Abstract
In this article, I argue that concern with the public sphere and the necessary conditions for a genuine democracy can be seen as a central theme of Jurgen Habermas's work that deserves respect and critical scrutiny in the contemporary moment, when throughout the world liberal democracies are in crisis. My study intends to point to the continuing importance of Habermas' problematic of the public sphere and its relevance for debates over democratic politics and social and cultural life in the present age, in an era in which the Occupy Movements, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the Trump Resistance Movement, and Ukraine and Palestine Solidarity groups use social media to struggle against multiple forms of oppression. At stake is delineating a concept of the public sphere which facilitates maximum public participation and debate over the key issues of the contemporary era and which consequently promotes the cause of radical democracy and social transformation.
Keywords
Jurgen Habermas'
While Habermas's thought took more philosophical twists and turns after the publication of his first major book, he has himself provided detailed commentary on
Hence, my study intends to point to the continuing importance of Habermas' problematic of the public sphere and its relevance for debates over democratic politics and social and cultural life in the present age, in an era in which the Occupy Movements, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, the Trump Resistance Movement, and Ukraine Solidarity groups use social media to struggle against multiple forms of oppression. At stake is delineating a concept of the public sphere which facilitates maximum public participation and debate over the key issues of the contemporary era and which consequently promotes the cause of radical democracy and social transformation.
Habermas within the Frankfurt School
The origins and genesis of Habermas’s
Habermas conceived of his study of the bourgeois public sphere as a
Habermas submitted the dissertation to Wolfgang Abenroth at Marburg, one of the new Marxist professors in Germany at the time, and in 1961 became a
Habermas's focus on democratization was linked with emphasis on political participation as the core of a democratic society and as an essential element in individual self-development. His study
Generalizing from developments in Britain, France and Germany in the late 18th and 19th century, Habermas sketched out a model of what he called the ‘bourgeois public sphere’, and then analyzed its degeneration in the 20th century. As he puts it in the Preface to the book: ‘Our investigation presents a stylized picture of the liberal elements of the bourgeois public sphere and of their transformation in the social-welfare state’ (Habermas 1989a, xix). The project draws on a variety of disciplines including philosophy, social theory, economics, and history, and thus instantiates the Institute for Social Research mode of a supradisciplinary social theory. Its historical optic grounds the approach in the Institute project of developing a critical theory of the contemporary era and its political aspirations position it as critique of the decline of democracy in the present age and a call for its renewal – themes that would remain central to Habermas's thought.
After delineating the idea of the bourgeois public sphere, public opinion and publicity (
Habermas' study of the public sphere has been subjected to intense critical argumentation which has clarified his earlier positions, led to revisions in later writings, and has fostered intense historical and conceptual research into the public sphere itself and debates over its nature. Few books have been so systematically discussed, criticized, and debated, or inspired so much theoretical and historical analysis. The result, I believe, is considerably better understanding of the many dimensions of the public sphere and democracy itself in contemporary liberal democracies.
Habermas's critics argue that he idealizes the earlier bourgeois public sphere by presenting it as a forum of rational discussion and debate, when in fact certain groups were excluded. Habermas concedes that he presents a ‘stylized picture of the liberal elements of the bourgeois public sphere’ (Habermas 1989a, xix) and should have made it clearer that he was establishing an ‘ideal type’ and not a normative ideal to be resuscitated and brought back to life (Habermas 1992, 422f). Yet it is clear that a certain idealization of the public sphere was present in Habermas's text, and I believe that this accounts both for its positive reception and a good deal of the critique. On the affirmative side, precisely the normative aura of the book inspired many to imagine and cultivate more inclusive, egalitarian, and democratic public spaces and forums; others were inspired to conceive of oppositional democratic spaces as sites of the development of alternative cultures to established institutions and spaces. Habermas thus provided decisive impetus for discussions concerning the democratization of the public sphere and civil society, and the normative dimension helped generate productive discussions of the public sphere and democracy, while inspiring social movements in its transformation.
Yet Habermas' idealization of the earlier bourgeois public sphere as a space of rational discussion and consensus has been sharply criticized. It is doubtful if democratic politics were often fueled by norms of rationality or public opinion formed by rational debate and consensus to the extent stylized in Habermas's concept of the bourgeois public sphere. Politics throughout the modern era has been subject to the play of interests and power as well as discussion and debate. It is probably only a few Western bourgeois societies that have developed any public sphere at all in Habermas's sense, and while it is salutatory to construct models of a good society that could help to realize agreed upon democratic and egalitarian spaces and values, it is a mistake to overly idealize and universalize any specific public sphere as in Habermas' account of the bourgeois public sphere as characterizing an entire epoch.
Moreover, while the concept of the public sphere and democracy assume a liberal and populist celebration of diversity, tolerance, debate, and consensus, in actuality, the bourgeois public sphere was dominated by white, property-owning males. As Habermas's critics have documented, working class, plebeian, and women's public spheres developed alongside of the bourgeois public sphere to represent voices and interests excluded in this forum. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge criticized Habermas for neglect of plebian and proletarian public spheres (1972 [1996)], and in reaction, Habermas has written that he now realizes that ‘from the beginning a dominant bourgeois public collides with a plebian one’ and that he ‘underestimated’ the significance of oppositional and non-bourgeois public spheres (1992, 76).
Mary Ryan notes the irony that not only did Habermas neglect Women’s public spheres, but he marks the decline of the public sphere precisely at the moment when women were beginning to get political power and become political actors (1992, 259ff). Indeed, the 1999 PBS documentary by Ken Burns
Further, Howard Zinn's
Despite the limitations of his analysis, Habermas is right that in the era of the democratic revolutions a public sphere emerged in which for the first time in history ordinary citizens could participate in political discussion and debate, organize, and struggle against unjust authority and militate for social change – a sphere institutionalized, however imperfectly, in later developments of Western societies. Habermas's account of the structural transformation of the public sphere, despite its limitations, points to the increasingly important role of the media in politics and everyday life and the ways that corporate interests have colonized this sphere, using the media and culture to promote their own interests.
Like Horkheimer and Adorno in
Habermas, the public sphere and the radical movements of the contemporary era
Critical theory had its global moment in the United States, Europe, and throughout the world during struggles of the 1960s and 1970s when liberation and resistance movements appeared in a radical democratic public sphere that drew on the work of Marcuse, Habermas, Fromm, Adorno and Horkheimer and other members of the Frankfurt School which made critical theory a global force much of the world that was undergoing intense social struggles and upheaval. In 2011, the Arab Uprisings, the Libyan revolution, the UK Riots, the Occupy movements and other political insurrections cascaded through broadcasting, print and digital media, seizing people’s attention and emotions, and generating complex and multiple effects that make 2011 as memorable a year in the history of social upheaval, comparable to the multiple upheavals of 1968 (Kellner 2012). In this section, I argue that the new wave of struggles in 2011 demonstrated the global theoretical and political relevance of critical theory, and that global movements of youth developing oppositional cultures and public spheres provide a base for the growth of critical theory in the present and continuing into the future.
Indeed, the contemporary moment exhibits the expansion of youth resistance movements paralleling new social movements of the 1960s. Following the year of upheaval in 2011, new movements such as Black Lives Matter emerged, accompanied by Dreamers and Latino youth struggling for basic rights for immigration and to stay in a country to which their parents brought them. These struggles were followed by Bernie Youth during the 2016 Democratic primaries, where an army of youth mobilized behind progressive candidate Bernie Sanders in his struggle against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination, exhibiting a strong socialist movement for the first time in decades in the U.S.
Bernie Youth remained active during and after the 2016 election and were part of a Trump resistance movement consisting of Black, Brown, White, and a rainbow of youth struggling against the Trump administration and the racist, sexist, and neo-fascist forces that supported it, along with highly organized groups of women and men in a rainbow of liberation movements. After a series of mass shootings in the Trump era where the Trump administration and Republican controlled Congress refused to take any action on rational gun control, youth in Parkland, Florida, after a school shooting on February 14, 2018, which left 17 dead and 17 wounded, the students of Parkland mobilized a national pro-gun control movement under the hashtag #NeverAgain, a movement inspired in part by the ground broken by the #MeToo movement and the 2018 Women's March.
#NeverAgain demanded legislative action to prevent similar shootings and vowed to organize and defeat lawmakers who received political contributions from the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the 2018 Congressional elections and beyond. The group rallied on February 17 in Fort Lauderdale and planned to focus on legislative action; rallies in support took place all over the world. The Women's March Network organized a school walkout that took place on March 14, and the Parkland youth and their supporters helped organize demonstrations named ‘March for Our Lives’ on March 24 which included a march in Washington, DC.
Since this period, there continue to be shocking outbursts of mass shootings in the United States, and youth continue to organize, and rally state and local legislature for gun reform. On state and local levels there continue to be significant reforms, as well as Executive Action on the Federal level by President Joe Biden – although a Republican Congress beholden to the NRA has blocked more significant action, such as the banning of assault weapons like the AR-15 rifle used in most mass shootings.
In all these cases, the insurrectionary youth movements used media spectacle and digital media to mobilize resisting youth and gun safety reform groups in public spheres that used mainstream and alternative media to promote their issues and to mobilize for radical social change. Hence, in the next section, I will provide studies of political insurrection as media spectacle in democratic public spheres to provide a context for study of the rise of multiple youth movements in the past years across gender, race, class, regional, and other divides which have militated for rational gun reform.
Political insurrection in contested public spheres
In the face of the failures of neoliberalism and a global crisis of capitalism, tremendous economic deficits and debts in these countries, enabled and produced by unregulated neoliberal capitalism, there were calls by established political regimes to solve debt crises on the backs of working people by cutting back on government spending and social programs that help people rather than corporations. These struggles emerged globally with powerful protest movements against government austerity programs emerging in Spain, Italy, the UK, Greece, and other European countries, intensifying as capitalist economic crises intensified. In many of these struggles, youth played an important role, as young people throughout the world were facing diminishing job possibilities and an uncertain future in an era of global economic crisis. All of these crises and struggles were played out in contemporary Western media public spheres with different political groups using alternative and mainstream media in an expanded public sphere that includes a wide range of social and digital media sites, as I will argue in the following sections, thus revealing the actuality and continued relevance of Habermas’ concept of the public sphere in an era of the increasing importance of cyberpolitics.
In September 2011, a movement, ‘Occupy Wall Street’, emerged in New York as a variety of people began protesting the economic system in the United States, corruption on Wall Street, and a diverse range of other issues. The project of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ was proposed by
The idea caught on and during the weekend of October 1–2, similar ‘Occupy’ demonstrations broke out in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Denver, Washington, and several other cities. On October 5 in New York, major unions joined the protest and thousands marched from Foley Square to the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park. Celebrities, students and professors, and ordinary citizens joined the protest in support, and daily coverage of the movement appeared in US and global media.
As it has come to own all major political stories of 2011, the
In the United States, police violence against the movement appeared to intensify its support and Al-Jazeera had telling footage on October 5, 2011 of demonstrators videotaping police beating up their citizens, calling attention to the fact that the participants were using media to organize, to document violence against them, and to circulate their message globally, and that the Occupy Wall Street movement was traversing the globe as a major media spectacle of the moment.
During the weekend of October 8 and 9, large crowds gathered in Occupy sites throughout the country, and it appeared that a new protest movement had emerged in the United States that articulated with the global struggles of 2011. Like the movements in the Arab Uprising, the Occupy movements were using digital media and social networking to both organize their movement and specific actions, as well as to document police and government assaults on the movement – documentation used to recruit more members and to intensify the commitment and resolve of its participants.
Occupy Wall Street was focused against financial capitalism and the corruption of the political class in the US, just as the 1990s anti-corporate global capitalism movement focused on the WTO, World Bank, IMF, and other instruments of global capital. In Greece, Spain, and Italy, people were demonstrating against these same institutions of global capitalism, as well as their own national governments. Like the Arab Uprisings, the Occupy Wall Street and other anti-corporate movements were outside of the domain of old-fashioned party politics, embraced diversity, and tended to be leaderless, practicing a form of radical democracy.
Slogans such as ‘We Are the 99 percent’ and ‘Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out’, and critiques of economic inequality and greed were becoming characteristic of the movement, which was producing a great diversity of slogans, including humorous ones like ‘We Demand Sweeping, Unspecified Change!’ and ‘One Day the Poor Will Have Nothing to Eat but the Rich’. Momentum continued, the protests spread globally, and by mid-October, there were over 1000 Occupy sites in over 80 countries. Activism in these movements was taking place simultaneously online and in the streets, and activists circulated information, planned events, and mobilized for action. Indeed, by mid-October, there were over 1.2 million followers of the Occupy Wall Street movement on Facebook and hundreds of pages all over the world; during the global protests on October 15–16, the overall volume of Twitter doubled, as an analysis from Trendrr indicated (see https://blog.trendrr.com/2011/10/21/trendrr-occupy-wall-street-press-recap/ (accessed October 22, 2011).
Interestingly, many of the tactics and goals of the Occupy movement replicated the politics and vision of Guy Debord and the Situationist International, 1 creating situations, demonstrating outside of organized party or movement structures, using slogans and art of different forms to raise consciousness and inspire revolutionary movements; 2011 was looking more and more like 1968 with eruptions of struggle, police and establishment brutality, and renewed protest and actions. Yet, digital media and social networking were creating new terrains of struggle. In using digital media and social networking, the Occupy movements had the same decentralized structure as the computer networks they were using, and the movement as a whole had a virtual dimension as well as people organized in specific public spaces. Hence, even if people were not occupying the spaces where the organizing and living were taking place, they could participate virtually and be mobilized to participate in specific actions and public places as the movement evolved.
While the rightwing Tea Party movement which had helped the Republicans win Congress in 2010 and block all and any progressive and even mildly ameliorative initiatives, were hierarchical and top-down, as was the neo-fascist Trump movement, the Occupy movements were genuinely bottom-up. The Occupy movement exemplified Deweyean strong democracy, was highly participatory, and experimental in its ideas, tactics, and strategies. While the Tea Party was financed by rich rightwing Republicans like the Koch brothers and had a national television network in Fox News to promote their goals and fortify their troops, the Occupy movements produced their own media, including their own website, news media, videos, and Livestream that broadcasted live action taking place in Occupy sites (see the Occupy Wall Street website at https://occupywallst.org/ [accessed on January 3, 2012] and Livestream at https://www.livestream.com/occupywallstnyc [accessed on January 3, 2012]).
As Michael Greenberg points out, by the middle of October, 2011, polls indicated that more than half of Americans polled had a positive view of the movement: ‘By mid-October, according to a Brookings Institution survey, 54 percent of Americans held a favorable view of the protest. Suddenly, there was less talk of budget cuts that would limit, if not dismantle, social insurance programs such as Medicare while extending Bush’s tax cuts, and more talk about how to deal with economic inequality’.
Several events pointed to an altered political climate. In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo partially reversed his opposition to extending the so-called millionaire’s tax, pushing through legislation for a higher tax rate for the wealthiest New Yorkers. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase abandoned plans to charge a monthly fee to use their debit cards after an outpouring of indignation from customers – a minor event in the larger picture, but indicative of the public’s rapidly shifting mood.
More significantly, in Ohio, 61 percent of voters rejected a referendum favored by Republican Governor John Kasich that would have severely restricted the collective bargaining rights of 360,000 public employees. And in Osawatomie, Kansas, on December 6, President Obama gave a speech that echoed almost verbatim what I had been hearing from protesters in Zuccotti Park. Obama deplored ‘the breathtaking greed of a few’ and called the aim to ‘restore fairness’ the ‘defining issue of our time’ (cited in Greenberg 2012).
By the end of October, establishment violence against the Occupy movements intensified, and on October 25, police brutality was used to forcefully remove Occupy Oakland militants, causing a concussion and hospitalization of Scott Olsen, a young Iraq war veteran. Olsen became a cause célèbre and the Oakland movement organized a general strike on November 2 that closed down much of the inner city and first slowed down and then shut down the Port of Oakland, the country’s fifth biggest, as thousands of marchers descended on the Port. The same day in New York, demonstrators ascended on Lehman Brothers where George W. Bush was allegedly meeting, shouting ‘Arrest George Bush’ and calling for a citizen’s arrest that apparently kept Bush imprisoned in the Lehman Brothers building until he was spirited out in a limousine after the demonstrators left for other destinations. Henceforth, demonstrators could be assembled in flash mobs that could occupy any site at a moment’s notice and submit corrupt businessmen, politicians, and others to the wrath of the people.
The Occupy movements had generated a new political discourse that focused on economic inequalities, greed, the corruption of Wall Street and financial institutions, and the need for people to organize and demonstrate to force government to meet their needs. As evidence that the Occupy movements were constituting a threat to the established system of power in November 2011, police and city governments closed down some of the biggest Occupy tent sites, sometimes violently, yet people continued to rally to the cause of the movement and demonstrations, occupations, and actions continued through the year. The brutality pictured in the closing down of the Occupy Wall Street site on December in Zucotti park presented images of a fascist police state as images documented police beating up demonstrators, tearing apart and bulldozing their camp-sites, and throwing their possessions in garbage trucks, including the Occupy Wall Street library that had collected over 5000 books presented a frightening image of a fascist police state.
One of the main features of the Occupy movements was having media on hand to document their activities and those of police brutality, presenting the spectacle of police throughout the United States brutally tearing down Occupy camps, which made the United States look like the thug regimes overthrown in the Arab Uprisings. The documentation accumulated of brutal police power provided material to radicalize new Occupy members and harden the resolve of the experienced ones that made possible a continuation of radical Occupy movements in the future.
After the political establishment shut down some of the major Occupy sites, like Occupy Wall Street, members began taking specific actions, transforming public spaces into ‘temporary autonomous zones’ occupied temporarily by flash mobs of protesters. As Michael Greenberg (2012) indicates: ‘On December 1, for instance, protesters gathered in front of Lincoln Center to await the end of the final performance of Philip Glass’s opera
On December 16, the third month anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement happened to correspond to the first anniversary of the death of the vegetable vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, who had set himself on fire and burned to death in protest, a media spectacle that was frequently taken as the spark that ignited the Arab Uprisings. As argued earlier, the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Everywhere! Movements were inspired by the Arab Spring, creating an American Autumn and Winter that guaranteed that 2011 will long be remembered in history books and popular memory as a time in which media spectacle took the forms of political resistance and insurrection.
As 2012 began to unfold, Occupy movements continued to undertake actions throughout the United States and the globe. In the United States and other countries, the movement morphed from being primarily located in tent cities and occupations of specific sites to groups focused on particular actions. The Movement’s base was expanding to include individuals who had not participated in the first wave of occupations and to make coalitions with varying groups for targeted actions.
Occupy groups in the United States also began focusing on politicians, heckling candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in the primaries which began in earnest in early 2012. Those affiliated with the Occupy movement demonstrated against various and sundry politicians of both parties and carried out protest actions at various politicians’ offices in Washington or locally. How the Occupy movements would participate in the 2012 presidential election was of interest to both parties and those participating in or sympathizing with the movement. Indeed, it was the very nature of the multiplicity and complexity of the Occupy movements that they could not fit into standard political models and were thus spontaneous and unpredictable in nature.
The Occupy groups and their allies could point to specific victories in early 2012, to which their movements had partially contributed. On January 18, 2012, major Internet industry websites went black in a day of protest against a proposed Congressional bill Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and a Protect Identity Property Act, which opponents claim could lead to online censorship and force some websites out of business. By midday, Google officials asserted that 4.5 million people had signed its petition against SOPA, 2 while Wikipedia claimed that 5.5 million people had accessed the site and clinked on a link that would put them in touch with local legislators to register their opposition to the act. Evidently, the action had an impact as politicians who had been for the bill, suddenly indicated opposition to it, and the bill’s sponsors withdrew it for further consideration.
On January 18, 2012, the Obama administration announced it would temporarily deny a permit for the building of the highly toxic Keystone XL Pipeline, which would have transported extremely dirty oil from a vast oil deposit in Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. 3 And on the same day, activists were celebrating in Wisconsin having received over one million signatories to have a recall election to potentially unseat Governor Scott Walker who was financed with ultra-right wing Tea Party movement money and had attacked union bargaining rights in a highly publicized affair that led union workers, students, activists, and their supporters to occupy the Madison Wisconsin state capital in protest in May 2011, 4 linking Occupy movements in the Middle East with the United States and anticipating the Occupy Wall Street movement by some months.
Hence, new politics and subjectivities were emerging from specific sites of the Occupy movement, which are global in inspiration, tactics, and connections, leading to a new era of global, national, and local political struggle with unforeseeable outcomes in the Time of the Spectacle. These movements were inspired and connected in certain ways with the North African Arab Uprisings that began an intense year of struggle throughout the world in 2011. History and the future are open and depend on the will, imagination, and resolve of the people to create their own lives and futures rather than being passive objects of their masters. Media spectacle is a contested terrain upon which the key political struggles of the day are fought and 2011 was a year rich in examples of media spectacle as insurrection.
Black lives matter
Race and racism have been a highly contested feature of US life throughout US history and the color line between Black and White has been a defining feature of life in the United States. 5 Since the 1960s Civil Rights movement, racism has been sharply opposed, and resistance and movements opposing racism have been a recurrent phenomenon in US politics. In 2013, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who admittedly shot a young unarmed Black man named Trayvon Martin, activist Alicia Garza turned to Twitter to express her devastation at the verdict. She wrote, ‘Our Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter’, which her friend and fellow organizer, Patrisse Cullors, quickly adapted into #BlackLivesMatter. The hashtag is commonly believed to have sparked a movement (NPR Staff, ‘The #BlackLivesMatter Movement’, 2016). While the hashtag, and subsequently, the official Black Lives Matter network, provided a visible slogan and cause around which groups could coalesce and those new to activism could identify, the movement itself is built on a broader foundation established by those working for social justice and against anti-Black racism in intersecting areas of American life.
Hence, the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) from the beginning intervened in the public sphere to organize, mobilize, and publicize its issues in ‘a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society’ (Black Lives Matter, ‘About the Black Lives Matter Network’, 2016). The call to action, the organization explains, was intended to move ‘beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within Black communities… keeping straight cis Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all’. In many ways, the rhetoric of BLM is consistent with Deborah Atwater's observation that, regardless of the historical era in which they live, African American women’s rhetoric tends to display a ‘driving need to establish personhood, dignity, and respect not only for themselves, but also for the men and children that they [are] close to… in a society that [is] often hostile and degrading to them’ (2009, 1).
Unlike previous movements for racial equality, such as the Civil Rights movement, which conceived of a ‘struggle for survival [that] superseded and supersedes any preoccupation with gendered relations’ (Robnett 1997, 4), BLM was conceived with gender, intersectionality, and various identity differences in mind. However, in its first 2 years, mainstream news coverage of the movement focused most heavily on the movement’s actions concerning male victims. In 2015, coverage of the movement’s three female founders as well as adaptations of the movement such as #SayHerName and #BlackWomenMatter called attention to the ways that women and other non-cis male groups existed primarily in the background of major media coverage.
Rhetorical tensions emerged as BLM attempts to reconcile the tensions in prior movements around the multidimensional oppression experienced by Black people who are also women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex. To fully appreciate the espoused views of the BLM network, observers must acknowledge its far more complex history than the mainstream media conveys. BLM evolves out of not only the Civil Rights Movement but also movements for human rights, PanAfricanism, women’s rights, LGBTQ + rights, and movements for ending mass incarceration, among others. As such, BLM activists distinctively attempt to bring together multiple expressions and communities of Blackness into a common movement for political, economic, civil, social, and cultural rights. At times and in certain contexts, BLM activists are connecting these justice heritages more effectively than others.
Since abolitionist movements led by activists such as David Walker and Maria Stewart in the nineteenth century, human rights movements in the United States often centered around Blackness and liberation for people of African descent. Indeed, the particular methods by which systems and structures oppressed Black people continued and, at times, continue as the central focus through which civil rights activists organized movements. As a result, the canonized rhetorics of the Civil Rights Movement privilege voices such as Martin Luther King, Jr., while marginalizing alternative perspectives that challenge the authority of mainstream rhetorical traditions. As Holmes juxtaposes the rhetoric of Ralph David Abernathy to that of Martin Luther King, Jr. as counterhegemonic communication not unlike the Underground Railroad, BLM’s rhetors broadcast a formerly hidden ‘hush harbor rhetoric’, which Vorris Nunley defines as a poignant and productive form of unapologetic argumentation that occurs in safe places for free expression among African American speakers.
BLM’s rhetoric attempts to make Blackness operate as an umbrella wherein all Black people’s issues may be addressed. Ransby (2015) explains BLM as not only a racial justice movement, but also an economic, social, and political justice movement: Black Lives Matter, which includes nearly a dozen black-led organizations, is as much an example of a U.S.-based class struggle as Occupy Wall Street was. To focus on the black poor is not to ignore others who also endure economic inequality. In speech after speech, the leading voices of this movement have insisted that if we liberate the black poor, or if the black poor liberate themselves, we will uplift everybody else who’s been kept down. In other words, any serious analysis of racial capitalism must recognize that to seek liberation for black people is also to destabilize inequality in the United States at large, and to create new possibilities for all who live here.
In so doing, recent reports suggest that communities are conferring to BLM activists greater cultural and political authority than of the African American preacher – particularly with audiences condemned by or estranged from the traditional Black church, sending its messages and circulating its struggles throughout society via multiple public spheres. Black LGBTQ + activists particularly are telling
For BLM, combatting state sanctioned violence includes not only violence committed by the police, but also violence against Black people that is endorsed by the state through a failure to convict. For instance, in the murder of Trayvon Martin, Zimmerman was
Moreover, BLM organizers draw upon a rich rhetorical history of questioning and challenging theological, scientific, economic, and sociopolitical arguments in the traditions of Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary McCloud Bethune, Fannie Lou Hamer, Audre Lorde, and other womanists and Black feminists. Increasingly, mothers (and some fathers) of victims killed by police are leading local, national, and global efforts. BLM also is cross-pollinating its rhetoric with that of groups like the African American Policy Forum and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies to move away from a focus on only Black male victims and toward the #SayHerName Movement that responds to calls for attention to police violence against Black women by offering a resource to help ensure that Black women’s stories are integrated into demands for justice.
Coordinated actions such as these suggest that BLM is engaged in the status model of recognition politics, wherein redistribution of economic, social, and political power is inseparable from recognition. Here, like the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s, BLM articulates claims for recognition as a method for establishing themselves as full partners in social life who are able to interact with others as a peer. Parallel to Habermas’ notion of unrestricted communication, BLM activists engage in internal and external arguments about the ways in which misrecognition functions as a form of institutionalized subordination that violates justice. Their demands for recognition often aim at overcoming subordination by deinstitutionalizing patterns of cultural devaluation that impede parity of participation.
Each city and chapter has their own list of tangible demands, but most have similar elements. In fact, Chicago’s BLM chapter already has achieved some of these objectives and many observers credit Los Angeles’ BLM chapter for the LAPD chief’s early retirement in 2018. Furthermore, on the national level, BLM organizers in 2016 called for presidential candidates to participate in a debate on the topic of ‘Black Lives Matter’ in relation to state violence, healthcare, wage parity, poverty, ‘house-lessness’ and other social issues. Although that did not occur, the presidential candidates responded with official statements and addressed related topics during general debates. Further, since the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016, an anti-Trump resistance movement emerged consisting of people of color and a broad spectrum of groups and individuals organized against the Trump presidency.
Concluding comments
Many of the groups from Occupy to Black Lives Matter, Dreamers and Latino Youth, #MeToo and Bernie Youth, along with new sets of youth from every ethnic group and part of the country, coalesced into an anti-Trump Resistance which attacked Trump and his movement’s anti-Muslim bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, and rightwing extremist politics throughout his presidency. The Trump resistance began the day after the 2016 election when vigils and protests flared up across the country the day after the election, as opponents of President-elect Trump displayed their anger and rage over the election results, highlighting continued division in the country and that the election was not over and the country was far from united. The Trumps got to view the protests up front and close, as thousands of protesters marched up Fifth Avenue toward the Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan, which was surrounded by giant garbage trucks filled with sand, armed police, and security guards. A crowd of thousands gathered in front of the president-elect’s building with angry demonstrators chanting: ‘Fuck your tower! Fuck your wall!’ Several blocks of Fifth Avenue were blocked off from traffic, making New York appear a city under siege.
Elsewhere in the country, protesters held marches and sit-ins from sea to shining sea on election night and in some cases for days thereafter. College students gathered in spontaneous marches and asked university leaders to schedule meetings to assure students of color, Muslims, women, and others denigrated and threatened by Trump and his followers that they would be protected. Following Trump’s victory speech, more than 2000 students at the University of California, Los Angeles, gathered on campus and marched through the streets of Westwood. There were similar protests at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, with rivals UCLA and USC united in their horror of Trump. Other campuses in the University of California system in Berkeley, San Diego, and Santa Barbara held protests, as did other universities throughout the country.
Protests were planned in the weekend following Trump’s election and a major anti-Trump movement seemed to be in the making, as the political establishment and media which he had mocked was normalizing Trump, as if it was business as usual, and just another transition in the hallowed history of American democracy which Trump had mocked as rigged. Against media and establishment forces normalizing Trump, there were forces all over the country protesting and insisting: ‘He’s not my president!’ On Saturday, November 12, 2016, there was a large demonstration of at least 10,000 marching through downtown Los Angles, while on the other side of the country, thousands marched down Fifth Avenue, surrounding once again Trump Tower, as Trump and his associates tried to prepare their transition team and government, for which insiders said they were woefully underprepared (apparently Trump is superstitious and did not want to talk about who would be in his administration until after the election).
Throughout the Trump administration, resistance against Trump and his agenda continued to grow, although Trump maintained the support of his base. After the Parkland, Florida, school shooting on February 14, 2018, at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, youth began speaking out against guns and the NRA, calling for gun reform, and carried out a March on Washington and demonstrations all over the country some weeks afterwards. Young people stepped up voter registration in high schools and organized to support progressive candidates in the 2018 US midterm elections and 2020 election when people of color, progressives of all stripes, women and youth turned out to defeat Donald Trump and win the election for Joe Biden. Indeed, election analysts recognized that youth and black people played a significant role in defeating Trump and electing Biden in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election (see Siddiqui and Ngo 2020; Jamerson and Belkin 2020).
Hence, youth have been on the march throughout a multiplicity of public sphere in cycles of revolt from the North African Arab Uprisings through the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, Dreamers, high school students struggling for rational gun control, young activists against Trump, and activists fighting for a sustainable environment in an era of dangerous ecological crisis. Ultimately, these young activists are calling for Congress’ and global authorities’ receptivity to students, teachers, and communities’ demands for gun safety, protection against hate crimes, sexual aggression, anti-Black racism, a sustainable environment, and to ensure human rights and dignity for all.
The spirit of Habermas and critical theory is alive and well in today’s youth and the current historical moment could be read as a parallel to the global struggles in the 1960s and 1970s in which critical theory achieved a global reception and the concept of the public sphere became central to critical theory and radical democratic struggle. While the public sphere has undergone significant mutations since Habermas developed his concept, the public sphere continues to be of crucial importance in understanding the formation of public opinion, political debate, the mobilizing of political groups, and determining elections on the local, regional, and national level.