We Go Low

• In Event: Reimagining World-Making: Ideals, Concepts & Processes of Oppositional Politics

Abstract

What kinds of freedom emerges in collective actions typically dismissed because they seem debased, inferior, or bad examples? How might actions that ‘take the low-road’ expand radical political visions for free action? This paper will explore freedoms at a distance from expected practices like organized social movements, heroic figures of courage, or vaunted revolutionary action, and identify them with the phrase “We Go Low”. We Go Low is not (only) a snarky condemnation of democratic visions encapsulated in the iconic phrase We Go High, visions that imagine themselves to be politically righteous and morally superior to their opponents in ways that can be smug and self-defeating. We Go High is taken as shorthand for a political strategy that imagines roads to equality and freedom to be unstained by the manipulative, sleazy, and norm-upending strategies of one’s opponents. Yet it is a block to real emancipatory visions and possibilities, as it refuses impure methods, stymies lived experiences of moral and political ambivalence, and remains within current narrow standards of acceptability that always benefit elite power structures. We Go Low, by contrast, advocates for shared visions of a free and just world that willingly traffic in the muck, in the uncivilized, or in spaces of ill repute. This paper sketches a theory of going low and examines contemporary examples of freedom that take the low road.

Author

• Elisabeth Robin Anker, George Washington University