Is There a Way Out of the Logic of American Empire?
The British historian A. J. P. Taylor once said: “The British did not relinquish their Empire by accident. They ceased to believe in it.” That is the challenge. How can we make effective political arguments so that people no longer believe in the necessity of American empire?
To answer that question, I suggest we think back to effective political arguments in previous eras – namely the antislavery and anticolonial arguments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In those instances, activists were trying to undermine and eliminate economic, social, political, and military beliefs and practices that seemed normal and legitimate, where the balance of belief and power favored practices that had been taken for granted for thousands of years.
In trying to eliminate slavery and colonialism, activists used two kinds of arguments, practical and ethical arguments, to make incremental changes that first undermined and then eventually helped to abolish those institutions. They did this in 5 steps – denormalization, delegitimation, providing an alternative, changing the balance of political power, and institutionalizing their gains – that they kept repeating over and over again.
For example, with slavery, anti-slave trade and abolitionist activists in Britain, which was the largest slave trader in the eighteenth century, argued against slavery and changed the institution. Specifically, they:
- Denormalized slavery – they argued that it was not natural; they made slavery seem strange and disputed the longstanding notion of “natural” slaves.
- Delegitimized it – slavery was not done for a good reason, it was illegitimate; slavery was not in god’s providence or holy plan.
- Provided an alternative that is better and seemed achievable – free labor was better on moral and economic grounds.
- Changed the balance of political power that supported those institutions by changing beliefs and focusing their energies. They fractured elite consensus and increased the power of those who supported their views. They used, for example, boycotts of slave-grown produce and sent petitions to Parliament.
- Institutionalized their gains incrementally. They regulated slave practices and the slave trade, gradually abolishing both.
Institutionalization increased the openness of the system. They could gradually pull the antislavery movement up by its argumentative bootstraps as one argument for slavery after another was demolished.
What these movements did not do was jump directly to changing the balance of political power and trying to institutionalize new beliefs. They spent decades on the first three steps. Slavery and the slave trade were first regulated in the late 1700s and Britain abolished the trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1834.
You could tell a similar story about the anticolonial movement. In other words, it was not economics that caused the change. It was partly that, but change was largely due to a change in beliefs as a result of effective political argumentation, which was used to help fracture elite consensus and organize political opposition.
