Disrupting American Politics: Interpretive Research and Egalitarian Movements

• In Event: Up for Interpretation? Reflections on Methods, Concepts, and Policies

Abstract

As much now as ever, the world needs scholars of politics to not only describe and explain the world but also help change it. And this is as true for those studying the United States as anyone else. Over the last fifty-plus years, important political happenings in the U.S. have either engendered or outright promoted extreme inequality and a series of related injustices. Developments such as the post-1960s resurgence of racial conservatism and American nativism and the corporate capture of government institutions have helped to facilitate wealth concentration, mass incarceration, wage stagnation, anti-immigrant violence, affordable housing shortages, and many other harmful outcomes. These same developments have also enabled harmful foreign interventions – from the "war on terror" to the development of transnational, business-dominated supply chains – and, in doing so, further instantiated exploitation, domination, and the growth of inequality around the globe. To settle for merely describing and explaining such an unjust situation in ever more precise ways would be to miss an important opportunity – namely, to show how movements of ordinary people might come to reshape it, giving way to better futures.

How can contemporary scholars of American politics seize this opportunity? How can they not just describe and explain the unjust world they study but do so in ways that may also help change it? "Disrupting American Politics" will not claim to answer this question in its entirety. What it will argue, however, is that interpretive approaches to the study of American politics – those that foreground the role and operation of meaning-making – are a necessary and all-too-often overlooked part of the answer. More specifically, it will argue that, at their best, these approaches support egalitarian change by underscoring the enduring mutability of the American political order. They show how entrenched but nevertheless adjustable meaning-making processes – such as the construction of foundational identities, categories, and ideologies – suffuse and undergird this order, thereby, exposing possibilities for disruptive and egalitarian movements from below to rework it in their favor. And they push readers “to better appreciate, explore, and broadcast these possibilities” (Forrest forthcoming).

This paper will not only underscore interpretive scholarship’s overall disruptive potential vis-à-vis American politics. It will also argue that the range of that potential is quite broad. One aspect of this range is interpretive scholarship’s ability to expose movement-building possibilities across different types of political dynamics, including political behavior, political institutions, and political economy. Another aspect is interpretive scholarship’s ability to identify such possibilities across various spaces of American politics, from kitchen tables and church basements to legislatures and executive agencies and everywhere in between. In short, I will demonstrate that interpretive scholarship’s disruptive potential is not confined to a particular segment of the American political scene. It cuts across the whole thing and, thus, has relevance for anybody trying to study it or make it better.

Finally, this paper will identify the research strategy through which many interpretive studies of American politics maximize their disruptive potential. This strategy is to focus on what Bent Flyvbjerg, Todd Landman, and Sanford Schram (2012) call “tension points.” These are points where highly influential and harmful political dynamics are most mutable and contingent, where a near-term shift in practice can readily generate or exacerbate pressures against – that is, “tensions” in – the reproduction of those dynamics. Interpretive studies of American politics best illuminate disruptive and egalitarian movement-building possibilities, I will show, by gesturing toward if not explicitly labeling such points. This would include, for example, those engendered by many influential nationalist discourses, which promise to serve the interests of “ordinary Americans” even while sowing resentments within the polity and rationalizing state projects that favor its most elite members. Not only are such discourses fraught with contradiction. They are reliant on mass as well as elite actors for their perpetuation. Consequently, their presence heralds manifold possibilities for disruptive and egalitarian movements to unsettle foundational identities, categories, ideals, and the like – what Victoria Hattam and Joseph Lowndes (2007) have aptly called the “ground beneath our feet” – and rework central dynamics of American politics in their favor.

Author

• Michael David Forrest, Oberlin College