Review of Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Truth-Telling (2019)

"What does a truth teller look like?" I first read this opening line of Lida Maxwell's Insurgent Truth: Chelsea Manning and the Politics of Truth-Telling (2019) on an airplane as live coverage of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman's public testimony in the impeachment inquiry of President Donald J. Trump streamed on seatback screens all around me. If ever a man cut the profile of what Maxwell describes in this timely and incisive book as the archetypal Socratic truth-teller—"someone who sets aside his private interest, publicly identifies himself as acting on behalf of the public good, and takes the consequences of telling an unpopular truth"—Vindman did. He sat before the House Intelligence Committee in his full-dress Army uniform, replete with the insignia of a long and distinguished military career and laid out the facts concerning the Trump administration's efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate the president's chief domestic political rival. Of course, Vindman's truth-telling would be of little consequence. Even before the hearing, the president and his surrogates on cable news and social media were busy painting Vindman—a naturalized citizen whose family came to the US as refugees from the Soviet Union when he was just four years old—as a foreigner and "deep state" operative whose loyalty to the United States was suspect. In the through-the-looking-glass world of Trumpism, it seems, even the Alexander Vindmans of the world cannot pass as disinterested and public-spirited speakers of facts and truth.

This scene from the impeachment inquiry perfectly underscores the powerful contemporary resonance of Insurgent Truth's central thesis. The model of political truth-telling represented historically by Socrates and, more recently, by whistleblowers like Edward Snowden—the CIA contractor who kept a pocket-copy of the US Constitution on his desk as he leaked classified documents exposing an invasive global surveillance network—is no longer viable, and what both democratic theory as well as actually existing democracies urgently need is an alternative, more capacious, and potentially transformative model of political truth-telling (53). Across six theoretically rich chapters, Maxwell fleshes out a portrait of this alternative: the "outsider truth-teller" who tells an "insurgent truth." Unlike the whistleblower who wields the smoking gun of "facts" to fight the enemy of corruption, leveraging his always gendered, raced, and classed credibility to defend a basically functional system against the threat of a few anomalous "bad apples," the outsider truth-teller confronts the entire system of power that determines which "facts" will be accepted as such and who will be authorized to speak them.

Chelsea Manning, the army intelligence analyst turned trans*-rights and anti-war activist who leaked troves of US top-secret information about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to WikiLeaks in 2010, is Maxwell's exemplary "outsider truth-teller" (136). Unlike traditional "insider truth-tellers," Manning's motivations for leaking blurred the lines between public and private. From Manning's vantage, the US military's demand for secrecy vis-à-vis the deadly implications of US militarism abroad was inextricably bound up with its demand, formalized in the policy of Don't Ask Don't Tell, that Manning keep her sexuality and gender-nonconformity a secret (62–70). Thus, Manning's leaks were aimed not only at stopping murderous abuses of power in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also at transforming a masculinist, heteronormative, and transphobic culture that silenced Manning, constructing her "as an improper soldier and public person, unworthy of notice" (69). This blend of public and personal motivations has led many observers to impugn Manning's credibility by portraying her as a bullied queer with an axe to grind. However, Maxwell insists, it is the mingling together of public and private motivations in Manning's leaks that makes them so potent and, in Maxwell's terms, "transformative." As Maxwell explains, "While the whistleblower reveals facts hidden by the state or...