Victor Wallis, Democracy Denied: Five Lectures on U.S. Politics; with Introduction by Johanna Fernández and illustrations by Kevin “Rashid” Johnson (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2019), xxv + 124 pp., $19.95.
Victor Wallis’s Democracy Denied is an occasional work in that the five lectures which compose it were originally written for actually existing audiences and scheduled events: a series of talks given in 2018 at the invitation of the Institute of Marxism, Renmin University of China in Beijing. Collected as chapters of a single volume, however, the lectures are anything but “occasional” in the sense of sporadic or situational; on the contrary, together they constitute a systematic overview of US politics from a globally comparative perspective.
The book has tricontinental appeal, being published by Africa World Press with their focus on African, African American, Caribbean and Latin American issues. Wallis’s critical survey of America from Asia is paired with a deliberative and well-documented introduction by Johanna Fernández, a scholar of Latino activism. Interspersed are seven full pages of thought-provoking illustrations by Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, an incarcerated artist, author, and founding member of The New Afrikan Black Panther Party—Prison Chapter. Democracy Denied is designed to both capture and concentrate attention, which should help it to find a more popular audience and cross more disciplinary borders than the typical big blocks of text that can wall off more specialized studies.
One of the primary organizing principles that unifies the various topics and concrete examples which Wallis uses to introduce his audience to American politics is that of “American ‘Exceptionalism’”, which is also the title of his first chapter. Here Wallis puts to excellent use his decades-long experience as a political scientist, in addition to the political commitments that connected him to collaborators such as illustrator Rashid Johnson. He rightly reclaims for productive discussion (including critique) a concept, American exceptionalism, that has a long pedigree both on the socialist Left and in academic political science, despite its more recent, degrading cooptation by the Right in polemical, mass media usage.1
In the 1980s, it was Michael Harrington, one of the founders of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who recommended to me the relevance of the question that titled Werner Sombart’s 1906 book, Why is there no Socialism in the United States? and who advised taking seriously, but critically, the work on “exceptionalism” by political scientist Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America. Wallis also uses the concept as a socialist critic of liberalism while taking advantage of the idea’s necessarily comparative approach to US politics for his international audience. However, while seeing great hope in the rapid growth and increasing radicalization of the D.S.A. membership after Trump’s election, Wallis strongly cautions against over-reliance on strategies to turn the “exceptionally American” Democratic Party in the direction of a European-type Labor Party, as Harrington’s “realignment” strategy advised. Democracy Denied’s final lecture, “The Current Political Scene”, develops this argument and concludes with the following assessment, whose balance of reasonableness and radicalism makes it worth quoting: “The Left cannot ignore the discussions taking place within the DP [Democratic Party], but it also has to avoid being sucked into them. It must . . . provide a pole of attraction to people for when they finally come to see—with its help—that the reigning duopoly is like a ‘good cop/bad cop’ performance in which the bad cop has the last word” (113).
Conservatives, on the other hand, have since the 1980s increasingly spun a normative or jingoistic version of what they call “American exceptionalism” in contrast to a scientific analysis. The scientific approach searches objectively for the distinguishing, or even historically singular, features of the US. It views the country as a species of a more general category of social formation, European settler colonies, for example, as Wallis does. By contrast, the Right intendeds their “we’re-number-one exceptionalism” as an exclamatory boast of superiority that exempts the supposedly special, even divinely sanctioned, “mission” of US nationalism from the consistent application of international moral standards to its imperial policies: foreign military interventions, torture of enemies, and punishment of whistleblowers (37-40). The cheerleading claim of “exceptionalism” further functions to prevent comparisons that might find useable progressive models in the movements and institutions of other countries, such as powerful socialist/labor parties, more democratic methods of voting, or free universal healthcare and transportation (2-3).
In an important and deft condensation, Wallis claims that the way in which the US is most “exceptional” when compared to its peers (in the OECD for instance), is a first-place ranking that is not worth wanting, much less bragging about, and is a crucial liability for the Left to overcome: “Of all the ‘advanced’ countries, the US is the one whose working class, rent at its core by the ‘racial’ division, has been politically the weakest” (1).
While also mentioning the fractures in workers’ unity that were “magnified by the arrival of successive waves of immigrants”, the book’s greatest emphasis is on the descendants of enslaved Africans and the unique racist legacies of the slave plantation economy.2 The outstanding third lecture, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration”, ably covers this ground and focuses on examples of white-supremacist singularities in the US such as the freakish “one drop rule” of segregationist racial identification, whose folkloric, if not juridical, persistence continues to baffle foreign observers and vex the 2020 census questionnaires (49). The statistical outlier status, on a global scale, of the American system of mass incarceration receives both the outrage and analysis that it deserves, incited by a collage that rips and riffs its way into the top rank of Johnson’s art (57). Wallis and Johnson point out that the constitutional amendment ending legal slavery had an “exception clause” for those convicted of a crime: a loophole that, with the aid of the noose, led to yet another version of institutionalized Black subordination in Jim Crow and continues to enable regular unusually cruel prison policies that would be actionable human rights abuses in many other less “exceptional” countries.
The limitations of the 13th Amendment are well-known, but Wallis expertly uncovers for his audiences, Chinese and American, some more symptomatic exceptions in the US Constitution that are remarkable for being generally unremarked upon. Most US citizens do not realize, for instance, that “there has never been a constitutional guarantee of the right to vote”, that the 1965 Voting Rights Act’s attempt at a guarantee was effectively overturned in 2013, or that “the sole non-amendable provision of the Constitution . . . guarantee[d] the continued enforcement of slavery for a definite period . . .” (7).
In addition to the critiques of American ideologies, individuals, and institutions, Wallis correctly recognizes the crucial role of violence and coercive state-power in repressing for a time the continual struggles by the movements of US working people to defend popular interests. The summary of the US Left’s past in Lecture Four, its prospects in Lecture Five, and the fascinating, well-sourced “note on assassinations” in the middle of the book all deal with the realities of power. In them, Wallis skillfully unbends an analytical stick deformed by a (mostly liberal) avoidance of “conspiracy theories” and a denial of the importance of material forces.3
Democracy Denied is especially relevant to the needs of the contemporary social movements of the Left in another of the book’s overarching themes, US imperialism, which like the questioning of “exceptionalism” demands an internationalist, comparative perspective on the national. Johanna Fernández makes this point in her introduction when she notes appreciatively that “Wallis’s analyses unveil an underlying unity of imperial and domestic policies” (xxii). The links between (particularly racialized) oppression at home and domination abroad recur throughout the text, but are featured in the hard-hitting second lecture, “US Imperialism: From Continental Expansion to Global Intervention.”
The topic of imperialism is very timely, given the largely domestic and mostly economic policies occupying the growing number of American socialists today, especially compared to thirty or forty years ago, when many socialists were active in Latin American solidarity, anti-Apartheid, and peace activism. Both outlooks, national and international, are needed and demand integration into a kind of progressive bifocal vision. As Aziz Rana has convincingly argued in a recent article posted at the Jacobin website, the resurgence of socialism in the US will be limited without “The Return of Left Internationalism”, because even though “Bernie Sanders and AOC have helped to transform our domestic politics . . . in order for those politics to stick, we also need to confront US imperialism and the power of multinational corporations.”4 Victor Wallis, in Democracy Denied, offers an exemplary model of how we might begin this task.
Matthew Schultz
Illinois College
matthew.schultz@ic.edu
1 A good, accessible summary of the expression can be found here: https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/09/american-exceptionalism-neither-joseph-stalin-nor-alexis-de-tocqueville-coined-the-phrase-that-is-now-patriotic-shorthand.html. Mark Lieberman’s Language Log entry on the topic, which has a link in the Slate article is definitive. See also the 2018 Haymarket Books collection The American Exceptionalism of Jay Lovestone and His Comrades, 1929-1940, for more on the rich history of the term in Communist (CPUSA) debates of the 1930s.
2 For a more historically detailed “solution” to the problem of “American exceptionalism” that complements Wallis’s survey, readers may consult Kim Moody’s recent work on the role of internal migration in the organizational weakness of the US working class, its failure to develop “class-struggle unionism” and the lack of a politically independent party capable of unifying ethnic immigrants and “racially” defined (or internally colonized) Americans. Tramps and Trade-Union Travelers: Internal Migration and Organized Labor in Gilded Age America, 1870-1900. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2019
3 As the author notes, the “official stories” given in the assassinations of Malcom X, Martin Luther King, and Chicago Black Panther Fred Hampton have long been challenged by the Left in the context of the COINTELPRO Papers, which were burglarized from an F.B.I. field office in Media, PA, in 1971, by a courageous group of anti-war activists and then leaked to the press. Wallis’s justified skepticism of the governmental accounts of the Kennedy assassinations is rarer, although occasionally evidence emerges inadvertently outside of the dominant histories and sources to confirm such doubts, as it did recently in the New York Times obituary of one of the surgeons who operated on JFK in Dallas: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/obituaries/dr-robert-mcclelland-dead.html
4 Rana, Aziz. “The Return of Left Internationalism.” Jacobin, 2 June 2019, www.jacobinmag.com/2019/02/left-foreign-policy-internationalism-security....
