Membership in (un)civil societies – governing through members and with ‘strangers’

‘Doing things with words’ - Vladimir Putin (CC-BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

As I discussed in a previous post, if David Brooks is right about the Republican Party in America, and not just “on the right-wing side of things”, then the party’s leaders – and those of the Democrats and a lot of other political parties around the world – need to think hard. Are they merely playing to an audience, and preying upon them, instead of cultivating a membership?

The Brooks column for the New York Times came out just before the silly “interview” that Tucker Carlson, thrown out of Fox News last year, had with Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, so let’s start this reflection on membership in Russia. (Gideon Rachman, a columnist for the Financial Times, likened Carlson to the “useful idiots” whom Lenin used to praise for coming to Moscow and spreading the Soviet Union’s message to the West.)

Do Russians feel they are members of Russian society, of the society as constituted in the domestic news broadcasts that Carlson made no effort to challenge? I haven’t been to Russia in fifteen or so years, and then only for a very short visit, and I don’t speak Russian. As a result, I’m reliant on at best second-hand insights about the country and its culture. But I know a few Russians who feel Russian despite the regime, despite having emigrated and settled in other countries. They think of themselves as members of Russian society, albeit estranged from the apparatuses of governance, strangers in and to their homeland. They have the sense that everything their president says is an act. In a word – an ugly one – his speech is performative.  

The philosopher J.L. Austin (1962) described speech as performative when it is designed to consummate an action, rather than to make a statement that can be evaluated as true or false. Austin, a philosopher of ordinary language and a military intelligence officer in World War Two, laid great store not just in what words mean, but in what effect they had on those listening.

Performance speech draws upon symbols and emotive devices, defining and then reinforcing an identity. Performances can be real, when actors on stage inhabit the characters they play, what’s sometimes called an “in-performance”. They can also intend to lead the audience to a view, an “as-performance”, by merely wearing an identity, as someone would wear a costume. They can even dupe the audience, cynically persuade them of a viewpoint that the performer knows is untrue or to act in a way to their own detriment.

It can be hard to discern when a politician is being performative in the worst sense, though it’s easy on the outside to guess what Putin is up to, and even to guess what Carlson hoped his interview would achieve.

But the problem that Brooks identified with the Republicans – in Congress and around the country –  is that they have come to believe as true the performances of their putative leader, and not merely as performances of the cynical.

If the Republican Party were a corporation, we might say that their leaders are not in fact cynical. They now believe their own marketing materials, or rather the marketing materials the CEO created. That’s because the party faithful, and now even the leadership, have become an audience, ripe for entrapment in identity politics (Appiah, 2006; Fukuyama, 2018), rather than a membership.

From a perspective developed by Michael Walzer (1983), membership arises when agree to join a social structure, participate in its activities, absorb and reflect its values and culture and participate in both the creation and distribution of the social goods at society uniquely controls. This sort of society may exist at many levels: the neighbourhood, the club, the association, a company, a political party, a nation-state. An individual might start as a complete outsider, even hostile to the society: an enemy. With growing familiarity and a growing appreciation of the values and culture and the value of the goods it creates and distributes, the individual sheds hostility, becoming a stranger, someone no longer to be feared but only on the threshold, a liminal actor, not yet a member. Only members participate in and benefit from the goods of that society.

Admitting strangers to a society brings the risk of change but also its advantages – innovation, growth, and a growing sense of the permanence-in-evolution of the society. Strangers follow a path to membership. They earn it, and in so doing alter the societies they join. (For how this might apply to corporations, see Nordberg, 2023.)

Judge for yourself what types of performance you see as watch the election campaigns unfold this year.

• Trump on stage, whipping up the faithful to action, as he did during the 2020 campaign and on January 6, 2021, after he had lost, examples of what Austin described as “how to do things with words” – and with manipulative and malicious intent.

• Biden’s sad attempt at the White House on February 8, 2024, to refute claims of his failing memory, doing with words something that undid what he intended.

• Putin’s sweep through a millennium of Russian history, even as Tucker Carlson mixed up the history of Ukraine over the past two decades; Putin pushing his audiences – at home and in America – even further from membership in a society, doing with words precisely what he intended.

If politics is merely performative and the people merely an audience, and if – unlike Walzer’s strangers-becoming-members – those people no longer join in creation and distribution of the social goods of that society, they are merely outsiders, strangers wishing to become members but denied a path to it. They become tools of the smaller, narrower group at the centre, which lacks the mechanisms of growth and change. All the more so when the speech is manipulative and the performance cynical.  

Happy election year, in America, India, Russia, France, Britain, and quite a few other countries! May the elections show us a path to membership, and not merely …

Appiah, K. A. (2006). The Politics of Identity. Daedalus, 135(4), 15-22.

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures at Harvard University, 1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Fukuyama, F. (2018). Identity: Contemporary identity politics and the struggle for recognition. London: Profile Books.

Nordberg, D. (2023). Governing corporations with ‘strangers’: Earning membership through investor stewardship. Philosophy of Management, Online first. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s40926-023-00237-4

Walzer, M. (1983). Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books.