nearby permitted rally removed the dumpster from the street and set it upright on the curb, only to watch it get dragged into the street again minutes later.  This sequence was repeated at least three times.  Elsewhere, a car was driven into the center of a busy intersection and screech to a stop, diagonally blocking traffic from both direction under a banner reading: NO WAR BUT THE CLASS WAR. EAT THE RICH. FEED THE POOR. A video circulated on YouTube shows a protester jumping an officer from behind as he attempts to make an arrest.  (The officer subsequently retreats empty-handed).  On the afternoon of September 4th, thousands of Twin Cities youth walked out of their high schools and colleges in a citywide student strike against the Republican Convention, organized by Youth Against War and Racism.  Despite threats and public recriminations from the mayor and the superintendent, many high schools across the metropolitan region were reportedly shuttered.  Although the heavily defended security perimeter immediately surrounding the convention hall was never breached, delegate busses from Connecticut and Alabama were delayed and Democratic pundit Donna Brazile was accidentally hit with pepper spray.
      The award for Most Creative Protest Tactic goes to "Bash Back!", a Chicago-based collective of trans-folk, queer youth, and anarcha-feminists clad in pink and blue, many brandishing magic wands and some with fairy wings.   When confronted by the members of the incendiary anti-homosexual Westboro Baptist Church, the queer bloc chanted "We're here, we're queer.  We're anarchists, we'll fuck you up!" while pantomiming gay sex acts, much to the consternation of the churchgoers.  The reward for Most Idiotic Slogan goes to the neo-Trotskyite Sparticist League, who raised placards advocating "Unconditional Defense of the Deformed Chinese Workers State Against Imperialist Counterrevolution".  Not quite as catchy.
      Of course, all this was lost to readers of the New York Times, who had to turn to page A18 to find any protest coverage at all. The media, for its part, was mainly bewildered.  The local FOX News affiliate reported:  "At every turn, the peaceful protesters were overshadowed by the anarchists, who left a trail of vandalism in their wake, without cause or ideology, leaving police to wonder, 'What's still to come?''  (Apparently, those who identify ideologically with the anarchist tradition are 'without ideology'.)  Another naïve television reporter asked a member of my band whether we were Obama supporters.  To be sure, the convention attracted the usual mix of liberals, NGOs, and social democrats, many of whom still have illusions in Obama or the Greens, but their endless speechifying and permitted marches were overshadowed by more disruptive groups. The mainstream American left, in its pitiful state, cannot see beyond the bounds of party politics.  History shows we can't vote our way out of a war by backing the least offensive candidate. 
      At press time, 8 individuals face charges of Conspiracy to Commit Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism, a 2nd degree felony that carries the possibility of 7 ½ years in prison under a "terrorism enhancement" clause normally reserved for prisoners of war.  The last use of such charges in Minnesota was in 1916, when organizers with the Industrial Workers of the World on the Iron Range were charged with 'criminal syndicalism' for organizing unions.  This comparison is surprisingly apt.  Then, like now, we were reeling from an increasingly unpopular war in an era when dissent was equated with terrorism.  In an open letter to allies, the  defendants group writes, "These [conspirarcy charges] create a convenient method for incapacitating activists, with the potential for diverting limited resources towards protracted legal battles and terrorizing entire communities into silence and inaction."  To support RNC arrestees – monetarily or otherwise – visit www.RNC8.org 
      Finally, it seems, the American Left has shaken off the post-9/11 malaise that tamed street protests in the half decade immediately following the WTC attacks.  Despite Bush's posturing, the Angry Left is back (although we certainly deplore the comparison to NLF torturers).  In a email message circulated widely just after the convention, a collective associated with the demonstrations wrote, "the upsurge associated with the anti-globalization era was not a flash in the pan: if anything, we are stronger today than ten years ago."  Who knows what the next 10 years may bring….