Doing Democracy: Activist Art and Cultural Politics

Chapter 7 Tragedy and Democracy

143 Chapter 7 Tragedy and Democracy The Fate of Liberal Democratic Values in a Violent World Wairimu Njoya Introduction In the current climate of global insecurity, liberal democratic values have fallen into a crisis. Following the tragic events of September 11, 2001, lawmakers and the general public in the United States expressed their willingness to set aside concerns for liberty, justice, and human rights in the quest for greater security.1 This chapter contends that the arts, and the art of tragedy in particular, have a crucial part to play in calling attention to the compromise of America’s democratic values. At the same time, tragedy could provide vital resources for the reaffirmation of political and moral principles that have been set aside or discarded in the ongoing security crisis. Tragic narratives, songs, musical odes, poetic lamentations, and other creative expressions of pain and loss offer a lens through which we can examine the hopes, failures, and possibilities of democracy in a violent world. The moments of decision in which communities or tragic heroes confront a clear and present danger with courage and moral integrity offer a useful guide for democratic decision-making. Artistic work that focuses on tragic dilemmas has been especially effective in demonstrating that there is no necessary opposition between liberty and security. The quest for physical security has been linked, in various tragic scenarios, to the types of action that reject the option of violence and physical 144 / wairimu njoya aggression. Nowhere is this ethical vision more evident, I argue, than in the blues tradition in African American culture. Building on the insights of philosopher Cornel West, this chapter shows how representations of moral resistance against racial terror could reconfigure our understanding of the relationship between liberty and justice, on the one hand, and the need for security in a dangerous world.2 I consider the contributions of classic blues singers of the 1920s and 1930s, and then trace the ethos of the blues through the creative writing of Toni Morrison, whose characters represent a commitment to freedom even in the most devastating circumstances. The vision of the blues is sorely needed as a counter to the claim that the principles that support a vibrant democracy have no place in the high-risk operations of international politics. The “states of exception” arising from these claims pose a grave threat to human rights through the suspension of civil liberties and the enactment of authoritarian emergency measures.3 Historically, such measures have opened the way for large-scale abuses and the denial of fundamental freedoms, inflicting particularly grievous harms on ethnic minorities and people with political views outside the mainstream.4 The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, investigations of “unAmerican activities” during the Cold War, and the detention of Muslim immigrants after 9/11 are cases in point. Yet these lessons from history were quickly discarded in the context of the War on Terror, which was launched by the U.S. government in response to the terrorist attacks.5 This war effort was accompanied by the retraction of long-standing commitments to civil liberties and access to justice.The “torture memos,” which the Bush administration used to authorize interrogation techniques that violated international conventions, are a particularly egregious example of unprincipled actions that were taken to enable the aggressive pursuit of “national security.”6 Without democratic interventions that could expand public perceptions of the available options and bring rigorous scrutiny to policy-making in this field, the prospects for human rights and civil liberties will remain grim even after the drawdown of troops directly engaged in fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The discussion further on does not suggest that nothing at all should be done to enhance the physical security of citizens and minimize the risk of violence. Instead, I raise the question of how security threats are defined, and what kinds of responses can and should be supported by a democratic nation. Must one kind of tragedy—the devastating loss of tragedy and democracy / 145 human life—be followed by yet another loss—the renunciation of liberal democratic values? Put differently, might there be alternative ways of responding to human tragedy and global insecurity that do not reproduce the violence that democratic societies are struggling to combat? This is the question to which I believe the blues tradition could offer a response, making...