Race, Democracy, and the Politics of Counterrevolution in the United States
Interview With Michael Gorup
August 4, 2026
In the United States, democratic politics have long been bound up with racism and white supremacy. How should we think about the ways that racial politics have structured practices of popular inclusion and exclusion in the United States since the founding? Developing the concept of democratic despotism, Michael Gorup’s new book The Counterrevolutionary Shadow: Race, Democracy, and the Making of the American People traces how racial categories have been implemented and transformed during critical junctures in US history to establish boundaries around who belonged to “the people.”1Michael Gorup, The Counterrevevolutionary Shadow: Race, Democracy, and the Making of the American People (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2025), https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.34015589. Gorup argues that racism should be understood as a distinctly democratic technology of counterrevolutionary politics: a political construct developed to render despotic practices tolerable within a society in which the people are said to be sovereign.
In this interview, Rafael Khachaturian talks with Gorup about processes of people-making, the deployment of racial ideology as a technique of governance, and emancipatory struggles over the terms of political inclusion.
Michael Gorup is an assistant professor of politics at Ithaca College. His research focuses on modern and contemporary political thought, US political and constitutional development, and the politics of democracy, race, and capitalism. He is the author of The Counterrevolutionary Shadow: Race, Democracy, and the Making of the American People (University Press of Kansas, 2025).
It began as a dissertation project about a decade ago, and then I subsequently transformed it into a book over the years. If you think about the tumultuous decade we’ve just lived through, there were some changes in my life, the political world, and the relevant scholarship that I was intervening in. And so to talk about the origins of the project, we have to go back to my days in graduate school.
At that time, I was particularly taken by a set of conversations having to do with the politics of peoplehood, popular sovereignty, and what’s sometimes known as the paradox of the people, which posits that “the people” is not an empirical object to be apprehended—it’s a political claim that always remains indeterminate.
If we take the people as the bedrock source of political and legal authority for modern democratic societies, then what do we do with the question of who counts as a member of the people? How do we draw boundaries around the people? This is sometimes known as the boundary problem in democratic theory. And of course, our democratic instincts would suggest that we should direct that question to the people themselves, but that’s exactly the thing we’re trying to resolve! So, we run into this foundational bootstrap paradox.
There are a number of democratic theorists who I’ve taken inspiration from, for example Bonnie Honig and Jason Frank, who have seen this paradoxical quality of peoplehood as key to its emancipatory potential.2Bonnie Honnig, “Between Decision and Deliberation: Political Paradox and Democratic Theory,” American Political Science Review 101, no. 1 (2007): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055407070098; Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822391685. The fact that the people always remain indeterminate is what enables those who have been excluded from some hegemonic understanding of who counts as a member of the political community to make claims against that society and contest the boundaries of exclusion and domination. And this means that claims to peoplehood always carry the power to forestall closure around the political community in a way that is supposed to enhance the emancipatory appeal of democracy.
So, I was reading a lot of this literature in the era of the Tea Party and birtherism. We get the introduction of Donald Trump as a major figure in American national politics. It seemed to me that these tendencies represented another, perhaps partially forgotten, tendency in the politics of American peoplehood—a type of revanchist invocation of the people to enclose political community and reinforce existing forms of hierarchy. This version of peoplehood has almost always been articulated as a racialized conception of the national community. This led me to think that, in democratic theory, we were thinking about peoplehood in this one-sided way. And so, I wanted to explore this other tradition, but in dialogue with the more emancipatory potentials of peoplehood.
Over time, as the political world shifted in the ways that it has, there also developed another literature that’s often associated with the phrase “white democracy” or herrenvolk democracy. There’s a recovery of Joel Olson’s book, The Abolition of White Democracy, which was published in the early 2000s and develops an account of American democracy as always a project of white civic inclusion.3Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) “White citizenship” is one of its central categories.
Then, after Brexit and Trump’s election in 2016, there’s also the rapid development of literatures on authoritarian populism and far-right politics. I was obviously influenced by much of the work on white democracy and on authoritarian populism, but it also seemed to me that the white democracy frame in particular tended to overestimate the internal democracy that’s produced through racialized practices. Whiteness tends to get conceptualized as a type of civic glue or solidarity that binds the political community together and levels social hierarchies. But it seemed to me that practices of racialization always require forms of border fortification. Sometimes this is symbolic, with the promotion of ethnonational ideas of political community. But we also find material examples of it, like the ones we’re living through in the present moment: really aggressive forms of immigration enforcement, policing, incarceration, and suffrage restrictions.
Looking at these instances, the act of enclosing the people ends up undercutting the democratic practices that those who are included can actually engage in. That dimension seemed to be missing in a lot of the white democracy literature.
This gets to the core of the project. I should acknowledge that, in thinking about the egalitarian norms we often associate with democracy and racism as emerging hand in hand, I am building on the work of scholars like George Fredrickson and Barbara Fields who’ve argued that a commitment to universal equality was a necessary historical condition for the development of racism.4George Frederickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400873678; Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 1, no. 181 (May/June 1990): https://doi.org/10.64590/cfe.
The basic idea is that if equality is accepted as the baseline condition of humanity, then domination and hierarchy can only be made legitimate or rendered sensible if there’s some extraordinary deficiency that excludes some people from the blessings of nature and of nature’s God, as Thomas Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence. So, in the story we get from the historians I mentioned, racism supplies a special set of reasons for authorizing exclusion and domination that are typically pitched in a recognizably modern and scientific idiom—in the idiom of natural history and philosophy and, later, of biology. It supplies a special set of reasons for regarding some people as naturally distinct and inferior and therefore fit for a life of domination. So as odd and paradoxical as it may seem, modern egalitarianism makes racism possible and in some ways even necessary, so long as domination is to persist in the presence of egalitarian norms.
What my book adds to that picture is a special emphasis on the introduction and development of the idea of popular sovereignty: the idea that the people are the ultimate source of political authority. Racism is not just at home within a world that embraces moral universalism or egalitarianism; I think it’s actually of a piece with a world where the people are said to be the ultimate foundation and source of political and legal authority. Racism is fundamentally, in practice, a politics of peoplehood.
It doesn’t reject the idea that the people shall rule. In fact, it typically embraces it, but it encloses who’s said to belong to the people. One phrase I use in the book is that racism is a politics of popular enclosure. It speaks in the name of the people to authorize a set of fortifications around who counts as a member of the political community.
So, racism is deeply entangled with popular sovereignty—which is really the cornerstone idea behind modern democracy. But, at the same time, it undercuts democratic practices of self-rule. This is why, as I put it in the book, racism contains democracy from within.
You’re right that racism is often talked about as a matter of prejudice, attitude, or ideology. I actually want to distinguish among those. My book is more critical of the discourses that posit racism to be prejudice or attitude, than it is of racism as an ideology.
With the first schools of thought, broadly construed, which conceive of racism as a prejudice or attitude—for me, that language tends to foreground subjectivity as the thing that needs to be analyzed in order to understand racism. So the thing that needs to be attended to is how people think and feel.
I by no means think that that stuff is irrelevant, but I don’t think it’s primary for understanding racism. I’m really interested in thinking about racism as something that is produced and reproduced through social practice and through institutions.
One of the strengths of the language of technology is that it draws practice into view in a way that the language of prejudice and attitude might obscure. One other concern I raise about the language of prejudice and attitude in the third chapter of the book, on abolitionism, is that when you take racism as a matter of individual prejudice, you risk naturalizing racism and then, effectively, race. So, when I talk about race or racism as a political technology, it is meant to orient us to understanding racism as something that’s invented through human practice.
My use of the language of technology is indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, who uses it as a term of art across much of his later work on disciplinary power and biopower. He tends to use the language of technology to describe techniques or practices for directing human conduct or behavior or, relatedly, for describing techniques and procedures of population management and governance.
For me, that’s precisely the register to be thinking about. Racism is a technology for carving up the social world. It’s a technology for drawing a boundary between the sovereign people and racialized populations. So that’s what attracted me to the way that Foucault uses the language of technology.
But of course, Foucault’s turn to that language happens in a very specific context where he’s reacting against versions of French Marxism that make use of the other category you mentioned, ideology. However, I don’t see an inherent conceptual opposition between thinking about race as a political technology and thinking of it as an ideology. Race is in some important ways both. In the book, I describe it as a political technology that is ideological in form. Racism constitutes a set of social practices that are authorized by an ideology of race.
That ideology might come in different forms depending on the historical context. At the turn of the twentieth century, it is rooted in biologistic racial pseudoscience. Later in the twentieth century, in the postwar period, it is rooted in discourses about the culturally pathological poor or the underclass—racialized discourses in American politics that end up structuring and legitimating certain policy practices.
The thing to notice here is that the ideological scripts that accompany racism are subject to some historical variation, so we can’t identify racism with just one ideology in particular. But I am comfortable with speaking about race as an ideological construct. Throughout the book, I draw on Barbara Fields, who really develops that position in her landmark essay in the New Left Review and lays out a systematic understanding of what it might mean to refer to race as an ideology.5Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America.”
I borrow the phrase “democratic despotism” from an essay that W. E. B. Du Bois published in the Atlantic around the time of the First World War, called “The African Roots of War.”6W. E. B. Dubois, “The African Roots of War,” Atlantic, May 1915, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1915/05/the-african-roots-of-war/528897/. He uses the phrase just once but it’s been picked up by some perceptive readers of Du Bois who are particularly interested in the dilemmas I take up in the book. I specifically use the phrase “contradiction of democratic despotism” to refer to the uneasy alliance between democratic norms of legitimation and despotic practices of domination, exclusion, and dispossession.
In the first chapter of the book, I trace a historical genealogy of this contradiction. I draw on the work of historians to examine how a democratic republican civic culture, that values freedom and equality as political principles of the first order, develops ideologically and institutionally in the colonial context in a way that was precluded back in the metropole.
The material and constitutional structure of Britain in the early eighteenth century forbade the development of a robust culture and set of institutional practices that would make democratic republicanism real. But that’s not the case in Virginia. And, as Edmund Morgan argued decades ago, one of the primary reasons was the presence of slavery.7Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1975). The fact that surplus labor was taken care of by a class of people who were fully excluded from political rights enabled a type of in-group equality to develop among white settlers.
So, the idea is that democratic practices develop on the back of dispossession and enslavement. I make the argument that this ends up producing an ideological contradiction, because practices of domination, dispossession, and enslavement become ripe objects of critique and contestation in the name of the democratic ideology they have made possible.
So, that’s the real contradiction. Domination makes democracy possible, but then democracy provides a framework for subjecting domination to thoroughgoing criticism. What I argue in the book is that racism develops as a political technology for suturing the contradiction of despotic practices existing side by side with democratic norms of legitimation. It sutures the contradiction by enclosing the people, demarcating the boundaries between the people and those subject to a system of lifelong hereditary bondage.
And I think this should be understood as a distinctively democratic technology of counterrevolutionary politics. It’s democratic because it speaks in the name of the people, but it’s counterrevolutionary because it’s supposed to suppress or foreclose the insurgent claims that might be raised by those subject to domination and despotism. It’s a way of warding off the revolutionary claims of the subordinate classes. It does so, paradoxically, in the name of the revolutionary subject of the people, but ultimately we should understand its political effects to be counterrevolutionary.
I should clarify what I mean by destituent here.
The phrase “destituent power” is probably most readily associated with the work of Giorgio Agamben.8Giorgio Agamben, “What is Destituent Power?” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, no.1 (2014): 65–74, https://doi.org/10.1068/d3201tra. It’s a concept that he’s used in some of his writings to refer to a type of political resistance that withdraws altogether from the paradigm of sovereignty. I’m using the term “destituent” in a different way. I try not to conjoin it with the word power. I tend to talk about “destituent politics” rather than “destituent power” just to put some distance between Agamben’s usage and my own. But one thing my usage shares in common with Agamben’s is the emphasis on negativity, in contrast with the generativity of constituent politics.
The way I think about it is that claims to peoplehood are destituent when their orienting purpose is to enclose political community and reinforce hierarchy. They’re destituent in the sense that the political aim is political abandonment.
If you think about a lot of the literature on constituent power, such as Jason Frank’s work on constituent moments, the emphasis is on the ways that claims to peoplehood inaugurate new political orders or new practices of peoplehood. Constituent claims open up the horizons of democratic inclusion and freedom. For me, destituent practices are about enclosing the people and reinforcing forms of hierarchy. So they’re specifically counterrevolutionary articulations of peoplehood.
Of course, we could say that every effort to institutionalize a democratic society is going to have some remainders. There’s going to be a frontier that we have to draw between the people and those who don’t belong to the people. That’s just an inevitable feature of politics.
Some version of this basic insight has haunted a lot of democratic theory for several decades now. But that doesn’t mean that you achieve determination through negation. That’s the way I tend to think about destituent practices. It is through the act of expulsion that there is a sense of internal cohesion that’s supposed to be achieved.
One of the key examples of this in the book is from chapter four, which examines the rituals that surrounded mass spectacle lynchings in the Jim Crow South. There are a few different important explanations for why lynchings take off when they do, but the one that I ultimately settle on and defend in the book is that the rituals of mass spectacle lynchings repudiate the vision of multiracial peoplehood and abolition-democracy—to borrow a term from Du Bois—ushered in during the Reconstruction Era.
Mass spectacle lynchings are the founding acts of the Jim Crow order. They serve to repudiate the vision of multiracial peoplehood that fueled emancipation during the Reconstruction Era. That’s a concrete set of practices we can point to that ritualistically enthrone a white demos, at a moment when there is deep public contention over the boundaries of the political community.
But there are often more prosaic forms of destituent politics. It doesn’t always take the form of extraordinary public violence. We can think of institutional practices of disenfranchisement as drawing a frontier between the people and its racialized others. That was an important part of the institutional configuration that defined the everyday textured reality of the Jim Crow South. If we look at our own moment, the Trump administration is currently trying to achieve a sense of internal cohesion through practices of aggressive immigration enforcement. That is a politics of popular enclosure, a set of destituent practices—repressive immigration enforcement against racialized communities—that are supposed to shore up a sense of national unity in the face of ongoing crises.
Jefferson is incredibly complicated. It’s probably obvious why I was drawn to him in the context of this project because, among the figures often credited as the founders of the American Republic, he is the one who’s most comfortable with a pretty radical understanding of democracy.
This has been picked up by some people on the political left in recent years. Michael Hardt has taken a deep interest in Jefferson as a theorist of the radicalism of modern democracy. And there’s an important grain of truth to that reading. He’s much more comfortable with the language of democracy than a lot of the other founders and framers. You can contrast him with Madison on this point. He really does think about the people as always transcending their institutional bounds.
But then the other way in which he’s peculiar among his generation is his commitment to a more doctrinal understanding of white supremacy and racial hierarchy than many of others, including many of the other slaveholders. So my interest in him was due to his development of this deep systematic understanding of racial hierarchy. Those two features—his commitment to democracy and his doctrinal white supremacy—made me think that I needed to address him in this project. One important point is—as you’ve suggested—that Jefferson doesn’t deploy his understanding of racial hierarchy in order to justify slavery.
At no place in any of his published works or his private correspondence does Jefferson suggest that there is a justification for slavery. He acknowledges that slavery is always unjustified for precisely the reasons we might think: because it is incompatible with a democratic republican political culture and his core political commitments. So he recognized that there was this glaring contradiction—of democratic despotism, we might say—between the professed ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the practices of enslavement that he engaged in.
But he’s nonetheless committed to a doctrinal understanding of white supremacy, and that emerges most clearly in “Query XIV” of Notes on the State of Virginia, which I extensively analyze in the book. That section of Notes on the State of Virginia is the section on laws, which is interesting.
Readers familiar with the book know that there are chapters on geology and chapters on natural history, where he’s detailing the various flora and fauna of the New World. Sometimes he’s detailing the different populations that live in the New World.
But the most systematic account of anti-Black racism we find in his writings is actually in a chapter on laws. Notes on the State of Virginia is Jefferson’s response to a questionnaire circulated by the French diplomat Marbois to representatives of each of the states.
Jefferson’s response to the questionnaire turns out to be this elaborate book that gets published. The fourteenth query is about emancipation. Marbois asks, “if you were to end slavery, why not incorporate the enslaved people into the political community, rather than importing new settlers from Europe to expand the empire of liberty?”
In response, Jefferson goes on this long digression about naturally rooted racial difference. The analysis that I put forward in the chapter suggests that Jefferson is not here justifying slavery. Instead, he’s resigning himself and his readers to the inevitability of slavery because it becomes impossible to abolish slavery without a program of systematic colonization, meaning systematic expulsion of formerly enslaved people.
He was a major proponent of colonization, which is a policy program that really takes on a new life even after his death with the American Colonization Society, which James Monroe, among others, is involved with. The American Colonization Society is involved with the founding of the State of Liberia and numerous political elites, up through Abraham Lincoln endorse colonization as a program of abolishing slavery while retaining the white racial homogeneity of the United States. But Jefferson is one of the first, if not the first, major figure to promote this idea in a systematic way and it’s motivated by this deep commitment to white supremacy and anti-Black racism.
But because colonization is such an arduous task, Jefferson ends up resigning himself and the nation to the inevitability of slavery’s persistence until colonization can get off the ground. In the chapter, I put special emphasis on this language of resignation because I think we tend to think that the way that racism functions in politics is that it enshrines, legitimates, and rationalizes relations of domination.
But in Jefferson’s case we can see that it resigns us to the inevitability of domination. For Jefferson, it’s preferable that enslaved Africans remain enslaved than that they become free, and thereby jeopardize the entire political community. So through the analysis of Jefferson we get in that second chapter of the book, we get a picture of how this works in practice.
Totally. That’s a great point, and thank you for reminding me of it. One of the claims I make in that chapter, is that Jefferson sets up the future terms of the debate about the fate of slavery. The question of slavery’s future is reframed from being about practices of domination and despotism to being about the subjectivity of the enslaved.
The enslaved are tasked with redeeming themselves as human beings and persons worthy of freedom. That’s the burden they have to fulfill to make the case for emancipation as an immediate aim of politics. And this is why a lot of Black abolitionist authors who I turn to in the following chapter of the book feel obligated to engage with Jefferson. You find David Walker doing this, James McCune Smith, James Pennington, and others. They feel the need to take up Jefferson’s arguments because he established the terms that structured the political conflict around slavery.
The chapter on Jefferson is followed by the chapter on Black abolitionists, which focuses primarily on David Walker and Hosea Easton, with cameo appearances from a few others. The way to think about the relationship between those two chapters is that they each analyze different strategies of responding to the underlying contradiction of democratic despotism. Jefferson diverts attention from the material contradiction and relocates the source of the problem to the subjectivity of the enslaved, such that they are burdened with having to redeem themselves before slavery can be ended. Or they need to be expelled from the political community, which is his preferred policy if slavery is ever to come to an end. The abolitionists, by contrast, propose a different solution to the contradiction of democratic despotism, which is to abolish despotism.
The solution is elegant and simple in some ways, but it ends up entailing a quite complicated political program because despotism had contributed to producing the basic structure of the society they were living in. The thinkers that I’m most interested in, Walker and Easton, were free Black men living in the North—New England, specifically. Walker was born in the South, but he lived in Massachusetts as an adult.
So they’re thinking of slavery not just as the system of racialized labor exploitation that existed in the American South, but as structuring social relations even in the North. They’re coming to this idea in the midst of the rise of Jacksonian democracy—which is a type of racialized populism. In many northern states, there are laws being introduced to disenfranchise free Black people. There’s increasingly hostile calls for their colonization. This is really when the American Colonization Society is coming into its own as a political organization. There’s also mob riots and mob actions. So, these figures are responding to both the persistence of slavery as a system in the South and these forms of racism in the North, and they consistently link it right back to slavery as an institution.
Easton calls racism slavery’s “auxiliary.” It’s the thing that perpetuates domination, even well beyond the plantation complex. These Black abolitionists come to recognize that in order to abolish slavery in this capacious sense—understood as all the practices of racial domination and discrimination that pervade society—the project of abolition has to be one of refounding the American people. We can think about this in a couple of different ways and it connects to the critique of colonization.
There are some antislavery colonizationists. There’s some that are apologists for slavery as well. But even the anti-slavery colonizationists want to say that Black people are not part of “the people.” So, colonization is a program of white peoplehood.
One of the points I make in the chapter is that Black abolitionist demands for founding the people anew are not just a matter of symbolically reconsecrating the political community. There is also a material program of abolition.
In the Reconstruction context, this gets linked very clearly to demands for a redistribution of land. If you go to Walker and Easton’s writings, you find that they are early proponents of what we might today call reparations, meaning a form of symbolic and material restitution for the longstanding crimes and injustices of enslavement.
Later on, in the Reconstruction context, I’m particularly interested in how the idea of reparations for slavery gets articulated together with demands around land confiscation and redistribution—the idea that the lands that planters owned would be carved up into forty-acre parcels and redistributed to the people that had been enslaved on them.
In that context, this program is linked to a new vision of the political community. In some ways, it’s a very classically democratic republican—almost Jeffersonian—idea that in order to be a member of the political community, you need not just political rights, but material economic independence.
This is a very familiar idea in the republican tradition going back to classical authors. But it receives new purchase in the Reconstruction context, in some of the debates over confiscation. One figure I’m particularly interested in is Thaddeus Stevens, who makes this argument and draws on some of the ideas of antebellum abolitionists. For Stevens, constituting the people anew and abolishing slavery is not just a matter of thinking about political community in a new way. It’s really about reconstructing the material relations that had enshrined and enclosed the people for so long.
You’re right to say that Reconstruction did not fail due to its own internal limitations, but was defeated by a counterrevolutionary mobilization, what Du Bois in Black Reconstruction calls the “counter-revolution of property.”
That’s a phrase I use at a few points in the book. Even though there’s no chapter specifically on Du Bois, he deeply influenced the conceptual framework of the whole project.
In chapter four, I discuss mass spectacle lynchings. These are lynchings that happen in front of large crowds, sometimes crowds that number in the thousands. They’re often represented in photographs and memorialized on postcards. So they’re meant to be these ritualistic public episodes of violence that are technically extralegal, but receive the sanction of local elites and are “legitimate” in the eyes of the local community.
And they’re typically authorized in the name of the people. They appeal to the principle of popular sovereignty for authority. In fact, popular sovereignty is often said to be the thing that distinguishes lynchings from other forms of vigilante or mob violence. The term lynching actually goes back to the revolutionary era and to antiroyalist episodes of violence that were authorized on the democratic republican grounds of peoplehood.
In the chapter, I propose that mass spectacle lynchings should be understood as rituals of retribution and destitution,. When I say rituals of retribution, I’m drawing a bit on the opening chapter of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish here, where he talks about the brutal public murder of the accused regicide, and the way that the performance of this public execution restores a wounded sovereignty injured by crime and transgression. The accused regicide undermines the king’s authority and then the public execution reauthorizes the king. That’s the retributive bit.
In the case of racial lynchings, they’re ideologically connected to accusations of interracial rape. Ida B. Wells actually identifies that this was not the most common excuse for lynchings, but it’s the one that loomed largest in the public imaginary.9Ida B. Wells, “Lynching and the Excuse for It,” Independent 53, no. 2737 (May 1901): 1133–36, available at https://archive.org/details/sim_independent_1901-05-16_53_2737/page/1133/mode/1up.
And that’s because this form of sexual violence represents a transgression against the people’s body—against the firm boundaries of racial segregation, and of course, against the kind of sanctity of white womanhood. So as rituals of retribution, mass spectacle lynchings were meant to reauthorize and reconsecrate the people’s body against this alleged injury and crime.
But it’s also important to think about this happening, as you mention, at a moment where there is real conflict on the ground about who the people are—that is, at a moment when the legacies of Reconstruction are still a palpable presence on the political scene. The 1890s is really the decade that mass spectacle lynchings take off. And so that’s why I suggest they’re also rituals of destitution, meaning that they constitute a racialized people as the political foundation of the Jim Crow social order that is beginning to take institutional shape.
They’re rituals that typically, though not exclusively, single out Black men as objects of political violence and public humiliation. They aim to constitute the people as a political community, as a repudiation of the dreams of abolition democracy and of abolition as people-making, as I cover in the preceding chapter.
I think it’s important to see them as a response to Reconstruction. And you’re right that lynching does decline after the first two decades or so of the twentieth century, and this is particularly true of mass spectacle lynchings.
They become less significant as institutional power has been reconquered by the planter class and by white supremacists. It’s not as important to stage the political people because the political people is not an object of contestation as it had been at the moment that Reconstruction had come to an end.
I was drawn to the Black Power moment, and particularly the Black Panther Party, because the language of peoplehood is very conspicuous in all of their political communications and political ideology.
The Panthers are readily associated with the phrase, “All power to the people,” as an emancipatory slogan against the forms of racial domination that they were identifying in the mid-1960s.
As I dug a little bit deeper, I became struck by this puzzle about how they were thinking about peoplehood and self-determination. Because, when we’re thinking about the Panthers, one way to understand them is that they are a response within the United States to a lot of the revolutionary anticolonial movements that had then been upending global politics at the time. So you have peoples fighting wars of liberation against European empires all throughout what we would now call the Global South at this moment, developing political ideologies and political theories around these struggles, and the Black Panther Party—with Huey Newton in particular, who I spend a lot of time with in the chapter—are reading a lot of the primary texts that are emerging out of these contexts, and thinking about the tactics, strategies, and ideologies that are being developed in those places.
And they develop something of an US analog by thinking about “American” racism as what they call a distinctively domestic or internal form of colonialism. They understand the situation of Black Americans to be analogous to colonized populations elsewhere in the world.
They’re drawing on the Third Worldist ideologies that are at that time proliferating and they particularly take up the idea of self-determination, which is in many ways the cornerstone idea of anticolonial political thought at that moment. But of course, in these colonized spaces outside of the United States, the endpoint of the struggle for self-determination is territorial control and sovereignty. These movements make claims to territory.
What fascinated me about Newton is he hangs on to the language of self-determination but divorces it from the end of territorial control, and in fact ends up being quite critical of other figures within the broader Black power universe in the United States who think that African Americans ought to make territorial claims.
There is the Black Belt Republic idea that had been debated and pursued by some members of the Communist Party, including Harry Haywood. And then, there’s a late-1960s, early-’70s version of the Black Belt Republic idea that gets taken up by the Republic of New Africa, who Huey Newton is in dialogue with.
He tends to be critical of those moves and instead conceptualizes self-determination as a project of revolutionary people-making, essentially. Understanding the people as in some sense the ground of that project, but also the thing that’s supposed to be produced through the practices that he associates with self-determination.
And this is a revolutionary transformation, as he conceives of it. But one thing to note about Newton’s trajectory, from the early inception of the Black Panther Party in Oakland during its phase of policing the police (when it’s known as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense), through the later “survival programs”: the programs of community service, like the free breakfast programs; the medical programs; some of the programs around education and community development. One thing to notice is that Newton hangs on to the language of revolution and self-determination as the party shifts its tactics, from endorsing guerrilla tactics to practices of community development and survival programs.
Ultimately, what I think he’s getting at is producing a kind of new political subject. The people are an artifact of political and organizational practice, built through solidaristic practices and organization. One place I look, toward the end of the chapter, is the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention, which is a constitutional convention that the Panthers run and organize, but is actually attended by a broad rainbow coalition of New Left organizations. In Newton’s reflections on this constitutional convention, he’s less convinced that its significance has anything to do the document they produce, as if it’d actually inaugurate a new constitutional order, and more about the coalition that they build on the ground by getting together and deliberating about the types of programs and policies that they ought to pursue.
The kind of questions that are raised at a constitutional convention are precisely the questions that need to be confronted by the emergent rainbow coalition, to use Fred Hampton’s language, that is supposed to emerge through that process.
So, that’s ultimately where I end up, thinking about the people as a political process that’s produced through these solidaristic and coalitional practices.
In the epilogue to the book, I get into some of the questions you raise about neoliberalism and the carceral state. I like to refer to them as “the market” and “the prison” as a shorthand, though I recognize those terms are narrower than I really intend.
These to me are the two sites where we can apprehend the contradiction of democratic despotism in the present. They’re the two places where discipline and domination get articulated together with democratic norms of legitimation and produce real forms of social antagonism and ideological contradiction that, in our present moment, ideologies of race and technologies of racial differentiation are deployed to suture. But, as the quotation you read a moment ago suggests, they never precisely resolve them.
In our present moment, those contradictions are all too apparent and are inflamed in ways that go beyond what I was seeing at the time I wrote the epilogue. The scripts of racialization that might be deployed to authorize the deeply repressive practices of immigration enforcement we’ve been seeing in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, are ultimately failing to do the political work they’re meant to. They’re failing to sufficiently alter the expected costs of repression. I’ve been very heartened to see on-the-ground mobilizations that identify ICE, CBP, and the Department of Homeland Security as an enemy of the freedom of all.
The political response has not been one of resigning oneself to the Gestapo in the streets, so long as they’re only targeting racialized vulnerable populations within the community. It has been one of broad reaching solidarity.
We see no clearer exemplification of this than the fact that two of the folks who have been killed by ICE and CBP are white activists engaged in solidaristic political practices. They clearly recognize that their freedom is bound up with the freedom of immigrants in their communities.
So there is a universalistic politics that seems to be emerging organically on the ground there. These organizing practices, and the broader political strategies that we see developing here, are definitely drawing on legacies of neo-abolitionist politics, as you’re saying.
And when I say neo-abolitionists, I don’t mean anything pejorative by that. I just mean the movements for police and prison abolition that we’ve seen take off in the past several decades. So there’s been lots of reporting and interesting conversation about the ways anti-ICE organizers on the ground in Minneapolis are connected to the vestiges and reservoirs of social struggle from 2020 in Minneapolis.
Because of course, George Floyd was killed just a few blocks from where Renée Good was executed by ICE agents. So there is an organic connection on the ground between those movements.
And the movement is further exposing the contradictions of our present. The promise of the Trump administration is that expelling immigrants and hardening the borders of the political community is somehow going to bring back a kind of vibrant industrial democracy. That is very clearly bankrupt to a lot of folks. And it has increasingly been exposed as such.