Dusk of Dissent

Dusk of Dissent Joseph Lowndes (bio) Paul A. Passavant Policing Protest: The Post-Democratic State and the Figure of Black Insurrection. Duke University Press, 2021. 354 $28.95 (pb). ISBN: 9781478011439. There is no shortage of scholarship these days on what is alternately called democratic backsliding, democratic decline, or just straight-up fascism. In the United States this work is primarily centered on the rise of Donald Trump and the transformation of the Republican Party into an openly antidemocratic entity, driven by far-right demonization and conspiracy. But authoritarianism penetrates US political culture and institutions far beyond its expression in a president and a party. In Policing Protest: The Post-Democratic State and the Figure of Black Insurrection, Paul Passavant makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of the United States as a clear instance of democratic decline. But instead of the florid spectacle of Trumpist nationalism, Passavant demonstrates how free speech and political protest—the very lifeblood of self-rule—has been foreclosed in the United States through “a distinctive state formation” he calls neoliberal authoritarianism. This development has happened unevenly and in different settings, made possible by shifting judicial interpretations of the Free Speech clause of the First Amendment and newly [End Page 218] aggressive practices of protest policing within the transformed political and economic landscape of post-Fordism. Passavant’s thesis is that substantially new forms of violent and aggressive protest policing were produced in the 1990s by three interrelated crises which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s: a crisis of democracy, an urban fiscal crisis, and a crime crisis. All three, he argues, were animated by the haunting specter of Black insurrection. The crisis of democracy emerged in Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, which contrasted protesters to the law-abiding “Silent Majority” of Americans who neither demonstrated nor rioted. Nixon cemented this orientation toward democracy in four judicial appointments to the Supreme Court, which in a series of consequential decisions privileged commerce over free speech rights in first in the privatized landscapes of shopping malls, and then in in public spaces that would come to be governed under the logic of privatization. The urban fiscal crisis, set in motion first by de-industrialization and then by the withdrawal of federal funding for urban programs, forced cities to become supplicant to market logic through tourism, conventions, and entertainment for suburbanites—all of which would require safe, orderly zones of commerce. Finally, a crime crisis emerged as politicians equated protest and urban social breakdown with criminality—with the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations expanding militarizing both federal and local law enforcement. Driven in part by social scientists George Kellings and James Q. Wilson’s “broken windows” theory of crime prevention, local police departments in major cities began to target not so much crime but signs of disorder in poor communities. Passavant walks the reader carefully through the series of court decisions that over time delimited the right to protest; and through the emergent police strategies and tactics—forged in response to counter-globalization, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy protests—of monitoring, harassment, intimidation, pre-emptive arrest and other means to either severely minimize popular assembly or prevent it altogether. He describes this shift in protest policing as both post-democratic and post-legitimation. Police departments need no longer justify aggression—even extra-legal violence—since protest is associated with social disorder and criminality. But the book is given yet more urgency by Passavant’s harrowing descriptions of the treatment of activists at the hands of police. He powerfully conveys the sense of dread and terror of nonviolent demonstrators shot with pepper spray; brutally tackled and beaten; hit with water cannons in freezing weather; fired on with skull-cracking beanbag projectiles; cuffed for lengthy periods in intentionally painful positions; held in degrading and unsanitary conditions; and subject to painful and permanently debilitating sonic assaults. These stories alone tell us much of what we need to know about the post-democratic era that we have entered as police officers enact not aggressive law and order, but rather unlawful disorder through intimidation, assault, disruption, and pre-emption. Nearly as disturbing is Passavant’s account of violent policing of protest is his

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